Yesterday was the big consumer launch for Vista and I meant to post this yesterday but beers always take precedent. I’ve been using Vista and Office 2007 at work for right at a month. You can read reviews everywhere. So I’ll keep this short. The first thing you will do if you’re a power user is to turn off the User Access Control. It hoses up a lot of apps like Visual Studio. Vista is pretty but so is OS X. It is clearly a knock off and I don’t find many reasons to upgrade. I have not tried the Media Center version (Ultimate) but I suspect I’ll upgrade to that soon on my mediabox. Obviously icons are moved and you’ll need to hunt around for a few things which is aggrevating. If you want to upgrade for the sexy factor, which is probably the single most compelling reason to, then that is your call. I am not that impressed.
Office 2007, on the other hand, is well worth the upgrade. It is a very well designed and implemented. Obviously Outlook is used the most and the built in RSS reader is fantastic. I can add work related feeds to that and not get distracted by my other feeds in Google Reader. And they are much easier to store and sort. Not had a need to do anything with Access 2007 but I have run some 2003 apps in it to see if they worked and they did. Excel/Word/InfoPath/OneNote have been opened and run but only minimally. Still I give it two big thumbs up!
“The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.”
“Roosevelt in the Kansas City Star”, 149
May 7, 1918
The Effect of Typeface on the Perception of Email - Ranking of fonts that should be used for email. I don’t see Tahoma on the listings. Calibri, the new default for Office 2007 (which is well worth the upgrade) ranks highest. Impact ranks the lowest.
Since Mike Huckabee officially announced his presidential candidacy today, it might be a good time to review the case of Wayne Dumond.
The Greatest Drunk on Earth - Andre the Giant. worship and OBEY my new hero.
What We Don’t Know - Worth the link just for Hodgman’s Intro and Conclusion.
Free Tech EBooks - For personal bookmarking unless you want to program too.
I have had a shitty week and it is only Tuesday. The latest, I was checking my credit card activity online and noticed a charge for $5.60 for a Moneyback Tax Recharge. No idea what that could be so I googled and got only spam sites. This was enough of a concern for me to call the credit card agency. As I am talking to security, I got disconnected. Nice touch douchebags! Anyway, second time more luck and the details of the charge were “international, made without the card (over the phone/internet) to a movie store or gift shop”. None of that apparently set off any red flags within their IT infrastructure. So I have to cancel the card and get a new one. Right at the end of the month when I have less than $50 in checking. Nice. 2007 is starting off with a lot of douchebaggery and now it is time to watch the State of the Union!
Where I work falls under state budgeting which means two things, everyone is underpaid and everyone’s salary is public information. While everyone is underpaid, some of us are more underpaid than others. So with budget planning beginning, I am going to my boss to justify a raise. Here is where is the second part of my first statement comes into play. It is fairly simple to setup statistical models to show how underpaid you are.
The model I am taking to my boss is a fairly simple one. Salary = Worth + Years Worked * Annual Raise. Here Worth is pretty much the intercept of the graph and represents how much each person is worth in relation to one another with Seniority factored out. A fairly simple model but somewhere to start and I also only included people in the pool with my job or similar. No point in comparing my salary to the directors’ salaries. Some reading about multiple regression: Intro to Regression and Multiple Regression.
Here is how I did this in Excel 2007. You’ll need the Data Analyzer plug-in installed. First you’ll need 3 columns of data - Pay, Years Worked and optionally Name. Go to Data Analysis -> Regression and select OK. Here you select your Y Range (Salary Column) and X Range (Years Worked). When selecting options, make sure you have Line Fit Plots also selected. This generates a histogram (wherever you specified your output range). The X-axis will be Years Worked with 2 columns for each data variable. One is Pay and the other is Predicted Pay. You’ll need to match up according to the correct Seniority values but you get the basic gist. If there are any math/stats wonks who would like to add input to this; I would love to hear it.