Bret Hermsen

The best value on the web still has to be MLB's Gameday Audio. Nothing like being able to listen to any baseball game that you want live for the whole season for $15. Makes it so much easier to follow the Cubs when I can listen to them every game they play over the 'Net instead of hoping that I can pick up a radio station broadcasting the game.
This is my first chance today to get to use Microsoft's Silverlight player and it seems to be doing a failry nice job on the game broadcast and the ability to pull up some of the stuff that I used to have to open in a separate game tracker window is very nice. We'll see how it goes as the year goes on.

It's amazing how much better your computer starts acting when you wipe it out and start over fresh. All the assorted junk that you've installed that's left it's entrails all over your machine. Software that you thought that you'd use but has done nothing but take up space since you put it on. Little quirks that drive you nuts but aren't quite bad enough to make you want to fix them. All of that gone with a fresh OS install. Only the programs that you really use installed back on the machine, migrating only the preferences for the stuff you use.

It's a great release and in my case resulted in another 20Gb of free drive space to play with (not that I was hurting). I know that I should do that more often (with as often as I'm installling and uninstalling things) but it's such a pain. Making the backup, waiting for all the installers and updates to run, figuring out where the preference files live for each application. And all of this spurred on with the discovery of an unused firewire drive and a couple of random lockups.

As cool as Apple's blogging solution is on the surface it keeps getting uglier the more that I look at it. At least as far as integrating with Active Directory goes Apple claims that it's fairly simple in that you only need to change a few lines in some config files. Unfortunately even if you follow Apple's directions to the letter it still doesn't work like it should. First problems with the Podcast Capture solution that Apple presents not working when ClearText Auth is turned on to allow AD users to blog. Now a new out of the blue a problem where AD users can't log in unless we rerun the commands that Apple says that you need to run initially for setting up AD access.