Microsoft has released to Vista Ultimate owners the much anticipated DreamScene update. It's labeled as a "preview". Not sure what that means. Will it expire in 30 days?
Or is this their way of tagging it as a beta product.
Either way..its pretty dern cool. Unfortunately it only came with one scene. I have a couple others on the drive, but was hoping to land the waterfall video.
if anyone in Redmond happens to have the demo'd video and would like to share with Microsoft's official fanboy, please contact me.
I'm thinking of throwing some HD video of the childrens on the background to check it out.
In other news...this is an intense coding week for me. We're going to QA on friday, so its a must deliver situation. The blog will be a little lean for a few days, while i pound out code.
Friday can't come soon enough.

Michael skating with Griff, the mascot from the Grand Rapids Griffins:

Michael getting his helmet signed:

I love hockey.

A man walked into a very high-tech restaurant in a fancy hotel. As he
waited to be seated, he noticed that the maitre d' was a robot.  The robot
clicked to attention and said, "Sir, there is a one hour wait. I am
programmed to converse with you until a table is ready, If you please."

Intrigued, the man said, "OK."

The robot clicked a couple more times and then asked, "Sir, what is your
IQ?"

The man answered, "Oh, about 164."

The robot then proceeded to discuss the theory of relativity, interstellar
space travel, the latest medical breakthroughs, etc.  The man was most
impressed. The next day he returned, but thought he would try a different
tack.

The robot again asked, "What is your IQ, sir?" This time the man answered,
"Oh, about 100".

So the robot started discussing NASCAR racing, the latest basketball
scores, and what to expect the Red Sox to do this weekend.

The guy had to try it one more time. So the next day he returned.

Again the robot asked the question, "What is your IQ?"

This time the man drawled out, " Uh.....'bout 50."

The robot clicked, then leaned close and very slowly asked,

"A-r-e   y-o-u-r   p-e-o-p-l-e   g-o-i-n-g   t-o   n-o-m-i-n-a-t-e   
H-i-l-l-a-r-y?"

well we made it back from the Vista Launch trip. and not without our share of near-death experiences.
a general recap, with pictures, follows. i dont have much time to go into details as i'm pressed for time today.

woke up at 6:45 a.m. Quite possibly the earliest I have risen in years.
waited for the valet to fetch the trailblazer and amazingly enough, it still had all four tires and the same mileage as it had when we saw it last. Fired up the GPS to get to the McCormick center. Halfway there, we lost the signal for a few minutes. And of course, turned down a road that led to nowhere. Moments later, we had signal and were back on track.

arrived at the convention center and was a little disappointed in the vendor area. it was notably smaller than most events. we did stop and talk to a few vendors, some microsoft blue shirts and others.

keynote:
ONCE AGAIN - no Bill Gates or Ballmer! What?!!! Thousands of people here in Chicago attending the event and the best Microsoft could do was some non-Gates/Ballmer dude? I guess Microsoft hates chicago.

so there we sat.
bored.
we tried to NOT be bored. but the keynote lacked passion, charisma and any real content to dig into.
we decided to entertain ourselves:

Finally Adrian decides to curl up on the floor and take a nap:

after the keynote, we're off to eat an early lunch. we stop by the pizza joint at the Mccormick Food court. We (the romanian and i, are the only two eating at the time, when all of a sudden, the manager closes the restaurant. We had just finished eating and had started to leave when all of the employees (6 of them) swarm the restaurant, wiping down everything. One of the managers tells another employee that absolutely everything had to be cleaned. I asked if we, the food victims, were soon to die from some italian guck-guck disease that we had recently acquired in our food stuff, but she insisted that nothing was wrong. despite the fact that she was turning away customers at the door, during their most busiest time of the day. so reluctantly we returned to the convention area, waiting patiently for the flesh eating disease to rear its ugly head.
but nothing erupted, so we fired up the laptops to try out the new Ajax controls released this week.
which, by the way, you'll want to try out. Nikhil has provided a browsing history control of sorts that allows you to un-break the Back and Forward buttons of your Ajax applications. Also there are some neato transition effects for the Update Panel that are worth trying out. I'm sure everyone will over-use the neato stuff as they usually do when something shiny and new comes out. Remember when flash hit the web?
so anyway....
the lunchroom area was packed:

adrian has to whip out his mac, there amidst the microsoft nerd herd:

i told the onlookers to pay him no mind as he was a bit 'special' in the head.
after the lunch trauma had passed, we turned our attentions to the Developer track sessions.
First up....Interfaces in Vista, featuring XAML, DX10 and others...
ummmm...
no.
the session sucked.
sorry...no better way to put it.
no code.
no descriptive look at the technology behind the demos. Visual Studio never opened.
A room full of devs and NO code.
It was, however, a demo of Travelocity's Vista Gadget, but there was little to no discussion of the behind the scenes technology. Ultimately it ended up being a 30 minute commercial for Travelocity.
Most of the people in the room were disappointed and rightly so.
so we bailed.
we picked up our grab bag, tshirt and left the windy city.
oh yeah...remember how we're supposed to get a free copy of Office 2k7? ummmm...kinda.
well they give you a card with the product key on it.
if you want the software, you'll have to visit the website and download it. thats right. no dvd for you.
i kind of feel sorry for the poor sap that might be there and doesnt have high speed at home.
the trip home was less eventful. no ice. no snow. just traffic.

Dear Friends at Microsoft:
It sure would have been great to see some top Microsoft brass there at the keynote.
I'm starting to get the feeling that maybe the Midwest isn't much of a priority anymore.
maybe i'll have better luck at TechEd.

Adrian posted an excellent expose' on I.T. offshoring from an insiders perspective. Worth the few minutes it will take to read.

Go HERE.

[edit: fixed link. sorry...my bad.]

well we're here. it took us 4 hours to get to chicago because of the crappy roads. and hooray for GPS. Used MapPoint and my handy dandy Microsoft GPS usb plugin and it was dead on. We had zero navigation issues. We did almost die on the highway when the trailblazer forgot where the highway was as it slid across a grizzly slab of ice. The romanian however, deftly kept the vehicle in a forward facing direction of which my current state of living is much thankful for. All those years of Need For Speed have finally paid off for him. So we're at the hotel, about a mile from the convention center and its not a bad place to park for the night:

Your typical hotel. And $100 a night for downtown chicago is not bad.
My room has your normal inner city view:

Thats an art/music school of some sort outside my window. Adrians window faces inward and i think his view is of two bums and a dumpster, but i could be wrong.
well i'm out for the night. i'll post more pictures as wifi becomes available.
we're not sure if we'll stay for the whole show or not. We'd like to drive home with daylight upon his lest we die in a horrible accident that will certainly become a must see movie for drivers education students for years to come.

So today, Jim Becher comes across a contest on Gizmodo and passes it on to me.
They're giving away a bunch of Vista stuff from the launch party they attended:

To win this stuff, you have to prove to the folks at Gizmodo that you are a true Microsoft fanboy. So I sent in the photo of my tattoo.


AND I FREAKING WON! You can click the image above to hit the article on Gizmodo HERE.
WAHOOOOO!

so today is the official launch day for my book!
i'm hoping that it is well received and benefits a great many developers.
the world needs more biztalk guys.

on a side note:  I'm sick.
of all the days to be sick, this is quite possibly the worst one.  i have so much stuff to do.
i'll have to work the weekend just to get caught up. bleh.
starting to feel a little better this afternoon, but still quite nauseated.
i probably just need a good healthy barf. the kind that makes your stomach hurt and your eyes water. oh yeah.

also...Bill Gates on the Daily Show was pretty entertaining. You could probably find it on YouTube. He's promoting the Vista launch, which i'm pretty excited about.  I'm finally 100% Vista now. And I'm loving it. There was a series of rapid fire updates at the last minute and a good majority of the stuff I needed was in there. They even threw in a free Texas Holdem game for free.  And free is always good.
So go grab you some Vista. You'll be glad you did.

ugh.

ok...so i've had a few hosting issues lately.  mostly due to some peehole on the shared server running up the cpu.  but heres where webhost4life rocks.  they migrated my sites, quickly and efficiently without little intervention on my part.  my sites are faster and more responsive.  webhost4life rocks.

Zune update:
my replacement headphones showed up today!  thats two day service.
i didnt have to wait in line at some stupid "genius" bar only to talk with some pastel wearing nancy-boy who's only job is to confirm what the customer already knows - 'the headphones are dead jim.'
a few minutes on the phone and BAMM - new headphones.
suck it apple.

The BizTalk book is here!
Again, I need to thank the fine folks at Apress as well as my friends and associates for helping me survive the process - AGAIN!
Without further ado, I give you: