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And the award goes to…Office 2008 for Mac – “Simplify your Workday”

Since getting my first intel Mac I was waiting impatiently for Microsoft to update their Office suite as a Universal binary. Frankly I’d have been fine with just an Office 2004 code port to the intel platform, but I understand that Microsoft wanted to go for a new release. Makes sense.
Now after waiting seemingly endless two years… I am still waiting now! More than ever actually!
Huh? The software is out, no? Well yes it is. And that’s the sad part. Since I started using it for the last 2 weeks or so, my productivity in doing anything MS Office related dropped by an estimated 90% or so. It is USELESS. U S E L E S S.
How on earth they were able to make an intel native app run (seemingly) 10x slower than an emulated old PowerPC one is beyond me. Honest to god. It flabbergasts me. Not only did they add no noticeable new features, but they did take features out of Excel (the only Office app I use. I think Pages is a better word processor and Keynote is a considerably better presentation software) like VBA or the Math ToolPak, Solver, whatnot. But no. The app is so slow that I can’t do anything with it anymore.
A large 20 MB pivot table (12000 rows) takes about 22 seconds to be generated on Excel 2004 on my MBP. While I am typing this, the same table is still being generated in Excel 2008. It started 15 Minutes ago and is now at ‘85% complete’. Unbelievable. This and the fact that Excel takes longer to start up as a native app than Excel ‘04 did with Rossetta does it for me. I am seriously disappointed and happy I didn’t have to pay for this myself, but rather got it through work. Now Microsoft does do great software, including Office 2007 on Windows, which I really like. But this? Gee…

Update: Was completed in 19 mins. Sadly I had to force-quit Excel 2008 two mins later because it bogged down my system so much that I couldn’t do anything with it anymore. Back to Office 2004 it is.

Update2: Had to reinstall OS X, this time without Office 2008. Turns out something in Office generates a spinning beach ball in many network-related tasks, even if Office isn’t running. Reinstall of OS X fixed it. After installing Office 2008, problem re-appeared. Second reinstall fixed it again. This time Office 2004 will grace my hard disk again.

So I was in LA again this weekend to congratulate my old Berkeley roomate James (called Jamie) and attend his wedding with his beautiful wife Azadeh. Now this Sunday WAS Oscar season and thus Hollywood was closed in about an 8 block radius. Sadly I didn’t see any stars.

To my surprise though, when I went on a brief trip down to San Diego on Saturday on the table next to me Jamie Alexander (Jesse from Kyle XY) had lunch with a friend. Sorry for the bad pictures, but she IS actually really beautiful in person. More so than in the TV show – surprisingly.

I thought I’d never say those words, but.. here goes: Thank you Comcast!
After having endured a 1.5Mbit/sec DSL line in Mountain View I upgraded to the 8Mbit high-speed package that Comcast offers in San Mateo, CA. Officially starting tomorrow Comcast is offering all those 8Mbit customers TWICE the speed with 16Mbit download/1.5Mbit uploads.
And what can I say? They started early! And they started strong. See this:

I have to say I am surprised every weekend by the rise and fall of perceived cool and hip hang out spots for San Franciscans. The mission seems to be particularly prone to that phenomenon. A small hole-in-the-wall type shop, restaurant or cafe suddenly becomes hip, people wait in lines around the block to get in, which only adds to it’s perceived mystery and coolness and thus draws an even larger crowd. Crowd behavior at it’s best.
I have to admit I fall for this trap quite a few times. Friends recommending me places and me checking them out. With the willingness of a sheep herded by a shepherd’s dog I stand in line 20 minutes in the cold just to get a cappuccino. The problem? It never, ever lived up to it’s hype. On the one hand that’s understandable. Expectations are so great that they cannot possibly be fulfilled. Yet on the other hand, I had croissants or coffees so bad, my local Starbucks in my apartment complex does a 10x better job at half the price and without the 20 minute wait. I’ll leave the name of the cafe depicted here off, but frankly you can take any of the plethora of overhyped places and get the same feeling of disappointment once you tried it and woke up to reality.

Try out Google’s new search demo page I put together a couple of week’s back and that finally launched this weekend:
http://www.google.com/mobile/search/demo.html

The idea is to try out how mobile search looks like on your mobile handset and what you can do with mobile without having to pick up your phone. So play around with it and let us know what you think!

Had a little drama with my iPhone this morning. As I wanted to make a call I couldn’t hear anything through it’s build-in speaker. Turning the speakerphone function on did work though. So when I tried playing with the volume buttons I noticed how the ‘headset’ moniker was displayed whenever I changed the volume. This indicates that I have a headset or headphones connected and thus mutes the built-in speaker.
Problem was: There was no headset connected!
It seems this is a well-known problem though. I barely was able to finish describing my problem to an Apple employee in the Palo Alto store when he said: ‘Oh give me your phone. I’ll fix it for you right now.’. Turns out, the headset connector get easily get dirty enough by just normal usage that it believes there is an existing headphone connection even if there is none. A simple blowing of compressed air solved the problem. Funnily enough, the store had a special ‘headphone socket cleaning kit’ behind the Genius bar for just this very issue.

Yes, people are THAT crazy here. I guess the (now-revised) $5K-if-you-buy-a-envirofriendly-but-freakin-ugly-Prius (TM) program has been successful…

I love going to LA. Usually I spend more time in the West LA area, but this time I used our Anaheim hotel location to focus more on the OC. The LA area beach cities are awesome – may it be Manhattan Beach, Newport or Laguna Beach – everyone has their unique flair.

I know as a kid my Disney hero clearly was the underdog: Donald Duck. I just looooved the guy. It took me a few… well… decades really, but I finally managed to get a little hugging and photo shooting done with Donald tonight at Disneyland in Anaheim, CA! And oh yes, that’s Pluto in the back trying to sneek into the picture as well.

Tomorrow I’ll be on my way (thanks to the support of the Virgin America folks) to LAX and then to Anaheim for Google’s yearly ski-trip! Oh wait. There’s no skiing in Anaheim. So what’s this all about?

Well it turns out that Google with it’s 16,805 employees is now so big that we cannot by any means rent enough rooms in Tahoe, so it was decided to give us a choice this year:
- Camping at the Pinnacles National Monument south of Salinas, CA (bring your own tent!)
or
- Disneyland! Google’s got the whole park just for Googler’s after 8pm on Tuesday.

Nuff’ said. Gotta pack my bags!

PS: I decided to rent a car, so as to be more flexible. Don’t really wanna hang out at Disneyland all day…