Got to Phoenix only to discover I had left the charger for my development laptop (otherwise known as my “portable server”). Since I’m here to talk code, maybe having a working laptop is a good idea. (My tablet is going to be a good dev machine, but I haven’t gotten it entirely configured yet). I drove around a while, looking for a replacement AC adapter. Found what I thought was a Fry’s Electronics, but was actually a Fry’s Food & Drug. Luckily, there was a Best Buy nearby. No AC adapter, but they did have the T2: Extreme Edition on sale so I picked it up. I eventually found a universal AC adapter after visiting two Radio Shacks, but frankly I wanted to check out T2. Unfortunately, the “player recommendation” indicate that laptops don’t play the hi-def version “due to the amount of data transfer required”. They weren’t kidding. But even without being able to watch the hi-def version (for now), it’s got lots of great features. Audio commentary by James Cameron, lots of new documentaries and on-the-set footage. Favorite toy: the Terminator FX studio. You can import your own photos and either make morph videos into the T1000 or create a “battle damaged” T800. I only have pictures of my son with me, so I made a cool, but disturbing, photo of him as a T800 with part of the cybernetics showing through.

I was looking up something on the VS.NET site when I noticed a link to PowerToys for VS.NET 2003. There are currently 5 PowerToys available:

• VSTweak – Allows you to modify some of the more obscure VS.NET options and settings
• VSEdit – Command line tool to load a file into currently running instance of VS.NET
• VSWindowManager – Enables you to design your own custom window layouts
• Custom Help Builder – allows you to create a custom help collection for your XML-style commented Visual Basic or Visual C# class library. Integrates the custom help collection into the VS.NET help system
• VB Commenter – XML-style comment tags for VB

Future tools include:

• VSCMDShell Window – One window to access both the VS.NET Commands Window and your external CMD.exe process.
• VSMouseBindings – Assign all five mouse buttons to commands within VS.NET
• VSTransparency – Make floating windows and pop-up UI semi-transparent in the IDE giving you a better view of the code below

Sweet!

After weeks of not getting around to it, I fired up my Media-Center-in-process. I got a copy of the Do Amazing Things DVD, which has Hi-Def Windows Media versions of BMW Films series of short films. Mostly, I wanted to see if my underpowered (733MHz Pentium 3) could handle the Hi-Def feed. Short answer: it doesn’t. So do I want to buy new CPU/MB/Memory and rebuild my system just to be able to watch Terminator 2: Judgment Day in Hi-Def on my big screen TV? Short answer: not yet, but soon. Given Windows Media’s focus on digital cinema tools, I imagine that T2 will be just the first of many movies available in Hi-Def Windows Media.

Observant readers who view my site in HTML rather than just reading the RSS feed may have noticed I’ve added a disclaimer to my site. What a coincidence, it’s very similar to the disclaimer other Microsoft employees use when they post on newsgroups.

I got my new Tablet PC today – the Toshiba Portege 3500. Seems that’s the tablet of choice inside Microsoft. I like it because it’s got 1GB of RAM and a nifty place to hold a full size pen. My previous Tablet was a beta unit – I was a tablet champ so I had one 6 months before they launch. That was great before they were generally available, but as it had only 256 MB of RAM, it’s not like I could use it for coding. With a GB of RAM, I can run write code in the host talking to a web/app server in a virtual PC.