I have griped a bit about running betas in a production environment, but sometimes I just can’t help it.  Last night I finally installed Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007 Beta 2.   That’s a mouthful!  So far (a whopping 14 hours later) so good.  Their initial release of Office 2007 had a radically different GUI, it looks like with this release they have gone back to the classic look and feel quite a bit, at least in Outlook.  Word is another story.  I really like the redesign of the tool bars up top, although they seem a bit big and bulky, kind of a Fisher Price meets Microsoft feel.  Once I play with it a bit more, we’ll see how it goes.

With the addition of an RSS reader in Outlook, MS is taking a lot of steps to meet the needs of the Web 2.0 generation.  There are still some bugs (like when I subscribed to my own blog, each post came in doubled up…two of everything…), but this is a beta release after all.

The program is a little slow to load, but just a tiny bit of patience seems to pay off.  Is anybody else out there running Office 2007?  I would love to hear your impressions of it.

Sitting in the coffee shop earlier, I noticed a few others in the shop listening to music like I was.  I was plugged directly into my laptop, but nobody else was doing that.  Of the 5 others I saw, 3 were using iPods.  Nice market share Apple! 

I don’t own an iPod.  I would be horribly surprised if I ever did.  Why?  Overpriced, under performing and limiting.  They do a fine job, but fine doesn’t cut it for me with electronics.  I’ve been keeping an eye on the portable music market, and I’ve got to say, iPod is exceptional in its market push, but less-than-mediocre with what it delivers.

Before anybody asks me via email or comments what I use, I’ll just offer it up, and it’s going to make you laugh.  When I go to the gym and work out, I carry a 256 MB Rio.  Yup, 256 megs. *gasp*  Why?  Two reasons: 1st, it’s so simple to sync mobile devices without much effort (especially w/ Windows Media v 11), and I change my portable play list often.  Frankly, I don’t have 4GB of music that I want to listen to at the gym.  My library is deep and wide (21+GB as of this writing), but a lot of that isn’t good music for the gym.  I need some beat, I need something to keep my blood pumping while I’ll exercising.  Second reason: I’m cheap.  When I take something to the gym, I cannot expect it never to get damaged/lost/stolen.  For that reason, a little $40 player suits me just fine.  If I lose it, it’s not the end of the world.  "But Matt, it doesn’t play video…".  Yeah.  I’m aware of that.  The 18 televisions at the gym do however.  Thanks for thinking of me though.

Seriously, I don’t think I’ll ever get an iPod.  If/when I feel that I need a high capacity player (BTW, I have a 1GB SD card that I can slide into my MP3 player anytime I want MORE), then I will stay away from Apple’s offerings.  What else is available?  Plenty!  Check out this site.  If you want some satirical marketing (viral marketing to boot), check out the iDon’t page.

So what about you?  What do you use to listen to your music?  Please, somebody say a record player and be telling the truth!

Thanks to Jason for the post about Adobe finally offering non-profit pricing.  Since we’re bringing Creative Suite into the church on several computers, this got me pretty excited!  I contacted CDW right away to sign up for this program.  This is a good company that is usually on the ball.  Unfortunately the rep on the other end of the phone didn’t know what I was talking about. So he said he would look into it.  I came into work this morning, retrieved my email and had a note from CDW.  It said:

Although Adobe has put together a NP program CDW is currently not set up to sell from it.  Due to legal paperwork that is required before CDW becomes authorized to sell from this program, there is currently not an ETA for a CDW start up date.Sorry that I do not have a better answer for you.  However, until we are set up on this new program I will give you the best competitive pricing that I have available to me.  Talk to you soon!

Rats!  We need to purchase a couple of licenses for Adobe CS2 pronto!  So I’ll have to do a little more leg work to find out where to get it at non-profit pricing.  *shrugs*  If it will save us several hundred dollars, it is well worth the time.

UPDATE: CDW is now missing from the list of authorized resellers for the non-profit program from Adobe.  They were there last week!  LOL…now I have to go down this list and sign up with a new vendor.  We’re still going to go w/ CDW for all of our Microsoft needs though.  They’re a top notch reseller.  If you are a non-profit and aren’t taking advantage of this program, you are throwing your money away!  Call CDW today!

UPDATE #2 (June 6): John (I believe he is the department manager for Adobe w/ CDW) called me this morning and left a voicemail indicating that everything has in fact gone through the hoops at CDW in terms of their compliance with Adobe and the NP pricing.  He expects to be selling this coming Thursday or Friday.  I’ll create a detailed post when the information is available.