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March, 2007
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M9 is Live!
Over the past two weeks, I’ve had the pleasure of watching another PM on my team work with the Customer Support team and Operations to gauge customer satisfaction and look for any signs of problems on M9. Watching them do their thing leads me to just one conclusion: they rock! After two weeks of 24/7 monitoring, I’m happy to announce on their behalf that M9 is stable and is cruising along just fine.
Now that it’s out there, let me highlight what I feel is the biggest improvement in this milestone: Windows Live Mail is faster. I’ve heard echoes of this on blogs and comments all over the place, so I’m glad you guys are feeling the speed too.
Aside from that speed boost, I also encourage you to check out the Classic experience, which allows you to:
- Read, find, and sort your email and contacts faster than ever
- Choose contacts quickly when composing a message by using the Contact Picker (this shows up on the right side of the compose page, letting you add recipients to your message with a single click)
- Tweak Windows Live Mail to use your favorite color
- Find information about your contacts quicker using alphabetized contacts filtering
- Write professional-looking emails with the rich-text editor
- Reply, forward, and delete messages easier with a toolbar that appears below each message (don’t worry, we still kept the top toolbar =])
The Full experience also has some new features, three of which I want to mention here:
- Sort and search your messages easier with additional options
- Make your emails stand out with message importance indicators
- Interact with Windows Live Mail better with an improved context menu (which appears when you right-click on a message in the message list, for example)
Both the Classic and Full experiences also have:
- Support for importing and exporting your contacts
- Updates to the Today Page
- Detail-oriented improvements on the user interface
Thanks to all of you who have forwarded feedback and comments. Please keep it up! As usual, keep your eyes on this blog for the latest!
Benjamin Poon
Windows Live Mail Program Manager
P.S. For those who are using the Windows Live Mail full experience, but prefer to use the fast and simple Classic experience, here’s how to switch:
- Click the “Options” dropdown on the upper right of your screen
- Choose the “More Options…” menu item
- Click the “Click here to use the classic version, which is good for slow connections.“ link
March, 2007
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GEORGE VLOSICH Etch-A-Sketch Man
ART NEWS
GEORGE VLOSICH - Etch-A-Sketch Man
This is about the Etch-A-Sketch artist George Vlosich. I can always remember Etch-A-Sketches when I was a kid. I can remember my parents buying me one every year for christmas. But I could never do anything on them, and still can't. When I came across this artist, I was amazed what he could achieve with an Etch-A-Sketch. Apparently he started when he was just 10 years old. He went to Washington with his Etch-A-Sketch and drew the capital on it, and that's how it all started. Now at 27 he's world famous. His subjects range from portraits of famous people to baseball players. He has been on TV and radio and featured in over 250 newspapers all over the world. Apparently it takes him around 50 to 55 hours to complete a picture. Today, he still does demos of his work to people at the cooperstown baseball of fame, prints and originals are for sale.
I have to say not anybody can do this type of art, me for one. But it's amazing what people can do with different things you wouldn't expect from. Enjoy his work.
CLICK FOR A LARGER VIEW
HAVE A GO YOURSELF. USE YOUR ARROW KEYS TO PLAY
CLICK BELOW TO PLAY
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
March, 2007
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Talking about Windows Live Blogger search
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Windows Live Blogger search
The Spaces team are looking for people to run blogs and you’re invited to be an official Windows Live Blogmaster.
Start up a Windows Live Space on a particular theme, make it look great and the Spaces team could promote it on the Spaces network. Your Space could grow into a worldwide community!
What kind of Space? Whatever floats your boat – anything from a Space supporting your favourite football team, your favourite TV show, tips and tricks on an area of your expertise, to exploring the weird and wonderful. You’re the voice of the Space.
Some inspiration:
Spaces based on...
· Major Festivals and events
· A celebrity
· Tips or advice – recipes, buying guide, relationships, technology, biggest excuses, surviving exams, etc..
· Fan sites – football, sports, etc..
· TV series/shows
· Seasonal spaces (Christmas, Valentines, holidays)
· Types of people, like a Mums Space etc...
· Spaces based on a particular experience or life-stage
· Location based Spaces
· Other Communities
· Animals, Arts, poetry, hobbies ...
· Anything else! ..
If you already have a Space like this going you can sent it in to the Spaces team, i-kellyc [at] microsoft.com and suzcook [at] microsoft.com or me : hack.msn.spaces@gmail.com
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Windows Live Blogger search
The Spaces team are looking for people to run blogs and you’re invited to be an official Windows Live Blogmaster.
Start up a Windows Live Space on a particular theme, make it look great and the Spaces team could promote it on the Spaces network. Your Space could grow into a worldwide community!
What kind of Space? Whatever floats your boat – anything from a Space supporting your favourite football team, your favourite TV show, tips and tricks on an area of your expertise, to exploring the weird and wonderful. You’re the voice of the Space.
Some inspiration:
Spaces based on...
· Major Festivals and events
· A celebrity
· Tips or advice – recipes, buying guide, relationships, technology, biggest excuses, surviving exams, etc..
· Fan sites – football, sports, etc..
· TV series/shows
· Seasonal spaces (Christmas, Valentines, holidays)
· Types of people, like a Mums Space etc...
· Spaces based on a particular experience or life-stage
· Location based Spaces
· Other Communities
· Animals, Arts, poetry, hobbies ...
· Anything else! ..
If you already have a Space like this going you can sent it in to the Spaces team, i-kellyc [at] microsoft.com and suzcook [at] microsoft.com or me : hack.msn.spaces@gmail.com
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Make a difference by playing games in Messenger
Today Messenger announced the i'm making a difference campaign. With i'm, conversations you start using Windows Live Messenger will contribute towards a donation to one of nine great global charities - you select which one to support. And the best part is, this goes for games as well! Each time you start up a game in a messenger conversation with a friend, it also counts as a chat session that will contribute towards a donation to your selected charity.
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Try our newest game Quarto today!
Challenge your friend to a strategic game of Quarto. Your goal is to make a line of pieces that all share a common attribute but your opponent gets to choose which piece you will play on the board.
March, 2007
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“Dear Messenger”
 posted by Steve
Hi out there! Welcome to my first MessengerSays blog posting. I’m the new guy, Steve, and my role on the messenger team is to process all the comments, letters and other missives we get from a quarter of a billion (would that be one deci-Sagan?) customers – and make sense of it all.
By the way, we do get and read pretty much every single piece of feedback we get. But that’s another topic for another post down the road.
There’s another way to reach us, too, and that’s through technical support. Support’s a little different. A customer has a problem and needs some information that they can’t find in the help pages. This is supposed to be a dialog. The support page asks for your email. It asks for greater detail about the specific nature of what you’re having trouble with. And if your issue is unique enough to be something we don’t have a ready answer to, you wind up swapping emails with one of our support techie peeps – top notch folks who KNOW this system inside and out. Great for you ‘cause you get your problem fixed and great for us because we learn more about the complex and unique ways one deci-Sagan’s worth of customers use our product.
I’ll answer the first question first. Feedback is intended to be used for things like new feature requests: “Hey, you guys thought about doing this...?” Think of it as suggestion box (gee, maybe we ought to rename it that?!) And as with any suggestion box, the input is valuable but nothing ever comes back saying, “Yeah, we got that, we hear ya.” Even though we definitely do.
What goes in support?
“Yo! I can’t log in!” “My buddy list won’t come up.” “My display picture’s green and I look like Ugly Betty.”
You get the picture. It’s the place to go for issues which you can’t find in our extensive (and growing, we heard you when you told us to make that bigger and friendlier!) help pages.
As to the second question, yeah, there ought to be just one place to send “stuff” to the Messenger team. Ideas, complaints – and *gasp* even praise. By the way, THANK YOU for sending kudos our way, we tremendously appreciate hearing how much you love Messenger. Particular thanks to the very touching letter from the person who recently lost her hearing and now uses messenger to communicate with her sister and kids. Woah. Very cool.
But yeah, all that kinda stuff should go in one big bucket and we Microsofties should sort through it and figure out what’s support related and what’s feedback. We hear ya. We’re moving in that direction but these things take time.
So for now – rule of thumb: Support if you want a response. Feedback if it’s just a suggestion.
Now, how do I get support? Well, first you have to use our help system. Search for and read the pages which relate to your problem. Chances are really good that the answer's there already. If not -- and this shouldn't happen very often -- then click all the way down in the lower right hand corner "Get additional help" That will bring up a page of additional help options -- and Get Technical Support will be one of those options.
Ciao for now! February, 2007
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Windows Live Writer
Windows Live Writer is a desktop application that makes it easier to compose compelling blog posts using Windows Live Spaces. You can now use WL Writer to get true "what you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) authoring to make your entries look exactly the way you want them, easily upload, insert and customize photos in your blog, and even publish maps from Windows Live Local.
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Sending photos to your space (mobile)
Mobile Spaces all the way.. 
Sending photos to your space
Several days ago we made uploading photos taken with your camera phone to Spaces more powerful. In the past you could post them only to your blog. Now you can also post photos directly to photo albums. You can do it as long as your phone allows you to send e-mail. There are two ways to set up the feature: from the PC site and from the mobile site.
If you are on the PC just go to your space (make sure that you’re signed in), go to Options, then E-mail publishing, and at the bottom of the page you’ll see a list of e-mail addresses for photo albums in your space. Each email address has the following format:
Member_name.Keyword_of_your_choice.Secret_word@spaces.live.com.
By default the keyword is a GUID, but you can change it to any string that you want. Then just add the email address to your phone’s address book and you can start sending photos to the photo albums in your space.
Another way to enable the feature is from the mobile site. Just go to http://mobile.spaces.live.com in your mobile browser, sign in and go to your space. From there, navigate to the photo album to which you want to post photos and select “E-mail publishing.” You’ll be given an e-mail address for that photo album (once again, you can change the keyword used in the email address to anything that you like).
One more note: if you want to post photos to a completely new album you can do it too. Just go to your space in the mobile browser and select the link to “Add an album”. Then save the email address generated for that photo album to your address book and you're all set.
PS. According to Telephia’s research Windows Live Spaces are #2 in the UK and #3 in the US among the sites receiving mobile-generated content.
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Magnusson inspects new site
Filed: Thursday, 15th February 2007
By: Matthew O'Greel
Eggert Magnusson has once again visited the site mooted as the new home of West Ham United FC.
The current Parcel Force site - which is situated next to West Ham tube and rail station - was visited by a party of Icelandic businessman and architects led by the United Chairman on Wednesday afternoon.
The current Parcel Force site bordered by the Fenchurch St line (left to right) and the Jubilee Line (top to bottom)
The site is currently owned by the LDA (London Development Agency), who have been busy snapping up land ahead of the 2012 London Olympics.
Parcel Force have been steadily moving their operations away from the site in recent months; the remaining sectors are set to leave by early 2009.
Old and new? Both locations (the current Parcel Force site on the left, The Boleyn Ground on the right) are within a couple of miles of each other
News of the proposed move has been greeted positively by supporters, many of whom have expressed a desire to see the club remain in East London.
The new site is less than two miles from The Boleyn Ground, and just over a mile away from United's first home at the Memorial Ground.
Magnusson first outlined his plans to build a 60,000+ capacity stadium for the club upon succeeding Terry Brown as Chairman last November.
He turned his attention to the new site after plans to develop the Olympic stadium following the 2012 games fell through.
However a new bus station has also been mooted as a possibility for the site.  marvels & mysteries aliens
 anight to remember
 after betty and barney
 hills had seen a ufo at
i love making people cool  and have a good time playing on my computer i think about my blogs every day
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September 26-29, UK, Singapore, NZ
Tuesday 26th September
Tony (Lindas uncle) took us from Faversham to the airport. We took the M25 north because the traffic report said there was an accident on the M25 south, and later we found out a truck had overturned blocking 2 lanes, causing massive delays! Phew!
The nice man at checkin ignored our massive amount of luggage and signed us in. The stressed security guards were yelling at a woman who interpreted the 1 carry-on bag rule to be 1 for everyone else except her who could have 4. It was a coat, in a bag, not a bag, apparently.
The plane was sweet, in-seat entertainment with 500 entertainment options. The most ‘entertainment’ however came from the girl sitting beside me, who stood up mid flight, collapsed onto the floor, got dragged into the galley area and was vomiting for the next few hours.
As usual we got no sleep on the 12-hour overnight flight, so were exhausted by the time we got to Singapore.
Gordon Ramsey designed the food on the plane, but I suspect he never actually ate it after it had been in the warmer for 10 hours.
Wednesday 27th September (I think, stupid timezones)
NEW COUNTRY!!!!!
Singapore. We only had a few hours to kill, but enough time for a bus trip downtown and a walk around a mall. Gadgets weren’t as cheap as I would have liked, and jewellery was exorbitant, so no shopping for us.
Back on the plane, ready for a 10-hour flight, still without any sleep. Was again an overnighter, so no views until Auckland.
Thursdays 28th September (so I’m told)
NEW COUNTRY!!!
NEW ZEALAND
Our first experience of New Zealand was a smiling immigration man who thought I’d misread the question about what countries we’d visited in the last 30 days. No, we really have been to 12 countries in 30 days!
A quick stop to duty free to re-stock our bar which my friends kindly emptied during our farewell party. Mmmmmmmmmmmm…………… cheap alcohol.
We stepped out into the winter Auckland sun, and got blinded by the light. Good grief the New Zealand sun is bright. It was only 18 degrees, but the sun was by far brighter than what the European sun was like. No wonder we have such high skin cancer rate. Can’t wait for summer!
Linda’s dad picked us up, and drove us back to Matata (matter-ta for the English folk, NOT ma-ta-ta like in the lion King song). Apparently we stayed up until 7pm, but I don’t remember much of the day, so very tired.
Friday 29th September
Woke up 15 hours later to a pleasant NZ day. We went down to the beach at the bottom of Lindas parents road. It is school holidays here, and as you can see from the photo it is really busy at the beach.
Just a lazy day today, hooray!
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I'm out of sympathy
You spend your nights alone
And he never comes home
And everytime you call him, all you get is a busy tone
I heard you found out
That he's doing to you
What you did to me
Ain't that the way it goes
When you cheated, girl
My heart bleeded, girl
So it go without saying that should let the feeling hurt
Just a classic case scenario
Tell is always time
Girl, you got what you deserved
And now you want somebody
To cure the lonely nights
You wish you had somebody
That could come and make it right
But girl, I ain't somebody
I'm out of sympathy
February, 2007
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Bijna weekend
Hela,
Een hele goede middag. Alweer een week voorbij het gaat wel heel erg snel. Van het weekend weer klussen nu is Ryan zijn kamer aan de beurt. Nu de kids weer naar school zijn heb ik weer even tijd voor een verhaaltje. Eerst nog even dit, het is echt heel jammer maar iemand die ik zeer waardeer en graag mag had een leuk forum gemaakt. En wat denk je, heeft een of andere rotzak hem gehackd! Echt een rot streek het was zo'n mooi, leuk forum, ook erg leuk opgezet en kon er ook gezellig chatten met andere forum/space gangers. Ik hoop voor hem dat het allemaal weer terug komt want er zit volgens mij heel veel tijd en energie in. Snap echt de humor er niet van.  . Verder heb ik eigenlijk niet zo veel bijzonders te vermelden. Woensdag en donderdag zijn de skate offs weer in Thialf. Ik had het plan om daar woensdag heen te gaan met de kids, maar ik weet niet zeker of Bob dan ook rijdt. Hij heeft zich nl. al geplaatst voor de 10 km en hoeft wrs alleen de 5 km te rijden. Maar als hij zich wil plaatsen voor het WK allround dan zal hij beiden dagen rijden en dan wil ik er woensdag natuurlijk bij zijn. De kids willen ook wel mee, Amber vindt het helemaal geweldig. Ook zij vindt Bob leuk hahahahaha van wie heeft ze dit toch  Dus ik wacht het nog even af tot ik het zeker weet en dan lezen jullie dit natuulijk op mijn space!. Nu ga ik ff lekker onderuit met een goed boek, en en kopje thee want voor je het weet komen de kids al weer uit school en dan is de PC bezet hihihi.
Fijn weekend allemaal, knuffel Heidi
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Bijna weekend
Hela,
Een hele goede middag. Alweer een week voorbij het gaat wel heel erg snel. Van het weekend weer klussen nu is Ryan zijn kamer aan de beurt. Nu de kids weer naar school zijn heb ik weer even tijd voor een verhaaltje. Eerst nog even dit, het is echt heel jammer maar iemand die ik zeer waardeer en graag mag had een leuk forum gemaakt. En wat denk je, heeft een of andere rotzak hem gehackd! Echt een rot streek het was zo'n mooi, leuk forum, ook erg leuk opgezet en kon er ook gezellig chatten met andere forum/space gangers. Ik hoop voor hem dat het allemaal weer terug komt want er zit volgens mij heel veel tijd en energie in. Snap echt de humor er niet van. . Verder heb ik eigenlijk niet zo veel bijzonders te vermelden. Woensdag en donderdag zijn de skate offs weer in Thialf. Ik had het plan om daar woensdag heen te gaan met de kids, maar ik weet niet zeker of Bob dan ook rijdt. Hij heeft zich nl. al geplaatst voor de 10 km en hoeft wrs alleen de 5 km te rijden. Maar als hij zich wil plaatsen voor het WK allround dan zal hij beiden dagen rijden en dan wil ik er woensdag natuurlijk bij zijn. De kids willen ook wel mee, Amber vindt het helemaal geweldig. Ook zij vindt Bob leuk hahahahaha van wie heeft ze dit toch Dus ik wacht het nog even af tot ik het zeker weet en dan lezen jullie dit natuulijk op mijn space!. Nu ga ik ff lekker onderuit met een goed boek, en en kopje thee want voor je het weet komen de kids al weer uit school en dan is de PC bezet hihihi.
Fijn weekend allemaal, knuffel Heidi February, 2007
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November monthly mailbag
Posted by: Matt
It's the first day of the last month of the year, so time to look back through our mail bag from last month.
Farepak debate
An article written by one of our columnists Robin Amlôt on the recent collapse of Christmas savings firm Farepak stirred up a large number of comments from users last month.
Here are a selection of your responses to Robin's piece:
I totally agree with this article and the governemnt should get its act together and look at real problems‚ not just the ones that can give it a bit of good PR around election time.
On the Farepak issue, could you imagine yourself being in their situation, saving all year to receive nothing. Your article here is putting the boot into these less fortunate families. If you can remember your childhood‚ how would you feel waking up on Christmas with no presents under the tree? These kids will be humiliated by their peers as they didn't get presents. This guy who did this with Farepak needs to be sent to jail. He has stolen money. But his company goes into adminiustration and he is still rich. He has a personal fortune of £30 million. This should be taken off him and they should make him live the life of one of his customers.
Your writer has absolutely no idea of the difference about those who generally use a pay weekly scheme like Farepack. The users of these type of savings have no isa options‚ often no current account‚ many are women who "hide" the savings from their husbands. It's not an easy life and your writer should not be so blinkered in his advice. He could have offered information on local savings schemes‚ he could have thought just a little more before putting pen to paper‚ but he didn't. I have reccomened the page to others really just ot show them how blinkered your attitudes are.
We don't expect everyone to agree with the views expressed by our writers in their columns. They are intended to provoke thought and debate, not merely to tow the line and play safe and on this topic, Robin has clearly achieved the former.
What's happened to some of our old pages?
One of our investing users emailed us to ask:
"Why don't you have the page "the week ahead" and "what's in store?" anymore - it sets out which results and dividends etc are due?"
We moved our site onto a new publishing platform at the beginning of 2006 - sorry to get technical, but there's no other way to explain it - and as part of this process, some of our pages were moved or deleted. We've currently just revamped our investing section, but we're always looking to improve the site and make it as useful for individual investors as possible so we'll look into the possiblity of restoring this page and let you know about any upcoming changes and developments.
And remember, if you can't find one of our pages any more, you can use our handy site search box located on the left-hand side of most of our pages to find exactly what you're looking for.
Where's Alvin?
Why are we still on Alvin Hall truth 5? When can we expect truth 6?
Financial expert Alvin Hall has been producing an excellent weekly series of articles and podcasts for us, entitled Alvin's 12 Truths of Money. Unfortunately, for the past fortnight he has been laid low with illness and has been unable to write or record for us.
The good news is that he's now back on his feet and will be revealing his sixth money truth next Thursday, December 7. Make sure you check it out, it's a cracking read and listen.
The perils of a place in the sun
The article is all about Europe!! Have you never considered The Bahamas? For £160k, you can have a new 2-bedroom, 2-bathroom villa on the beach on a secluded island surrourded by blue clear water.
It's true to say that the main focus of Naomi's piece was on Europe, but it was not totally Euro-centric. And the reservations she has about buying property abroad are equally valid outside of Europe. I'm sure properties in the Bahamas are stunning: who wouldn't be tempted by the thought of a dream home on a tropical beach - but it pays to be fully aware of the risks you take when you invest in property overseas.
Virtual Trader
A teacher writes:
I am using the site with my Economics students and find it a very valuable teaching tool. However‚ there seems to be a glitch in that when you sell stocks the money does not get credited back into your account. Is there a way you can fix this problem please?
We have recieved a number of complaints about apparent glitches in our fantasy sharetrading game, Virtual Trader. The game is actually administered and run by an outside company and therefore we are unfortunately unable to address these issues directly. However, rest assured that we will pass on all your queries to them, and they will endeavour to fix any bugs that may be occurring.
Nevertheless, it's great to see that as well as being a horribly addictive game, it's also highly educational. If you haven't signed up already, I urge you to do so now; you won't regret it, trust me!
Send to a friend
Sheena wrote in to us to say:
I thought this article was really useful and it would be nice to forward it on as an e-mail to others that I think would benefit. Alas, if I cut and paste it into an email, the links would be lost. A nice feature would be one that enabled you to email it to others in an e-mail-friendly format that kept in all the links.
We're happy that you found the article useful Sheena. The ability to email our articles on to friends is something that is very much in the pipeline; we're just waiting for our developers to create the feature. As soon as it's completed, we'll let you know. In the meantime, why don't you paste the url into an email and send that on to your friends or family. That way, they will be able to view the page in its full glory, links and all!
Keep 'em coming!
Thanks to everyone for their great comments and suggestions again this month - keep them coming by using the feedback link on the bottom right of all our pages. And don't forget that if you've got something to say about one of our articles or you just want to get something off your chest, then get involved on our message boards.
Season's greetings to one and all!
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