Shanna and I just saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. There was plenty of that Indiana Jones charm, and Harrison Ford seemed to pick up right where he left off with the last film.

Originally, I was worried that it would be all computer graphics driven, and that it would lose the feel of reality, but barring a scene of swinging on vines in the jungle, it wasn’t too heavy on the CG.

What I always liked about the other movies was that even though some of the actions scenes were hairy and crazy, they were still plausible. Could someone hang on to a rope bridge after it had been cut? Maybe. Could someone avoid a rolling boulder and then escape from natives with poison darts? Maybe. Could someone survive a tank going off a cliff? Maybe.

This fourth movie however was full of too many ridiculous, over the top stunts that were not believable at all. This left very little suspense, as you knew that no matter what, the entire team of heroes was going to come out unscathed (the refrigerator scene in particular).

The story was interesting, but rushed. I felt that there was just too much action to pack in, that there was not enough time left to develop the characters and the story. My biggest beef with the film was that there was very little down-time. The moments of dialog with Sean Connery, the gross dinner scene at the Temple of Doom, the bar in Nepal. There was plenty of slow time to develop things in the other movies, but not in this one.

Overall, it was entertaining and met my expectations, but predictably not better than any of the other films.

We’ve implemented Ontolica search (for MOSS 2007) for several of our customers. The product fits our service offerings very well, and provides a great value add for minimal cost and effort (compared with other search replacement products).

The sales team has been very helpful and responsive. They’ve provided trial licenses quickly and without hassle, have provided training and demos/overviews of the product, and have even been excellent interfaces to help escalate support incidents. I can’t really say enough about the sales team.

I can’t say that about their support however. So far, they have had just about the worst level of support I have experienced with a third party SharePoint product. If you file a support incident through their web site or via email, you are guaranteed to not get a response.

I filed one particular support incident, never heard back from anyone, until 2 months later, when I received an automated email asking me if my incident had been resolved. Another incident received no response until I involved the sales persons, who managed to look into the issue themselves. A co-worker filed another incident, and never heard a response. I’m not even convinced they have a support team.

Outside of the support, if you are interested in their product, keep in mind that they have very little extensibility. This can be important if you ever need to write any customized search code, and would like to take advantage of the Ontolica features in your custom search solution.

One client of ours had a need to run searches using impersonation, so we wrote code to leverage the MOSS search web service, passing in the credentials of the impersonating account. We would have liked to have been able to pass our returned results into the Ontolica web parts (or simply have been able to use Ontolica with impersonation), but the web parts all use internal hidden search objects that are obfuscated and cannot be interacted with (unless you like deciphering obfuscated code). This made it so that we had rich search tabs with all the Ontolica features, and then our customized search tab with stripped down functionality. To be fair, my beef also lies with Microsoft for closing up their own search with the SearchResultHiddenObject, which cannot be used easily without reflection and a big level of effort. I would have thought that a product that provides such a good experience with installation and configuration would have put more thought into extensibility (and support).

Overall I would give Ontolica 3 out of 5 stars.

Tags: Ontolica, SharePoint

If you are shopping for granite countertops in the Seattle area, Import Stone has a great selection. While Pental probably has the best selection, they are too big and pricey. Import Stone is just the right size to not be overwhelming, but is big enough for you to find that unique special piece.

The folks there were very friendly and helpful, and we got an amazing and very unique slab from them.

When we had our granite countertops installed, we used a great installer, Western Tile and Marble. They were very professional, and did a flawless job. They didn’t make a fuss when we requested keeping the leftover bits (they had to make a second trip out to deliver the scrap pieces).

Additionally, we had ordered a marble-topped vanity from overstock.com that came with a chip in the corner. We asked for a price to have them take the square edge of the marble top (with the chip in it) and router the edge to make it rounded to get rid of the chip. They just decided to throw that in for free for us, and made a separate trip out to fix that edge. They routered the three sides of the marble top flawlessly right at our house.

I’d recommend them if you have any granite fabrication to do in the Seattle area.