I'm a week and a half in, and I still dig gmail.. a ton.  There are some things missing, but for what it does, it does it really, really well.

I like :
FAST interface.  In and out faster then outlook any day.
Thread view of emails.  This is fantastic.  No more search for related messages and wait, and wait.
The spam filter is excellent, catching more then the yahoo one did 2 weeks ago.
Keyboard shortcuts.  They did them very well.

I dislike :
Contact's are very lacking.
I want to be able to add any message to an existing thread.

I would also put no client in the dislikes, but I did just find this link on Stefano Demiliani's blog.  Something worth checking out.  I also saw rumors of gmail being availibile in the google API.....  /me drools

Came yesterday from Bookpool (as usual lightning fast shipping).  I have purchased too many books this month.  This one, though, may be the one I am most excited to read.  I did not read the original, and after getting a jist of what the book actually covers, I can't wait to crack it open.  Have to finish Coder to Developer and Coding Slave first though, so my target is to start it next week.  Can't wait.

I have worked with xsd.exe before, and have had my share of complaints with it.  Although it is a powerful tool, you are also at the mercy of what it wants to create, and often it's just not what you want.  Nothing like generating a bunch of public fields  :)

Peli posts a link to a new app XsdTidy which seems like it may be a nice flexible replacement to xsd.exe.  I had thought of coding this myself after seeing this, but of course never actually sat down to do it.  Glad I didn't.  I hope to check this out tonight.

Just got word from 15seconds, and the article is live.  This article will walk you through putting together a group of components to create a value added build system.  Check it out here.

Yay my email was read.  And I get some (now) useful crap.  I will find all kinds of uses for it I'm sure (throwing at people, balancing on my head, see how many people I can get to ask what DNR is).  Make sure to listen to this weeks episode.  Even got the blog pimped on dnr (yay!).  Get it here.

Slow posts last week..  Been taking all my free time to read Coder To Developer.  Fantastic book, I'll post my thoughts soon.  Also waiting for the word from the editor, but my Build article should be avail soon.  I will post here as soon as it is. 

Just got my invite link, and I will offer at least 1 of the 2 I have avail to blog readers who can explain why it should be theirs.  I will take cue from Marcie Robillard on this, so, you must email me (tranqyATTHEGREATgmail.com) with the subject "I want your gmail". 

I spent alot of the weekend in gmail, and although I am in no way prepared to write anything in depth on it, I did have some initial thoughts.

The interface is slick.  Very fast to move around, and very minimialistic, which I like.  I also like the keyboard shortcuts, and that the list is always at the bottom (although I would prefer context sensitive).

I like the star idea.  You can click on the star in any message, and then the message will appear in your "star" folder until you un-star it.  This is a nice replacement to a follow up flag.

I also like that the number of new messages show up in the task bar, making it easy to see how much mail you have at any time.  The only thing I don't like is on my laptop the taskbar icon gets cut off a bit, and I can't see the number (I see the open paren though  :(

The spam filter is on par, if not better then yahoo's.  I have been very impressed with it.  Another side effect, since I mark each message with a label of which account it came in on, going through my spam I can easily see which account it was sent to (or if it was broadcast).

So label, which account, what is he talking about?  Well, I went 1 further then the plunge.  I ended up forwarding (or sending a copy) of every account I have to gmail (obviously except my work account which wouldn't quite be appropriate), and label them as they come in.  I figure if I can have the power of google search for one account, might as well do it on all.  This decision was at least made after more then 5 minutes of playing with it like my original plunge.

Quick wrap up, gmail rocks so far.  I'm anxious to use it for a complete work week and form a more educated opinion, but my initial thoughts are great.  I am working on a wish list, though, cause there are a few things I would like to see.

I expect to have some invites sometime soon.  I have not decided what to do with them.  Anyone who thinks they might not be able to live without one, drop a comment or some feedback on why.  I expect at least 1 of my invites will go to a blog reader, but maybe 2 if there is good response.

PS : Love some of the remarks from the app.  Like when I delete some stuff, the success message is sometimes “Who needs to delete with 1000 megs of mail”, or when the spam is empty, “hooray no spam”.  I like to see a sense a humor in my software  :)

This looks like a cool little link.  Seems to be a spider that grabs code samples by namespace.  Interesting way to see some objects used in different context's all in one place.  This could quickly become a frequent site for me I think.

Check it out here at Ohad's WebLog

Of course I wanted a gmail account.  Who doesn't?  Out of no where, a friend of mine today sends me a message..

[09:49] <sakic> want gmail?

Hell yeah I want gmail.  So within a few minutes I'm sending mail back and forth to myself, tracking threads, and trying to see how gmail was going to work.  Although I talk to myself alt in general as it is, I decided this was not the best way to really stretch gmail's legs.  I toyed with the idea for all of five minutes, and took the leap of faith.  I forwarded my primary email address to gmail. 

This scares me.  My isp yahoo dsl (snet/sbc) has a pretty good setup.  The web mail is excellent, and I use outlook at home once I get what the yahoo spam filter doesnt catch, which relativity it doesn't miss much.  Not only that, but I like outlook.  Alot.  Ditching outlook could be the hardest thing.  Yahoo also offers pretty good virus protection. 

I have been struggling with managing my mail though, and been thinking about different ways of managing it.  Gmail addresses these issues differently, though, so I'm willing to give it a shot.  And I have obviously always been a sucker for something new anyway.

So I'm ready to try this.  Oh, and I reserve the right to change back at any time  :) 

For anyone interested, the new address is tranqy@, well you know the rest. 

Saw this over at peli's blog.  Reflector plugin.  Love saving keystokes.  Taking the weekend off, have to try it out Monday  :)

Check it out here

I was bummed when the DVD's were out of stock, and puerturbed when the dl site was just over run with other anxious people.  Thanks ms for putting up a link for this.  For those who haven't read about it yet WeRock is an end to end smart client sample.  I'm looking forward to diving into it.

Get the details here

Kimberly L Tripp has started blogging, and after reading some of her posts this is a great thing.  If you do anything with sql server, subscribe now.  NOW!  Or at least read this great post on sprocs.

Ordered Code Complete vol2 and Coder to Developer today.  No estimated delivery on Code Complete yet, but hopefully I'll have Coder to Developer for the weekend (bookpool is usually very fast for me).  Can't wait  :)

After reading Mike Gunderloy's post about his experience with Compaq, I was inclined to post up here too.  His post talks about a horrible experience he had when trying to receive out of warrantee (read : paid) support for a handheld.  After reading this, I reflected back on some past customer non-service experiences I had.  The point of all of this being, who the hell CAN we buy from?

< These are some short excerpts. For example, my issue list with Dell in the past is MUCH longer>

About 2 years ago I had an IBM hard drive die.  Those who know me know I'm a big fan of IBM, especially my ThinkPad.  Dealing with them about my in warrantee harddrive had to have been the worst experience I ever had with a tech support company.  In the end, I was out of a drive for 3 months before I got a replacement drive, that died a couple weeks later.  I never RMA'd the last drive out of frustration, even though I was the loser.  Customer service didn't give two ***** about my issue, had no advanced replacement, and never even replied to most of my inquiries.

About a year ago I was working on a mail server for a client.  It was a Dell Poweredge.  I contacted Dell on a Thursday looking for pre-sales support on extending the raid array, and to order the parts for overnight delivery (for upgrading over the weekend).  After 3 weeks, and 3 errors on Dell's part, we finally got the drives.  Again, "paid" service, incompetent support staff, horrible service, and in the end all the client saw was it took 3 weeks.

I can say I've had no issues personally with HP/Compaq, but know plenty of people that have.  Hearing this just re-iterates the fact that no one really cares.

So my and co-workers experiences tell me not to deal with IBM, HP/Compaq, or Dell for hardware.  Hmm.. the 3 biggest players..

And the story goes on.  I have horror stories with Sprint (mobile), Verizon (Dedicated Circuit's), SBC (this is a long list), Comcast, etc, etc.  So as well as tangible items, even the companies selling services don't seem to listen or care.

Well, in either case, I contest that customer service, for the most part, should be considered a luxury now.  As unfortunate as it is, its not required to be successful anymore.  Can we as consumers do anything?  Not that I can think of.  What are you going to do, not use SBC?  You will end up just using someone that uses their lines anyway.  Not buy an HP/IBM server?  Well, poor support for good hardware is still better then good support for bad hardware.  So we are pigeon holed into decisions to use companies that don't care.  I would even go so far as to contest that in some industries, you have no options for choosing a well supported product (think of phone service, or even mobile phone service (although I have heard good things about Nextel)). 

Now, I do have one shining star in my limited experience.  Geico.  After switching to Geico last year (you all expected the rate joke didn't you?), I was so amazingly surprised when someone answered their customer service line.  ANSWERED IT.  No recordings, no menus, a real person.  And to my shock and awe, a competent person.  They were able to help, without yelling, without escalation, and best of all within a few minutes.  Excellent service, and this year I did not even shop for insurance even though my rates went up a little.  It was well worth the extra cost.

So maybe this thread will spark the opposite.  How about we try to make a list of companies that DO serve the customer.  It will be a MUCH shorter list, and I would be very interested to see other companies that may have half of the interest geico has in its customers.

Larkware Compaq Story
Last installment of Cory Smith's sprintPCS horror story that I am watching closey.

 By the way.  Being a .net developer I of course have to voice in on MS.  Besides my licensing for professional's gripe, which I contest would be customer service, MS's service has been very good to me.  I have used support on many issues both on the admin, and the coding side.  They have ALWAYS been responsive and competent.  No geico, but much better then most I have dealt with.

The Scobelizer notes that ebay now has a few rss feeds.  Glad they finally came to the table.  I am a huge fan of ebay.  I buy everything on ebay if I can.  If only people would auction food.  Bought the car I drove to work, the laptop I'm typing this on, etc, etc, etc all on ebay. 

One thing I would love to see, though, are personalized feeds.  I would love to see my favorite searches come through in rss.  How about my watchlist in rss?  How about a general per user activty log so I could see all of my activty in 1 condensed view (and watch for actvity thats not mine) etc.  Anyone from ebay listening?  Anyone else think these have value?

After I finished listening to all the dot net rocks, I ended up having to listen to *gasp* music during my commute.  Although I do love music, I really like the idea of having something more constructive on my commute since I have more then enough time to listen to music at work.  I saw JospehCooney blog about ITConverstations, and think it might be time to give it a try.

IT Converstations
New Ideas Through Your Headphones

Not focused on .net, but there still seems to be some very valuable content.  I will down a few episoides and give an update next week.

I was part of a team that was tasked with CodeGen at work.  The intended goals were to gen as much as we could, staying within our coding standards, and utlizing as much of our common code as possible.  With these goals in mind, the research began.  After looking at a number of "turn key" gen tools (mostly O/R mappers), we realized that most, if not all of the turn key options required that we subscribe to their procedures.  This was not going to be sufficient since we had existing code and designs that we were looking to gen on top of.

So I started to look at CodeSmith as a possible option.  After putting together some prototypes of templates, I was pretty much able to get to the 50% mark on the entire CodeGen project in about 2 days.  After a few Aha! moments, I was cruising.  I still have quite a bit to do, but I have been amazed with how quick it was to learn, and how flexible it is. 

For example, we were in a position where we required some meta data to do some stuff in the gen.  CodeSmith doesn't have a native way to go and grab a value from an XML file that I could find, but it really didn't matter.  I simply created a code behind file with a wrapper around some XPath, and was grabbing values in about 15 minutes.  Fantastic.

I know CodeSmith is old news to alot of people, but if you haven't given it a try yet, your only hurting yourself.  Think of it as asp.net, but it will render code instead of html.  Very flexible and easy.  Thanks Eric for a fantastic product.

Check out CodeSmith here, and Eric's blog here.

Here is a relativley new blog (about a week and a half old) from Major Nelson.  He is the Xbox live director of programming. 

I would love to see more xbox blogs, probably since I just got mine  :)  This is the only one I am subscribed to now, anyone have any others?