Background As part of being a technologist in real life, I’ve always felt that one of the important things that I did was that I brought my work home with me, and actually enjoyed it. What I mean by that is, the long days that I spent with Windows Server, Exchange, and other things in the Microsoft ecosystem, always followed me home in the evenings and on the weekends. I seemed to have enjoyed the work enough where I really wanted to use my extra time to play with it at home too, which helped me to really build my skills. I’ve done this for the last 20 years. My home network didn’t need to be overly complex, but it was. Learning these things in my off-work time made me more efficient in my “real” job. An issue I would encounter at work would follow me to the home lab.

With Twin Cities AT&T customers getting an added Thanksgiving gift of LTE, I decided to run a handful of tests to see what performance looked like. This was performed on a Samsung Galaxy SIII using the app from speedtest.net. The results are pretty impressive.  Almost 40Mb/s down and over 10 Mb/s upload speeds. 

Looks like today is the day when AT&T flips the switch on full-time LTE for the Twin Cities.  I noticed back in September that the State Fairgrounds was lit up and providing some nice download speeds.  Also the U of M campus and a few other northern suburbs have been enjoying that functionality as AT&T was going through testing. I can’t find an official release on AT&T’s website, but a few media outlets are reporting this too. heraldonline.com Star Tribune Pioneer Press

Introduction For some time I have had a few ideas for Internet Explorer add-ons that I’d like to create.  One of the biggest challenges was with creating the wrapper that is required to encapsulate the executing code.  You could create context menu actions pretty easily through the registry, but you were limited to what you could do via JavaScript. That being said, I was doing some research to see how I could accomplish this.  Almost immediately I came across Add-In Express which makes a product called Add-In Express for Internet Explorer.  They have a number of products available that help build add-ons around Microsoft Office and Microsoft Internet Explorer. I thought I’d give it a try, so I sent them an email to see about getting an evaluation copy.  Within a couple of days they provided me with an evaluation key good for 45 days.  This would be enough time…

Kind of a bummer for Verizon and Sprint customers who were hoping to have one of those new Windows Phone 7 devices in time for the holidays.  Initial reports indicate that Microsoft will delay the launch of an OS that will support CDMA technology in order to focus on GSM.  This is probably for good reason as CDMA is widely used in the United States, but not much at all beyond that.  GSM is the predominate technology overseas and in other foreign countries. That being said, AT&T and T-Mobile would be the first to offer the devices, while Spring and Verizon customers will have to wait till sometime in 2011, when CDMA support is rumored to be made available. "We had to make some trade-offs," senior product manager Greg Sullivan told CNET today. "Even Microsoft doesn’t have unlimited resources. We had to prioritize doing fewer things, really, really well." (Read…