Microsoft finally made this a part of Exchange

Exchange 2007 finally has the ability to add a custom footer or a disclaimer on all outgoing e-mails as a native part of Exchange. No more fumbling around with odd VBScripts, registry hacks, and third party tools. The Daniel Petri site at http://www.petri.co.il/transport-rules-adding-a-disclaimer.htm has a good explanation. I like the warnings at the bottom about that are basically "this will affect everyone, test it first"...

Winter hasn't been too bad

We're on the "backside" of our first full winter in Tokyo and it hasn't been too bad. Tokyo is warmer than Seattle, overall, but you spend far more time outside in the cold so it feels much colder. The majority of December and January have had a high of roughly 10 degrees Celcius so in the high 40's or low 50's with low temperature dipping into the 3o's. We probably had less than six days of below-freezing low temperatures. But, since I actually walk 15 minutes in the morning to the train station vs. starting the car in the garage and driving to work, Tokyo seems cold.

We didn't get any snow in Tokyo itself and only had a handful of rainy days - probably the biggest difference between Tokyo and Seattle. The vast majority of the winter is sunny. Last week, we had four days of gray and drizzly weather and we had a couple of scattered rainy days but it seemed always sunny.

Still alive...

I'm slipping on my new year's resolution to post more often. Things have gotten a little busy at work so I suppose I have an excuse, even if it is a lame excuse. I've been working on a whole bunch of training material for SharePoint and WebEx and I've started using the Camtasia Studio software to put together Flash demo clips. My company bought Version 5 in a bulk license deal of soome sort. There apears to be a newer version available but we haven't purchased that.

It has been a long time since I had to do a lot of video work but Camtasia is a lot better than any of the tools I used previously. You can drop in clips and different resolutions, glue them together, do a voice over, and then spit out the video in whatever format and size you want. For Flash video, you can have it create the clickable chapter headings on the left, build the web page, and output it straight to FTP if you want.

There might be better tools - and Camtasia is kind of expensive - but this makes it easy...

Happy New Year!

明けましておめでとうございます。今年もよろしくお願い致します。

It’s been a while since I uploaded any new posts – almost two months. I will try to do a little better than that in the next couple of months.

New Years was relatively tame for us – no big trips or vacations. Chiho’s brother came up to visit us and Chiho’s parents and we sat around and ate a lot of food. Also, we watched a lot of television. The Japanese TV studios show a lot of once-a-year specials right before and right after New Years and they can be a lot of fun. Our cable service comes with a DVR so we can skip all the extra commercials they throw in there too...