The company I work for recently decided to get a bunch of the new Motorola MPx220 SmartPhones per the suggestion of one of my co-workers who had owned one for a while and liked it.  At first, I didn’t want to give-up my boring, simple Sanyo phone because it worked well as a phone… something that seems rare these days with mobile phones.

My first impression of the MPx220 was “Wow!”  It’s a camera, it’s a PDA, it’s an MP3 player, it’s a video recorder, and last but definitely least, it’s a phone.  I must say that I really like the phone’s ability to sync with our Microsoft Exchange email server.  It’s great being able to pull-out my entire calendar, contact list, or even email pretty much where ever I am.  It was also very nice to not have to type-in all sorts of names and phone numbers like I did on my previous phones.

I find the user interface pretty easy to use and well laid-out.  Considering all the things this phone does, it must’ve been quite a task to design a user friendly UI.  In addition, seems like there are quite a few free downloads out there to help you design your own UI if you so choose.

I haven’t had any time to tinker with the Windows Mobile 2003 OS as of yet, and I probably won’t… I don’t want to break it!  It does look like many others are tinkering though… I’ve seen various forum posts of people trying to adjust speaker volume issues and the like by editing the phone’s registry.

One simply feature that I love (in addition to the Exchange syncing) is that the phone has the ability to automatically switch between a regular sound profile and a meeting sound profile if there is something scheduled in your calendar.  In other words, if you have an 8:00 AM meeting in your Outlook calendar and have the sound ‘profile’ set to ‘automatic’, the phone will automatically change to the ‘meeting profile’ at 8:00 AM.  The meeting profile is set to ‘vibrate’ by default, but you could change that to no ring or a quite ring if you want.

Now for the bad part.  For all the cool features this phone has, the one thing it seems it’s not good at is being a phone!  On my second phone call, the person I was calling couldn’t hear anything I was saying and hung-up.  After doing some research online, many people have problems with the microphone not working (amongst many other problems.)  Most seem to say that restarting the phone fixes this… but who wants to restart their phone daily?  I found that if I quick switch to speakerphone, I can still talk to the person on the other line, but that’s not an acceptable solution to me.   Hopefully this won’t become an ongoing problem.

Overall, if this phone is a sign of things to come, I’m pretty impressed.  As the technology improves, it’ll sure be nice to not have to carry a mini camera, Palm Pilot, and a phone!  However, if you have a very low tolerance for things not working as they should, don’t get one yet or you’ll go nuts :)

Admit it, you do it to.  You can’t remember the .NET way to do something, so you give-in and put Imports Microsoft.VisualBasic at the top of your .vb file.  It’s time to stop the madness! Where there is help, there is hope.

As of recently, a co-worker explained to me the virtues of not using the old-school VB namespace in favor of learning the newer VB.NET way of doing things.  One of the benefits is that VB.NET code is typically optimized to run faster… and we all love speed, don’t we?    There were two places in particular that I kept resorting to the old VB way: date manipulation and formatting.

For example, here is the old VB way to add 7 days to the current date:

DateAdd(DateInterval.Day, 7, Date.Now)

And here is the VB.NET way:

Date.Now.AddDays(7)

That’s not so bad, is it? Now let’s look at formatting.  Sure, there are quite a few ways to do the same thing, but here’s an example.   If you want to format a date type variable in VB:

Format(Date.Now.ToString, "MM/dd/yyyy") 

… or …

FormatDateTime(Date.Now, DateFormat.ShortDate)

And in VB.NET:

Date.Now.ToString("MM/dd/yyyy")

Actually, the VB.NET way seems easier! I wish I would’ve explored the VB.NET method sooner.

Here's some more handy conversions:

To subtract to dates:

Dim dblDateDiff As Double = datEndDate.Subtract(datStartDate).Days

So far, I’ve only come across one VB function (but I’m sure there are more) that I haven’t been able to find a VB.NET replacement for: vbTab.  I found the replacement for vbCrLf is Environment.NewLine (one of the new VB.NET classes that is actually less convenient than its VB counterpart), but I have yet to find a way to put a simple tab space into a string.  Not a huge problem, but odd in my opinion since that means I can’t completely lay the Visual Basic namespace to rest!

To help yourself cure your addiction to Visual Basic (the old-school kind), set the filter in the Microsoft Visual Studio.NET 2003 Documentation library to ‘.NET Framework’ instead of ‘Visual Basic’.  I was under the impression that the ‘Visual Basic’ filter meant VB.NET, but it does not.

Microsoft Word has got to be one of the most frustrating applications on the planet.  It typically takes me hours to figure-out how to do things that I would think should be simple, such as having a document that contains portrait and landscape oriented pages which all contain a footer with consecutive page numbering.

To change one or more pages in a document from portrait to landscape orientation, select File > Page Setup… and then click the Margins tab.  If you select the This Page Forward option under the Applies To area, all pages after the current page will be rotated when you select the landscape orientation. 

That’s all well-and-good, but if you have your pages automatically numbered in the footer, switching one page to landscape orientation also creates a new Section in the document and starts page numbering over from 1. Argh!

So, what to do?  Well, where there’s help, there’s hope.  After creating a set of landscape oriented pages, select View > Headers and Footers.   Select the footer of the first landscape page and make sure the Link to Previous button is not selected. 

Figure 1: The Header and Footer Tool Bar

Then click the Format Page Number icon (the one with the # symbol and the hand as shown in Figure 1) and select Page Numbering > Continue From Previous Section radio button as shown in Figure 2. That’s it!

Figure 2: The Page Number Format Window

As a bicyclist, I probably one of the first to be interested in Lance Armstrong’s LIVESTRONG campaign.  Ever since he won his 6^th consecutive Tour de France, it seems like everyone and anyone can be seen wearing his LIVESTRONG armbands. Most wearing the band could probably care less about biking or the Tour de France, but are likely supporting the fight against cancer for which this band symbolizes.

Will I’m all for people supporting cancer research (I have two of the bands as well), I have to wonder how many people who buy these bands actually “live strong” and how many just buy the bands in the hopes that their $1 contribution will contribute to what is someday the cure for cancer?  To me, the point of the band, beyond the $1 contribution, is to tell people, “Hey!  I’m choosing to lead a better life for myself and not just become another over-weight, lazy human!  I am going to 'live strong' by taking care of my mind and body so that it I may lead a better life.”   Obviously, Lance truly is “living strong”… his body is in better shape than probably 99.999999% of the rest of the world and that’s probably the reason why his body was able to fight off his cancer.

Improving your own health through proper diet and exercise as well as encouraging others to do the same will do more for fighting cancer than monetary contributions and yellow bands will do… yet how many people who buy these bands take a serious look at their own lifestyle and make the change to “live strong”?  As of recently, the government (well, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration) recently changed its recommendations for good health to basically stating, “eat less, exercise more.” This includes 30-minutes to an hour of exercise every day in addition to recommending that we eat a ton of fruits and vegetables, grains, etc. Typically, when the government makes a recommendation, it’s not setting a very high standard but more of a “minimum requirement”… do you get as much exercise as they recommend? Heck, I like to think I’m active and even I don’t!

The American Cancer Society, American Diabetes Association, and the American Heart Association have teamed-up to address this problem of people simply not taking care of themselves by creating a web site called Everyday Choices.  You may have already seen their television add called “Protect Yourself” which depicts a woman who locks herself into her apartment to protect herself form intruders, only to plop-down on the couch, light-up a cigarette and eat some junk food.  (You can see this commercial and get many other useful health tips on the Everyday Choices web site.)   Unfortunately, I knew far too many people who smoke, eat a steady diet of junk food, and are nearly allergic to exercise, yet these same people often sport a yellow band on their wrist.  Isn’t something wrong with this picture?

Anyway, I know it’s hard to truly “live strong”, at least by my standards… but I’m going to keep trying.