I just got my hands on a Nomad Zen Micro. That makes four Nomad’s so far – I also have a IIc, Zen Xtra, and a MuVo NX. While I like my other Nomads, the Micro blows them all away.

First off, it’s tiny. It may only be 5GB compared to the Zen Xtra’s 40GB, but it’s also around a third the size. The touch pad is a little funky to get used to, but it sure looks nice. And unlike the Xtra, it pulls power from the USB connector. It doesn’t even have a separate power connector – the AC adapter that it comes with actually plugs into the mini USB slot. Cool

Haven’t had it long enough to talk about battery life or the interface, though the interface at first blush seems much better than the Zen Xtra. For example, if you’re listening to a song you can jump to that artist in the library. I’ve wished for that feature many times with the Zen Xtra.

Of course, the first thing I did was flash the device to the new 2.1 firmware. The 2.x firmware adds support for Plays for Sure subscription services like Napster To Go. And I signed up for my 14 day trial on Napster about 10 seconds after I updated the firmware. I’ve downloaded about 1GB of music from Napster – I figure that’s a good start.

(Note to Creative – the fact that I got a Zen Micro does not let you off the hook for updating the firmware of the Zen Xtra. I expect to be able to use that with Napster To Go as soon as possible.)

This is way off topic, but did you ever notice that the characters on Sesame Street that date back to the 70′s – Big Bird, Grover, Oscar the Grouch, Cookie Monster, The Count, etc. – are all adults while the more recent additions like Elmo, Rosita, Zoe and Baby Bear are all kids. I’m not sure what it means, but it made me think: Did the makers of the show decide they needed characters that kids could identify with better? Or did the original characters somehow grow up? That’s a sorta wacky thought.

In case you’re wondering, Patrick watches Sesame Steet every morning and I have to sit in with him to make sure he doesn’t climb out of his high chair.

I think TechEd 2005 is shaping up to be awesome again this year. They just posted the list of sessions (well, most of the sessions anyway). I can’t link directly to the architecture sessions, but you can filter the list to show just one track at a time if you want to. We haven’t got speakers or abstracts posted yet, but I can tell you that we’ve got some good speakers lined up like Scott, Ted, Roger, Rocky, and Steve.

Of the ARC track sessions, I think I’m most looking forward to “Building and Using a Software Factory”. I jokingly call this session “Here’s the Beef, Chris Sells”. Chris blogged that he wanted a concrete example of a software factory. It turns out that we’ve been working on a concrete example since before OOPSLA. In the TechEd session, we’ll see how far Michael, Jack and Keith have gotten since October.

I just finished upgrading my blog to the new 1.7.2 RC build. I’m excited about some of the new features, such as the major caching improvements, CAPTCHA for avoiding comment spam, and the new permalinks. The permalinks one is pretty silly, esp. because I pushed for a version that used pluses for spaces. So the permalink for this post will be New+DasBlog+Version.aspx instead of NewDasBlogVersion.aspx. But it’s a style thing (I am in marketing now, right?). Speaking of style, I also upgraded the site template and pared down my navigation links. I moved the blogs on that list to a new “friends and family” blogroll. I did add a link to the new Archives page, which lists all the posts I’ve ever made, by category. And I added flair links to add this blog to your desktop newsreader of choice (that supports feed://) as well as to My MSN and NewsGator.

There’s still room for improvement. DasBlog still need story support, IMO. Also, I’d like to have a good offline posting experience. None of the existing blog authoring tools work for me since I use crossposts for my MSDN blog (which is what gets pulled into Architecture Center). I end up writing my posts in FrontPage and then cutting and pasting into the dasBlog web interface. Yuck.

One quick note – because of the new permalink title support, a set of existing URL mappings on my site started causing internal exceptions. This is because any URL ending in aspx that isn’t a file on disk is assumed to be a permalink. Of course, all my existing mappings aren’t files on disk nor are they permalinks to blog entries. I changed these mappings from *.aspx to *.ashx to avoid these exceptions and my template and navigation links to match. The only .aspx mapping I left intact was rss.aspx, since pretty much all of my subscribers use that as my rss feed. When I upgraded from my original blog engine, I had to add the rss.aspx mapping to avoid breaking any existing subscribers. Of course, I certainly don’t want to break those subscribers now. As a quick and very dirty workaround, I created an empty rss.aspx file in my web app directory. Now, the title mapper doesn’t attempt to map to a permalink since there’s an existing file on disk. Oh well, that’s why this is a release candidate version.

Typically, my movie tastes are further down the long tail from the big blockbusters. I mean, I’m looking forward to movies like Batman Begins and War of the Worlds, but usually it’s the small quirky films that get my attention. In fact, one of the reasons I’m excited about Batman Begins is because it’s directed by Chris Nolan, director of the awesome yet quirky independent film Memento.

Along these lines, I saw something about a movie from Sundance called The Aristocrats by Penn Jillette (of Penn & Teller). The premise sounds awesome:

Magician, comedian and entertainer extraordinaire Penn Jillette takes us into the secret world of comedians as we’re introduced to a perpetually filthy joke that is never told the same way twice, serving as the comedy equilavent of a jazz solo since the Vaudeville days. All that remains constant is the beginning and the end, and 105 comedians fill in the rest. [From Greg’s Previews on Yahoo Movies]

Aristocrats has been picked up by ThinkFilm. I hope they get into a theater near me, but clicking thru their site, I don’t have a lot of confidence. The only movie currently listed on the site that I recognized was Going Upriver, a documentary about John Kerry that I heard about late last year during the presidential campain. Combined with the fact that it will likely be released “unrated” as it would likely get an NC-17 rating for langugage, I’m thinking that I won’t see it until it gets released on DVD.