Obviously, there’s some fairly big news coming out of Las Vegas this week. I’ll get to that either later today or tomorrow. In the meantime, here’s what I did with my parents this past weekend.

• My parents arrived Thursday at the same time Patrick has to be dropped off for school. My office is fairly close to his school, so Julie dropped him off with me on her way to the airport. He and I ate lunch together and then I took him to school. Always fun to spend extra time with the kids.
• Friday was Take Your Dad to Work day – at least it was for me. We had a team lunch out and he sat in on a couple of meetings. He’s spent quite a bit of time on IPv6 recently, so infrastructure discussions like my group’s are right up his alley. According to one of my team’s PMs, my meeting behavior is “much better” when he’s around.
• Saturday, we went to the Museum of Flight. I don’t know who was more excited, my son or my father. Dad’s favorite plane is the Blackbird, so he really enjoyed sitting in the SR-71 cockpit. It was raining the last time we went to the museum, so this was the first time I had seen Air Force One and the Concorde.
• Sunday, we watched the Mariners beat the Royals. It’s been three long years in the basement for M’s fans, but they have been slowly getting better year over year. Not sure they can make the playoffs this year, but maybe they can at least finish over .500.
• Yesterday, we went to the Woodland Park Zoo. My parents are members of FONZ and my kids love the Zoo. We had fun, though after three and a half days of “go go go” with my parents the kids were a bit worn down. The gorillas were very active, banging on the glass and running away – sort of the gorilla version of ding dong ditch. Another highlight was getting to see the tiger cub.
• My parents flew home last night on the red eye, and everyone is very sad to see them go. It had been about eight months since we had seen them. Here’s hoping it won’t be that long before the next visit.

• It’s been almost four months since I started these morning coffee posts. I like the regularity – there’s been 84 weekdays so far this year, so 84 – (71 + 6 days missed from vacation) = only seven missed morning coffees. On the other hand, I think my daily blogging fix is keeping me from digging deeper into some issues. So I’m going to start cutting back to only three morning coffee posts per week, with the hope of three deeper technical posts and one wildcard post per week.
• Speaking of cutting back, my parents are in town this weekend so I doubt I’ll get a post out tomorrow or Monday. Have a good weekend anyway.
• Windows Server “Longhorn” Beta 3 is out. Now is time to start getting serious with it.
• Joe McKendrick is reporting that Gartner has given the green light to spending more on SOA. Maybe it’s because I work for a technology savvy company, but I’ve never understood outsourcing critical business decisions about technology adoption to a consulting company.
• It’s a Joe McKendrick twofer: He also reports that IBM is calling for a new SOA directory / discovery / registry standard to replace UDDI. I totally get the need a “new UDDI”, though I’d wager that my issues with UDDI are very different than Big Blue’s.
• Yesterday, I made a crack about how un-scalable the Internet would be if every cFonnection went thru a central hub. Two days ago, Clemens has a long post about the implications of an Internet Service Bus. First, I can’t wait to see how that thing works. Second, it’s fairly obvious that not all traffic will go thru this bus (since the bus ain’t out yet and yet you’re still reading this via the Internets), so maybe that answers my question about ESB’s and centralization? That is to day, use the bus where you it’s useful, otherwise don’t bother?

• 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)