Two cool tidbits. 

First, my colleague, Karsten Januszewski, did a totally cool demo at the Flash In The Can conference where he showed some new features coming in the next release of Avalon.  Check out what you'll be able to do with multimedia in Avalon now!

Second, something near and dear to my heart: Anti-productivity applications!  Better known as "Games."   MSDN is hosting a series of webcast videos, produced by the game-instruction masters at DigiPen Institute, on how to write games.  The cool thing about this one is that you can use Visual C# 2005 Express Edition to follow along.  Go forth and have fun!

Other interesting, non-work-related things:

It appears that a palmtop nuclear fusion device has been invented by Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Another part of Oak Ridge National Laboratory called BS on those findings.

Coming next week....my take on Tiger (my OS upgrade gets here tomorrow.  Woohoo!)

And, yes, I will revisit the "Mac Experience" that I've posted before.  Thanks to some great feedback, I've purchased Aaron Hillegass' book "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, 2nd edition".  I'm going to dive deep into looking at what the new XCode 2.0 has to offer, as well as some other new features (for instance, did you know that Avalon lets you quickly write Konfabulator-style applets, similar to what you can do with the new "widgets" on the Mac?  Of course, when people see them, they'll say, "You copied that from the Mac!"  *sigh*).  It's gonna be a loooong weekend for me!

I've only worked with Vic Gundotra for a little over a year now, but it's been an absolutely fantastic experience.  Today, he started a blog.

Mind you, this isn't some kind of blog where a corporate PR person makes up stuff and the exec pretends he said it.  Nope, Vic is the real deal.  He's grokked blogging right from the beginning. That's why there's people like Robert Scoble in his organization.  But until today, he's kept behind the scenes in the blog world.  This seems strange to me in a way, because Vic is kind of what I consider an "Evangelist's Evangelist."  This probably explains why he's the GM of the Evangelism group, but it goes beyond that.  His energy, enthusiasm, and outright passion is quite infectious.  But he's not simply a mouthpiece for Microsoft.  Vic believes in the power of software, and when he sees something that doesn't sit right with him (or more importantly, our customers), he can bark pretty loudly.

Ok, I've rambled too much.  Go read his first post, "In Defense Of The Company I Love" and hopefully you'll get a taste of what I'm talking about.

I was browsing Andy "ZMan" Dunn's website, The ZBuffer, this evening and came across some interesting new tidbits.  I continue to be amazed at that people are doing in C# with Managed DirectX.  Case in point: HADDD.  These guys have created an amazing free 3D engine for first-person shooter games.  They've created two demo videos (XVid codec required) which are well worth downloading.  The first video does a great job of creating a "teaser" trailer for a game....dark lighting, mood music, things that go bump in the night.  Turn off all the lights and watch it with the volume turned up.  Creepy.  Written in C# (Using the latest C# Express beta no less!) and Managed DirectX.  Enjoy!! 

P.S. -- Brush up on your Spanish if you intend to read the forums or the source comments. 

One of my co-workers, Jeremy Mazner, has posted openings to hire technical evangelists for Longhorn and Internet Explorer.  Jeremy is a great guy to work with, and being an evangelist at Microsoft jut plain R-O-C-K-S!!

• MSDN has a new area called "Coding for Fun" that includes a section on game development
• Two other Managed DirectX websites that have been around, but I've somehow missed: Inner Realm, powered by Community Server (which also powers the MSDN blog site where my InkBlog posts are echo'ed on), and Michael Russel's "Roms Rants".
• ArcsOfFire.  Interesting Tablet PC game, but it still has some rough edges.  Source is available though.

Finally, Kitten Cannon has been a great time sink for me.  It's funny to find a game like this, because I'm actually writing something similar for my book.  Except I won't use kittens......because full-grown cats have MUCH more momentum