Check out this study that our Nielsen Online business unit recently completed where they used the NetRatings panel of 250,000 Internet users to determine who is using Twitter.  It ends up that the 25 to 54 year old age group are the primary users, but even more interesting is that the youth group under indexes by 34%!

The complete Nielsen Wire post is here.

Nielsen: Twitter Usage by Age Group

Like many others recently, I have just received my Google Voice telephone number.  It’s great!  I can now keep the same telephone number for the rest of my life.  I know, Local Number Portability, is suppose to help with this, but it’s only local and can be a hassle.  Along with a host of great features, I got to review a long list of telephone number to choose.  It even has a great feature that allows you to type a word and they will look for an available telephone that uses the corresponding numbers.

As for the site, it’s a pretty typical Google UI:

The service has a bunch of great features, such as:

• Call screening – Announce and screen callers
• Listen in – Listen before taking a call
• Block calls – Keep unwanted callers at bay

I am currently hiring a new developer and since these opportunity are far and between nowadays, I want to make sure I pick the best one for our environment.  I am already doing all of the basics: recruiter interviews, phone interviews, in person interviews, each with increasingly more in-depth technical questions.  But, I wanted to add an additional step of a practical interview.  Basically, come up with a development request, with as little information as possible, so that I could see where these people go from there.

Here is the example:

Development Request:

We need an end-to-end solution that will display the results of data collected from a set of field vendors.  We need the data available in the report as soon as the upload is complete.

This is the information that we will be collecting:

• Name
• Age
• Gender
• Favorite Color

We need a report that will display this information in the following ways:

• Percent of Favorite Color broken down by Gender/Age (age broken at 25 into Under/Over)
• This report should allow us to filter on Vendor.

What questions do you have?

What technologies will you use to facilitate this request?

Pretty simple, right?  It’s actually a more complete request that I usually get, so I think it’s more than fair and something that shouldn’t take more than 1 hour to whip out.

Since we are primarily a Microsoft tech stack shop, I was looking for the person to answer the question, “What technologies will you use to facilitate this request?” with:

• SQL Server 2008
• SQL Server Integration Services
• SQL Server Reporting Services
• Visual Studio 2008 (.NET 3.5) in C#

Here is how I went about the project:

1. Open SQL Server Management Studio 2008
   1. Create a new database called ApplicationX

I just installed the Adobe CS3 suite and it is awesome. The last night couple of nights I played with Dreamweaver. I setup a couple pages using Java Server Pages (as I was also playing around with Apache Tomcat 5 because I am interested in trying out Red 5 for Flash Streaming via Open Source) and then PHP. Man, getting Dreamweaver to connect to MySQL is simple in the end, but

I was recently asked if there was an easy way to transform tabular data into a format that was ready for a data warehouse (or at least was normalized).

Initially, I wondered if there was a simple way to do this in Excel. I tried the cut and paste special with the Transpose option checked but that didn’t work.

I then went to the place that I should have started, SQL Server Business Intelligence Development Studio and found a great Data Flow Transformation called Unpivot. This tool was exactly what I was looking for. It was so simple to do this semi-complex task, I

I was on the way into work this morning and noticed three guys putting up the new GTA IV billboard on N. La Brea in Hollywood:

First, let me tell you that I can get into almost anything that is hyped up to the extreme and secondly, I love a good battle. The true shock and awe of the “next gen” game console war is set to take place April 29, 2008. The reason that I say this is that all previous events

I woke up early and went to bed late on Saturday so that I could follow up on that great article on High Dynamic Range photography that I mentioned earlier in the week. Here’s what I found out.

Somethings that you will need:

1. A camera that will allow you to adjusted the exposure value (EV).
   I am shooting with a Sony DSC-W90 and found this option by pressing the Menu button and scrolling down to EV. The +2 adjusts the exposure brighter and the -2 makes in darker.
2. A tripod.
   The original article mentioned anything to keep the camera still, but I can’t imagine anything other than a tripod allowing you to steady the camera enough. Later on, I will mention that the Photomatix software (or even Photoshop) will

So, one of my colleagues is working on a project that involves Microsoft Windows Vista Media Center (man, MS has to work on their naming schemes – Freestyle would have been such a cool name) and while answering a number of questions about how it is truly positioned to be the center piece to your connected home, I got to thinking that it was the perfect time to start a multi-part story on setting up my connecting home. These posts will dive into all the various aspects on getting everything seamlessly integrated and working together.

A few plans that I have will include:

• Audio Video Receivers
• Speakers
• Universal Remote Controls
• Home Theater PCs
• Windows Media Center
• Cable vs. Satellite vs. Over the Air
• Online Movie Rentals
• Video Download Services
• Home Automation
• Home Networking
• Remote Access
• IR Repeater Networks
• Central File Storage and Printing
• and more.

Well, stay tuned for the details…

I’m checking out this cool blogpost that I found on Digg.com (http://abduzeedo.com//how-create-hdr-photos-hdrphotomatix-tutorial) on how to create an HDR (High Definition Resolution) photo. It’s a really neat, simple article that I think that I will out this weekend. I’ll post my results. Stay tuned.

Well, here’s my first post.

I am into all things technical, especially gadgets, home theater stuff and seeing how things work.  My blog will be about all kinds of different experiences and projects that I work on.  Hopefully, I can share some useful tips on home networking to the extreme.