For vacation this past week, my family went to Los Angeles to visit friends and family. We got to see some of my old college friends as well as Julie’s brother, dad and best friend. We also went by our old apartment building to see iLia and Elena Anossov, the apartment managers, as well as their son Phillip. In addition to managing our old apartment building, they are both artists. Ilia is one of the few fresco masters living in the US. In addition to his art, he also runs a variety of online properties dedicated to fresco painting. You can check out his portfolio, read his bio, learn about fresco painting, take a fresco painting class, view the fresco image database or read the Fresco Painting Society Weblog (RSS subscribed).

I’m reading Jeff’s account of the mural for his wife with great interest. I don’t think I want to invest in such a project in my current house, but in a few years when we move on to something bigger (hopefully) then I hope I can bring Ilia (and family) up to paint a fresco mural for my house.

I’m back from vacation and I just had to deploy a small dasBlog update that I hacked up while I was on the plane and my wife and son were sleeping. Clemens posted on the GDN workspace about registering your own macro classes. The theme that my wife wanted for her weblog comes with a variety of different sayings for the top of the page (My Journal, Welcome, Listen To My Cheery Chirpings, etc). I thought it would be cool if the image rotated or changed every time you came to the site. So I built my own custom macro class that overrides the radio.macros.imageUrl macro. Now, if you pass in a series of images seperated by vertical pipes (i.e. “image1.gif|image2.gif|image3.gif”), it will split out into an array of image urls and pick one at random. Pretty cool. Anyone want to see the code?

I’m supposed to be on vacation, but it doesn’t look like this news has hit the blogosphere. Ward Cunningham, inventor of the Wiki and general pattern wonk, has joined Microsoft. He’s got a wiki page up for tips. I got to meet him on Tuesday and promised not to blog his arrival until he posted it on his site. Welcome Ward! I’ll be doing some very cool things with him, but more on that later. In the meantime, check out Testing Software Patterns on the MSDN Architecture Center.

Speaking of wikis, the source code FlexWiki, another .NET based wiki, is available online. I need to dig thru FlexWiki to see if having DevHawk Wiki around anymore makes any sense.

I hear Jim Blizzard is having another Portland Nerd Dinner. I wanted to go meet Rory in person, maybe see Scott (who I haven’t seen since KL last year) and continue a conversation I was having with Chris last week on campus. Not going to make it this time. I could use the holidays as an excuse, but the truth is that I’ve got an early morning all-hands division meeting to see Return of the King and I’d like to get more than three hours of sleep.

From Sean Alexander’s Addicted to Digital Media blog, I learned that the Dish Network is planning on bringing a HDTV-PVR system to market in a few weeks. I was just begining to wonder about HDTV + PVR functionallity. I’m really interested in how Media Center systems will incorporate this functionallity. I really dig the new Gateway Media Center with it’s stereo-component form factor. According to the specs, it has Composite A/V inputs to the TV Tuner card. Does that mean it can PVR HDTV too?