Tina's been a little, errr ... skeptical ... about how enjoyable it is that our living room now reverberates to the sound of up to 8 Ferraris simultaneously trying to negotiate a corner in downtown New York City (in surround sound!). So I thought I'd investigate XBox360 as a media extender.

First …

A few weeks ago I bought a Griffin RocketFM Transmitter, a super-clever USB gadget that allows me to stream music from my desktop machine (in my office) to my living room stereo system. It works perfectly -- I can listen to KEXP, podcasts, what-have-you. The fidelity, I'm sure, isn't what you'd …

So my determination "not to open the XBox 360 until I finished my month's work" lasted about 24 hours. Yesterday was Thanksgiving, for heaven's sake! A holiday! Heck, I wrote 700 words in the morning. Only 3,500 to go before next Wednesday. I'm cruising, for heaven's sake.

The first …

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Much to my surprise, my local Costco had 23 units. When I arrived an hour before opening, I was 9th in line and, when I left the store they still had at least 4 units sitting in the cage. (Ah, the joys of living in a small town!)

Now, in …

I decided to switch to an official Cingular calling plan now that it's been a year since AT&T Wireless went away. I took in my year-and-change-old \$300 SMT5600 Smartphone and was told I'd have to get it unlocked before it would work with Cingular. (But it already works with …

The software development community is about the fall off a cliff.

• Single-threaded programs will never run faster than they run today

Think about it: clock speeds have maxed out and no mainstream programming language is automatically parallelizable. Pissing matches about Java versus CLI generics are irrelevant. The Intel and AMD …

The recent release of Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server, and .NET 2.0 is all good news, but it seems to cripple me a little. My next two articles on Avalon / WPF and Tools for Domain Specific Languages, neither of which can I get to install on top of the …

My latest article on DevX implements a packet filter and custom selection tool using the Tablet PC RealTime Stylus APIs.

Trying to download VS2005 or SQL Server, I get "Error Code = 11001" on MSDN Subscriber Downloads. That's "Host Not Found" in SQL Server, according to the search engines.