Back From Orlando ... Final HP TX1000 Impressions

I came home from Orlando Wednesday night, but with Thursday loaded up with a work back-log and classes, I'm just now starting to get back into the swing of things. I think I'll need the weekend to get off of East Coast time, though.

First thing's first, my partner and I managed to take Second Place in our International Marketing Case Study for Delta Epsilon Chi. We were a bit disappointed that we didn't get first, but from what I've heard in the rumor mill, the field was incredibly competitive. We'll have scores probably end of next month, so I'll just have to live in suspense for a while. Either way, second is better than third, so we'll take it. Another of our Huskies came home with both a second place plaque and a job offer from ESPN, and a fourth placed in the top ten in her subject, so it was a good trip. Sadly, that's pretty much the end of my DEC run, and I think I'm really going to miss it.

Walt Disney World was pretty much as I remember it, albeit with a few additions. Honestly, I didn't have as much fun as I would have liked; it was really difficult to try to enjoy myself without my wife to share it with. By the end of the trip, I was getting really lonely and just wanted to come home.

The HP TX1000 continued to both delight and disappoint in equal measure during the trip, however. On one hand, the small size and swiveling screen made it perfect for enjoying on the long plane ride, and the machine was great for our presentations. One small issue came up in that while the remote control could run our PowerPoint presentation, the angle of the machine made it impossible to get line-of-sight to the infrared receiver. HP should really consider a radio for future iterations of the remote, or just make it Bluetooth.

Sadly, while I loved watching movies on the machine while flying, the batteries, even the extended battery, just weren't up to the task. I was lucky if I could squeeze just about two hours out of either of them, and then only by lowering the brightness to the point where I could hardly watch the screen. (Having to switch the batteries out was a pain as well.) It's worth noting that running the movies as files off the hard drive might have been a factor, but I'd think it would be better than having a second spindle (the DVD drive) running. The touchscreen did make controlling the movies a breeze, and the machine definitely attracted attention from people who saw it on the plane.

Overall, I like the machine a fair amount. Would I buy it? If HP added an active digitizer, I'd probably buy it in a heartbeat. Other nice-to-haves would be a DVD drive bay battery option for those longer flights, a bluetooth remote, and a better amplifier for the headphone jacks (it was hard to hear the movies, even with noise-cancelling headphones). But I think that for many people, especially those not looking for a perfect ink experience, this is a great alternative to something like a UMPC, and a very attractive and capable machine.

Office 2007 Review

I've been running the final code for Microsoft Office 2007 for a little while now, and I'm very impressed. In fact, everyone that has seen the work that I've turned out has been impressed. Sure, the new "ribbon" UI takes a little getting used to (my wife still isn't over it), but it makes finding features much easier now that most of them aren't buried in menus.

The biggest changes have come to Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. The new version makes creating professional-looking documents incredibly easy. To give you an example, this picture is a slide from my Market Research project that my group is presenting tonight.

This presentation took very little time to prepare. The data was collected by paper survey, dumped into Excel, and then used the built-in functions to create Excel graphs. Those looked great on their own. Then it was literally a cut and paste operation into the PowerPoint slides.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. All three Office programs have built-in graphic themes that can be applied to your work. The themes are essentially painted with the new SmartArt engine behind the Office programs, basically vector art with some nice polish. However, the real power comes in by the fact that the font packages and color packages for all of the graphic themes are interchangeable and customizable. With literally a couple of clicks, you can take a "basic" theme and customize the look.

The wild thing was what happened when I took a chart from Excel (with one basic theme) and pasted it into PowerPoint. It immediately picked up the local theme settings and conformed itself to the style of the presentation I'd already created. Knocked out a few background elements and viola ... you've got a gorgeous presentation.

My only concern is that once more people adopt the new Office, this level of polish will become baseline, and suddenly my "magical" PowerPoint abilities will have to really step up to the plate. But until then, the new Office makes me look like a million bucks.