Microsoft: How do I love thee?

I'm conflicted...do I hate Microsoft for making my life a mess every few years by making me recreate my training materials or do I love them as they keep making me money and keeping me around as a necessary part of society?

Vista, Office 2007, Internet Explorer 7.0...thank you Redmond...throw my whole life into update mode why don't you? As an general IT guy, applications trainer and web and multimedia designer, Microsoft has screwed up my world BIG TIME...couldn't have spaced it out a bit, huh?

Oh well, you know this actually makes my job kind of fun (or at least never dull) and I will say given the "weirdness" of Microsoft applications training opportunities will always be around...time for a new round of business cards.

"What are you talking about?" is what you might be thinking...IE7 doesn't look that much different, Vista is still the same idea, and even though Office 2007 looks quite different it all acts the same...

Well here the "gig".

IE7 fixed a bunch of bugs which means that web design training is going to be different...also means some $$ making opportunity fixing those pages that needed to be hacked to work, which now have problems because of the hacks...

Vista looks different...in training if one person has something red on the screen and another has something blue..all hell breaks loose...the differences between vista and xp (or god forbid, something earlier) more significant than red/blue

Lastly, Office 2007...well I used to have great screen shots and screencast training materials...I teach online...25 students: 2 have Office 2007, 15 have O'2003, 10 have 2000. Next semester more 2007 users...time to warm up my Camtasia. Yep, FUN.

So, my personal jury is still out, but just typing this to give you another idea of how software upgrades affect the world (well at least mine)

Utilize? how about Customize, Maximize, Personalize

I've been to several Web2.0/Library2.0 workshops lately where I've heard the following phrase: "You don't even have to learn html"

Well, ok, I understand the idea that learning html can be a barrier to posting things to the web and blogs, wikis, etc. allow you to post content without that learning curve.

But here's the rub...isn't web2.0/library2.0 also a bit about customization and personalization? If so, there are only so many templates that you can choose from. But here's the thing, most of these templates are changeable IF you know some html(xhtml) and css, yes, yes I know some are WYSIWYG, but a bunch aren't...so...go take a class and have what you want, rather than being stuck with what you get.

Yes...thank you Walmart

A student in my Web Design class, sent me an excellent story...but a little background 1st. In class I always stress that a design has to "work" in various browsers, at various speeds, on various platforms, etc. If people can't "view" (let's not forget screen readers) your site...it just doesn't exist.

Apparently Walmart decided to launch a beta of their video download service last week.
Check it out in IE, FF and/or Safari: http://mediadownloads.walmart.com/mmce/jsp/storeHome.jsp

Looks pretty nice in IE..too bad for the rest of us. When they put it out at first this is what it looked like in FF: Walmart VideoDownload Site

Nice, thank you to Walmart for making my point