Microsoft is giving away free SPOT watches.
Right now. Call right now! 866-676-8487
What’s the catch? Oh, you have to have a first generation SPOT watch and currently have a MSN Direct subscription. Me? I have a second generation Fossil Square. I still tried though, but was shut down. Here’s the deal. If you are like me and have that second generation Fossil, and you have been experiencing any data reset problem, then call. Call right now! They hooked me up with a new watch. Not the newest version, but a replacement of my current watch. I was going to write something along the lines of my first year watch review after the beginning of the year, but I guess I’ll do it now.

My watch rocks! It’s one of those tools that you might not miss if you don’t have it. But once you start using it, you feel naked without it. Case in point, with a SPOT watch and MSN Direct, you can hook up your Outlook calendar to your watch. So all of those pesky tasks like remembering that I have a meeting or dr. appt to go to, I can just forget about now. My watch tells me. In the morning when I put on my watch, I scan my appointments and I’m ready for the day. Then it reminds me when the appointment is coming up. It uses the standard Outlook timing, so you can set that yourself. Sometimes I need it to remind me a day in advance. Sometimes I only need five minutes. I also have mine set up so that people on MSN Messenger can send instant messages directly to my watch. It’s also got all your standard SPOT stuff like weather, news, sports, movie times….. all kinds of stuff that I don’t really use too much. The calendar and messaging have proven to be my favorite functions. If you have a phone that does these things, maybe that won’t be too impressive. But if you are me, and don’t have one of those phones, then this watch becomes addictive. The few times I forgot to put it on in the morning, I’ve been practically lost. It’s amazing how your brain shifts out of having to remember appointments when you don’t have to. At least mine does.

Here’s the part that sucks though. Around mid summer my watch started resetting. I would just be sitting there (or standing there, or walking), I would hear a beep, look down and my watch would be reset. What does that mean? I would have to go online to MSN and set up my watch again. It would have forgotten all of my appointments. All summer long it happened. Doing some research online, I found that the first generation watches had a problem with static electricity and resetting. I got to thinking, it seemed like my watch would reset pretty closely to when I had done a lot of activity like walking home after work. I started taking it off when I did that. I also started being conscious of what hand I was using to open this particular door at work that always gave me a static shock (just like in Office Space). Since I’ve done that the resets have subsided a bit, but they still happen from time to time. So, when I called MSN to try and finagle a new watch from them I explained all of this. I didn’t qualify for the upgrade, but they did hook me up with a replacement. We’ll see how it goes. The new one should arrive in a couple of weeks. Anybody want to buy an old SPOT watch?

UPDATE!!
According to Marq, the Yoda dance clip has been replaced by porn. I'm at work, so I haven't verified this yet. Surf over at your own risk.

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UPDATE II
Stop sending me email asking if it is Yoda porn.
I wonder what kind of weird google hits I'll get having posted that phrase on my site. ------------------------------

Revenge of the Sith DVD easter eggs are already rolling in. Witness the Yoda dance.

via marq

Sometime last week NewsGator stopped working on my pc. While that’s annoying because it keeps me from easily keeping up with news and some of my friends’ weblog posts, it’s also really inconvenient because I also use it to keep track of some event logs on applications that I maintain.

I did all the usual things you might think of. Reinstall the app. Nothing. Uninstall, then go through the registry wiping out any mention of NewsGator. Install it again. Nothing. So I moved on to searching the web for someone with a similar error. Nothing.

What the hell?!

I don’t know what I was searching for earlier, but it must’ve not been too slick. Because I just now googled for it some more and found this on the NewsGator site. Imagine that! Looking for help on the product’s web page.

So it turns out that under the Outlook…Help…About menu item, there is a list of programs and dll’s that have been disabled. I never even knew that existed. Looks like Word and Excel both have it too. Huh. Learn something new every day.

By the way, NewsGator was listed on that Outlook Disabled Items list. I took it off the list, and it’s working like a charm now.

So it looks like Microsoft and Yahoo’s IM clients will finally start playing nicely. That’s great. Now I can remove one of the three IM programs that I seem to have running on my machine most of the time.

You know that you are starting to get old when you see all of the movies that you watched as a kid start showing up on the American Movie Classics channel.