I’ve been trying to find some concrete information on the use of Remote Desktop in Windows 7, but I’ve seen some conflicting reports about it. Specifically, I’m looking for information on using RDC with dual monitors. I know in RDC version 6, you could use span to extend your remote session over two desktops, but it is sort of an ugly process. I have been reading that Windows 7 uses multimon instead of span, and instead of having to start from a command prompt, there’s actually a check box to “use all available monitors” in the program settings.

The part I’m having difficulty with is if Windows 7, or Server 2008 R2, which have this version of RDC built-in, are required on both ends of the connection. Also, according to MS, it only works with Windows 7 Enterprise and Ultimate editions, but again, is that on the host end, or the client end, or both? If I have a Win 7 Ultimate host, and can get a copy of RDC 7 on Vista, would that work?

Not having Windows 7 installed anywhere, I have no way to test any of this, so if you have access to some of these versions and a desire to do some testing, I’d love to hear your thoughts! Leave a comment, or if you want to write up a guest post, drop me a comment and I’ll be glad to offer up a place for it!

Like most of you, my gmail account was integrated into Google’s new “Buzz” social networking tool, and unlike many in the blogosphere, I decided to give it a little while before commenting on it. So, after using it for a few days, and seeing what the “early” commentators had to say, I’d have to say that I think Google really is too little, too late to this game, and that Google has no idea how normal people use social networking tools, or email for that matter.

See, here’s part of my problem with Google. Months ago, I wrote about Google Wave, that it was underwhelming, but that I had faith that Google would continue to add to it and make it something useful. They haven’t done anything useful to Wave yet, but here they are rolling out Buzz as the new “This is going to be great” application, only it’s not, in it’s current format, great, or even good for that matter. Given the past few months with Wave, I have no faith that they’re going to really improve this much, and as it stands now, it just sort of sucks. Like Friendfeed, it can pull things from other sources into Buzz, but currently those sources are severely limited. Twitter, Reader Shared Items, Flickr, Picasa, and maybe a blog feed. That’s it. It’s not Friendfeed on steroids, it’s Friendfeed on diet pills.

Those aren’t even the only Google products that I am have been expecting improvements to, that never seem to come. I don’t use Google Reader’s shared items feature, because there’s no way to tag items, which would generate different RSS feeds based on those tags, or items you could follow based on a tag, so that I could use shared items on both of my sites at once. Delicious does that, has for years.For that matter, Google still hasn’t integrated Google Reader’s shared items with Feedburner’s link splicer feature, and they own both of those! So I have to use Delicious if I want to be able to put daily “links” in the RSS feeds for my blogs, not that I care, because again, I can use Delicious to send different tag groups to different blog feeds right now too!

So now, they roll out Buzz, and integrate social networking into email and Google Reader, two places I don’t actually want social networking. (And I’ll leave the ridiculously stupid idea to autofollow your Gmail contacts and the privacy implications alone, since they’ve already sort of acknowledged that was a bad idea.) They’ve hacked their way into two products I actually do use, Gmail, and Reader (as an RSS reader only), and made them more annoying. They’ve decided that I want to follow the people I email most frequently, which is where they are too late to this game. The people I follow on social networking sites, like Twitter and Facebook, are not the people I email the most. When I need to send them a message, or see what they’re up to, I go there. My Gmail account is for people who aren’t connected to me in those places. I use email to interact with people about my various websites, give them a way to contact me for help, and, occasionally, I get an offer to get a copy of a book for review, or a request from someone doing research, etc. I reply to those people, about that subject, but that hardly means I want to start following them on Buzz. Again, the people I want to follow, I already do! I don’t need them added to Gmail or Reader, and most of them don’t have Google Profiles anyway. Why would they? They have Facebook and Twitter profiles, and are easily accessible from there.

Seems to me that someone in Google has been charged with making a social network, no matter what. So they’ve tried Profiles, only there wasn’t any incentive to use those for much. Then they tried Wave, which showed some promise, but confused people too much to really grow beyond the geek crowd. So, they looked around at the various Google services, saw the large number of users on Gmail, and decided that if they couldn’t make a truly revolutionary product for social networking, they would just glom onto that user base, and add Buzz to existing Gmail accounts. Voila, millions of users! An overnight success!

Personally, I haven’t seen an iota of value from Buzz. The only place I see the potential for usefulness is in the mobile version, which can show you Buzz going on nearby, but even that doesn’t interest me all that much as a every day tool. Might be great when tailgating at an OSU game or some other big event, but when I’m looking at Buzz from the office, or my house, not so much.

Still, I’m going to leave Buzz up and running for a little while longer, but I fully anticipate that I’ll either be turning it off completely, or unfollowing everyone and leaving my “buzz” posting so those who really want to use it to follow me can. Just don’t expect me to reply to you there. I’m already interacting with folks in plenty of other places.

Writing this from my iPhone using the Wordpress app. I like the ability to write quick posts fe anywhere, but like email on my phone, anything that will require a lot of typing will have to wait until I’m at a keyboard!

On the other hand, this is a great way to handle comments, I can approve pending comments, delete spam comments or even reply to comments quickly, just so long as I have my phone with me.

So, if the trend for 2010 coming from LegalTech is toward efficiency, can we assume that law firms, finally, are starting to realize they are just like every other business?

Also, does the fact that the legal industry is just now starting to look at using technology to be more efficient prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that law firms typically lag behind other businesses? I think it does, after all the entire tech/internet revolution is about communicating and sharing information more effectively. Believe it or not, law firm IT departments don’t put in new infrastructure and tech tools just to make you uncomfortable, it really is to help the attorney’s they support work more efficiently. Other industries have implemented tools in the name of working smarter. law firms have typically lagged behind in that regard.

Then again, as someone who works with technology, I do have to wonder if we are keeping that priority at the forefront of our minds? Our job is not to limit the amount of network congestion, or make sure no possible harm can come to the PC’s that sit on the desktops of our users. It’s to make those users more efficient. I do wonder sometimes, when I talk to other IT pros, if that’s their first priority.

As I spend much of my time trying to come up with ways to market the Litigation Support services we provide to the attorneys in our firm, I keep coming back to this idea. How do I convince them not just that the tools we have are solid, and useful, but that they do, in fact, help them be more efficient in their work? It’s a tough sell, but one I have to make if I’m going to get any of them to reconsider how they practice and how technology might help them. If anyone has had some rousing success with that, leave a comment and let me know what you did! I can always use the suggestions.

I didn’t realize those wireless mics you use in office conference centers, churches, etc. could become illegal soon if they are broadcasting in the 700MHz band. I posted the details over at the Friends in Tech blog.

Being the avid social networker that I am, as well as an iPhone owner, of course I was excited to see that both the LinkedIn and Facebook apps were introducing features that let you sync information from those networks to your phone’s address book. However, after I got both updates, downloaded my LinkedIn contacts to my phone and turned on “syncing” in the Facebook app, a curious thing happened.

I noticed that some folks I am connected with on LinkedIn, who don’t happen to have a photo on their profile, and who I wasn’t even aware were on Facebook, suddenly had photos along with their contact information on my phone. It seems that the Facebook app was grabbing their publicly available information, which now includes the profile photo, by matching up the LinkedIn email address, even if I’m not connected to them on Facebook.

So, if you’ve got a somehwat questionable profile photo on Facebook, you might want to be aware that it may be getting attached to your LinkedIn info, and sent to folks you connect with there, despite your best attempts to keep your Facebook profile a secret from them! Consider this your warning.

I ran across this post about ReadTwit over the weekend and was immediately intrigued. I’ve watched as Twitter has become a source of interesting links being passed around by the folks I follow, I’m missing some really great information.

Now, as I’ve said before, I have no desire, nor the time, to try and read every tweet from the people I follow, nor do I have any expectation that I’m going to check out anything close to 100% of the links they are sharing, but I sure would like a way to see more than the 10%, less when I’m too busy to really check my twitter stream at all, that I currently see.

The other downside to trying to follow links to things shared on Twitter, is that most times you just get a link, with maybe a brief description, or the title. It’s a lot of work to decide what’s worth the click and what isn’t, and again, when pressed for time, the title better be darned good to get me to click!

Thus, my excitement about ReadTwit:

Readtwit filters your twitter feed to links only, resolves link destinations and publishes the content as an RSS feed. You can then use any feed reading software / service to read twitter posted content along with the rest of your feeds.
Duplicate links in the same time-frame are grouped together. No more retweets overwhelming your link browsing activity.

Naturally, I went to check it out, and added my ReadTwit feed to Google Reader right away. The next morning, I had 97 items waiting for me in that feed, stuff I normally wouldn’t have seen as it got tweeted while I slept, with 2000 characters of available items as a preview instead of 140, and the ability to filter out certain hashtags or users. I was able to skim through it right along with the other things I normally browse through in Reader. I haven’t started using the filters yet, but I can see where I will start filtering users who send a lot of links to a subject that isn’t highly relevant to me. I don’t know, it’s sort of an experiment at this point, to see just what kind of ReadTwit feed I can come up with that allows me to see more of the links people I’m following are sharing, without having to spend all of my free time catching up with Twitter!

However it ends up, I’m willing to bet it helps me see more links to good information than I’m seeing now.

I also wonder if this doesn’t help, at least a little, with the security risks involved with shortened URLs, and not always knowing where they are leading you? Not sure if it’s a cure-all for that, but can’t see where it would hurt either.

Last week, while my niece was visiting, we took her to the local Mall to visit Santa. Now, normally this wouldn’t be something that I wrote about on this blog, but I noticed something going on while I was there that I found interesting.

The Santa area was setup so that you would have had to walk all the way around the far end of the display to actually see where Santa was. I assume this was done to limit the opportunities for you to take your own photos of your kid on Santa’s lap, as you had a small area to watch from, and someone was there making sure you didn’t even try to take a photo from there. I can’t blame them, selling those photos is how they make their money, but the interesting thing was, that as my niece was getting to the front of the line, and I was standing in this little area, I happened to be responding to an email on my iPhone while I waited. This elicited a rather loud reminder that I wasn’t allowed to take photos from there, and a request to put it away. Of course, I wasn’t even trying to take a photo at that moment, I was using my phone for one of the many, many other tasks it’s designed for. Still, rather than create a problem for my niece, I did put it away and responded to the email later.

It does create an interesting situation, at least to me. There are plenty of times where we might have a few minutes to kill, and pick up our smartphone to look at email or Twitter, or Facebook, where it would also be inappropriate to try and take a photo or video. (In a movie theater, on the way out of a restroom, in a locker room, around other people’s children, etc.) Is it ok for people to assume you’re trying to take a photo and ask you to put it away, or are we all going to have to get used to the idea what someone using a cell phone around us may just be taking photos and there’s nothing we can do about it?

What do you think?

Looking at my own Google Wave account, and the folks I follow on Twitter, it seems that Google has opened up the floodgates a little bit, and has given out quite a few more invites. That’s a good thing, because the first thing I realized when I started was that there weren’t very many people who I could actually collaborate with. That limits the usefulness of a collaboration tool.

So now that I have some invites to give out, perhaps I can get some of the people I would normally collaborate with to use it and really see how it works, as opposed to forcing collaboration with people I don’t work with as closely just because they are on Google Wave too!

We’ll see if that changes my initial impressions of Google Wave. I’m still underwhelmed at this point, but maybe if Angela and I plan our next party using it, I’ll feel differently.

If you need an invite, let me know and I’ll try and hook you up.

Since I was in Indianapolis this weekend, for my niece’s birthday, a stop at Fry’s was on order before heading home. Turns out they were running a special on a Western Digital 1.5TB external hard drives. Until Nov. 19 they are $99.99. Naturally, I picked one up while we were in town, and immediately made plans for rearranging my backup workflow over the long Thanksgiving weekend.

A 1.5TB drive should allow me to take my current dual 250GB drives that currently act as two copies of our photos and other documents, into just the first copy, with the backups being on the 1.5TB, along with my Time Machine backup of my Macbook Pro, and perhaps some video storage. Not a bad pickup for a hundred bucks.

Of course, that was my first impression. My second thought was, of course, about the e-discovery implications of having that much storage available that cheaply. Not that I’m all that worried about being sued myself, but for small business, we’ve surely reached the point where the temptation to simply keep everything is going to be overwhelming. You can keep a lot of stuff on a 1TB drive, more than a typical 5-10 person office is currently using up, and then you can double that storage for very little by buying a new 1TB drive cheaply. Creating a retention policy is much more work, and maybe even much more cost, right up until they get served with a discovery request for the first time and have to try and find relevant documents.

After all, with storage that available, the days of an attorney coming in and reviewing documents without doing any sort of in-depth search, are gone. There’s simply no way to look at everything that might be stored on a 1TB drive, let alone a few of them, at a reasonable cost in a reasonable time.

Good search is definitely the future, at least I hope so!