Cathy's Blog » Technology

Exploring Microsoft SYNC in 120 Hours

Cathy — Wed, 26 May 2010 19:00:33 +0000

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 love (photo) sharing

Cathy — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 19:43:01 +0000

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!

The end of an era

Cathy — Wed, 20 May 2009 23:22:48 +0000

So today, I decided to overhaul my website. Back in 2005, I wrote a custom blogging tool for my website. Okay, maybe it wasn’t really an “tool” but it was definitely cool. The admin page consisted of features to create a new post (with tags), edit an existing post, and delete a post. I worked for several weeks on this tool and in the end I was proud of the outcome. I used mySQL to store each post and all associated information about it (date, time, subject, author, etc.). I then wrote a PHP script which I called Feed Builder to generate the mySQL rows (only the most recent 5 or so) into standard RSS XML. From there my feed was readable by almost all RSS readers and my own website of course.

This was awesome! Now speed forward to today. About 3 years and 4 months later, it’s just a pain in the you know what to post anything to my blog. I decided to give WordPress a try. After reading through the hosting features of WordPress.com, I found it was extremely limited in terms of what customization was available. Of course, if you are willing to pay a small fee, you can get some of that customization back. I then discovered WordPress.org. It was like finding my way into Heaven (if I could imagine that for a second). Anyway, self-hosting WordPress sounded like a dream.

So here I am about an hour later after customizing this thing from left to right and top to bottom. I can pull in my Flickr photos, post directly from Flickr (with the photo of my choice), and pull in custom RSS feeds (like my Yelp reviews). Ahhhh, I feel right at home. Now if only I will feel more at ease posting to my own blog. Enjoy.