Too much time has passed since my last blog entry, so I figured another entry was LONG overdue. Some of you may know that I have agreed to be the first to have Windows 7 installed and configured on the computer I use for all of my daily work and technical support activities in SCE Academic Computing. Late last week I backed up everything on my SCE laptop, wiped the hard drive, and installed Windows 7 on my system. Initially, the installation took only about 35-40 minutes to complete. I pretty much used the default settings, and let the installer do it’s thing. I’ve had three full workdays using Windows 7 including last Friday, as well as Monday and Tuesday this week. So far, everything seems to be working pretty good. Aside from a few minor things I’m still working out due to changes in where Windows 7 stores User profile information, this new operating system works pretty good.

My laptop is no spring chicken, but it has a fairly decent Intel Centrino Dual Core processor running at 2.0 ghz with 2.5gb of 667mhz DDR2 ram. Windows 7 is pretty responsive on this computer, and so far I haven’t experienced any issues that would prevent me from doing my work. I’m not impressed at all with the Aero Glass visual enhancements, so that got disabled pretty quickly. Some people like visual enhancements, but I prefer a cleaner looking interface so transparent title and scroll bars are not important to me. The Start menu works a little different than on Windows XP, but I think most staff and students will be able to get accustomed to it given some time working in Windows 7. Some items that you may be used to using in the Start Menu are probably turned off by default, but they are easily enabled with a few clicks in the Customize Start Menu from the Taskbar properties window.

The Control Panel is really different, and will take time to find things you’ve used previously as many applets have been renamed. For example, the familiar ‘Display’ from Windows XP has been folded into a new Control Panel app named ‘Personalize.’ I also discovered that you can reorganize currently running applications on the Taskbar. I think I’ll find more stuff that’s been updated or changed as I continue using Windows 7 over the weeks and months ahead. So far so good.

Just this past weekend, I installed the latest version of the Imail Server email software onto the SCE Email server.  Quite a few improvements have been made behind the scenes for mail processing, server administration & management, and some tools from an older version of Imail were improved and brought back into the mix with version 11. There aren’t a plethora of new features for SCE Staff and Students, but a few that are worth mentioning here:

1. When using the Webmail client, you can now perform quick searches for contacts near the top right corner of the screen. 

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As you type, the system does a quick search based on the first few letters you type and auto-suggests a contact.  This is a bit more optimized than before when the system had to perform a more lengthy search of the contacts

2. Any person you send an email message to can now be added automatically (or auto-magically as I sometimes say) to your web-based address book.

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If you use the ICS Shared Calendaring system on your pc, and contacts that get auto-magically added to your web-based address book will at some point get synchronized to your Microsoft Outlook address book.

3. For managing web folders, when you use the CHECK ALL option

4. Word & character count for each message

Some older methods of generating and sending spam email messages are returning. Take a look at this article from Yahoo Tech and be on the lookout for some of these old methods as they resurface:

http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/145642

We held a Holiday Cookie throwdown this morning in Academic Computing. I baked my Fall Harvest pumpkin spice cookies with White chocolate chips, pecans and organic pumpkin along with real Madagascar vanilla. Fred baked his chocolate fudge cherry cookies, and Jason baked his double chocolate cookie with peppermint icing. Our judges were Leslie Jackson-Reed, Quamrul Shahid, and Adam Howard. Criteria used for judging included taste, texture, and appearance. All three cookies were very good, but ultimately my cookie won. The prize for the winning cookie was a Home Depot gift card. I don’t have the recipe with me right this second, but I will post it here to the blog in the next day or so. It’s safe to say that there is probably enough butter and sugar in the Fall Harvest pumpkin spice recipe to keep any cookie connoisseur very happy! Thanks to our judges, and to all cookie bakers for their participation. I think this cookie throwdown could become an annual event - possibly even bi-annual.

Our SCE Academic Computing coffee of the day today is Cafe Britt Dark Roast, and it was excellent. Jason made a great pot of this Costa Rican coffee this morning, and we went through this pot very quickly. Lately the comment has been that we take our geography lessons and travel the globe simply with a bag of coffee beans. I actually traveled to Costa Rica and bought these beans while I was there, so for me it was truly a geography lesson along with traveling across the globe. My first step off of our tourbus at the Cafe Britt coffee roasting plant was met with some of the most amazing smells of freshly roasted coffee. Their freshly picked coffee only has to travel a few hundred feet from their coffee plantation into their processing and roasting facility.

While I was in Costa Rica, it was great seeing coffee plants growing on almost every hillside, banana plantations, volcanoes, spiders that are almost as big as your head, exotic blue butterflies fluttering through, lizards everywhere, and colorful but poisonus frogs along with everything else that lives in the rainforest.