Nerd Stalker

Oh yeah forgot to mention in my previous post to check out the picture of the blue screen of death I got when walking into the Microsoft Keynote this morning, hilarious. Pretty bummed at Microsoft they really blew it for developers at this conference as all of the developer track rooms are over flowing. Really poor planning on Microsoft which is really surprising. I had to defer 2 of the breakouts I wanted to attend, I checked out the "Sandbox" this morning which was probably the hidden gem of the event. At the sandbox they have tons of machines with virtual machines on them with labs of the various new technologies to try, it was pretty cool. Then sat through a cool track called "Developing Data Driven Applications Using the New Dynamic Data Controls in ASP.NET", problem is this stuff is still in the early phases and sort of sidtracks biz rules and the whole biz logic layer instead depending on future release of Linq. Tried to see the ajax patterns with asp.net tr...

So i'm at the Microsoft Mix conference here in Vegas and there is quite a buzz in the air here. Started with a great band that sounded like a mesh between oingo boingo and devotchka. Then Rey Ozzie took the stage to deliver the new path of microsoft, in short it's that for now there is going to be a connection between web and client apps as one is not dominating the other. Then he hyped Silverlight, which is squarely aimed at Flash and Flash video, looked nice but it's beta till the summer 1.0 release. They mentioned something called Photosynth for some uber powerful online photo zooming. Scott Guthrie then took over and mentioned Silverlight has a streaming option, a cross platform .net framework (yes runs on mac), demo's available for download starting today, silverlight.live.com free vid hosting/streaming, multi browser support, and support for virtually all programming languages. They are seeing a 300-1000% speed increase over using javascript. They showed demos run...

Ok so I'm skipping ahead but it's my second day here in Vegas and I can't believe I haven't even played a hand of poker yet. I did see the bizzaro show called Jubilee at Bally's, yeah I will never do that again. In a nutshell baby was awesome on the plane, it's really warm/hot, the venetian rooms are amazingly huge, view blows a bit, people are bizzaro, the girls dress like prostitutes/prom queens, many jock hawks, and i'm exhausted and need more sleep. I'll be getting my first tournaments in tomorrow, probably at Caesars, Paris, or Ballys. more to come....

I've rediscovered that when you go to any non apple store you get lots of misleading and incorrect answers to any mac related questions you have. So I'm at the point where I'm ready to connect the mini audio to my bose system. The mini has a optical out option, but the jack can be used for either optical or your regular 3/4" headphone jack. So I went to Radio Shack to look for a cheap optical to RCA cable as my old bose only takes RCA. Radio Shack tells me only the Apple store has such a cable, and that Apple likes to make things you can only get at the Apple Store (bs), I know they don't know what theyre talking about so i'm off to Best Buy. Best Buy tells me essentially the same crap so i'm finally off to the Apple Store. I park far far away from the Apple Store and make the trek, they tell me theres to such cable and that going optical to RCA makes no sense anyhow so I may as well go 3/4" to RCA. They show me the cable they have which sells for $30...