My wife and I moved to Seattle from Los Angeles about 18 months ago. Of all the things we miss, friends are first on the list. One of those friends from USC (Fight On!) is Keri Johnson. Haven’t seen him in a while – don’t get back to LA as often as I’d like to – but I just got email from his band Urban Family Dog. Keri’s got a voice like you wouldn’t believe and the band is awesome. If you like funk and/or horns and are in LA, you’ve got to check them out Feb 1st at the Key Club in Hollywood with one of their main influences: FishBone! They have a new album + lots of MP3′s online. Check them out!

UPDATE: The show has moved Feb 8th. Same time, same place, just a different day.

And then there is Julie, Harry’s wife. Every now and then I go over to their place for an incredible dinner. She is a fantastic cook, and I am sure I could maintain a decent weight if I eat reasonable portions, but its sooooo good, I can’t just have one portion. They keep saying I can come over more often, but thankfully I am in Bellevue, and they are up by the future MS campus in Issaquah. This means that, although the drive is only 10-20 minutes, I have to actively make an effort to go. But when I do go, it is often the highlight of the week. [Matt Williams Technovangelist]

Thanks Matt! As you can imagine, I share Matt’s one portion dilemma. The worst is chicken enchiladas – my wife’s chicken enchiladas are like crack. I look my empty plate and think “I could eat one more” even though I’ve polished off six already.

I also share his resolution to lose weight. Julie does too, but since she’s 8 months pregnant, losing weight now would be a bad thing. 😄

Does anyone know if there’s an RSS feed for KurzweilAI.net? I got a rare opportunity to hear him speak yesterday as part of a Microsoft event and he was amazing. (I wonder if he got more sleep than Chris Anderson did?) I’ve started on his book The Age of Spiritual Machines (which I’ve had for a year and never found time for) and I was picking through the massive amount of information on his website. But I want to keep up to date and an RSS feed is (obviously) the easiest way to do that.

They haven’t posted the article yet, but MSDN Magazine has posted their March Issue Preview, which will feature my first article:. Site Skinning: Rich XML Classes Let Users Personalize Their Visual Experience on Your ASP.NET Site. It’s about using a custom IHttpHander to build a Transform View for an ASP.NET website. Needless to say I’m pretty excited. I’ll be posting additional content related to the code here on this site (hence the recent facelift to the site – sitelift?) after the article ships. I’ve been delivering the content at .NET user group meetings up and down the west coast (most recently the MSDN chapter Phoenix) to good reviews, so I have high hopes for the article.

Now I just have to finish writing the second half – using CodeDOM to actually compile the pages just like ASP.NET WebForms do. It’s amazing how much easier writing the code is than the article that describes the code.

I’ve been using FeedReader for aggregating news feeds, but I just downloaded and configured Syndirella. I think I’m going to switch permanently since Syndirella handles some of the 2.0 RSS feeds that FeedReader can’t. (I want to try News Gator, but I’m not running a compatible version of Outlook). Additionally, Syndirella is a .NET app, which I like even if it has little bearing on the apps’ functionallity.