I know, I know.  My two loyal Omaha readers are saying, "Jeff, Why did you wait so long to tell me that you were coming to speak at the Omaha .NET UG?  How can I get out of my pilates class at the last second????"  The pain and anguish that comes with being a loyal fan of the world's only .NET Sex Symbol.  I am sorry.  The visit has been on the books for a while and for this, that, and the other reason I never got around to blogging about it.  But it is true, and you can get all the details on the .NET UG Event page. 

If you are in Omaha and want to swing in, I'll be talking UX/WPF/Silverlight/Expression and will be bringing some books to giveaway.  And yes, I will be signing autographs in the lobby after the show.

Spaghetti Code Podcasts resume with a look what is going on in the Twin Cities developer community.  I sat down with Farhan Muhammad, President of ILM Professional Services, to talk about the upcoming Minnesota Developers Conference and more.  Get the latest scoop on what the MDC has to offer and why you should go, along with some of the other exciting things happening in the local developer community.

I picked this up from Chris Williams when he posted about Caligari 7.6 being free for the taking.  This is very, very cool.  I have always thought 3D modelling was way cool and actually bought Caligari TrueSpace 5 many, many years ago.  Everything I made was crap but it was still fun to learn something like that.

From the Caligari website, cool stuff for devs leveraging Virtual Earth or XNA...

An entirely re-written X format exporter lets you save your trueSpace creations to load into game engines such as XNA to develop games for Windows or the Xbox 360.

Also included is an export to Virtual Earth which will let you place your 3D creations straight into Virtual Earth from trueSpace. Now you can place whatever you make into real world locations in Virtual Earth and share them with others!

trueSpace also supports import from a wide variety of formats, letting you take existing objects and use them in Virtual Earth.

For those of you that don't know, Caligari is actually owned by Microsoft now.  Of course, I find out about the free software from Chris and not from an internal announcement!!!!!!!!!!

Download here - http://cart1.caligari.com/web/Truespacemainreg.aspx

I stumbled across this create resource and immediately had to replace my old HTML based Twitter widget with a much nice Silverlight one.  You can see it in the right sidebar of my homepage.  Though I am not sure if something that splatters my face even more on my site is a good idea.  I may have to grab the source and hack a more viewer friendly version...

I was having a conversation the other day with a customer and we started talking about what each of us had been reading (non-technical, no work related).  It is always fun to learn about a new author and share opinions on common books.  I thought I would post on what I have recently finished or am currently working on.

Recently Finished:

The Dreaming Void (The Void Trilogy, Book 1) : Peter F. Hamilton
I am a huge Peter F. Hamilton fan.  His The Reality Dysfunction Series was absolutely fantastic, as was his series starting with Judas Unchained.  The Dreaming Void is set in the same universe he developed for Judas Unchained.  It was a bit of a slower start than his other books, but it really started to move in the second half of the book.  Hamilton is a master at developing a complete world and the characters within it, and setting a fantastic pace at the same time.  If you like "space opera" type novels, I cannot recommend Hamilton enough.

Drive to the East (Settling Accounts, Book 2) : Harry Turtledove
I picked up the beginning of this series American Front (The Great War, Book 1) (actually, it's the Great War series but the story and characters continue between the series) on a bit of a flyer.  I had avoided Turtledove since he has so many books (lots of ghost writers maybe, I don't know???) so I was a bit leery since its hard to imagine that much quality work being turned out.  It turned out to be a great move since this is another series that I have fallen in love with.  While the twists on the historical timeline are interesting, it really is the characters that drive these books.  Another top recommendation.

In Progress:

Titan (Gaia) : John Varley
Another recommended book. It has been interesting as well but only about a quarter of the way through it. A few reviews compared the series to Dune (as far as scope) but so far I haven't seen it. It's an easy read so hopefully it to begins to grab me.

Thirteen : Richard K. Morgan
I really enjoyed Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs Novels and thought the premise of this one sounded interesting as well. I've been a bit disappointed. Slow start and Morgan seems to make a few too many pointed "political observations" in his book that I don't entirely agree with, so I've spent a few pages rolling my eyes at his views. It has slid off the active reading list as I work on the others I am reading, but I'll return to it as I finish the others and hopefully it will get back to the quality I have previously enjoyed from his novels.

Harrington on Cash Games: Vol. 1 : Dan Harrington / Bill Robertie
A poker book on playing No-Limit Texas Hold'em Cash Games. I have played limit for almost ten years and have dabbled in tournaments, but I have yet to step into the no-limit cash game arena in any big way. That has, for good, bad, or indifferent, become the rage in Vegas and even online to a large degree so finding good limit games has become hard (I like $8-$16 or so, but it's hard finding more than a $4-$8 or the occasional $6-$12), so it's time to get better at no limit. I have done ok when I have dipped my toes into the no-limit games, but I was not beating them to the same degree I do when I play limit so I know I have holes in my game and am not always thinking right. I have faired decently in the tournaments I have played, but in general I do not like tournaments and deep stack no-limit games play (or should be played) differently than no-limit tournaments. I'm halfway through and have already learned a great deal.

Yes, today was the day that DirecTV came and took my old Tivo HD DVR and replaced with a DirecTV HD DVR.  Sniffle...

Background:  DTV has launched several new satellites that has expanded their HD channel lineup considerably. I am sure you have seen their commercials proclaiming that very fact.  These new satellites use MPEG4 for sending down the HD signals.  Problem is (was), my Tivo HD DVR came out long before those satellites went up and was built using MPEG2 compression - in the hardware no less.  So I have been unable to watch some of the newer HD channels on DTV like the Big Ten Network, SciFi, and more.

The Story: DTV called me a few days ago and said that they were going to actually move some of the existing MPEG2 channels to MPEG4 (in particular ESPN and ESPN2) so I was going to get the double whammy unless I moved on to new equipment.  To DTV's credit, they did replace both my DVR and my satellite dish (need one of the slightly bigger ones now) for free.

Well, I have been up and running for a couple of hours now and I have to say that all in all the DTV DVR experience is better than I thought it would be (read a lot of early complaints online), but I already miss my Tivo.  Two big things jump out right away. 

The first is truly a WTF issue.  On the old Tivo, had dual live buffers meaning I could pause live TV on one channel then switch to the other channel and watch it live, pause it, go back, etc.  The DTV DVR has dual tuners but not dual buffers so you have to record two shows and use a cumbersome menu process to switch back and forth.  The live buffer thing is a big deal once you have used it a few times since it can be sooooo convenient in a lot of situations.  A glaring omission on DTV's part and one I miss badly.

The second issue is one of preference, but I really like the Tivo Guide layout much better than the DTV one.  Tivo let me go to the History Channel for example, and see what would be on for the next 10 hours or so.  It was great to be able to find the one-off show and tell Tivo to record it.  DTV forces you into the scroll channel by channel and see the programming for the next hour or so.  To see what is on the History Channel 5 hours from now requires a lot of scrolling and then scrolling back.  Not slick.

I haven't had it long enough to comment on its reliability, scheduling, etc.  But it looks like it has the basics covered.

Can I get an "Amen"? ;-)

Sam Chenaur has an interesting post and video on some proof of concept working going on with Silverlight Mobile.  Very cool stuff of what will be available to Silverlight developers in the mobile space in the not to distant future.

What has been a rumor forever has finally come to fruition - subscribers to both NetFlix and XBox Live Gold can stream movies to their XBOX 360 - intro details and caveats here.  This is something I have been waiting for for a very long time.  I was doing the Blockbuster Online DVD thing by mail for a while because I liked the option of going to the Blockbuster on the corner and swapping movies.  The challenge recently, however, has been that I've been so busy with family and work things the past few months I was never watching what came by mail and just rolled over to swap DVDs for something more recent when I had time to watch a movie.  I've thought the idea of getting movies via XBox would be great - but then again, I don't do much pay-per-view either so maybe not.  Regardless, this is a cool announcement and a nice first step.  Hopefully, it won't be long before the entire NetFlix catalog is available.  When it is, maybe that will be the time to watch all of the Babylon 5 episodes again! ;-)

Ryan Stewart over on ZDNet has some interesting thoughts on this area... nothing earth-shattering but one of the few times I have seen this thought put together so succinctly.