Tada! It's the birthday of A Biehler ltd.

Just to be clear: I am not limited by any means, just the liability of the company I formed is limited. :)

I'm had a fantastic time in Cogent Business, and it was great fun to build Cogent Business and http://shoebox360.com, and dabble in ODM... but right now it's the right time to take the step to move on from Cogent. I'll really miss working with Alistair, Trevor, the Ashleys (both young and old), Oliver, Ram, Claire, James, Paul, Matt, Simon, Tas, Alison, Dave, Bob, BazL, the Phazer... (if I've missed any one - that was unintentional!): all the smart people in Cogent!

I've learnt a lot on many fronts, and will drip feed my learnings over time here as appropriate. But for the moment I'm just enjoying the change and setting up my new plans. It's great to be in a position where I have numerous very exciting options available to me, and until I finally decide on my pathway for the next BIG investment of effort and time, I'm not going to jump the gun with more detail yet.

Thanks for all my friends and family support over the last 18 months.

And as it planned, Spotify rewards me with "We've built the city" right on cue!

OK - the title was just to dramatise how funky this tool is... but it's not really a friend. Friends != tools.

I needed a tool to quickly count hits in *numerous* IIS log files, and I found this gem... from Microsoft!

Log Parser 2.2

And, if you are a GUI kind of guy, a GUI for it

What struck me about the tool, is it’s a SQL interface to most things, including IIS log files, Event viewer, XML, CSV, AD, LDAP, the file system and more!

It took me less than a minute to download, install, and figure out how to do the job over 60 log files!

Or

But the power lies *way* beyond this:

Say I want to know the first 404's for this year...

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Log Parser 2.2\logparser" -i:IISW3C -o:CSV "select top 10 cs-uri-stem from C:\inetpub\logs\LogFiles\W3SVC1\u_ex10*.log where sc-status=404"

Or the hits with "/from/*" in the URL...

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Log Parser 2.2\logparser" -i:IISW3C -o:CSV "select cs-uri-stem from C:\inetpub\logs\LogFiles\W3SVC1\*.log where cs-uri-stem like '/from/%' "

Hope it’s of some value to you in the future!

Best wishes for the New Year!

I've been working on Windows machines for years now, and the Windows promise to "remember my password" is good and nice, especially in a workgroup environment or when you connect to home resources from a domain-joined work laptop etc...

The problem for me has always been this: When it works, it works. But when it does not work... (e.g. with a password that changed, with another connection that might be connected with other credentials etc.) then it does not work as it should... And until recently I could never figure out how to *control* the cached passwords... add another one, remove one, change one etc...

And in came CMDKEY... a command line tool built into Windows!

Fire up an elevated (right click, run as administrator) command prompt.

Want to see what Windows is remembering? Type the following:

c:\> cmdkey /list

equally... the following would delete my cached credentials to the server called bigpond

cmdkey /delete:bigpond

Want to know more? Try cmdkey /?

For me it solved the problem of how to connect to System Center Virtual Machine Manager that is connecting to a machine on another domain... now the SCVMM console app just fires up without any hesitation!

Have fun!

eBay is a very popular place to sell your stuff and it has an incredible user base, making it easy to sell anything. It's strength over Amazon is definitely the auction capabilities, as you can sell your _fill_in_the_blank_ at whatever someone is willing to pay.

But it has some drawbacks, including the complexity of listing something, and despite it's effort to track buyer and seller reputation, it still is seen as a fairly risky place to buy some things...

I find that selling things (new or second hand) on Amazon is becoming my preference. Setting up a basic seller account is free, and you only pay a < 20% cut to Amazon when something is sold. Listing items is dead easy too, as you basically find the product you want to sell on Amazon, and then simply say "sell mine too", provide your price and optionally text describing how yours differ from the Amazon product, and that's it.

And - buyers seems to attach a higher level of credibility to Amazon.

So there - now you know my little secret, which could be self-defeating, as soon as most of the dodgy dealers also ready this post!

If your product is not yet to be found on Amazon, then you can also add your home-made inflatable edible Christmas tree, but it's a bit more advanced.

1. You'd need a "Pro" seller account, which cost a few pounds to set up (***more later)
2. You can only add products to some Amazon categories, so check this first!
3. Some product categories has other requirements (e.g. a bar code or safety certificate), so pick the "right" category!
4. Once you added the product, it will stay on Amazon's catalogue, probably forever... so here is the concluding trick:
5. Once you added your product, you can downgrade your seller account back to a basic free seller account, and your product stay there, and you can still sell it :)

For the bargain hunters like me, you could time your upgrade & downgrade around the 21st of the month, and pay very little!

Amazon's pro-account billing cycle runs every month on the 21st. If you upgrade your account on the 10th, you'd only be billed about 1/3rd of the monthly pro account bill. Create your product, and then downgrade before the 21st, and you should not pay any more the next month :)

If you have not yet seen the ability to mount VHD's in Windows 7 - then have a look at this incredibly powerful capability.

For step by step instructions, see http://www.online-tech-tips.com/windows-7/mount-vhd-windows-7/

Why do you want to do this?

1) If you work with Hyper-V or VHDs, this means you have another way of accessing the content

2) If you can also boot into VHD natively (not running two machines at once... just the VHD image...http://thelazyadmin.com/blogs/thelazyadmin/archive/2009/01/12/windows-7-boot-from-vhd.aspx

I recently had the opportunity to send a Christmas message to a few thousand contacts in our database, and there are a few things I'd do differently next time, and I realise that one trick in particular would have enabled me to catch most of these things: Mail merge offline - make sure Outlook is not connected to the internet (file -> Work offline), so that all the mail merged emails first land in your outbox, allowing you the see the blunders before they reach your customers.

Makes sense?

In my case, I would have caught that the emails where sent from the wrong profile in Outlook... I would have liked the emails to be sent from a different address...

Here's the scenario: You want to contact all your customers in your SQL server database, and tell them about your relocation... how?

Fire up Word. Click on "mailings"

"Select Recipients", and "use existing list"

The first time you open this "existing list" dialogue, you'll have to create a "new source".

And select your data source. Clearly, if the data lived elsewhere you'd select something other than SQL Server here... e.g. an Excel spreadsheet with contacts would probably do best with the ODBC or "other" options. In our case, select "Microsoft SQL Server" and click "Next".

If you don't know your server connection details, you'd need to ask someone these things

Type in a server name (that is either the friendly (NetBIOS/machine) name such as Fluffy-001, the IP address such as 10.0.0.72 or the fully qualified domain name fluffy-001.ourbusiness.local

Again, technical information you can get from your IT team (or database administrator/developer) is the security you need to connect to the database... hopefully things would be easy and you can just use Windows Authentication, but you might need to offer a SQL user name and password.

Pick the right database and the relevant table...

You can click "Finish" here, as the next screen is simply other metadata that help you save (and find again) the connection for your next mail merge.

Now you've got a heap of power ready for you to use.

E.g. you could choose "Edit recipient list" in the ribbon bar, to see who would be emailed, and unselect some records manually.

If you've got a column named "email", you don't need to do any mapping, but you could if you wanted pick a specific field as email field using "match fields" on the ribbon.

You could create some funky rules to include/exclude certain bits of information only in some emails, e.g. parking instructions for those who requested parking via the ribbon "Rules" option, you can insert field from the database or create a greeting line to personalise each email and more.

Once you are done writing your email, click "Finish and Merge" which will do the rest for you.

Office 2007 will effectively create a new email for every contact, and drop each one in your Outlook Outbox, and it could take hours for thousands of records... be prepared to wait!

And then - prepare yourself mentally for all the "out of office" responses and "undeliverable" messages :)

I’ve written before about my mission critical MCE machine, serving the household with TV…

Well, the Dell Vostro 200 (with 2Gb RAM) hard disk failed again (the second one in 13 months… the first was a Samsung, then a Western Digital), and it required some surgery.

Since I’ve just installed Windows 7 RTM on my Toshiba M200 (very old kit, also 2Gb of RAM – but still running strong!), I thought I’d also upgrade my MCE machine with the RTM code of Windows 7.

I had less than an hour between two TV shows, and thought I’d time and write up the process from 7pm.

1. Rip out offending hard disk drive, and replace with new drive. (Wow – 1Tb disks are now soooo cheap! No wonder they are failing frequently!)
2. Install new disk (completed 7:06pm)
3. Boot from Windows 7 and install (completed 7:15pm!)
4. Download only missing driver, the BlackGold BG3450 driver, and install (7:20pm)
5. Windows Updates, Restore content & data to it from Windows Home Server in the garage (7:40pm)
6. Restore accounts (control userpasswords2) ,permissions, MCE configuration*, AnyDVD installation, and schedule recordings etc. (7:55pm)

So – all in all, in less than an hour with no fiddling (and even some time to play with the kids in between), I had Windows 7 MCE up and running, complete with surround sound, HD TV from several channels via dual co-ax and dual LNB and sky dish, and it looks even better than before!!!

I realised that what I like soooo much about this set-up, is that I also have a PC always connected to my big screen. When I do TV-on-demand, I don’t have to hunt for another machine. When I want to share photos, it’s right there etc.

All in all – I’m a fan. My only hick-up, was really with Home Server: The backups on it is not incredibly reliable…. I guess I’ll use more of Windows 7’s VHD backups in the future…

I've always been a tablet guy: I enjoy the option to use a stylus. Meetings are just less intrusive with a slylus than a taping keyboard. Photo editing is just better with a stylus. Casual internet browsing is just friendlier with a tablet. Snipping something is just sooooo much better with ink.

My old M200 shipped a long time ago with XP Tablet Edition, then I managed to get Vista on it (which is no mean feat, as it has no optical drive), and today, when Vista again dropped me in the "installing update 3 of 3" endless loop, I thought I'd rather spend the time to install Windows 7 than recover from that old chestnut again..

And bingo! It was not even that painful!

Steps taken:

1. Previous experience with my M200 showed that booting from a DVD drive is not reliable, and caused many blue screens, so the simplest alternative for me was to pull out the disk, and build it in another machine using a IDE to notebook IDE adaptor.
2. I did a full Update Windows on the other machine with my laptop hard disk
3. Moving the disk back to the M200 did not immediately work, but the workaround was to run msconfig.exe on the other machine, and check the box to say “detect HAL” and VGA-only, and then the laptop disk booted OK in the M200.
4. After a couple of reboots and wire-connected Windows Updates, I was back up and running, with sound, wifi, and tablet working.

Extra steps taken since the first build: I’ve updated the generic graphics driver, as I really wanted to run at native resolution. I used these drivers with “have disk” process: http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=7427 (This driver does not give full aero glass, but things work well enough, also with multi screen usage,)

And all seems good! This is encouraging, especially since things seems very nippy and happy!

I'm no fan of Anti-Virus software, but unfortunately we need it all. So - on my Windows 7 box, I was intrigued to see that the prompt to find a solution online did not include OneCare as an option.
Actually - it was not too much of a surprise, as I guess Microsoft won't be pushing OneCare much more. (I think Microsoft just *had* to jump into the AV market as it got a beating about security and partners just did not make it easy and cheap enough to AV protect Windows. But time have changed, OnceCare had redressed the balance in the market to some extent… so I don't expect OneCare to live much longer.)

Yet - I had a paid subscription to OneCare, so I wanted to install OneCare rather than anything else that might cost me money. I probably have to say that I think OneCare is reasonably good, not too much of a CPU drain, and has successfully protected my machines over the last few years. (OK - I'm probably biased: I recall taking the first beta of OneCare to market in the UK for Microsoft... and I especially recall the first meeting with a bunch of journalists... having to endure an hour of mockery with the dodgy “OneCare” name. I'm not going to spell it out, but the UK have other words that sound very similar ;))

So - How did Ii install it? Easy.

• Download OneCare from Onecare.live.com
• Set Vista compatibility mode (to get past install check error).
• Then run the following from an elevated command prompt the following to disable the Client Experience code that interferes with the installation:
  reg delete HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SQMClient\Windows\DisabledSessions /va /f
• Run setup.

Bingo - A working copy of OneCare on Windows 7.

I fed my diesel car petrol over the weekend, and it did not like that. In fact, it cost me hours and hours of frustration and lots of money to fix things... And I've only got myself to blame!

Equally you can apply this to our eating habits, and I'm sure some have already forgotten their New Year's resolutions about not stuffing themselves just with unhealthy food...

Then, why is it that we sometimes allow our brains to be fed rubbish? That's why I listen to carefully selected pod casts on my way to work, rather than radio. And that is why I think photographs are so powerful. Pictures as per flickr can be stunning, but photographs which triggers personal emotions and memories can really enhance our lives on multiple levels.

Have a lovely day!

Although it's true, I'm talking like a real marketer to present it in a bit more optimistic light :)

During my time @ Microsoft, the Windows 7 team hunted for desktop pictures, and some of my pictures made the short list and.... the beta build!

To see it, "simply" download the 2.6Gb, install Windows 7, choose the UK as your locate (I've possibly got some photos in other geographies like France...) and then when all is running, choose a desktop picture and you'll see my blue bells photo proudly amongst the others. Easy :)

Or you can find it in the strangely hidden folder of c:\windows\Globalization\MCT\MCT-GB\Wallpapers and it's gb-wp2.

(gb-wp5 was taken by Sam Hammami, a friend of mine.)

Scary to think that 6.5 MILLION Gb of Internet traffic and storage has been dedicated just for *my* photo! (OK - I realise that not even I downloaded it for the photo... it just happen to be part of the payload... but since bragging rights is all I get for this, I've got to use it...)

It's good to see that the I'm even credited for it in the properties...

Let no man say that I don't manage a production system. I do! Our Windows Media Center machine (MCE) @ home is a production system. When it goes out of production, I'm quickly called in (day or night) to fix it, as we don't have a Telly other than this thing.

Why are we so dependant on it? All my music is playing through it (although the music now comes from a Windows Home Server). All my (26 000 at last count) photos are shown through it (and a Sharp 32" LCD), and all our TV is watched (time shifted) through it. Gone are the days of struggling to find that photo. Gone is the days of wanting to play a CD, but with no chance of finding it. Gone are scratched CDs. Gone are adverts. Gone are the oh-there's-nothing-on-TV-but-I'll-watch-any-rubbish evenings, and now we always have relevant stuff recorded waiting for us to be watched.

Many moons ago (still in the Windows XP time) I bought the notorious Carrera system through Microsoft's employee purchase scheme, and it served our family well since then. True, early versions had many problems and a army of technical people trying to resolve these issues, but the hardware eventually died (after running MCE 2005 and later Vista MCE on it) and I replaced my setup six months ago with a £200 Dell Vostro 200ST machine, still with the old analogue eHome Wonder ATI card in it... despite only having XP drivers available ;)

However, my Sky decoder (for FreeSky) (that fed the analogue ATI tuner card) died for the nth time developed a "green feature" to switch itself off, which made recording from it difficult, so I took the plunge and bought a BlackGold GBT3540 card. Even though this card is supposed to give me the FreeSky by directly connecting it to my Sky dish, it also requires this funky dvb-s virtual driver to make MCE work with dvb-s (satellite) work as if it's a dvb-t (digital terrestrial TV) tuner. BlackGold say it's included, but the box I received, did not, and their site also did not have it.

So, as these things happened, I was left with an open machine, a new toy (the BlackGold card), "production down time" and no way to resolve it other than wait for BlackGold to hopefully deliver the virtual driver when they wake up.

Fast forward... and you get to me deciding I'll try Windows 7 (from my MSDN subscription, so test is the right term), especially after Simon Davies (from Microsoft UK, always on the safe side) told me yesterday that it's very stable.

The installation was extremely simple:

1) Pop DVD in drive & boot

2) Point Windows 7 @ an empty drive. (This served me well, as the new Dell came with a dodge Samsung drive that has already started ticking like you know what!)

3) Install the Vista BlackGold drivers & reboot. (BTW - it detected *all* my hardware except for a smart media bay for reading all memory cards on the Dell - I'm sure I can resolve that easily.) I was particularly impressed that Windows 7 had no trouble with my odd wide screen LCD - it knew the resolution and just worked via the HDMI cable.

4) Fire up MCE on Windows 7, and answer all the basic questions... and a few minutes later I was watching not only dvb-s (Freesat from BBC & ITV) on my Windows 7 machine, but also BBC HD.

The *only* down side is that FreeSat does not yet include five.tv and Sky's version do - so I've got to find a solution to the wife's "Home and away" requirement... quickly! Or it will fail the UAT :)

Windows 7 (the beta) and the BlackGold 3540 card did an astonishing job!

I've installed and played with an Outlook plug-in called Xobni (Inbox backwards). It does stats on your email sending and receiving habits, and it can search for stuff in your inbox in a few new ways.

I've not really used it, not ever. When I installed it, it could not add much value, as it has not yet analysed my inbox. And then I minimised it until I looked at it today again (before cleaning out my Microsoft inbox for good).

And I got this funny graph:

Why is it funny? Because the number of emails received is... (wait for it...) off the scale :) (I've been on holiday during the quiet week, before anyone asks!)

If you used my Microsoft email address to talk to me in the past, now is a good time to update your filofax or rolodex or contacts: The best email address to reach me, is my name@surname.co.uk.

More later...

I've recently bought a VW Touran, and it's a great car. It's got the needed occasional 7 seats, it is nice and punchy and I got it for a great deal (thanks to autoebid)... but it's <yawn> sooo boring. It's not even a bit exotic or exciting or exhilarating. I've got the DSG gearbox, which does exactly what it says on the tin, but even that is not really worth writing home about IMHO.

So - the one creature comfort that I did decide to splash out on, was something that would allow me to plug in my MP3 player - a Zune in my case. VW does a £25 Aux-in plug, but only if you have a custom factory order, which I could not wait for. So, I've considered several options, but discounted buying a new radio just for this, I did not find a goof FM-transmitter that would deliver me good sound quality and in the end, I opted for XCarLink. The UK site is http://www.xcarlink.co.uk, but it seems like the majority of these gadgets are being sold through eBay.

The £75 XCarlink from China (version 6) that I bought, is working very nicely. It connects to the rear of the RCD600 radio in the Touran, and pretends to be a CD changer. The CDR600 is quiet happy having it's own built-in CD changer and this external one, allowing you to switch between the two by just pressing "CD" a second time.

From the back of the radio, a cable runs to a fag-pack size box, with three connectors on the other side. 1) mini jack for stereo - which I use most of the time

2) USB plug that you can use for a) charging and b) playing MP3/WMA files. (You can store up to 99 files in six directories (CD01 to CD06), and then navigate through these as if they are CDs) This is a *very* nice feature, but is not completely noiseless. It's better than tape or an FM transmitter solution, but still a bit music-down-a-pipe-like.

3) A din plug that connects to the last bit of the XCarLink... a Bluetooth dongle and microphone. This allows you to (at least theoretically) a) make phone calls through the radio with a bluetooth connected phone, b) stream stereo music to the XCarLink via Bluetooth. (I've had this working with an old phone, but not yet with my Samsung i780... (BTW - this bluetooth capability is unique to version 6 - older versions of the XCarLink does not have this.)

I really enjoy having full access to my Zune's content in the car, and this will be a great companion for the road on the coming holiday!

If you are planning of forking out more than £20 on connecting your iPod (XCarLink does an iPod version too) or MP3 player to your VW (and they offer other models too, supporting other manufacturers), then this is a good option IMHO.

Note on installation: The early non-UK version I bought off eBay, only had Chinese information with it - and I had no guidance to do it. It's entirely possible, but don't expect a good detailed manual with it. It took me some time to get behind the covers of the dash board on my VW, but the rest was quiet easy. The last glitch was in connecting the XCarLink to the VW radio. The plug seemed to fit perfectly, but the connector block housing the pins inside the plug, was loose, and meant that even after plugging it in, it was not plugged in. The solution was to push in the cable (as opposed to the plug), and that ensured that the connectors also made contact.

I'll buy/use this again if I had similar needs.

As someone working in the software industry, it's weird that I'm not willing to spend money on software... or at least I think 100 times before doing so.

So - many moons ago I bought TomTom 3, then later 5 and later upgraded to 5.21.

Today, I've managed to get my shiny new Samsung i780 phone working lovely with TomTom without the need to spend any money. (No - I don't have any Scottish blood - I think :))

I think I should attribute this to Gavin Fabiani-Laymond - thanks!

In essence - download GPSProxy from SourceForge.net, install and configure (as per this blog above), and that's it!

I'm really impressed with the TomTom experience on this i780. It's accurate, find a fix quickly, works well on the screen resolution and... well... works!

You would have thought that an anorak like me would not even think twice about using Windows Live Writer to blog with... but I did not. I have a few blogs inside Microsoft (for those Microserfs out there, have a look on my SharePoint MySite) and I've been using Word to blog. Yes, Word 2007 can do it too, and so can OneNote via Word, and I just assumed it would be better than anything we offer for free.

But Neville convinced me that I might be missing a trick if I don't use our own product for blog posting. Windows Live Writer is really good. It know how to post to several different engines, and adjust it's capability accordingly. One thing that Word definitely could not do as seamlessly as Writer, is storing old posts and allowing me to edit old posts. Fantastic! And adding pictures & videos and more are just as simple.

Really - if you are not yet using a tool to blog, go check it out. If you are using a tool that is not serving you well, it's worth your time too.

And the good news is - Neville - if you go to Windows Live Writer via the link above, we *won't* assume you've opted in for all the other bits too - we'll just give you Windows Live Writer unless you opt in for the other bits :)

Thanks for the tip to check out our own software!

I've been brewing on the topic of privacy. I recall in my days as consultant on our Commerce Server product (even when it was just Site Server 3.0 Commerce Edition - now showing my age and technical background), we were contemplating the implications of personalisation, and how it might play out to the extreme when everybody knows everything about me.

There was the optimistic side in me that used to say: "Perhaps it would be good if systems and companies really knew me. Perhaps they'd stop sending me email I'm not interested in - spam - and start really handing me valuable information that will lead me to make smart business and buying decisions." A win-win. But at this lunch, Neville used a brilliant example that explains why this thinking is flawed: Advertisers are not trying to help you, they try to change your behaviour to benefit them.

Let's say you are going through a tough time in your relationship with your wife, and your email provider mine your emails and knows this about you, only to target you with display adverts offering you cheap sex. Although this might be an effective advert and good targeting from an advertiser's position, it is clearly not constructive to your life.

Back to the point: I think it is imperative that we al least enter into this brave new world of social networks with deliberate consent, rather than blissful ignorance. See Robin's blog for some more real life examples of this.

One of the replies to Robin's posting, was from Colin McKay, director of communications at the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, Canada. He also posted a video that he made to demonstrate this point very eloquently. Thanks for sharing Colin!

I'm proud of what we're doing to help simplify privacy statements so that it's easier for people to know what they sign up for, and I know as marketer in Microsoft - internally we take privacy extremely serious. And, we're also doing a lot to help educate people about how to be safe online.

But I'm very interested in what you think we could be doing more or differently. How can we make the world a better place to live?

I received my new Lenovo X61T tablet PC on Monday, and I'd like to share with you my first impressions.

I was hoping to buy (with work money - thanks Bill!) the ultimate power machine in a small and lightweight portable package, looking very sexy, with all the features I wanted yet within the budget available. Needless to say, I had to lower my expectations... something had to give.

And I then opted for our corporate standard (one of a few) Lenovo X61T. I have seen better looking machines, but this is not bad. I've certainly seen heavier and less well-built machines! This one is sturdy - as in carbon fibre, not iron.

And I'm impressed with the variety of drivers available for both x86 and x64, and I had little problems getting it going. The screen (I have the higher-res non-touch screen) is good - I'm currently out doors in the cold England with a weak sun, and I can see the screen well. Battery life seems pretty good, especially with the extended battery, and the keyboard is just right. I've never been a trackpoint fan - I prefer the touch pad of previous Toshiba, but I'll make do. The Inking on this machine is gorgeous - it reminded me of an earlier research project at Microsoft to find the ideal friction point between a lovely pen and paper - and this screen gives me that same paper feeling when inking. And the anti-reflection coating on the screen does it's job - but it gets dirty very quickly.

I've also got a lot of RAM in it - and therefore not all of it is available to access... I might try x64 later to see if I can see any difference.

It's great to now have a DVD drive again. I've been without a DVD or CD drive for the last 4 years on other tablets (this one has a docking station with it in), and it suddenly mean that I can now again at least consider things that only appear on CD :)

Like with any new machine, I'm still searching for keys on the keyboard, still constantly finding applications or settings that I want to re-apply/install, but all in all - I can recommend it.

Alfred

I've received a Zune as a gift a few months ago, and it worked brilliantly as an PM 3 player, but that was about it - especially since there are not thousands of friends around me with Zunes to share music with. I nearly sold it, but then stopped short because of the fantastic musical quality that I got with it. It was heads and shoulders above my otherwise trusted and great Creative Zen. I really like the sound quality of the Zune.

Then Microsoft came around and provided a *free* firmware upgrade to everyone who bought a Zune in the past. http://www.zune.net

What a bonus! Other than increasing the size (which we have not yet figured out how to do with a mere firmware update - doh!), it feels like a new Zune to me!

1. I love the new UI. The Zune has always been friendly and fresh - not your typical Windows (or Linux) UI, it was much more interesting - comparable in experience but uniquely different to Apple.
2. The wi-fi capability which in the past could only share music files with other Zunes, can now suddenly sync over wifi too - and the set-up was really a pleasant experience. My next thought was that this is useful, yet I won't need to sync in any case, as I don't buy new music that frequently, and all 314 albums on my Media Center is already on the Zune. But then I discovered the really long overdue podcatching capability!
3. Podcast catcher: The Zune application on the PC has been much improved, and does not look like a cheap skinning of Windows Media Player any more. It now more look like a complement to the Zune, rather than an old-hat PC app. And it offers a "marketplace" similar to that of iTunes, including a marketplace for free content including PodCasts. And it works very intuitively, complete with cleaning algorithm to remove old podcasts.

The only catch is that this is still designed and tuned for a US-only market. And intentionally. We chose to first focus on providing an excellent experience in one country, rather than have a world-wide offering that is not yet world-class. (However, if you want to get this working for testing purposes, then you might get away with creating a Windows Live ID with country = US, and then creating a Zune account with that Live ID with a machine locale set to US and browser locale = US. Once you created the account, you can switch all back to UK, and it still seems to work, at least for podcasts.)

May the Zune be with you!

Coming to a Zune near you, very Zune.

GeZuneZeit!