Last weekend I spent finishing up some of the wiring in the house for the home network.

When the house was built, we had lines put in for each room which terminated in the basement.  Although the lines were put in, they weren’t physically wired to the jacks in the walls or the basement.  Because both the TV and the bluray player that I bought are network capable, I wanted to hook them up to the internet so that I could perform software updates and use services they provided.  Unlike your old TV, VCR or CD Player, these new devices run on software that gets consistently updated throughout the year giving you additional functionality and features you may not have had before.

So in this simple network diagram, what I need to do is connect the wires in the office, where the Comcast Internet connection comes into the house via the cable modem and router, wire the connection to the wall, connect that to a switch in the basement, and connect the Great Room wall outlet to the basement to yet another switch in the great room.  Confused yet?

Note: Some of you may be thinking, “Wires?  Go wireless dude.”  Sure you could.  Wireless isn’t bad for say, downloading firmware updates, but for serious video streaming, we want bandwidth and wireless isn’t going to cut it when multiple devices stream video in high definition, playing music on another room, or um… gaming.

I need to go get some tools for this.  Fry’s to the rescue.  There’s one only 20 minutes from the house.

• Crimper
• Stripper
• Punchdown Tool
• Cat5e Cable (or Cat6)
• Connectors
• Cable tester [not required but saved time]
• Switches (2)
• Bluray disc to test bluray player [shh… don’t tell my wife]

Instead of buying the tools individually, they had a kit which had the crimper, stripper, and punchdown tools plus some connectors and 75 feet of cable so I bought that.  If you are reading this and looking for a kit, this one on Amazon is basically what you need.  Here's a link for a tester.  I already have the router in my office but needed to get two switches.  One for the basement and one for the great room.  The Planet Earth Bluray disc?  Well that’s required for right?

So remember I said all the wires from the rooms in the house terminated in the basement?  This is what it looks like.  A bunch of wire ends in the crawl space.

Luckily at the end of each wire they put a nice note telling where the other end of the wire goes.

So when connecting the wall plate in the room to the one downstairs you split the wires (there’s 8 of them total, grouped in pairs) and punch them down into the wall plate.  Don’t worry there’s great directions included with the tool kit telling you what color goes where and in what order.  This is both for the wall plate and for making your own Cat cabling to connect the switches to the wall plate and the devices to the switch.  This will save you loads of money over buying pre-made cat cabling.

To make sure it all worked I did by a tester.  I saved me twice.  First time I connected the wire in the wall to the wall plate I accidentally cut two wires with the wire stripper.  Second time I did the same thing making a cable.  Get one, it’s worth it.

So when checking the connection from the wall plate to the other end, the basement in my case, you plug this doo-dad into the wall plate and use the tester on the other end.

So down the in basement I used Heidi’s label maker to label the wires a little better after installing the connecters on the other end.

Here’s what it looks like with the switch.

In true trailer park fashion, I had to use a long extension cord to power the switch.  I guess I forgot to ask the builder to put a couple of extra outlets in the basement.  Guess that’s a project for another time – electrocuting myself.

Upstairs behind our awesome (read too small and I need to make something better, yes, yet another project) TV stand here’s the 2nd switch all hooked up.

The cool part was plugging the TV and Bluray player into the switch.  Now that they are connected to the internet, they came alive with more features and started to update themselves.

Here’s the TV performing an update.

Once the update was done, it had to ‘reboot’.  Just like a PC.

There’s a ton of version numbers.

Looks like there is one specific number though for the software?  Note that this is after the update.

One interesting thing I see from the License menu is that the TV is running on Linux.

Ok now the cool stuff.  Once the TV was connected, I was able to link it up to my Amazon account.  Notice how the bandwidth test shows excellent connection information and that I should have no problem viewing HD content.

I’m not sure exactly what VieraCast is yet, but when you use the button on the remote, you can see the original picture gets minimized in the center and now you can access the weather, youtube, picasa and Amazon video on Demand plus a ‘coming soon’ area.

There’s a nice list of video’s to rent.

The bluray player had a similar software update.

Download in progress…

Since the bluray player is connected to the internet, you can access Vudu (like Hulu?), youtube and my Netflix account.

Since I’m already a member of Netflix, I just need to authorize the device to connect to my account.

Then finally the Netflix instant watch queue is now available on the bluray player.

I’ve yet to stream any video watching but I did watch some of the Planet Earth stuff and that was jaw dropping.

Heidi has setup a house warming e-vite invitation thing.  She’s setup to do it on Saturday January 9th, 2010.  In true procrastination fashion, I’ve yet to add anyone to the email list.  But when you come over, I can show you this stuff in person.  If you’re into that.

We finally jumped on the High Definition bandwagon.  I’ve been wanting a HDTV for like 4 years but with building the new home and/or living in smaller spaces there always seemed like a different priority or reason not to do it.  So since I just turned 38, I decided a little birthday combination Christmas gift to myself was a nice TV.

We’ve had a 33 inch tube TV for the last 4 years.  When the cable guy came to the new home to drop the cable line he actually made fun of my TV.  Something along the lines of, “you have like 4 computers and this home network and then you have this old tv!”

After some diligent research I decided to go for a Plasma TV.  From the reviews I read on CNET and the avforums website, plasma is still the way to go for movies and sports.  Something about the overall image quality is better – technically it’s the 1080p/24Hz output that allows the TV to play at 96Hz so that blu-rays are in their original format and eliminates flicker mode.  Modern plasma’s also have lower power consumption, much like their LCD brethren, as well as low chance of burn-in or image retention.

Panasonic plasma HDTV’s in particular are now seen as the leader excellent plasma HDTV’s.  Especially their V10 series (not the G10) which come in 50, 54, 58 and 65 inch models.  It seemed to me that the price really jumped when you went from 58 to 65 so I decided to go for 58.  The reviews on Amazon and CNET were really key factors in making me feel comfortable with the purchase.

Price was comparable so I actually purchased the TV from Best Buy (and their Magnolia Home Theater) though because I wanted someone local to be able to contact if something went wrong with the TV.  I also paid the extra cash (almost $400) for the insurance for 4 years.  If anything goes wrong with the TV, they will come out and service it, if they can’t fix it, they replace your TV with the same model and if they no longer carry that model you get a newer TV as an upgrade.  Seemed like a smart thing for a $2700 investment in a TV (though we did get a 10% discount just by asking at the register and bringing it to $2,429.98).  One additional nice thing about living in Oregon is lack of sales tax, very nice for large purchases like this.

Here’s some shots of it – try not to laugh at the silly TV stand that’s way too small and has the TV hanging 30 inches over each edge – that’s yet another project in the new house.

Next to the fireplace to give you some idea where we put it and size.

Heidi watching Rudolf in standard def (guess they didn’t think about high def in 1964)

 

Another shot from upstairs while the snow monster appears.

Later on during the week we watching some football in 1080i (I guess that is the best signal you can get from the Comcast HD DVR).

When you live in a house with a girl born in Eugene you are forced to watch the ‘Civil War’ football games between the two state colleges.  It’s serious business and was the leading story on the news for the day.

After 1 week of use so far I’m quite please with the TV.  I’ve learned alot, like you can’t use the coax from the Comcast HD DVR because that only sends 480p output – you have to use a HDMI cable.  I do like the HDMI cables that combine both video and audio because it makes for alot less cables.  I did purchase a couple HDMI cables ($10 ea) off Amazon as well and I think I saved quite abit compared to purchasing them in Best Buy.

I did also purchase the LG BD 390 Network Blu-Ray player but I’ve yet to watch anything on it.  I did consider a PS3 but since I’m not a console gamer, I decided on the LG for it’s ability to network, play Netflix, and high quality.

Next project is to finish up the wiring so that I can connect the TV and Blu-Ray to the network.

This post is going to be a combination of fun and work.  After all, all of me went to LA for PDC, not just the work aspect or the pleasure aspect.

PDC 09 Conference Recap

These are notes condensed from 4 days of note taking in OneNote.

Stuff that got announced

• Microsoft Pinpoint - greater assistance in lead generation - http://pinpoint.microsoft.com/en-US/ – I didn’t know this existed but it looks like it’s been around awhile
• Microsoft Codename "Dallas" - find, purchase and manage datasets - http://pinpoint.microsoft.com/en-US/Dallas - I think this is deployed via Sql Azure Services
• Azure - going live Jan start billing Feb
• IE9 in development
• Silverlight 4 Beta available now
• Office, SharePoint and Visio 2010 Public Beta as of now
• OData - official name for protocol for WCF Data Services (formerly ADO.NET Data Services or codename Astoria or AtomPub) http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/ee844254.aspx
• SQL Server Modeling Services - Olso, M (textual modeling language), and Quadrant (data-driven applications) http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/default.aspx, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/ee477952.aspx
• Duet Enterprise for SharePoint and SAP - consume and extend SAP from SharePoint 2010
• Outlook Social Connector - general SDK
• MIX10 - Conference in March in Vegas

Main Theme

3 screens and a cloud  (next 'wave' is Cloud computing [Mainframe (1970's) --> client-server (1980's) --> web (1990's) --> soa (2000's) --> cloud (2010's)]

• Phone, TV, PC
• Silverlight being the client mechanism (they are really pushing this to be the main UI mechanism)

Data playing increasingly larger role - Vivek Kundra - Chief Information Officer for the USA live via video feed

• make information public - for public consumption and transparency of data
• data.gov - searchable data catalogs

Conference Sessions Attended (11) + 1 pre-conference workshop

Workshop

1. Developing Microsoft BI Applications - The How and the Why
   1. Note that I struggled with this decision.  I signed up for Getting the Most out of Microsoft Silverlight 3 but having spent the last 9 months on a Silverlight project for one of our clients, I did not think it was going to be that beneficial.  There’s a ton of info on the web for Silverlight.  However, there’s not much for BI.  The Silverlight application I worked on sits on top of a Analysis Services Cube – the API is completely different than just throwing down a Entity Framework model on top of a relational database (which I did as well for some parts of it).  This app has an AdoMdDataReader, CellSet and MDX statements.  I was curious how others approached this area.

Sessions

1. Data Programming and Modeling for the .NET Developer - SQL Server Modeling Services
2. Overview of SharePoint 2010 Programmability
3. Evolving ADO.NET Entity Framework in Microsoft.NET Framework 4 and Beyond
4. SketchFlow: Prototyping to the Rescue
5. Microsoft Perspectives on the Future of Programming
6. Should I Use Silverlight, MVC, or Web Forms for Web User Interface Development?
7. Networking and Web Services in Silverlight
8. Advanced Topics for Building Large-Scale Applications with Microsoft Silverlight
9. Automating the App Lifecycle with Windows Azure
10. SQL Server Modeling Services: Using Metadata to Drive Application Design, Development and Management
11. Mastering Microsoft WCF RIA Services

Conference Sessions I wanted to attend, 44.

There was alot of concurrent session angst for me.  At any given time slot, there were 11 sessions and many of those I wanted to attend more than one in that time slot.  Luckily it was all being recorded and available at PDC, http://microsoftpdc.com/.  It will be interesting to see how making this all available online affects conference attendance in the future.

I might add that one of my favorite sessions, ‘Should I Use Silverlight, MVC, or Web Forms for Web User Interface Development?’, was an audience participation session where I got to talk quite alot because out of the mass of people in the session, I was one of the few using Silverlight in a LOB application.  However since it was audience participation, there is no video or audio available – an experience you can only get by being there.

Also, this years swag was pretty nice.  A laptop.  I brought my wife to this years conference because last year Microsoft booked Universal Studios theme park.  This year there was nothing planned.  In fact, the twitter stream was full of folks lamenting the lack of a breakfast this year and no party – until the laptops were announced.  Every attendee got one.  Pretty nice.

 

The touchscreen is the highlight.  The other specifications aren’t too shabby either.  Windows 7 Ultimate, 2 GB memory, 250 GB HDD, huge battery life (8+ hours), bluetooth, all wireless specs (G, N, etc), and on…

The LA Experience

I’ve posted a few times here about how I’m going native so it wouldn’t surprise you to say I’m not a fan of LA.  You have to drive everywhere.  I saw a few bikes but with the weather so nice all the time this is the city that could lead the way in cycling.  The downtown area was a ghost town – during the day and at night.  All these high rise buildings.  Where is everyone?  One the streets driving.  The traffic was fun to watch from the hotel room.

The hotel, the Omni, was downtown and since I didn’t rent a car, I had some decent walks.  About 1.5 miles to the conference center (or you could take the attendee bus which was nice as well).

The conference center is in this area called an ‘entertainment campus’ called LA Live (wikipedia|web).  This was where we started off eating because we couldn’t find a place near the hotel.  Basically your franchise eateries plus some shops and anchored by the LA Lakers stadium.

We did ESPN bar the first night – they had good wings, good beer and lots of big screen TV’s.  It was fun watching the Sunday night game between the Colts and the Patriots on a huge screen.

The next night we did a bar called Yard House.  They have 135 beers on tap.

Then on the 3rd night I was feeling beer overload.  We did Mai Tai’s at Trader Vic’s.  It was fairly empty so we chatted up with the staff.  The manager was very cool and gave us this free drink in glass shell.

During dinner my Mai Tai was in a SoCal cup and my wife (born and raised in Eugene Oregon – Oregon Ducks country) had to let em know how she felt about SoCal (sorry Jeff!).

On the third and fourth night we were ready for some exploring.  We went to Little Tokyo which was a decent but nice walk (hey it’s like 65 degrees at night).  The sushi at Sushi Gen (500+ 5 star reviews in google maps) was very good.

The following night we checked out La Golondrina on Olvera Street.  This was a pretty cool market and reminded me of the shopping I did in Mexico City years ago.  The food was awesome and the manager spent alot of time talking with us.  There’s some good history around the restaurant and shopping Olvera Street (oldest part of downtown LA).

The Train Ride

The highlight of the trip although it almost didn’t happen.  We flew down and took the train back (Amtrak Coast Starlight).  After going through 3 lines (the line at the baggage check, the line to get through the TSA where you undress and then the line to get on the plane) it reconfirmed why I hate flying.  It’s customer-no-service at it’s finest.  For travel the train is the opposite.  No lines.  Comfortable seating.  Relaxed travel.  Yes it takes longer though.  Vote with my dollar is what I say.

When we went to Union Station to check in we discovered I made reservations for the wrong date.  We were supposed to board the day before.  Luckily we were able to switch but I gave my wife a nice scare (I think that will be the last time she let’s me make the travel arrangements).

Our cabin was very spacious and comfortable.  It had a bathroom with shower in it, two bunks and a chair and a nice window to watch the landscape roll by.  When I wasn’t plastered to the window watching the view I did lots of reading, I was able to finish two national geographic magazines and make it 1/3 of the way through my latest book series I’m starting, Wizard’s First Rule since it was a 24 hour train ride.

The view from SoCal was mostly desert and palm trees.

  

We then made are way along the coast and the train runs right on the beach and along cliff edges.

We even went past some kind of rocket launch site for NASA and a USAF military base.  I heard this is only accessible via the train.

Launch towers?

Lots of interesting people to meet at mealtime.  4 people sit in a booth.  This girl was from Australia doing a 14 month world tour – spending 6 weeks in the USA.

Then we started heading into the mountains as daylight started fading on the first day.

I lost track of the number of tunnels we went through.

The next morning we awoke to the mountains of Southern Oregon with the morning fog still sitting on some of the trees.

The beauty is hard to describe.  You are going to have to see it for yourself.

This will be the second year I’ll be attending the Microsoft PDC, Professional Developers Conference, in LA.  I was a bit confused at first that they were having this in back to back years.  According to wikipedia, I guess it has been done before in 92-93 and 00-01.  I’m still not excited about LA but at least the weather will be very nice in the mid-70’s.

Last year this conference really blew me away.  It’s huge.  Lots of new product gets announced for the first time.  The sessions are very professional with video and audio being recorded.  Huge amounts of free food, drinks and water available.

I’m going to bring my wife along this time.  Last year they rented out Universal Studios for the night during Halloween for just the attendees.  All food was free.  They had drink stations setup all throughout the park where you could get a beer/wine/soda.  All the rides were open with no lines and they had setup haunted areas in each section of the park with fog and actors trying to scare you.  It was really cool.

Heidi is actually looking forward to just relaxing during the day while I’m filling my brain up with new stuff.  She did mention possibly checking out the tar pits and Venice Beach.

I’m looking forward to riding the train back.  We are flying down to LA and then going to take the train from LA back to PDX.  We leave Friday morning from LA on the Amtrak Coast Starlight and get back to Portland Saturday afternoon.  The trip is 29h 25m by train.  We have a bedroom reserved with a shower, a little expensive but, I think it will be a relaxing ride back with some great views of the forest, mountains and streams of Southern Oregon and Northern California.  I’ve heard the train goes places where there are no roads.

We’ve recently been praising the food we are eating at lunch time at the office by going to what we call ‘cart row’.  Eric, my co-worker, and I make it a point to head to the carts for lunch each Wednesday – the only day I need to be in the office.  We are one of the those progressive companies that work from home and only meet once a week together as team.  Otherwise we use all the modern tools, instant messenger, live meeting and even Ventrilo to have discussions.

Anyway, we been surprised at the quality and freshness of the food at such a reasonable price.  It’s just over your standard $5 McDonald's price range – around $6-7 ish dollars for a meal but the quality is easily in range of some of your best restaurants – sometimes better.  Just yesterday Eric bought a sandwich and soup from the Portland Soup Company cart and they sliced the apple right in front of us that was making his topping for his Pork Butt with Apple and Cabbage Slaw.  How cool is that?

We both got the Beef Borscht soup.  I’ve never had beets in soup before, and it was a fantastic and a brilliant bright purple soup.

It seems to come in a wave and this seems to be a movement that has been going on in the background for awhile.  That same day, another co-worker, Serena, email us a link to a video touting the Portland Food Carts.  Then via twitter this morning I see Sam Adams, the Portland Mayor, has tweeted the same video plus an additional one.

I guess Portland is proclaiming itself the Food Cart Capital.

I have been thinking lately of posting some things about my cooking at home.  I’ve gone native.  Before moving out here I was easily your glorified meal guy.  Hamburger Helper, Tuna Helper.  I bought things in boxes at the grocery store with 30-40 ingredients of things you can’t even pronounce.  Today I cook mostly everything from scratch, buy veggies and fruits at the farmers market, and try to eat in season.

I don’t know if it’s the culture here or more of a national thing.  My Dad says there’s not the choice of grocery stores back in Illinois like we have here.  Portland does seem to love good food.  I sure do love eating it.

Here’s a couple videos just recently created about it.  There’s even supposed to be some kind of late night, evening food cart area where you can buy a beer and eat food under this tent that Eric has been mentioning at work.  Some kind of new hang out.  I see they mention what looks to be that place in video #2.

Video #1

I’m mostly jotting this down because I want to remember it and reference it in the future but thought it might also be interesting to share.

On my last stop today on my meals on two wheels route I had a longer than normal conversation with Dorothy Yoshida.  Dorothy is a first generation Japanese American.  Her parents moved here from Japan and her and her 8 siblings were born here in the Portland Oregon area.  Only 12 years separate those 9 siblings.  That in itself amazes me.

Dorothy is 92.  She told me today she was born in 1917.  Among other things I asked her if she remembered World War 2.  Why she sure did.

She spent 4 and 1/2 years in an Japanese internment camp.

She says she thinks about it alot and how hard it was.  She was trying to provide for her two children.  Dorothy said she was 26 when she went.  She said she was shipped to Idaho, specifically to Minidoka, and which I can see from the Wikipedia article. 

This is history alive.  One of only 9,397 people.  She said she had all her possessions taken away.  That is was very cold and hard and dry.  I sort of remember driving across Idaho to get here to Portland and how it was a dry, high desert sort of place.  I remember discussions of this in history class and the history channel but it’s something else to run into someone your delivering a lunch time meal for.

While she was talking I had to hold back for not getting teary eyed in front of her.

She said she lived in the barracks and that she made $12 a month delivering mail as a volunteer.  There were other jobs but the most you could get paid was $18 a month.

Perspective.  I was just thinking about how would i have felt at 26 to lose everything and get sent somewhere for 4 1/2 years and all of a sudden I’m almost 31 with nothing.  I’m amazed.  Something to think about when you’re thinking about your lot in life and how you got here and where you are going.  Doesn’t seem to bad compared to others does it?

Well we are in the new home finally.  Took longer than expected.  We moved out in November of 2008 and our old home was then promptly demolished.  The builder guessed 4-6 months, the contract said 9 months and the bank said no longer than 11 months.  It ended up at 10.5 months basically.  We moved in this weekend.

Old Home		New Home

Still getting acclimated but it is great.

I took over 500 photo’s while it was being built.  Some of it to document the process, document where the wires were behind the walls and most of it due to just plain excitement.

My favorites right now are the new appliances, no more making ice by hand – love the ice cube maker in the fridge, the stacking washer and dryer are quiet, the dishwasher is quiet but my highlight is the fireplace.

Fireplace turned out nice.

Of course I had to get one going this weekend.

The kitchen…

Heidi’s new favorite spot.

Stairs and open landing to the three bedrooms upstairs.

My truck actually fits in the garage.  Well barely.  But not bad for a 3/4 diesel truck.

And of course you know what moved in first.

I’ve had a few people ask about a house warming party.  Never had one so I don’t know what that entails but we should do something so that if you are wanting to check it out then cool.  If not then it’s an excuse to get together.

This is the first test of the bandwidth in our new home.  Dramatic improvement by 33% down and 300% up (16Mb/5.7Mb).  I did this at ~7:00 am on a Friday morning.  Interesting to note that if I use a local server to test, Portland, the numbers are dramatically better at 23Mb down and 8.5 Mb up.

Oct 2009

May 2008

Aug 2006

I’ve been getting quite a bit of blog comment spam the past few days.  When someone leaves a comment, I currently receive an email.  It’s a nice feature of BlogEngine.NET which is the blogging software I currently use to power this site.

After 3 years of mostly clean comments, apparently I’m now the target of an automated spammer called a bot in the techie world.  It leaves your inbox looking like this:

In the course of a few minutes you can receive hundreds of these.

So now you’ve got multiple problems:

1. Clean out your email inbox.
2. Stop this from happening on your blog.
3. Do it in a manner that isn’t annoying to users that want to leave comments.
4. Clean out the spam on your blog.

Clean out your email inbox

Not sure if there’s a better way to do this but shift clicking and or selecting all and clicking delete.  Using gmail this wasn’t too painful.

Stop this from happening

It had been awhile since I’ve upgraded the BlogEngine.NET code.  I think 2 years.  I was one 1.2 and they are now on 1.5.  First step was upgrade.

The latest version of BlogEngine.NET has the ability to add Extensions.  I was hoping that there would be some kind of spam management built into the engine but there is not.

One method would be to turn on comment moderation.  I don’t want that.  That means every single comment, good or bad, would need me to click and ‘OK’ button before it gets posted.  Sounds like work and I want automation.

Unfortunately there isn’t a clear list of extensions available for BlogEngine.NET.  Sure there’s an extensions page on their website but the list is certainly not complete and some of the links are link dead.  In particular, of the two ‘Anti-Spam’ extensions, SpamFighter is link dead and Akismet Anti Spam is outdated.  With some googling, I found an extensions project on CodePlex, that however has gone stale, the last release over 1 year ago. 

I finally found one that was somewhat recent called AkismetExtension (initial post|update).  It basically uses a service to check the body of the comment for spam and if it passes then it posts.  Ok fine.  Sounds good for now.  I’ll have to see how it pans out.

In the mean time the only change you the user should see is a new blog style.

Do it in a manner that isn’t annoying to users that want to leave comments

My wife was looking to leave a comment on blogger and I’m sure you’ve all seen those images where you have to figure out what the word is from some image.  She could not read it.  I could barely make it out.

How many users get turned away from using that method?

I also don’t want to have to do registration or force moderation, etc.

Compounding this is two types of spam.  Automated spam and spam from someone who is actually paid to manually add a spam comment.  I have been getting these for some time but the volume is very low so it’s easy to delete these.

Clean out the spam on your blog

Now I have to individually delete each spammed comment on blog.  This is going to be pretty tedious.  Logged into the blog, I get a few extra LinkButtons that you normally don’t see.  Like the IP address of the comment, the users email and a Delete option.

I’ve left a post lamenting the lack of comment management tools in BlogEngine.NET.

Looks like I have some work to do…

I was watching someone today launch a program in Vista by clicking (with the mouse) Start then All Programs then scroll through the list and try to find the right Program folder… 

This isn’t the first time and I watch people over and over do this.

Don’t do this.  It’s taking you minutes for what could be seconds.  Imagine all the time added up and you might get a week back to your life in just a year…

Built in the Start menu is a very handy search ability.  In fact, you could improve your productivity immensely by not touching your mouse at all.

Simply hit the Windows key, and start typing the name of the program, the website, the filename or whatever you’re looking for.

Imagine I want to launch Excel.  Windows key then two words ‘Ex’ and I get Excel second in the list.  I could then use the down arrow key (remember to keep your hands off your mouse to save you from wasting your life) to highlight Excel and hit the Enter key.  (note I could just type one extra key ‘Exc' and hit enter as well).

Remember.  Start.  Type.  Enter.  Hands off of mouse.