In the space of a week and a half: my battery bay was damaged, my screen was damaged, and my external HD with all my backups on it came within a hair’s breadth of going belly up. Luckily, on that last one, a few reboots and XP was able to piece everything back together again. So I backed up my backup and now am going to make a copy of the backed-up backup on CDR. Given that the XP built-in backup utility has no support for CDR, I need a decent personal backup utility. Any suggestions?

Peter blogged on my laptop dev config. I used to have two machines, my “production” machine for email and other office productivity and the my “development” machine that I wouldn’t mind paving at a moments notice, if needed. Now, I only have one machine so I can’t afford to be able to pave with extreme prejudice. Since I have a honkin’ laptop (2.4 GHz P4, 1GB RAM, 85GB HD) I decided to go the VPC approach. All I have installed in my host is Office 2003, SharpReader and VPC 2004 (it went gold today, so I upgraded). However, I have six VPC’s I’m managing. I can’t run them all at the same time of course, but it does give me a lot of flexibility. I run two primary VPC’s – one for WinXP and one for WS03. I’m actually running the WinXP VPC in the background as I blog – I’m installing the VSIP SDK (with the VSIP Extras Beta on deck). Then I have three dogfood VPCs – Longhorn, Whidbey and Indigo. Finally, I have a WS03 VPC running WSS. I need to upgrade my SharePoint Syndication project to support WSS RTM, but I just haven’t had the time.

Internally, we have a group that produces demo images and VPC’s for the technical field. So if I’m going to demo BTS 2004, I don’t have to go thru all the install process – I can either run a VPC or image my machine. Typically, I just use their base image VPC’s and install what I need.

Only downside to this approach – chews battery life like there is no tomorrow. I have two spare batteries and was completely drained of power going coast-to-coast a few weeks ago.

Authenticated feed support is all the rage. First RSS Bandit, now SharpReader. Now I’ve just got to update the SharePoint Syndication project to support the RTM version of WSS (in my copious spare time).

So my SAF coverage stinks. I missed all of Day #3 sick at home. Which means I missed BillG’s keynote. 😦

I did moderate an awesome session on Architecting for Manageability today. The session was awesome because of the speaker Praerit Garg (not because of my awesome if under-utilized moderator skills). He talked about the Dynamic System Initiative and the System Definition Model. DSI and SDM are very important for the Whitehorse analysis and design tools. However, you don’t need to wait for Whidbey to start designing for operations. Check out this whitepaper on how you can start adding support for management models in your applications today.

I don’t want to turn this blog into “What weird books did .NEAT use to as window dressing @ the SAF” but I can’t resist this one: “Los Negocios en la Era Digital” by Bill Gates. It’s a Spanish translation of “Business @ the Speed of Thought” though the literal translation of the Spanish title is “Businesses in the Digital Era”.

Speaking of Portuguese (I know, I wasn’t speaking of Portuguese, but it’s closely related to Spanish), check out Jose Silva’s blog (if you don’t speak Portuguese, check out the AltaVista Babelfish translation). Jose is an architect evangelist for Microsoft from Portugal. His most recent entry was on Keith Short’s PDC Architecture Symposium Session. RSS-Subscribed.