Yea… I cannot start off telling you all about recognition redefined without.. first giving you a story about how I came to learn of this amazing tool to battle all tools!

“Ooh! What’s that playing on the radio! Wow, let me see… (Pulls out iPhone4, loads up search and types in shaz – Select Shazam and select “Tag”) [listening… listening… listening…]

?!?!?WTF?!?!? I’m limited to 5 per tags per month?!? Okay fine.. sure that was a complete surprise, but I’ll download the pay version and finish tagging my song there. 

HI IM SHAZAM AND EVEN IF YOU PAY YOU STILL GET ADS – JUST LIKE CLASSMATES.COM  Seriously?!   Yea, #fail multiplied by #fail equals me going to look for another solution.   And it was then (that I complained about this on Twitter) that @jeffcoffee suggested I check out SoundHound!  

Okay, let me first off set the disclaimer:

There is a ‘5 per month’ limit on the Free version of SoundHound as well, but I was already in the market for a new product which clearly was NOT Shazam.

So, I load up the app and I get splashed with this screen

First of all, let me just say.   Whoa!  I decide to click “Tap Here” and I proceed to sing the Beatles “The Yellow Submarine” (I did consider filming me doing that… for your sake, I didn’t ;))

Lo and behold shortly into the song, BAM! It recognized it from my very own (at this point out of tune voice)  Wow! I should share this feat with someone shouldn’t I!? Ooh! Twitter and FB integration!  Yea, that’s the cost of doing business though.    But what if I don’t know the name of the song… all I can really remember is an artist…

With the ease of knowing ‘words’ I simply say a song name or an artist name by clicking on the “Title or Artist” section and bam! I’m presented with Michael Jackson!

And while it is very nice that they have the settings easy enough to configure inside of the Settings section… the following is something I tested (both from my iPhone and my iPad) Something I had wished Shazam could do.. but never did, and frankly I don’t care if they ever support it at this point!

Suppose the following situation exists:   You’re listening to a song out of iTunes/iPod on your device, or even listening to something on Pandora! And you’re saying “Man, I wish I had the lyrics to that song, or knew what album it was off of, or other details” etc etc..  So you go and launch Shazam and immediately all sound CEASES to operate.  WTF?!? That’s kind of dismissing!

I welcome you to this feature in SoundHound called “Now Playing!”   Yes, this screen shot is from my iPad because it looks soooooo much cooler in that sense ;) But it works JUST as well on the iPhone (I guarantee :))

And the last thing I’d like to share from my playing with this, is the “What’s Hot” “UnderPlayed” and “Just found by Users” options.  As you can see the iPad version looks a lot sweeter than the iPhone version… :)

And last but not least, I’d like to share some of the ‘highlights’ mentioned from their actual website which incase I missed any of this, you have it here! :)

	Free Version of SoundHound Now Available for iOS and Android Highlights Blazing fast music identification Sing & Hum recognition Voice-directed music search In-app lyrics Special on iPad: Big, beautiful lyrics and music videos The SoundHound Ticker
Version 3.3.1 for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad Version 2.0.1 for Android - SoundHound (free): 5 IDs per month Available on the App Store - SoundHound ?: unlimited Available on the App Store

Oh, and let’s not ignore the one feature (which seemed to be overlooked in too many ways in the features…)

Instantly launch a Pandora Station!!!

Okay..  I think that is enough… I’ll let you tell me your favorite functions, features and otherwise.   If you found this useful at all, and if you kick the ‘”Shazam” habit, let me know.  If you’re from Shazam I’d love to hear your feedback as well. :) 

So here we are kicking off the first official day of the IT Grand Prix in Washington DC!     We were supplied with a USB Key with our puzzle, an Internet connection USB card, and a $500 cash card for our incidentals! Our host David Elfassy gave us a ‘puzzle’ to solve in order to find out which non-profit organization we’re going to be going out to help.    Through deductive reasoning, over-thinking the problem, WAAAY OVER THINKING the problem, and some more deductive reasoning… :) We were able to find the non-profit we would be destined to help!

Welcome to KIPP DC!

KIPP DC is a network of high-performing, college-preparatory charter schools in Washington D.C., which serve the city’s under-resourced communities. At KIPP DC, there are no shortcuts: outstanding educators, more time in school, a rigorous college-preparatory curriculum, and a strong culture of achievement and support help our students make significant academic gains and continue to excel in high school and college.

But what does that mean to you and me?  They’re a business just like yours and anyone else’s who suffer many of the same challenges we all do.  And one of those challenges is how to manage the demanding needs of students, faculty and staff, while being able to stay strategic, forward thinking and be proactive instead of merely reacting to the future of computing.    The challenge with Daniel Nerenberg and I on the Red Team were helping them work with, was addressing Application Virtualization.  Our esteemed coopetition fellows Gordon Ryan, Andrew Bettany of the Blue Team are helping with a Windows 7 Deployment strategy and plan.

What do you get when you combine IT Pro’s, Non-Profits, Coffee and @cxi?

Innovative solutions the likes of which can only be explained with stirrer sticks and sugar packets!    If you know anything about me, you know that I love tactile reference of physical infrastructure, solely for the logic that we have the ability to MOVE objects around (unlike a whiteboard where we end up getting messy… and it’s not nearly as cool and impactful)   I felt it might be useful for a layman’s explanation of what I just said, so in simple terms…  I like to play with stuff you can find around you :)

The above picture is an architectural breakdown of application virtualization presented to a user use-case environment.   Basically look at it as the sticks are ‘boundaries’ in the first square picture, that physically shows a single ‘machine’ with applications living inside of it, with all of the constraints and conflicts which also happen to live within that environment.    However, in the second picture, you have a breakdown of applications virtualized into separate packages, yet there’s also a model of shared package layers and abstraction… Lots of abstraction! This video helps explain it a little further!

After our sit down talk and interview with Director of Operations, Edward Han and IT Manager, Adam Roberts we got to work on a plan of how Application Virtualization would help out Kipp DC with their organizational challenges.  

As you can see here, the Blue Team is hard at work.  I’m not sure if they were working on their slides, or checking out some new Chuck Norris statistic, but nonetheless… We all got down to business creating collateral, producing and providing information which would help out those folks and how it would apply (in our case) to what Application Virtualization with App-V could do for them!

I would be remiss in my duty to not share with you what I shared with them.  Use it in the context of your organization of course (as I will not be sharing the incidentals of their organization here! :))

Microsoft’s Application Virtualization collateral!

• App-V Case Studies
• University Reduces Application Packaging Time, Enhances Access, with Virtualization
• Independent App-V Blog
• Accelerate your Windows 7 deployment with App-V
• Application virtualization candidates
• Microsoft Office 2010, more integration in App-V 4.6

And here are a few videos produced by the folks on Sequencing and actually deploying using App-V (or Softgrid for you legacy folks like me :))

Though I’m sure some of you are saying “Hey, what about VMware ThinApp – Why didn’t you talk about that?!”  It’s true.   Our mission was to discuss App-V, fortunately I had Daniel with me who is an MVP in App-V too!  However, so you don’t feel left out, here are a few videos of Deploying VMware ThinApp from start to finish in 20 minutes! – Enjoy! :)

Following this, we wrapped up for the day, grabbed our (heavy) bags, and headed out to where the Bus would take us to our next destination: Marriott Brooklyn Bridge in New York City!

However, like the geeks we are… All the way at the back of the bus is… a Power Outlet! … Ooh! Two outlets actually! So the guys had their ‘friendmaker’ power strip multipliers, and we plugged them in, with enough arsenal to run a small business (or even a mid-sized enterprise with the kind of gear we’re sporting! :))   And just so you get a good feel for what we’re looking at here… I’m sitting in the literal hot seat!   See all the cables? Oh wait, what’s that you see? It’s 109.5 DEGREES DOWN THERE?!?!? Yea, it’s pretty hot at my feet :)

I hope you enjoyed Day 1 – This was only the beginning on this whirlwind adventure tour of madness, insanity, education, and Technology! We’re Technology Focused! :)

Who can relate to this experience? You’re out using your iPhone for whatever reason, perhaps you’re jamming away to tunes, sitting on calls all day long, or simply just ‘using’ it and you find your battery life has severely diminished.   I know what you efficiency zealots will say “You know, you can turn off this feature and that feature, and this and that and that! and it’ll extend your battery life!” Yea, kthxbye! Seriously. If I’m using my location feature and it’s draining my device, turning it off defeats the entire purpose!

Well, inspired by my good friend Louis Gray in his post: How I Stopped Worrying About Powering Up My iPhone 3G I’m writing this because I wanted to make sure those who missed this absolutely amazing-ness, don’t miss it!

This is something I’ve been looking for from Apple for some time, but I never got around to actually trying to search or solve my problem – and now.. now I have, especially as I tend to charge my phone 3-4 times a day from use (Can you say omfg power user? ;))

Our good friends at Mophie bring us the Juice Pack and the Juice Pack Air!  Not only do they double as power enhancing batteries but they also provide a case for you to use! Considering the scratches on my iPhone and my eventual need to get a case (not to mention how my phone partly cuts into me in its sharp bits… Well, there you go, killing two birds, one apple!)

To add to it, they even have a special twitter promotion available, whereby tweeting something about them, following them – will enter you into a chance to win their Juice Pack Air! a $79.99 value.. I’ll take free!

Incase also happens to offer something they call a “Power Slider” but frankly if you look at their website you may have a pain of a time trying to find it as it’s not really elevated to the surface in its ease of finding (Had to search to find it, and even then it wasn’t so intuitive) Which is likely why Louis and others have to resort to looking for it on Amazon like here Incase Power Slider for iPhone 3G – Black (EC20003).

Now while I personally like the look of the back of this particular device with the little lights as you can see in this image above – I frankly am liking more and more the Mophie Juice pack units already mentioned.   But feel pride in knowing when you have a constantly dying iPhone, don’t worry about changing your habits as much when you can rely upon an additional power source to aide in whatever you do!  So get out there and get yourself some Apple Juice!

Yea that’s right! Project Natal is hiring! (Sadly, when I first planned on publishing this to when I am doing it now, the number of positions has dwindled, meaning they were filled ;))

But I know what a lot of you are saying.. Who is Project Natal?!

Why, it’s only the coolest thing to hit interactive gaming… since, interactive gaming?!

But seriously! It takes all the effort things like the Wii and dance pads have done, and stepped it up a serious level.  Check out this Video for further insight into why you want to go rock it out with Project Natal!

Project Natal takes gaming to a new level, leaving the remote on the table and your experience in your hands!

Wow, you should have read my original ‘”Safari 3 a viable replacement” or my “Will IE8 replace Chrome for me” post, which I never published.  It sat in drafts as both of those browsers crashed and burned under the slightest hint of pressure.   To sum it up: Safari 3 crashed after I opened 2 tabs, and IE8 never ‘suggested’ anything for me, let alone not remembering even 5% of my passwords.  But the story is slightly different with Safari 4!

Let’s start with one feature which has been there for awhile

Top Sites!

It looks cool and all, and it’s very similar to the Chrome version of a similar feature, but for what it’s worth.. it looks fine and is editable to allow you to remove sites you don’t think are ‘top’ sites, like pictures of kittens in rainboots or something.  Nonetheless, a ‘usable’ feature.

The next lovely feature is support for Tab-Preview that is available in Win7 (chrome doesn’t support Tab Preview :)) So you get a view similar to this below.  Once you exceed 15 tabs though, it turns into the devil and looks like the second image.

But there is more to Safari than simply pretty looks and colors.  It also has some functionality! (Similar to Chrome).  One of those features is URL completion.   Which translates into ‘I type part of the site I want to visit and it suggests it as the default one, so I can simply hit enter’ not the IE world of things by “Do you mean this, and scroll down to find it?” Which I say ‘hellz no!” I visit the same sites hundreds of times a day, and I don’t want to have to press down, that’s two key strokes too many!

The fact that it hasn’t crashed yet, is very pleasing considering I’ve switched to a full on ‘use it for everything’ model.  And by everything I mean “Not for NetFlix because the bastards don’t support it even though they claim to”.  I still need to check it for WebEx support as well as Oracle support so I can do the rest of my work using it…. :)

Memory and CPU usage have been kind of suckish, but considering I would have 3million chrome processes before, it’s not too bad.

Grammar/Spelling checking seems pretty cool!

One function which doesn’t work at the moment.. typing searches into the URL bar results in… not a search, but instead trying to open whatever ridiculous search term you had entered!

That results in me having to hit enter ‘twice’ in order to get my search term searched!

That’s all I’ll say about it for now! We’ll see how it lasts, considering I’ve used Chrome almost exclusively for the past… since it was released in early beta.. it will be an interesting trial and experience.  One I won’t be shy to throw away if it’s not meeting my particular needs :)   So, look forward to future ‘raving’ or ‘destroying’ of this particular browser, depending upon how it is seen fit.  Oh, and it doesn’t let you view saved passwords like Chrome, which is a major negative in my book. It knows they’re there, so expose them to me, kthxbye!