• Big news yesterday was Microsoft announcing “Strategic Changes in Technology and Business Practices to Expand Interoperability“. More details available at the new Interoperability website and this interview with Bob Muglia.
• The videos from Lang.NET 2008 are now available, including mine.
• Mix08 is just under two weeks away, and the news is ramping up. Scott Guthrie provides a “first look” at the Silverlight 2.0 beta (aka the one with .NET) that will release @ Mix. He also provides a set of eight tutorials where he demonstrates building a Digg client for Silverlight 2.0. I’ve been doing a little Silverlight 1.0 experimentation recently, but I think I’m going to scrap it in favor of waiting for 2.0.
• Shorter Nick Malik: IoC is cool, but isn’t a silver bullet. Go read the whole thing.
• Brad Wilson has a new laptop with a solid-state hard drive. VS08 installs in under 10 minutes? I gotta get me one of those…
• In addition to the XNA news, Microsoft also announced Gears of War 2, Fable 2 and Ninja Gaiden II and Too Human will all be available this year exclusively on Xbox 360. Of those, I’m most interested in Fable 2, though Too Human is looking interesting. But what about Halo Wars? When is that shipping?

Not only does this month mark my son’s fifth birthday, it also marks the ten anniversary of my first date with my awesome wife Julianne. I met her online while I was laid up at home for six weeks after breaking my ankle at hockey practice. You see, I’m not just a hockey fan, but I also played several years of amateur league hockey in the mid-90′s. I’m not very good, but I really love playing, though it all came to a halt when I broke my ankle.

Last night, for the first time literally in a decade (shit, I’m getting old), I hit the ice for a local TechRec league game (“Home of the Thundering Nerd Herd”). And when I say “hit the ice”, I mean that fairly literally. Man, it’s been a long time and I am WAY out of shape. I hurt pretty much all over, but especially my right shoulder.

We only had ten skaters, which means only two lines total. I probably skated around 20 minutes total – I spent three minutes in the penalty box (grabbed an opposing player as I fell down) and skipped the single power play we had. I still felt like I was gonna die by the end of the game. Hopefully, after I get a few more games under my belt, I’ll be able to skate more than once up and down the ice without looking to the bench for a change. On the plus side, we won 6-2, I had an assist and was +1 on the night.

The TechRec league is very different from the league I played in down in SoCal. In SoCal, I played on the same team with the same players against the same players on the same other teams season after season. Naturally, animosity developed. In TechRec, they re-pick the teams every season, so it seems much more friendly and less competitive. I mean, we still want to win, but it takes on a different feel when you know some other player you don’t like may be your teammate next season.

Major thanks to my neighbor Stephen Bury for getting me back on the ice. I’m looking forward to smashing him into the boardsgrabbing him when I fall down facing off against his team a couple of weeks.