James Moody: Geek in Paradise

If you happen to visit the site at various time during the day, you’ll notice the layout will be changing quite often. I’m tired of the New Yorker theme as it pretty much squishes everything due to the 4 column layout. I’m working on transferring it all over to a 3 column fluid-width layout so I have more space to work with and hopefully, make it easier to read, navigate, etc.

If you happen to catch it in the new theme, feel free to leave your thoughts.

Time for me to break out of my techie mold I’ve enveloped myself in since starting to blog. It’s made easier due to the title of this post. My fiance and I’s favorite writer, Neil Gaiman, has a pair of films finally making it to the big screen this year, to join his previous film, MirrorMask.

Stardust, a tale of a fallen star, and the evil and good forces which seek to destroy/save her will hit the silver screen on August 10. The trailers are already running on TV pretty regularly, at least on SciFi and the Comedy Channel. There have been comparisons to The Princess Bride in regards to this film, also one of our all-time favorite films. We’re ecstatic to see how it plays out in theatres, but the trailers look very promising.

Beowulf. Yeah, it’s been rumored for as long as I can remember now. All the forums, rumor mills, etc. couldn’t pry any information regarding this supposed screenplay that Neil wrote for one of the most popular fantasy tales. It is now slated for a November release, with such talented actors/actresses as Anthony Hopkins, Robin Penn Wright (The Princess Bride ;)), Angelina Jolie, Crispin Glover and John Malkovich providing their talents to this long-awaited film.

It’s looking to be a great year for Neil Gaiman fans that want to see his work translated to the big screen. He also has Coraline slated for release next year as well, so maybe the production companies have finally caught on to the man’s genius. Death, The High Cost of Living is also in the works, which is a spinoff of his best known work, The Sandman.

*Waits patiently for a Sandman trilogy of films*

So yeah, a brief glimpse into *me* and what gets me excited other than new hardware/software to play with.

Who else is highly looking forward to the slate of Gaiman films coming down the pipes?

Tags: Neil Gaiman MirrorMask Stardust Beowulf Coraline Death Sandman

Microsoft released a hotfix today for SBS 2003 boxes that happen to lose track of the fact that they are an SBS box. An issue has arisen where the registry key, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft \Microsoft Integration\5717D53E-DD6D- 4d1e-8A1F-C7BE620F65AA is missing which will cause the following symptoms.

• When you run certain Small Business Server 2003 Wizards, they fail with: “This wizard can only be run on a Small Business Server computer.”
• SBS Backup Wizard will not display the retention selection screen
• SBS Backup Wizard will fail with: “An unexpected error occurred (80070057) The parameter is incorrect.”

To restore your SBS boxes “memory”, you will need to call Microsoft Support and ask for Hotfix 940318.

My box hasn’t hit the golden years as of yet, so I should be safe for awhile.

Courtesy of The Official SBS Blog

Tags: Microsoft SBS 2003 Hotfix Wizard

Official Press Release

Microsoft released it’s FY ‘07 Revenue numbers today, surpassing $50B, a 15% increase over FY06. Earnings for the closing quarter were $13.37B, a 13% increase over Q4 ‘06.

Keep in mind also, that Microsoft took a $1.15B hit to their earnings to cover repair/replacement/warranty extensions to the XBox 360, which people like to quote as having a 30% failure rate. I personally don’t believe that kind of failure rate, but it’s being thrown around, so there it is. Without that hit, revenue would have hit $14.52B for the quarter, ahead of projections released last quarter. As I predicted, they took the XBox hit this quarter since they were doing well for this quarter and still made their projected earnings. So much for people claiming Microsoft was on a downslide and wouldn’t make their earnings projection.

Great numbers for the quarter and year, and here’s to looking forward at the upcoming year with releases of Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008, Dynamics Live CRM and Office Performance Point 2007.

For posterity, here’s their projected earnings for Q1 ‘08 and FY ‘08.

Business Outlook

Microsoft management offers the following guidance for the quarter ending September 30, 2007:

•Revenue is expected to be in the range of $12.4 billion to $12.6 billion.

•Operating income is expected to be in the range of $5.0 billion to $5.2 billion.

•Diluted earnings per share are expected to be in the range of $0.38 to $0.40.

 

Management offers the following guidance for the full fiscal year ending June 30, 2008:

•Revenue is expected to be in the range of $56.8 billion to $57.8 billion.

•Operating income is expected to be in the range of $22.2 billion to $22.7 billion.

•Diluted earnings per share are expected to be in the range of $1.69 to $1.73.

Tags: Microsoft Fiscal Year Quarter Earnings XBox 360