• My wife and I celebrated our seven year anniversary over the weekend. She rocks. ‘Nuff said.
• Over the weekend, Gov.Gregoire signed a bill that protecting the rights of same-sex couples. It’s not the same as full marriage rights (which long time readers know I fully support) but it’s a step in the right direction.
• I picked up the Xbox 360 HD DVD player over the weekend. Rented Batman Begins and it looks awesome. However, it wasn’t the stunning difference between standard and high def TV programming. I wonder if my five year old HDTV is showing it’s age.
• Scott Guthrie continues his LINQ series with a post on the new Query Syntax in C#3/VB9. While this is feature is great for those who are using LINQ to SQL, it does force pretty much all LINQ to whatever providers to support the from-where-orderby-select pattern. But not all query sources want to be limited to that model. For example, if you wanted to do a LINQ to Data Warehouse, wouldn’t you want more flexibility in your query syntax?
• I didn’t realize Steve Jones had a blog. At least, I think this Steve Jones is the Steve Jones that I know. But I’m not sure. Either way, it looks good so I subscribed… (via Sam Gentile)

• Beta 1 of VS “Orcas” and .NET Framework 3.5 has shipped. Get it here. Besides LINQ, I’m most looking forward to experimenting with some of the new WF/WCF integration work. However, I don’t think this beta includes DBPro functionality. Not surprising, given that DBPro only shipped a few months ago, but disappointing since I’ve moved all my database dev work over to that model.
• Korby Parnell introduces Claimspace, part of the Microsoft.Community family. While the other family members are retreads – blogs, forums and tagging – but this seems like something fundamentally new – or at least new to me – and therefore interesting. (via Larkware)
• Scott Hanselman updates the new version of Notepad2 to re-enable Ruby support originally built by Wesner Moise. Ruby is nice, but where’s the PowerShell love?
• After his performance in front the Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Gonzales is grossly incompetent, lying or both. What does it say about President Bush that he was “pleased with the Attorney General’s testimony“? It says Bush values loyalty over competence, is hiding something or both. Given that his approval ratings can’t get much worse, I guess standing by Gonzales even in the midst of bi-partisan calls for his resignation isn’t going to affect Bush much politically. On the other hand, confirming a new AG with a Democratic congress and low 30% approval rating might be devastating, depending on the bodies buried over there.

Yesterday’s Morning Coffee was canceled on account of rain. In my living room. It’s fixed now.

• Andre Vrignaud writes about MS Research’s new High Capacity Color Barcodes technology. As he points out, there’s some fascinating gaming potential for these barcodes because they have such high capacity (something like 2kb per square inch) and can be read without special equipment (a camera phone should work).
• According to a Pew Research Center report, Daily Show/Colbert Report viewers are significantly better informed than Fox News viewers. On the other hand, they’re only slightly more informed than O’Reilly Factor viewers or Rush Limbaugh listeners so it seems like a wash.
• Speaking of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, you can now download them from Xbox LIVE Video Marketplace. But at $2 160 points an episode, it’s cheaper to set my DVR.
• I recently re-discovered Remus Rusanu’s SSB blog. He went dark for a few months there, but he’s recently posted a new version of his Service Listing Manager utility, presented SSB at DevConnections and showed how to implement a managed stored proc to receive SQL DDL event notifications. Event notifications is one of those features I didn’t even realize was in SQL.
• Dottie Shaw, one of the program managers on my project, has started blogging. That leaves two team mates and one project member still not blogging.
• Yesterday, I stumbled into some other teams morale event. They were bogarting the cafeteria, so it wasn’t like I was crashing it or anything. Normally, I wouldn’t hang around some other teams party, but they had a projector, an Xbox 360 and two copies of Guitar Hero so I had to hang out and watch them play head-to-head for a while. That looks like a fun game.
• Chris Anderson writes at length about the primary enemy of Long Tail economics: “the absurdly complicated and expensive process of rights clearance”. His case in point is the coming DVD release of WKRP in Cincinnati, which has replaced the dozens of songs used as background music with “Muzak-style songs that could be licensed in perpetuity for a small flat fee” that apparently “sucked ass”.

As I mentioned this morning, my brother went to Virginia Tech. In trying to come to grips with what happened in Blacksburg yesterday, he wrote the following and asked me to post it here.

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My name is Ted Pierson and I am a Virginia Tech Alumni, member of the class of ’95. As I heard and watched the events that unfolded on Monday April 16^th, my heart broke for the families, students and faculty at Virginia Tech. While I lost no one that I knew personally, I feel that I lost 32 of my fellow brethren. The community of Virginia Tech reaches well beyond the confines of the campus, and we all feel a deep sense of pride to wear our Hokie Colors to show support for our beloved home. We also now feel a deep sense of loss. In the coming months, there will be many political debates as to how this could have been prevented, gun control and proper security measures. Please remember, this is more then a political issue to be debated, it is a humanitarian issue. There can be, and never will be a rational explanation to the horrible tragedy the felled the VA Tech campus yesterday. We as a society need to learn a love of our fellow man/woman. We need to look as a people, beyond the surface level issues that we deal with on a daily basis, and ask ourselves, is this the world we want to leave to our children, one that views the death of our fellow humans as trivial or platforms for political gain. The only lesson that we can learn from this is that we are all one race, one gender, one person, and that we need each other, regardless of race, creed, or other distinctions. I urge all readers of this to wear orange and maroon in a showing of support to the Hokie Nation. We are all Hokies today.

• My brother is a VaTech alumni, so the shock of the deadly shootings there yesterday hits very close to home. My heavy heart is with the grieving Hokie nation today.
• Jeff Atwood has a couple of greatposts on Language vs. Platform. Earlier in my MSFT career, I spent a significant amount of time explaining .NET, often to companies that had made a significant investment in Java. Picking the Java platform is fine (it’s almost the best platform around!), but it seemed many people I spoke to didn’t understand the fact that “[w]hen you choose a language, like it or not, you’ve chosen a platform“.
• Ian Thomas riffs on my When is a Service Not a Service post. I like Ian’s thinking about SaaS as an analogy for SOA adoption – if for no other reason that SaaS is easier to “get”. But trying to realize SOA via SaaS inside the enterprise is a mistake in my opinion (and I think Ian would agree with that). SaaS is a business model, and I don’t think you want to turn your enterprise into an internal service marketplace. Instead, this ties back with Nick Malik’s points about central planning. Regardless if I’m right or wrong, I subscribed to Ian’s blog (and not just because he linked to me – check out his Elements of the Future Business Ecosystem)
• TLA Watch: Oracle coins Application Integration Architecture (aka AIA). Joe McKendrick calls it “Big SOA”. Isn’t this the market segment that BizTalk has been in for seven years?