Microsoft's CEO, Steve Balmer, gave his first keynote address at CES 2009 today. If you thought Apple's keynote was underwhelming, Microsoft's will really leave you guessing. The biggest thing Microsoft does is Windows, so of course, Mr. Balmer had to announce that Windows 7 (that's the version that comes after Vista - you know 3, 95, 98, Millenium, 2000, XP, Vista, 7 - yup those names make sense) will enter user beta tomorrow.

Interversant owns around 50 domain names. All of them are set to automatically renew with a credit card payment. All of them except one: Interversant.com.
 

 No, this is not another post about Big Old Detroit. But the last time I can remember hearing the phrase "unibody construction" was about how automobiles are being manufactured.

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple Computer, the company was in terrible shape. While certainly it wasn't as important to the American economy as the Big 3 automobile makers in Detroit, it was an important part of the history of the personal computer industry, the Silicon Valley, and the tech expansion that fueled our economy for a while.

David Pogue of the New York Times has reviewed Blackberry's latest smart phone, the Blackberry Storm. This is the one with the touch screen that is supposed to look and feel like an iPhone. David HATES this phone. His review is so scolding, it is funny. On the other hand, RIM has the ability to update the phone with software only changes, and it does run on the Verizon 3G network. 

 If you have a lot of email and you use Apple's Mail application, you've noticed that it can get a little sluggish. Leland Scott has created an application wrapper around a utility that can significantly speed up your mail app. It involved running a "vacuum" process on the envelope database.

 If you have a disk attached to an Airport Extreme or have a Time Capsule, Apple makes it very easy to use Time Machine over the network. However, I have a 1TB drive in my Mac Pro that I'd like to use for Time Machine for my other Macs. If the Mac Pro ran Leopard Server, I'd just set up Time Machine Server, but since it not running Server, I have to do a trick to make it work. Here's the steps:

1. Create a Shared Folder on the Mac Pro.

2. Use Finder to Connect To Server... and connect to the Shared Folder on the Pro from my laptop.

 Microsoft started last week airing a new ad which I guess is supposed to counter Apple's "I'm a Mac..." campaign. In this ad, an actor dressed like "PC" from Apple's ads opens with "I'm a PC and I'm not alone." Then, depending on the version and length, a whole array of people, both famous and not famous announce that they are also a PC. The people represent every demographic they can fit into a 30-second spot: male, female, white, black, spanish, rich, poor, you get the point.

Tidbits has a good summary of the newly released Mac virtualization competitor to Parallels, VMWare Fusion 2.0. Parallels used to have more features, especially when it came to integration between Windows running in the virtual machine, and the Mac OS X host. Fusion has slightly better performance.

I've had zero problems with the iPhone 2.1 upgrade. It seems to do most of what it claims to do - with the possible exception of battery life on a 3G iPhone. I haven't noticed much if an improvement, but I'm not having problems either.

Most notably, the text messaging and contacts lag seems resolved. The contacts lag effected many different apps on the phone like voice mail, email, etc because they are all tied into Contacts. So this is a welcome improvement.

3rd party apps seem to crash less too.

Not perfect yet, but much better. I recommend installing it.