Morning Coffee 142 - Wishful Catchup Edition

• After spending most of the last four days away from my desk, I was planning on a quiet day to catch up on a variety of things. Then I heard the oh-so-minor news that Microsoft is offering to buy Yahoo for almost $45 billion. Hasn't been much reaction on the dev, architecture, politics and hockey-oriented blogs I read, but you can get a ton of reactions on TechMeme.
• Lost is back. Finally. I stayed up late last night reading Lostpedia, catching up on Lost Missing Pieces and the Find 815 ARG.
• Alex The Great had four goals and an assist in last night's victory. Coughing up three goal lead and letting the Canadiens tie the game in the last 30 seconds isn't encouraging, but a win is a win. The Caps are currently one game behind the SE leading Hurricanes and two games behind the current eight seed Rangers. Alex was named first star for January.
• Ted Neward has a nice summary of Lang.NET by day: one, two and three. I wonder if my talk qualifies for the exception to Ted's rule that "A blog is not a part of your presentation, and your presentation is not part of your blog". I had 15 minutes to discuss something I've written about over ten posts  (so far).
• John Lam points to the latest DLR hosting spec. I'm much more interested in the DLR code generator, but at least the hosting interface is documented.
• Scott Hanselman has a nice post on fluent interfaces. Note to self, find out if Beautiful Soup works with IronPython.
• I wonder if the VS Source Code Outliner PowerToy works with F#? (via Sam Gentile)
• Chris Tavares has an extensive post Deconstructing ObjectBuilder? I've poked around inside OB before, but I'm really looking forward to Unity (also via Sam Gentile)
• NVIDIA finally updated the drivers for the video card in my Tecra M4. That only took a year.

Afternoon Coffee 106

Lots of meetings today, so my coffee post is late...

• The Big News^tm: Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Beta 2 is available for download. Soma and Scott have more. Silverlight 1.0 RC and the Silverlight Add-in for VS08 will apparently be available in a couple of days. Finally, there's a go-live license for the framework, so you get a head-start deploying apps before VS08 and NETFX 3.5 RTM. Time to build out a new VPC image.
• Next week, I'm attending the p&p Service Factory v3 Customization Workshop. I'm looking forward to playing with the new Service Factory drop, but I'm really interested in learning more about building factories. I wonder if they're going to discuss their VS08 plans.
• Nick Malik recently wrote about making "middle out SOA" work. I hate that term "middle-out". It feels like we're pinning our hopes on middle-out because we know top-down and bottom-up don't work. My old boss John DeVadoss (who assures me he'll be blogging regularly again "soon") big vs. little SOA, with big SOA being "dead". I like the term "little SOA" better than "middle-out SOA", but just because big SOA is a big failure, doesn't mean little SOA will make any headway.
• There's a new F# drop available. Don Syme has the details. Looks like they've got some interesting new constructs for async and parallel programing.
• ABC announced yesterday that they are streaming HD on their website. So you can check out the season finale of Lost in HD for free. They embed commercials so it's not really "for free", but you don't have to pay $3 an episode like you do on XBLM. I wonder if XBLM might offer this capability in the future? Certainly would increase my use of XBLM. (as would an all-you-can-eat pricing scheme)

Morning Coffee 74

Light on the geek factor this morning:

• My daughter Rileyanne turned two Saturday so we had a little pool party. One of the major selling points when we bought the house was the double sized hot tub in the back deck. So even though it was only in the mid 60s, we could still get in and swim.
• Saw Spiderman 3 yesterday. I liked the first two very much, but this one is iffy at best. The problem with these blockbuster movie series is the perceived need to be "bigger" than the previous installments. So we get more effects, more action, more villains. But that usually means less drama and less story. Spiderman 3 is no exception. Here's hoping that Christopher Nolan's Batman series doesn't suffer the same fate.
• Lost announces an end date. There will be three more shortened seasons for a grand total of 48 episodes (plus the three remaining this season). While I love Lost, I'm glad they're going this route.
• Politics 2.0 Watch: according to their blog, QubeTV.tv is "the conservatives’ answer to YouTube". Two thoughts on this: First, Having a site of conservative videos for conservatives seems like preaching to the choir. Second, to quote Andrew Sullivan: "It's not a good sign when a movement cannot engage the mainstream."
• John Shewchuk as more details of the BizTalk.net connectivity service. Hybrid mode and Direct connect are nice optimizations, but don't change the messaging semantics at all. But pub/sub eventing does, so I'm primarily interested in that capability.

Morning Coffee 1

I gave up drinkin', I gave up smokin'
I gave up thinkin' all the time, stone cold revoken
No reason to my rhyme, I wasn't jokin'
If there's a phony bone in me, I want it broken
"Rub It In" by All Day Sucker

I'm trying to write more in 2007. Here's a roundup of stuff rattling around my brain:

• Fight On! So much for Michigan and their bleating about being left out of the championship game. Also, massive congrats to Boise State.
• Santa did bring me free time this holiday, but I spent it playing games rather than writing them. I'm digging Gears (big surprise) and Dead Rising, and I've starting playing Viva Pinata with Patrick. Plus, I finished GRAW which I had on loan from a friend just in time to start playing Vegas. Note I said "free time" which is to say time when I wasn't hanging out with my family. Typically during naps or after everyone was in bed, though I did skip at least one birthday party to play instead.
• We had a "surprise" snow storm two days after Christmas. Not enough to be dangerous driving, but enough to make a snowman with my kids. It's still there, though now that it's 55 degrees, I'm guessing it will be totally melted by the time I get home from work. It's been melting a little bit each day, so it's been like watching the climax of Raiders of the Lost Ark in slow motion.
• My wife and I finished watching season 5 of Alias last night. Fun, though it had really jumped the shark by Season 5. We watched the entire series on DVD, which really makes me wonder about the future of broadcast TV. We watched season 1 of Lost on DVD but we've been watching on TV ever since. I'm hooked on Lost, so there's no way I could go back to DVDs at this point, but I'm thinking that DVD is a better way to go for most TV. I wonder how this will change TV storytelling.
• I wish I could see how a show like Lost or Alias evolves over time. How much of the Rimbaldi story arc was mapped out before the show started? How did the production team deal with forced changes like Jennifer Garner's pregnancy or the apparently surprise series cancellation?
• I had 12 days off for the holidays, so it's very tough to be back at work. As I suggested above, I did very little coding while I was off, so getting back in the saddle won't be easy. It's especially hard on my little boy that I'm back to work. He was acting up yesterday which is fairly unusual. I finally asked him if he was sad about me going back to work and he broke down crying. I'm very lucky to be a part of such a tight knit family.
• I've been in my "new" job for six months, but it seems like longer. I mean that in a good way. It feels like I fit better in this job, on a much smaller team, actually building stuff instead of just "evangelizing" it. Nothing against evangelism, I just think I burned out on that job.

So starts a new feature on DevHawk. As you might guess from the "1" in the title, I'm hoping to make this a regular feature. As I ease back into work, expect more tech related nuggets along with the more random stuff. I should admit, however, that I actually don't drink coffee. :)

October is for Lost and BSG

Wednesday Oct 4th is the season premier for Lost. Two days later on Oct 6th is the season premier of Battlestar Galactica. These are my favorite two shows - an in my opinion the best two - on TV right now. According to Major Nelson, a one hour recap of BSG called "The Story So Far" is available on XBLM. If they could post a Lost and the Lost Experience recap on XBLM, that would just be perfect.

Caprica

Battlestar Galactica is already one of the two best shows on TV in my opinion. Lost is one of the best shows ever, but I digress. Now comes news that their doing a prequel spinoff:

SCI FI Channel announced the development of Caprica, a spinoff prequel of its hit Battlestar Galactica, in presentations to advertisers in New York on April 26. Caprica would come from Galactica executive producers Ronald D. Moore and David Eick, writer Remi Aubuchon (24) and NBC Universal Television Studio.

Caprica would take place more than half a century before the events that play out in Battlestar Galactica. The people of the Twelve Colonies are at peace and living in a society not unlike our own, but where high technology has changed the lives of virtually everyone for the better.

But a startling breakthrough in robotics is about to occur, one that will bring to life the age-old dream of marrying artificial intelligence with a mechanical body to create the first living robot: a Cylon. Following the lives of two families, the Graystones and the Adamas (the family of William Adama, who will one day become the commander of the Battlestar Galactica), Caprica will weave together corporate intrigue, techno-action and sexual politics into television's first science fiction family saga, the channel announced.

OK, Comcast officially needs to get Universal HD so I can see this & BSG in HD.