While we were home in Boston a few weeks ago for my sister-in-laws wedding, we had the pleasure of renting a 2010 Ford Explorer (with the Eddie Bauer trim) from Avis. We usually request a full size sedan, but ran into some trouble operating the windshield wipers on the Nissan Altima that we were assigned. Before driving the Altima off the lot, we inquired about the finicky wipers and they quickly gave us the Explorer, which I knew would be fun to drive. Turns out this vehicle was equipped with Microsoft’s SYNC technology. Great we thought! We’ll finally get a chance to try it out.
For those who aren’t familiar with this technology, which is available in select Ford, Lincoln, and Mercury models, here’s a quick excerpt from the Ford Explorer site:
”SYNC®In-car Connectivity System Available SYNC allows you to easily operate most popular MP3 players and Bluetooth®-enabled phones with simple voice commands.”
Before heading out for an afternoon of errands, we hooked up our Zune to the USB input and initiated communication with the SYNC women. Naturally, we pulled out the SYNC owner’s manual to follow along in connecting our device. She was nice and pleasant to listen to but it seemed she couldn’t really understand neither Kevin nor I. She kept saying, “I’m sorry, I can’t understand you. Did you say X?” After several unsuccessful attempts, we finally just hit the play button on the device and stowed it away in the console.
Towards the end of our trip at home, I made the 1 hour and 30 minute drive from Kevin’s house to my parent’s house on Cape Cod. I was really looking forward to giving SYNC one more chance to redeem itself. I knew though, that I’d be traveling on almost all highways and wouldn’t have a chance to wrestle with the SYNC women or the device. But after familiarizing myself with some of the basic commands like, “USB” and “Play artist Cartel,” in the driveway (and obtaining a little extra patience), I felt confident that I could recall as many artists on my Zune to fill up the 90 minute drive. It ended up being a successful trip and I realized there’s definitely a huge learning curve with SYNC. I just hope I don’t forget everything I learned before our next trip back East!
Check out this guide for yourself to see the 12 step process to playing music from a device.
I used the Microsoft Image Composite Editor to create this panoramic photo. While I normally use the Windows Live Photo Gallery to create my panoramic photos, I thought I’d give ICE a chance. What might keep me going back to ICE for generating panoramic photos is the cropping feature. Nice work MSR (Microsoft Research)!
Here’s a recent photo I took from atop Highland Park on Queen Anne and stitched together with Windows Live Photos Gallery. The Queen Anne blog also featured my photo as well!
November 16th, 2009
Cathy
Last month the Northeastern Seattle Alumni Chapter was launched and it gave us a chance to connect with the Associate Director of Alumni Relations (Colleen Webb) and our fellow alumni from the area. As of today, there are 968 alumni in the state of Washington. Amazing! Our launch event, which we held at Buckley’s in Belltown brought well over 30 of us together to kick off the chapter.
Tomorrow (11/17) at 12:30PM (PST), we’ll be holding our first conference call to exchange ideas, talk about future events, and drive the direction of our chapter. I’ll be heading up our chapter as the Chapter Leader and I certainly can’t do all the work. So I encourage you to join in the call or email me if you can’t attend to share your ideas and potentially volunteer to lead an effort or two.
I’ll be tweeting about upcoming events and news in the chapter using this hash (#NUSeattleAlum). So follow along!
I love sharing most things, especially my photos (as you can see on my Flickr). I’m also the friend who either says:
1. Let’s use my camera to take group photos.
2. “Oh can you take one with my camera as well?”
It’s plain and simple, I am the only one who actually shares. Don’t get me wrong, I love my friends. But they don’t share. With that said, I have tried to make it easy for us to share our photos. Right now, we use Live Mesh which allows us to share and manage files (not just photos) in the web UI or with the desktop explorer client. So far this has proved to be successful. Now if only we had more hours in the day. I am sure that is the only reason why people don’t share. It takes time to download pictures from a camera, save them to your PC, then share them with friends.
As I think about the trials and tribulations of sharing between my friends and I, I begin to wonder how I’ll ask the guests of our wedding to share their photos. I think our photographer will do an amazing job, but I also want those candid photos that I know will be hilarious. Recently, my parents attended a wedding at our church (family friends) and they decided to use Picasa (a G**gle product) for their sharing. That’s cool, but I would never advertise the use of a non-Microsoft product at my wedding. So what’s next? Here’s my thoughts:
- I won’t use a non-Microsoft product like I said.
- FTP is most certainly out of the question.
- Live Mesh is a bit advanced in my opinion. I honestly think it would scare some of my family members/friends.
- Live Photos maybe? …with a dedicated username and password to share out?
Either way, I’ll keep on bugging my friends. Someday. 
If you have any suggestions for our wedding, let me or Kevin know!
