Tablets - Obviously the big winner of CES is Android 3.0.  Microsoft really did not show up unless you have really deep pockets.  I guess they are content waiting until Windows 8.  I think this is a huge mistake, as Android 3.0 and iPad 2 will be killing it next year.  I do think that if Windows 8 enables experiences anywhere on the lines of this Flickr demo, than the future is bright.  But, as always, Redmond is a bit slow in getting there.  I am still waiting for non-contract devices at $199.  As a programmer, I really can’t justify throwing out $500.  I already have one device that I cannot type on.

Phones - While I thought it was really cool to see dual core phones and a bunch of 4G phones, I was overall disappointed with what was released at CES.  Android 3.0 made such a huge splash that seeing phones with an older version of Android and muddled with third-party UIs was a bit disheartening.  Plus, there was not much WP7 news.  Yes, we are getting copy-and-paste, performance upgrades, and a deluge of games, but I was really hoping on some firm dates and a bit more news regarding the rumored Mango release.

Surface 2.0 - I thought that the Surface 2.0 was the coolest technology demo of CES so far.  The possibilities for a screen that can read paper and interact with objects is almost endless.  For consumers, it looks like we are still a ways off.

Media Hubs - I thought it was funny earlier in the week when the rumor was going around that Microsoft might compete with Apple and Google in the media hub category.  Don’t be fooled, this isn’t much of a competition. The 360 is dominating this category.  I think Microsoft did the right thing at CES by touting upcoming media capabilities of the 360.

Kinect - The Kinect was by far the best technology introduction of 2010.  And, it looks like they are going to keep innovating in 2011.  I think the Avatar addition is pretty cool.  I am not quite sure if I would use it, but I could definitely see it appealing to a younger demographic.  I would have liked to see some more information at CES about new games coming to the Kinect, but I guess that will have to wait.  Now, just to buy a Kinect.  I still think I will need a bit more square footage first.

I am still keeping it simple.  But, I added some new fonts via Google’s wonderful font directory.

Fan of Halo/Windows 7? Check out the Halo Reach theme.  I installed it last night.  It includes pictures and sounds from the game.  It is dorky, but pretty cool at the same time.  My favorite is the sound of a (plasma?) grenade when you empty the trash.

Strange Loop starts tomorrow.  I will be there.  You can get the program and venue map on their blog.

I always wondered when games/movies/etc. were coming out.  Now I can just go to When it drops.

So, I just got done with a redesign of my blog.   I am now on revision 3.  I always get sick of the design after a couple months, so this time I decided to go ultra-minimal.  I literally just got rid of all the styles on the site and went with just the basics.  The one “bell” for the site is that I added a bounded fluid layout, so it should work really well on both your desktop and a mobile phone.  I will be making some minor updates over the next week, so if that kind of stuff interests you, check back.

Microsoft is releasing Project Natal this fall.  If you haven’t heard, it is a NUI add-on to the XBOX360 that allows for motion-based gaming without the controllers.  This is extremely cool, but I honestly do not think I am going to buy it.  And, it is not because of the $149 price barrier that Gizmodo projects.  I will probably not buy the device because the Wii sucked so bad.  Yes, there were a few fun games here-and-there.  But, most of these were first party games.  And, some (like the New Super Mario Land) barely even used the motion sensors.  In the end, the Wii was essentially a gimmick that for me at only a short lived appeal.  I am lucky enough to have a choice between the 360 and the Wii on a daily basis, and 99 out of 100 times, I chose to go play the 360.  I think this is pretty true for my age demographic.  A number of people I know that have owned the Wii ended up getting a second console.  I think this is because (1) there are very few games on the Wii targeted at gamers my age (not 5-15), (2) motion-based gaming really only works well for a few genres, and (3) playing SD graphics on an HDTV just kind of sucks.  While the 360 does throw HD into the mix, I just don’t see this as being enough for me to really want another motion-based console.

I actually remembering watching the first episode of Lost six years ago in the basement of my parent’s house in St. Chuck.  I was hooked from day one, and apparently brought another devotee with me.   Sunday night, I watched the finale in Eric’s loft overlooking the mean streets of St. Louis.  It somehow seems fitting that what began in a dark basement lit by the glow of an SDTV, ended in a fancy loft surrounded by DTS and HD.   Looking back over the last 6 seasons, I think it was a brilliant use of time.  While sometimes a bit slow, the underlying plot and all the questions kept me coming back year after year.  This was capped by a moving finale that tied it all in a nice bow.  Do I still have questions that were unanswered?  Yes.  But, am I complaining?  No.   There are a plenty of answers on /r/lost, Dark UFO, and Lost… and Gone Forever to keep me entertained for weeks (and perhaps longer).  In the end, I think it was as good as a TV show can get.  It effortlessly mixed science, technology, theology, and meta-physics into an easily digestible 1 hour block.   I will remember it most for the great 1 liners, the poignant questions, the interesting characters, and the great arguments with my friends Eric and Theodore.

Nokia—Right now it looks like my e71 will be my first and last Nokia device.  While there are a few really good things about the device, its seems that Nokia’s next generation offerings (Symbian^3 and Meego) are simply evolutionary.  With Android looking better every day and WP7 looming, it will take a lot for any of their devices to break into my short list.  Honestly, I think they are done in the US unless they snap up Palm.  This seems pretty obvious to me…a company with great hardware and a so-so OS acquires a company with a great OS and so-so hardware.  Problem solved, right?  I just don’t see Nokia swallowing their pride and going this route.

Apple/HTC Lawsuit—This is such an odd lawsuit. To me, it seems like Apple really got pissed off about Android, but rather than suing Google decided to go after its smaller, weaker friend.  It will definitely be interesting to see how this plays out.  If Apple can successfully defend its multi-touch patent in court, what does that mean for the rest of the industry?  Will we not be able to see multi-touch on WP7, Android, and Palm?  Or, will these company’s be forced to license this tech?  My guess is that it will do little to deter Apple’s competitors.  And, most will just fine ways to circumvent the patent.   But whatever the outcome, I think most people agree that patenting a means to interact with an interface is ridiculous.  Apple should not be able to patent multi-touch.  Could you imagine what would have happened, if companies tried to enforce patents on the keyboard and mouse?  Hopefully, the continued criticism coming out of this lawsuit will finally cause the US patent office to change how it deals with IT patents.

This is a follow-up post to one I wrote  a month ago about selling my home by owner.  The outcome of the prior is now pretty obvious:  I was completely unsuccessful at selling my home by owner.  But given that there are 5 other homes that are still on the market that were up for sale by real estate agents in my neighborhood, I really do not feel too bad about that failure.  The truth is that the real estate market sucks.  And it is even worse for owners of condos and townhomes, because the only real differentiation they have is price.  It was particularly difficult in my neighborhood because one of the homes went up for a short sale and essentially undercut the prices of all the other sellers in the community.  But this is the reality of the market, and honestly, does not seem to be getting better any time soon.

Given this reality, I was left with a few options:  keep the house on the market and continue a price war with my neighbors or try my luck on renting the property.  Given that there were already two other properties on my street that were rentals and that I had enough equity to make it fiscally realistic, I decided to go the rental route.   Keep in mind that I was not flying blind into this decision.  Last year, I took a semester long real estate class as part of my MBA, so I had a pretty good list of prerequisites before making this decision.  I figure that I would share these before I started as it was pretty good advice when it was given to me.  The first prerequisite was that I had at 20% down on the home.  Apparently, this is a magic number for renting property.  At 20%, you are free of any PMI obligations that increase your monthly costs on the home.  Also as a good rule of thumb, you can rent your home for around the same cost of a mortgage on 80% of your home’s value.  The second prerequisite for me was that I had enough money set aside to maintain my mortgage if my renter defaulted on the property.  And, finally the third prerequisite was that I fully understood the laws around renting in my state.  Missouri really makes it easy, because they publish a guide called the Missouri Landlord/Tenant guide.  I gave this a quick read through prior to advertising my property to ensure that I knew what I was getting into.

After making the decision to rent the place out, I was really left with two key problems I needed to work out.  The first was how I would advertise the property.  And, the second problem was once I had found the renters, how would I do background checks to make sure they would be a good fit.  The first problem was actual quite an easy one to solve.  I called up a couple of my friends that were renting properties and asked them how they found their place.  The overwhelming response was that they used Craigslist to find their future home.  This really just reinforced what I had already known—if you want to rent a property in St. Louis, start at Craigslist.  The second problem was a bit more involved.  It is common sense to run a background check on potential tenants to screen them before they rent the property out.  But if you have never done this before, it is a bit overwhelming to get started.  Like with most decisions, I turned to the Internet to try to get some answers.  And believe me, I found a bunch of services willing to help.  What I found pretty amusing was how bad each of these service’s websites are.  As a web developer, I tend to judge a book by its cover, so it was pretty tough to trust financial information to a company that overlooked the design of the site.  In the end, I selected Transunion’s SmartMove service to do background checks.  I liked this service because it was from a reputable provider and they verified the prospective tenant online versus having to put the onus on me to collect the social security number and appropriate sign-offs.  With that said,  I never ended up using this service.  But, more on that later.  After selecting a service, it is extremely important to determine what your criteria is for selecting a qualified candidate.  Doing this ahead of time really makes the final decision easier, and it is actually pretty important if you run into any legal questions about how you select tenants.  My criteria was simple.  The rent could not be more than 35% of their monthly salary (preferably closer to 30%), they had to have clean credit, and had to have a good rental history with their previous landlords (no evictions, etc).

After I had all the prerequisites and process questions out of the way, I set out to find a potential tenant.  I posted the ad in Craigslist and to my surprise I started to get serious inquiries right away.  Within the first week, I had two showings scheduled.  The first showing was a bit nerve wrecking at first.  Going into it, I had to prepare a rental application to hand out.  This turned out to be pretty simple.  I grabbed one of the Internet that matched up well to ones I had filled out in the past.  I then modified it so that it would describe the rental process that I had put into place and so that it collected all the information that I needed to put the SmartMove process in motion.  The showing itself was much different than what I had experienced when selling my home by owner.  Rather than rely on the other real estate agents to show the property, I had to do it myself.  Most of the questions centered around month-to-month costs and square footage questions.  Since I had done a lot of that ground work when I was selling my house, it was pretty easy to field these questions.  The most surprising part of the process was the willingness for potential tenants to give away personal financial information without me really even asking.  I would simply mention the need for a credit check in the process and I would get a life long credit history complete with long stories about how they ran a foul.  I ran this by a friend of mine who also rents properties and he said that this happens all the time.  He told me that you will get a lot of “sob” stories, but just to hold out because there are tenants out there that have good backgrounds.  I thought that this was the best piece of advice I got before renting a property.

One of the first people to contact me about the place was not a potential renter at all.  Her name was Diana from stlrentit.com.  She runs a website that connects landlords and tenants.  She said that she had a few tenants looking in the area and would like to have them come out and take a look at the rental.  I was of course a bit suspicious of the service to start, but her process was very straightforward and the agreement I had to sign put no risk and (most importantly) no costs on my end to show the place.  So, I agreed and showed the property to her clients.  I went through the same process that I had gone through before to show the place.  But this time, they were interested and filled out an application.  Rather than going through SmartMove, I opted to use Diana’s resource for credit checks.  This made the process a little easier, but did require a little bit of trust on my end.  After receiving the credit information, I read through the reports for about an hour.  I had gone through my own a couple times before, so I had a pretty good idea what to look for.  I then made a few phone calls to verify employment, call references, and confirm positive rental history.  This actually ended up taking a couple days because it was tough to get a hold of people and I really only called references that I could verify the phone number from a secondary source.  After a bunch of positive results from my screening, I then accepted the application.

The only stumbling block left was getting the lease signed.  For my lease, I decided to go with EZ Landlord Forms.  I chose this company because early on I used them as a resource to find out more information about renting the property.  They then allowed me to create a sample lease and I found that their wizard was not only very intuitive but it covered all the points that I had read about in the Missouri Landlord/Tenant Guide.  It was nice that it was not only easy-to-use, but also it was thorough and was reviewed by attorneys in the state.  The form ended up costing me $20.  I thought that this was a little expensive, but the quality was apparent.

As you can tell by this post, the process to rent a property and become a landlord is pretty involved.  In the end, I think that I did my due-diligence to find my new tenants.  But, it goes without saying that no process is 100% bullet proof.  In the end, I stuck with my criteria and made what I consider to be a sound decision.  But at the end of the day, I still worry a little about the decision and hope everything turns out for the best.

This weekend I finally got some time to sit down and play Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer.  I played about 4 hours (not at once) and made it to a level 16 ranking.  I figure I would spend a couple minutes giving my impressions from the viewpoint of a casual player.

One thing that you will notice early on is that you are playing against players of all different ranks.  This is in stark contrast to games like Halo where you play against players only that have the same rank as you.  At first I thought that this would really suck, but I honestly like it much better.  The game does a pretty good job of balancing the teams before each match.  So if you are brand new, you tend to get paired up with a bunch of really good teammates.  This helps a lot because they tend to hunt out the campers, and you can follow them around to learn about the level.  The downside to playing against really good players is that as a casual gamer, you are always at a disadvantage.  MW2 rewards experience with better guns and other perks that give higher ranked players a huge advantage.  So, it is often like you are “going into a gun fight with a knife”.  As a casual player, you can mitigate this advantage in a couple ways.  The first and probably most effective is that you have to crouch around and use stealth a lot more than other players.  In MW2, you really only need to put a couple rounds on an opponent to get a kill.  And I found that no matter what gun they have, if you get the first shot in and it is solid, you will get the kill 9 out of 10 times.  The second strategy I use a lot is that I take on a support role.  I find a player with a solid gun and some claymores and hold up in a bunker or building with them and essentially cover the back door.  This prevents you from being exposed to care packages and you get a lot of surprise kills when someone tries to come in through the back door.

Another thing that was pretty confusing early was all the gun and perk options you are given to upgrade your player.  Being new to Call of Duty multiplayer, this was a bit overwhelming.  It really took me a couple hours to get a grasp of all the options.  But honestly, it is this depth that really makes the game a lot more fun to play.  In Halo, you are always worried about your rank, because this is the only thing that your work to achieve.  In Call of Duty, the rank is really secondary to your perks and gun options.  So, I think this really makes the game fun for a casual player.  If you mute the other players, the game really feels kind of like a “career mode” to the single player story.  But the difference is that you have some really good AI to compete against.  For this game though, I really would like to see an option to purchase perks and guns with XBox points for casual players.  I know I will get a little flack for saying that.  But, honestly, as someone who can play maybe 5-10 hours a week, it would be nice to use some of the more advanced weapons in the multiplayer.  And, I most likely will never be able to earn them organically as I cannot put in 50 hours a week.

Overall, I really dig the multiplayer on MW2.  As a casual player (read: old guy), it provides a pretty good balance so that I can have a good time playing even if it just a couple hours a week.  With that said, I still think I would like to see a way to get better guns and perks without having to hire a 12 year old kid to play when I am at work.

Given that most people have written off Windows Mobile, I figure I would give Microsoft a quick three step plan to make Windows Mobile relevant into 2010.

1.  Great Hardware and an improved UI. This is pretty obvious.  To compete in the smart phone market you need these two components.  Given that they already have a small screen device with great hardware and one of the best UIs on the market (the Zune HD), you would not think this would be too hard.  But, you never know.

2.  Zune. The Zune ecosystem needs to be completely integrated with the device….both music and movies.  The experience needs to be seamless.  Finally, I think the Zune service needs to be expanded to support both free (ad supported) and premium streaming.  I think 2010 is the year where your personal catalog of music becomes obsolete as music moves to the cloud.  If this was baked-in to the mobile Zune experience, Windows Mobile would have some additional appeal.

3.  Halo (and Xbox). Where Microsoft (and Sony too) still have an advantage over Apple is in IP.  And, the biggest untapped resource is the XBox IP.  I guarantee that if Windows Mobile launches with XBox branded gaming support, it would immediately be relevant again.  And, if you throw the Halo title in there, you would have converts jumping from both the Android and iPhone camp.

So, there you have it…a simple, and completely achievable road map for making Windows Mobile relevant into 2010.  Someone send this to Balmer.