• Scott Hanselman details how the “unblock” feature in Windows works. Basically, when you download a file with IE, it adds an alternate data stream that specifies the zone the file came from (Internet, Intranet, Trusted, etc.). Even more details on Bart de Smet’s blog.
• Nick Carr gets off on a rant on Wikipedia, Citizedium and “the truth” that’s pretty funny.
• Remus Rusanu shows how to to reuse SSB conversations in a data syndication scenario. A while back, he wrote about a lightweight pub/sub SSB implementation – barely 200 lines of T-SQL code – that would also be very useful in data syndication scenarios. I’ve got data syndication on the brain right now, so this stuff is very timely.

• John Shewchuk introduces the new BizTalk Services. Well, “new” is a bit of a misnomer: STS and Relay (now called Identity and Connectivity) were previously available under the Live Labs umbrella and the other new services they announced aren’t available yet. Bt these new services they announced are compelling: ServiceBus is an pub/sub event delivery mechanism that scales to the internet and Workflow is a WF hosting solution. I’m looking forward to experimenting with these new services (when they become available).
• Nick Malik continues his series of posts on governance. Money quote: “Tools manage, People govern”. I feel a little bad because I punted on the governance presentation that’s he’s preping, so maybe I’ll get that on a bumper sticker for him or something.
• Chris Anderson has a few voice-over lines in Halo 3. While that’s cool for him, he mentions a new feature I was unaware of: “the one thing that completely blew me away (aside from the graphics, animation, level design and new vehicles and weapons) was the ability to record a game and play it back on Xbox Live, freezing the action at any point and flying around the scene, Matrix style. It may sound just like a standard replay function, but take my word for it, it’s not. I think it’s revolutionary, and I predict that Halo 3 will take machinima to a whole new level.” Cool!
• According to the XNA Team Blog, the new XNA GSE Refresh is now available. And as a thanks for our patience, they added four free months to all creator club members subscriptions. Thanks guys!

• My wife and I celebrated our seven year anniversary over the weekend. She rocks. ‘Nuff said.
• Over the weekend, Gov.Gregoire signed a bill that protecting the rights of same-sex couples. It’s not the same as full marriage rights (which long time readers know I fully support) but it’s a step in the right direction.
• I picked up the Xbox 360 HD DVD player over the weekend. Rented Batman Begins and it looks awesome. However, it wasn’t the stunning difference between standard and high def TV programming. I wonder if my five year old HDTV is showing it’s age.
• Scott Guthrie continues his LINQ series with a post on the new Query Syntax in C#3/VB9. While this is feature is great for those who are using LINQ to SQL, it does force pretty much all LINQ to whatever providers to support the from-where-orderby-select pattern. But not all query sources want to be limited to that model. For example, if you wanted to do a LINQ to Data Warehouse, wouldn’t you want more flexibility in your query syntax?
• I didn’t realize Steve Jones had a blog. At least, I think this Steve Jones is the Steve Jones that I know. But I’m not sure. Either way, it looks good so I subscribed… (via Sam Gentile)

• Beta 1 of VS “Orcas” and .NET Framework 3.5 has shipped. Get it here. Besides LINQ, I’m most looking forward to experimenting with some of the new WF/WCF integration work. However, I don’t think this beta includes DBPro functionality. Not surprising, given that DBPro only shipped a few months ago, but disappointing since I’ve moved all my database dev work over to that model.
• Korby Parnell introduces Claimspace, part of the Microsoft.Community family. While the other family members are retreads – blogs, forums and tagging – but this seems like something fundamentally new – or at least new to me – and therefore interesting. (via Larkware)
• Scott Hanselman updates the new version of Notepad2 to re-enable Ruby support originally built by Wesner Moise. Ruby is nice, but where’s the PowerShell love?
• After his performance in front the Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Gonzales is grossly incompetent, lying or both. What does it say about President Bush that he was “pleased with the Attorney General’s testimony“? It says Bush values loyalty over competence, is hiding something or both. Given that his approval ratings can’t get much worse, I guess standing by Gonzales even in the midst of bi-partisan calls for his resignation isn’t going to affect Bush much politically. On the other hand, confirming a new AG with a Democratic congress and low 30% approval rating might be devastating, depending on the bodies buried over there.

Yesterday’s Morning Coffee was canceled on account of rain. In my living room. It’s fixed now.

• Andre Vrignaud writes about MS Research’s new High Capacity Color Barcodes technology. As he points out, there’s some fascinating gaming potential for these barcodes because they have such high capacity (something like 2kb per square inch) and can be read without special equipment (a camera phone should work).
• According to a Pew Research Center report, Daily Show/Colbert Report viewers are significantly better informed than Fox News viewers. On the other hand, they’re only slightly more informed than O’Reilly Factor viewers or Rush Limbaugh listeners so it seems like a wash.
• Speaking of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, you can now download them from Xbox LIVE Video Marketplace. But at $2 160 points an episode, it’s cheaper to set my DVR.
• I recently re-discovered Remus Rusanu’s SSB blog. He went dark for a few months there, but he’s recently posted a new version of his Service Listing Manager utility, presented SSB at DevConnections and showed how to implement a managed stored proc to receive SQL DDL event notifications. Event notifications is one of those features I didn’t even realize was in SQL.
• Dottie Shaw, one of the program managers on my project, has started blogging. That leaves two team mates and one project member still not blogging.
• Yesterday, I stumbled into some other teams morale event. They were bogarting the cafeteria, so it wasn’t like I was crashing it or anything. Normally, I wouldn’t hang around some other teams party, but they had a projector, an Xbox 360 and two copies of Guitar Hero so I had to hang out and watch them play head-to-head for a while. That looks like a fun game.
• Chris Anderson writes at length about the primary enemy of Long Tail economics: “the absurdly complicated and expensive process of rights clearance”. His case in point is the coming DVD release of WKRP in Cincinnati, which has replaced the dozens of songs used as background music with “Muzak-style songs that could be licensed in perpetuity for a small flat fee” that apparently “sucked ass”.