• I took my son to the Pacific Science Center this past weekend to see the Grossology exibit. His favorite was the barfing machine, but we also got to play Urine: The Videogame, stand inside a giant nose, work the burping machine, climb the scab wall and slide down the throat into the stomach and come out thru the colon. We also checked out the dinosaur exibit (Patrick’s favorite part: petrified dino poop), Kids Works and the Peter and the Wolf laser show. It was awesome.
• This week’s Big News^TM is the rebranding of WPF/E as Silverlight. Tim Sneath has the rundown, including the news that more news about Silverlight is coming at MIX. Personally, I think Silverlight is a great name. I was worried it was going to be another W*F name. (I’m waiting for the day that MSFT marketing tries to rebrand Win32 as the Windows Technical Foundation).
• Gianpaolo Carraro writes about what happens when a SaaS company bites the dust - i.e. “what happens to my data?” I expect that this is one of the aspects of SaaS that you have to weigh, though I doubt most companies will explicitly think about what happens if their SaaS provider goes belly up. As the SaaS market expands and more companies will go belly up (I agree w/ GP 100% that this isn’t SaaS specific, rather a natural force of any market) how much will that drag on SaaS adoption? I’m thinking it’ll be a fairly significant drag, but the SaaS market will eventually rebound.
• Nick Malik picks up the decentralization meme is started last Friday and compares enterprise architecture to city zoning boards. In general, I agree with Nick’s “not in a vacuum and not with a heavy hand” comment, but even more with his point that “we haven’t figured all it out yet.” Most EA efforts I’ve seen have been heavy handed and fairly divorced from reality (aka in a vacuum). More on this topic in the future.
• Kirk Evans closes the loop on city planning with a reference to Pat Helland’s Metropolis work. Pat’s work has been a huge influence on me. I often repeat Pat’s point about cities being “interconnected yet independent”. Services need to be interconnected yet independent also.
• Roger Wolter has a new Master Data Management whitepaper out, this one MDM hubs. I was literally talking about MDM on a conf call this morning, so Roger’s timing is impeccable.
• I haven’t read RADAR Architecture yet, but the fact that DAR in the acronym stands for “Dumb-Ass Recipient” made me laugh. (via Sam Gentile)
• MIT Media Lab has cointed the latest 2.0-ism: Human 2.0. I love Nick Carr’s take on it: “We’re definitely overdue for an upgrade – it seems like we’ve been stuck in Version 1.x for a few hundred thousand years, and that was after a beta that went on for freaking ever. Still, I think I’ll probably hold off until 2.01 or 2.02. I don’t want to be on the bleeding edge for this one.”

• Many years ago, I picked .net instead of .com as DevHawk’s TLD. My old pal Chris picked up devhawk.com and redirected it to the site because he got tired of typing “devhawk ctl-enter” into the browser address bar and getting nothing. He must have let it lapse because now devhawk.com points to what looks like a splog in development. Part of me is annoyed, but a bigger part of me just doesn’t give a shit. You – dear reader – have found this site, and that is all I care about.
• A couple of weekends ago, I re-wired my living room to enable surround sound. It meant adding a receiver to the mix, and that pushed us into three remote territory, which is too many. So I picked up a Logitech Harmony Universal Remote, since they have one specifically for the Xbox 360. So far so good, but I’m not sure my wife likes it much yet. However, their remote config application doesn’t run on Vista yet, so I had to bust out the old laptop to get it working.
• I’ve written about Spec# before, but I’ve never experimented with it. MS Research just released a new version that support VS05, so here’s my chance. (via Larkware)
• Speaking of MS Research, the Deepfish project has released a new tech preview. However, Loke Uei is reporting they’ve already maxed out on test accounts. (via Major Nelson)
• Jeff Atwood says there’s no substitute for learning on the battlefield. I always say that the only way to get good at something is to suck at it for a while. Different words, same concept.
• According to Naysawn Naderi, the “majority” of unit test features are being added to the Orcas Pro version. This is obviously good news, though personally I agree with Brad that they should available separately VS. Not sure it needs to be in the framework itself, inclusion in the .NET Framework SDK is probably sufficient. I also think there should be unit test support in the VS express editions as well. (via Knowing.NET)
• I’ve been digging Geekdad, but most of the stuff is for older kids. I mean, I’d love to take my daughter karting, but she’s only two and can’t reach the pedals! However, I’m itching to try out today’s post on image searching with younger kids. The kids love to draw on my new tablet, so I’m thinking of not only searching but snipping these images into OneNote for them to doodle on.

After a week’s vacation, I’m back in the office. I might have left with an empty inbox and newsreader, but I returned to nearly 300 emails and over 500 news items. Actually, 300 emails for a week is actually really good – most of them are in my “low priority” folder which means they are internal mailing list emails rather than things I actually have to deal with.

Major thanks to Dale for keeping the lights on around here while I was gone. With my renewed commitment to blogging this year, I’d rather not see DevHawk “go dark” for a week while I get some R&R. If you liked what Dale had to say, go subscribe to his blog. I hope he keeps up with his daily posts, now that he’s no longer on the hook around here.

Anyway, since I have little idea what’s going on in the technical blogosphere, this is a vacation wrapup instead. Normal Morning Coffee returns tomorrow.

• We spent a week in Southern California. Two days with my brother-in-law in Santa Barbara, two days at Disneyland and two days with my uncles in Palm Springs (with travel days between). We had a blast, but that’s a lot of driving. Next vacation, we’re going somewhere we don’t know anybody and staying put the entire time.

• My brother-in-law has three kids, including a son a few months older than Patrick and a daughter a few months younger than Riley. I’ve long said I would never move back to Cali, but seeing them all play together made me think it might be worth it. I don’t have any cousins (my father was an only child and neither of my mother’s two siblings had kids) so I didn’t realize what a big deal it is. I think Patrick misses his cousin Jack more than he misses Disneyland.

• When I lived in LA, I used to have a season pass to Disneyland. But seeing it thru my kids’ eyes made it brand new again. Our two days in “The Happiest Place on Earth” were a blast, though in retrospect we should have taken a day to rest and hang out at the pool between the two days.

• Riley’s favorite ride was Pirates of the Caribbean (which she calls “Yo ho ho”). My friend Brooke told Jules that little kids “natural reaction” is to hold on tight during the drops, but Riley put her little hands up and shouted “Wee!” They recently added some elements from the movies (Capt. Jack Sparrow and Davy Jones) to the ride. My wife and I were worried they were going to ruin it, but the changes were fairly small and subtle and we liked them.

• Patrick’s favorite ride was Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters but the Jedi Training Academy was a close second. His Jedi training was my favorite moment at Disneyland. He got to train with a lightsaber and fight Darth Maul. Here’s a video clip of my young Padawan:

  The big problem with Jedi Training Academy is that they only pick a limited number of “younglings” every show. Patrick didn’t get picked the first time we went, and frankly I pushed him out there the second time without him officially getting picked. You could conceivably waste an entire day at Disneyland attending all six Training Academy shows and never get picked. That sucks.

• Biggest disappointment of Disneyland: Patrick being 1″ too short for Star Tours. I was bummed.

• Disney’s California Adventure is a nice adjunct to Disneyland, but as a stand alone park it pretty much blows, though Jules and I did enjoy the Tower of Terror.

• Disneyland seems to becoming Disney-Pixar Land. Pixar movies are the basis for several of the newer rides, including the new Finding Nemo ride opening this summer. There was an article in the Disneyland Pixar Evolution in the airplane magazine so I’m not the only one who’s noticed.

• After two days in Disneyland, I expected Palm Springs to be a let down. But instead it was a nice casual cool down after two hectic days in the Magic Kingdom. Plus it was great to see my Uncles, who we hadn’t seen since last summer when my brother got married.

• We flew home Saturday so we could have a casual Sunday before heading back to work and school today. We watched Phantom Menace last night, though the kids are still a bit young for it. We decided on Episode I instead of the original Star Wars because it has a little boy (i.e. like Patrick) and a fight with Darth Maul (i.e. like Patrick). But it doesn’t hold a candle to the original trilogy.

• I was checking out the ASP.NET community site, and I noticed a small “Microsoft Communities” toolbar across the top. There’s a little menu that links to other MS community sites like Channel 9 and MSDN Blogs. I’m surprised the NetFx3 community site isn’t included.
• My teammate Dale is blogging about Proper SOA. He lays out 6 Proper SOA principles, and then drills into the first three: meets business needs, requires governance and responds to changing business drivers. I expect to see posts on the remaining principles this week. Maybe Dale should turn this series into an article.
• Speaking of articles about architecture, Architecture Journal 10 is online as a PDF. This issue’s topic is Composite Applications.
• Malbolge is a programming lanugage that is “specifically designed to be difficult to program in.” Here’s Hello World in Malbolge:
  (=<`$9]7<5YXz7wT.3,+O/o'K%$H"'~D|#z@b=`{^Lx8%$Xmrkpohm-kNi;gsedcba`_^][ZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA@?>=<;:9876543s+O<olm
  Seriously. Actually, it’s worse than it looks. The effect of any instruction depends on where it is located in memory.  Malbolge is so difficult, it took a month to write a Lisp program to generate that program. However, Lou Scheffer thinks we should think about Malbolge as a cryptosystem. I wonder if it could be used for obfuscation? (via Good Math, Bad Math)
• Nat Torkington blogs about teaching kids to program. He makes the point about “them to think in terms of small steps”. I was lucky to have a computer teacher in elementary school who did something similar. She had us write down instructions for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and she then followed them to the letter. For example, if you wrote, “spread peanut butter on the bread” with out first instructing her to take out a slice, she’d happily spread peanut butter on the entire loaf. (via reddit)
• To this day, my wife thinks the peanut butter and jelly lesson negatively affected my ability to communicate with “normal” people. She’ll even say “peanut butter and jelly” when she thinks I’m being particularly obtuse in my communication.

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.