Wow, I made it to ten of these morning coffee posts. That puts me only two orders of magnitude behind Mike and one order of magnitude behind Sam.

• We got snow, again. My son apparently said the other day “OK God, that’s enough snow now”. When a 3 year old is tired of snow, you know you’ve gotten a lot.
• Of course, people in snowier climates than here (the NorthEast, Northen Midwest, pretty much all of Canada, etc) will snicker that 5 inches of snow is “a lot”.
• I’m moving my STS code into a new VPC for handoff to the dev team. I was running Virtual Server before, but for individual work like what I do, Virtual PC is much easier to use. Drag and Drop into the VPC alone is worth it to me to use Virtual PC instead of Virtual Server. I am using the beta of Virual PC 2007, though I couldn’t tell you what the differences are.
• Steven King may love the new season of 24, but I can’t shake the feeling of jumped shark. However, I am impressed that Fox released the first 4 episodes of the new season today.
• Two name changes later, the RTM version of SQL MobileAnywhere Compact Edition is now available. BTW, I found this blog post by Steve Lasker about using SQLce with ASP.NET. So it sounds doable, though not recommend. Of course, for those of us using shared hosting, SQLce is a non-starter until it becomes part of the standard .NET framework install.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up… live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.
Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr

• My boss asks “Are We There Yet?” on fulfilling Dr. King’s dream. Sadly, the answer is no. I think we’re making progress, but we’re not “there” yet.
• No back to back trips to the Super Bowl for the Seahawks. They had chances to win it both down the stretch as well as in overtime and they couldn’t capitalize.
• I blogged about “Politics 2.0″ back on election day. Here’s an article about viral video in politics that’s very Politics 2.0.
• It finally warmed up enough yesterday to make a snowman. Patrick named the snowman “Capa” which is what he call my father. Apparently, my father and the snowman have the same bushy eyebrows (according to my wife). It’s supposed to snow again tonight, so maybe we can make a “Granny” or “Nana” snowman (snow-woman?).
• The new season of 24 started last night. Please review Larry’s list of the Top 10 Things I’ve Learned About Computers From The Movies and Any Episode of ’24′.
• My wife posted a picture of Patrick and I playing Lego Star Wars II. We really enjoy it, but I need to watch my language when we play. When we were fighting the Rancor, Patrick announced to his mommy that we were fighting the “big fucking monster”. Woops! Patrick already knows several words that your not supposed to say (and he reminds us if we ever use them) so I guess should add that to the list. Or I could start saying frak instead.

“The paper sure loves to talk about
Selling out
Some of us never get the chance”
Stick Around by Mr. Jones and the Previous

• Didn’t see that coming. I guess the Buckeyes didn’t either. Congrats to the Gators. That makes at least three championships in a row won by the underdog. For all the complaining about the BCS, it’s hard to argue they got the champion wrong this year. However, with the exception of the Fiesta Bowl, the BCS games weren’t very good this year.
• There’s a video of the new Xbox 360 IPTV service up on 10. I realize it’s a demo and we’re nearly a year away from release, but I’m not impressed. Xbox 360 Fanboy pointed to a blogger who got a deeper look at the service at Microsoft’s CE booth. Frankly, it doesn’t look or sound like it’s much different than standard cable service (though I like the sound of 35Mbps bandwidth at my house). I realize familiarity is good, but do we really have to lock ourselves into the existing TV paradigm?
• I got roped into a webcast today on Optimizing Application Platform Infrastructure. It’s at 11am Pacific time. Stop by and say hi.
• My colleague Dale has a rant about Service Oriented Assholes. His definition: “Any person or team that pontificates on Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) without considering the realities of implementing SOA in a real business environment with real suppliers, customers, and products. These people are great at designing something on a white board or on paper, but couldn’t produce a real workable production ready system if their life depended on it.” Sort of a more specific (and vulgar) version of Joel’s “Architecture Astronauts“. How many SOA-holes do you know?

As per Major Nelson’s blog, the XBL Video Marketplace went live yesterday. Being off work yesterday (vacation time: use it or lose it), I fired up the ol’ 360 to have a look see for myself. V for Vendetta in HD? Cool. 6GB? Not so cool. Guess I’ll have to blow away some of the demos that I’m not playing in order to make space.

The amount of HD space needed for HD movies begs the question, why isn’t Video Marketplace available for PC? My 20GB of Xbox HD space is taken up with game demos and downloads. But my home PC(s) can spare that kind of space. I’d much rather download the content to my PC then stream it across my home network to the 360 when I want to watch it. Not sure how DRM (I assume the content uses WM DRM) impacts network streaming, but I would guess that’s a solvable problem.

While I’m talking about DRM, why do I have to pay to download DRMed rental content? Shouldn’t I pay when it’s time to actually watch the content? I understand having a time limit (24 hours) to finish watching content I rented, but why is there a time limit (14 days) to start watching it? Once it’s downloaded it, I’m no longer using XBL resources, so why put any limit on it at all?

The pricing model seems pretty much in line with iTunes and/or Blockbuster. $2 to own a TV show, $3 to rent a “classic” movie, $4 to rent a new release movie, with a 50% markup for HD content ($3/$4.50/$6). While these prices are pretty typical, where’s the all-you-can-watch subscription plan? The all-you-can-listen model is one of the key values of Zune or PlaysForSure services like Napster and Urge not to mention NetFlix. I’d probably scrap my premium channel cable plan if I could get an unlimited subscription to XBL Video Marketplace.

I’d also like to see more content pricing tiers. Owning a 45 minute CSI for $2 seems pretty fair. But $2 for an 11 minute Space Ghost Coast to Coast seems overpriced. And while I’m making requests, how about making it easy to buy an entire season of a given show – both from a pricing perspective (i.e. a discount for buying an entire season) as well as a user experience perspective (i.e. one click to buy the whole season).

So all in all, a pretty cool service with some room for improvement. The availability of significant amounts of good HD content is a MAJOR winner for this service and a great foundation to build on. Like all things XBL related, I assume Video Marketplace will evolve over time. Can’t wait to see how it goes.