Category: Technology

A few days ago, I was having an instant message session with a friend of mine who was complaining that she was suffering from repetitive strain injury. Coincidentally, earlier that day, I had received an e-mail with an advertisement for Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 Preferred from Nuance software. Taking that as a sign from God, I [...]

As I was reviewing the Microsoft Online Services Partner Agreement, I noticed this paragraph:
Potential conflicts of interest. In situations where Company is receiving any compensation (money or otherwise) from a Customer for providing pre-sales support, or where Company has a fiduciary relationship with a Customer, Company has a potential conflict of interest. In these cases, [...]

For the first time in recent memory, I can actually see the entire expanse of my desk that lies between my keyboard and my monitors. I owe this to The Desk Apprentice ($37.99 at Staples).

The sucker is huge and consumes a lot of desk space all by itself, but its big pockets and Lazy Susan [...]

If you’re getting The Schlog via RSS feed, you probably haven’t noticed anything different. But if you’ve been to www.theschlog.com (a.k.a. www.davidschrag.com/schlog), you’ve seen that there’s been a major makeover. The Schlog has been commercialized.
I’m not under the illusion that putting ads on my blog is going to let me quit my day job. I [...]

Actually, let me rephrase that title. I think it should be "Why? Is SBS 2008 better than SBS 2003?"
There are few if any people on the planet more familiar with Small Business Server than Microsoft’s Sean Daniel. Sean recently posted a feature comparison between SBS 2003 and SBS 2008. What strikes me about this list [...]

You’ve read my rants about Microsoft licensing for years. Now you’ve got a chance to tell them what you think.
One minor problem: they may not be listening. I submitted my feedback this morning, and here’s what I got in return:
Your message did not reach some or all of the intended recipients.
Subject: What I need for [...]

In his brilliant book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell describes the tremendous impact that the Pepsi Challenge had on the soft drink industry in the 1980’s (see pp. 155-159). Pepsi was trailing way behind Coke in market share, but it looked like there might be a sea change. Pepsi began running ads featuring the Pepsi Challenge. The [...]

I was fully prepared to wait an hour or more in line, and even to return on another day if necessary, to get an iPhone. The timing was right. My wife’s phone had just died and it was out of warranty. We were at the end of our contract with Verizon Wireless, and we were [...]

It’s harder than you’d think to produce a list of all the e-mail addresses that are on your Exchange server. I found a Visual Basic script that will produce such a list. A sample entry for a single user looks like this:
cn: David Schragmail: david@schrag.netProxy Addressessmtp:David@schrag.localsmtp:dschrag@schrag.netSMTP:david@schrag.netsmtp:dave@schrag.net

(I really should have replaced the @ symbol with some [...]

Microsoft Response Point was announced sixteen months ago. Today — maybe! — it’s worth checking out. As I noted last November, the initial release of Response Point had a very 1.0 feel to it and was lacking many features already present in competing phone systems. Just this week at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft announced [...]