Insomnia

I was really surprised to hear about it on Shneier's blog and then on boingboing a few hours later.

Then it was too funny I had to post about it. Police in the UK seized a boardgame called "war on terror". It is dangerous... It has a balaclava that "could be used to conceal someone's identity or could be used in the course of a criminal act".

This is a picture of me with my Evil balaclava. I have owned this boardgame for over a year now. I don't play it very often because it is a 6 player game and you need to be in a certain mood to play it. But it is a very decent boardgame.

So be afraid... Be very afraid of my evil twin. He's the one wearing the balaclava.

Labels: fun

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Remember my post about Winzip?

They actually called back to check if we did a license audit. I told their representative, in person, that we didn't really do a license audit as they requested. But that, instead of doing an audit, our staff was instructed to uninstall WinZip and use a free alternative like 7-Zip.

She seemed all happy at this conclusion and thanked me for my help. That's it! No sales pitch, no offer to help us with anything. They had me on the phone and didn't even make an attempt to establish any sort of contact. I had assumed that this was the reason for the whole license audit thing in the first place. But no. They truly just wanted people to comply with their licensing terms.

I am a little baffled.

Labels: fun, work

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Once in a blue moon, I need to demo a feature to a customer or host an application sharing session. Like many people, I had used the trial version of WebEx to do this. Since I don't feel like I do this often enough to subscribe to their service, I had not.

Last week, I needed to do another demo. Remembering the fact that the last time I had used their trial software, they called me for nearly a year to get me to subscribe to their service; I was looking for something else.

This is where I found Microsoft SharedView. If you are doing a demo for a small group (less than 15) and you have another mean of doing the voice conferencing, this should work great for you. I was able to set it up in 5 minutes, I already had a Microsoft LiveID (from MSN Messenger) and I had a sharing session setup in no time.

The system is free, lets you send invites by email and doesn't require the attendees to have a Microsoft LiveID. It worked flawlessly for me even if there were 2 firewalls and a whole lot of routing equipment between me and my customer. I had no special setup to do. Performance was similar to previous webex experiences. The system lets you give control to any attendee and lets the attendes "scribble" on the screen as they talk to point things out.

One thing that seemed different than webex is that you can only share one application at a time. If you want to share more, you have to share your entire desktop. Maybe there is a way around this but I didn't bother trying to figure it out, it is not that big a limitation. Obviously, this is Windows specific so that might be a no-go for you.

Labels: work

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