.NETified

I got a PRS Standard 24 about 5 months ago. I don’t think I could ever purchase a non-PRS guitar now.

There are just way too many cool features.

• Locking tuners make it extremely fast to change strings, and keeps them in tune better.
• It has a floating tremolo.
• The bar on the tremelo is held in by pressure from a little plastic ring, so it will always have the same tightness, and won’t ever get de-threaded. It’s a better design than the floyd-rose in my opinion.
• The pickups have a push-pull pot from going between single coil and humbuckers for a lot of different tones.
• They inlays are birds of prey… how cool is that?
• The body shape is nice.
• The finish is amazing.
• The guitar is very light.
• It has a set neck. Not quite as good as a neck-thru in my opinion, but still gives nice sustain.
• Etc, etc, etc.

I was at Guitar Center over the weekend talking guitars to one of the employees and mentioned I had a PRS, and he tried to sell me on Gibson Les Paul’s. I like wide-thin necks, so he showed me a 60’s model that has a thinner neck than most Gibson Les Paul’s. I picked it up and almost fell over ’cause it was so heavy. The body was like 4 inches thick also. The guitar is just ugly too IMHO. Les Paul’s don’t have any of the nice features that PRS do either. I think you have to really be a fan of Les Paul’s to play one.

Needless to say, I’m still a PRS man. It’s going to take some convincing to get me to change my mind.

I’ve thought of getting a custom ESP built. Basically, a neck-thru KH2 with custom inlays and a custom graphic. Then I started thinking of all the PRS features I wanted added, and thought “why not just buy a PRS then?”. I could always put custom features on one of those too. I could just buy a hollow body instead.

Most people underestimate the PRS Standard too. Everyone wants a custom. Guitar Center carries mostly custom. There are usually only 1-2 standards in the store, and they’re not very nice ones (color/inlays). When people see mine, they are quite impressed. In all honesty, I don’t know if there is a custom color that I like. I already have my next standard color picked out though.

My suggestion: give one a try. They’re well worth the money.

Virtual PC 2007 has gone RTM.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=04D26402-3199-48A3-AFA2-2DC0B40A73B6&displaylang=en

SQL Server 2005 SP2 has gone RTM.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=d07219b2-1e23-49c8-8f0c-63fa18f26d3a&displaylang=en&tm

The Windows Vista, Office 2007 and Exchange 2007 launch was pretty fun. Not as fun as the Visual Studio 2005 launch last year, but I’m a developer, so what do you expect.

There was the usual slew of parters giving away swag. They were much more geared towards IT professionals than development. Most people were handing out cd’s with documents or training on their software. I was hoping for some actual applications to use, but got nothing. MS gave away a free copy of Office 2007 Professional and Office Groove 2007 along with Vista Ultimate Preview. This was curious… a preview version. It had a cd key, and looked like a “real” version, so I installed it. Everything seemed to work until I tried doing an update to get the Ultimate Extras, and they didn’t show up. Did some digging to find out that the preview version isn’t the RTM version, but the build just before it. This is kinda strange since the RTM has been out for 2 months. Oh well. Guess I’ll be purchasing it.

Vista has a great thing called People Near Me. If you have wireless, you can broadcast yourself, and create an ad-hoc network where you can share files, chat, and share your desktop, all without a router or server.

The demo of WPF using Visual Studio “Orcas” was probably the highlight of the day for me. WFP is just amazing and easy to use.

SharePoint 2007 has a lot of nice features. It’s integrated tightly with Exchange and Active Directory and has Wiki’s and blogs built in. It uses an IIS site instead of a Portal site now also.

Exchange has some nice new features also, such as voicemail. You can also hear your emails over the phone.

Anyways, there are a lot of cool things in all these products that I didn’t know about. Vista definitely isn’t “XP with a new look”. It has a lot of great new features that make it worth upgrading to.