By now you’ve probably started to hear about what my team has been working on: Windows Live Toolbar.

Here’s the full press release, including details about our acquisition of the popular Onfolio.

I can already guess the question on your mind: will the Onfolio features be free? The answer is Yes! That question, and others, are answered in the Microsoft Acquisition FAQ.

Here’s where you will be able to download all of it (any minute/hour now): http://ideas.live.com.

If you haven’t checked this site in a while, you should visit again – new stuff has been added, and will continue to trickle in regularly. At Windows Live, we like to ship frequently!!

Oh yeah… in case you haven’t figured it out yet, the MSN Search Toolbar is now known as the Windows Live Toolbar. Same great team, even better product, slightly longer name!

So, here’s the part where I personalize this entry by telling you what I’ve been working on. Well, since I left the Entourage for Mac team last May, and joined the Toolbar team:

MSN Search Toolbar and Windows Desktop Search 2.6
This actually shipped last November, but I didn’t really talk about it because this was mostly a release for corporate/enterprise customers. That said, a lot of the work there carried over.

In the release, I worked with my excellent feature teams to split up our products so that we could have separate installers for MSN Search Toolbar and Windows Desktop Search. In addition, I shepherd our team to becoming Microsoft Update compliant – so now, you may see Toolbar updates when you go to Microsoft Update, which we fondly call MU. Haven’t been to MU yet? Visit it today! It’s the way to get updates for all your Microsoft products in one shot!

Along the way, I also helped make our product MUI compliant (I think only IT admins know what that means) as well as to help redesign the experience you see when you run our product for the first time. Phew! It was a lot of plumbing work, and it was pretty hairy at times, but it sets us up in a better position for the future!

Windows Live Toolbar Beta
In this release, I worked on the Feed Detector button. When you visit a page with an RSS or ATOM feed offered in the headers, the button lights up and allows you to add it straight to your Live.com page. We also do some nifty things to make it so that if your feed title is simply “ATOM” or “RSS”, that we show something slightly more helpful to the user. Speaking of Live.com, check out the changes there!

Huh? That’s it? Well, for me for this release it is. The rest of my team worked really hard on all these great things like the Component Manager – so that you can go crazy managing which buttons are installed, changing the branding, working on the Onfolio integration, and plenty more.

(Unfortunately, it’s midnight, and I’ve been up since 6am, and I have to wake up at 6am again – so I’ll have to cut this short for now!)

This is a beta release, so we’re just scratching the surface. We’ve got some neat things lined up coming in the future. I’m proud of the work we’ve accomplished, and I think you’ll be impressed with what’s coming down the pipeline. These are going to be exciting times!

Today Avis issued me a Chevy HHR as my rental vehicle. Last week, it was the Ford Focus, and I was pretty happy with that – unfortunately I never found time to blog about it. That said, I’m pretty disappointed with the HHR.

While the interior is pretty nice, the blind spots on this car are pretty dramatic. Here’s an example:

And then there’s this mysterious control. What do you think it does?


Overall, the horsepower is a bit lacking, the steering is really loose, the blind spots are really awful, as well as the visibility through the rear window. And the radio reception for my favorite hard to receive channel was terrible.

I’m afraid I’ll have to give it a thumbs down.

Gah, it’s 6am and i’ve been up for an hour and a half already. Here’s a picture of how far backed up the security line was at 5:33am at San Jose Airport, Terminal C, for Gate C15:

How lame. I think there were people who missed the 6:05am Portland flight because of this.

On the plus side though, it wasn’t raining this morning! I really thought it would be… but once again I’ve missed having to board a plane in the rain – phew.

(Yeah, in San Jose, half the flights are boarded outdoors – you know, like in the movies from the 50′s.)

I ran NetStumbler tonight to troubleshoot a problem, and noticed this:

That’s a lot of wireless networks!! And look at how many of them are secured! Talk about a nerdy place! I was in Boston once, and did a scan: there were 6 networks called “linksys” and they were all open. Sheesh.

But what I think is really funny is how people leave them on the default channel of 6. That’s gotta eat into the bandwidth performance.

Take a tour of the new MSN Travel

Wow… yet another new site from Microsoft! it’s been a busy week for sure.

USATODAY.com – Study: Cellphones can impact cockpit devices

Talking on cellphones or using laptops on an airplane could disrupt cockpit operations, especially global positioning devices that are increasingly being used to help land planes safely, according to a new study.

Researchers monitoring flights in the Northeast found that several cellphone calls are typically made on commercial flights during takeoff or final approach, two critical flight stages when accidents could occur.

The research at Carnegie Mellon University was led by Bill Strauss, an expert in aircraft electromagnetic compatibility at the Naval Air Warfare Center in Patuxent River, Md.

Researchers monitored radio emissions from passengers on three airlines with the support of the Transportation Security Agency. The emissions were tracked using a broadband antenna that was attached to a portable spectrum analyzer in a piece of carryon luggage.

Granger Morgan, head of Carnegie Mellon’s Department of Engineering and Public Policy Department, said the activity recorded shows that the use of electronic devices should be limited on airplanes.

Morgan said the disruptions are enough to impact a plane’s navigation or other systems.

So please turn off your cell phones.