My “dog” David White started a blog. And he blames me for “shaming” him into doing it. That’s a first – I’ve never shamed anyone into doing anything. I’m not sure I really shamed David – “pestered” may be a better term.

The last session I went to @ PDC on Wed was on Building Media Center Applications (PPT). You can download the MCE SDK from the MCE Developer Center which isn’t on MSDN (go figure).

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).