My friend Chris Pirillo (who often takes a baseball bat I call, "Sense" to MS product groups) was just featured in the Seattle Times.
Chris is definitely not your average user, but I have to hand it to him- he was extolling the virtues of RSS over two years ago and was toying with Podcasting long before others got it. Chris- congratulations and I'll see you at Gnomedex and I'm giving my mom your 1-888 line for support ;).  Anyone else want to do a meet-up, drop me a line.

RSS: Chris Pirillo's Blog
RSS: The Chris Pirillo Show
RSS: The Seattle Times

Major Nelson, the (un)official spokesblogger for Xbox Live is doing an Xbox 360 Faceplate Design Competition. Winner gets a special edition E3 faceplate. They already have over 350 entries in less than 2 days and are using Flickr to host em. Check it out, a lot of very cool designs up there. You can view a slide show of the entries here (hint: use your keyboard arrow keys to navigate) or subscribe to this RSS feed and get them in your feed reader.  Oh and if you have the chops, enter to win up to $125,000 designing a PC too.

RSS: Major Nelson.com
RSS: Xbox 360 Faceplate Entries on Flickr

Yesterday I had the opportunity to meet Furrygoat (a.k.a. Steve Makofsky) in person.  We've chatted over the years but never had an opportunity to meet. Steve points us to Lou Amadio's new blog, "Ooey GUI" which besides being a cool name for a blog, offers up some great GUI tips and tricks for developers.  From Furrygoat:

Do any Windows programming?

I'm happy to say that after several weeks of peer pressure between Shawn and I, Lou finally buckled and started a blog. Head on over to Ooey GUI, a new blog by Lou Amadio.

So far he's posted some great tips of Fast Solid Fills and DIB sections. Lou's the man when it comes to GDI, GDI+ and layered windows (yes! It's the Lou, who wrote the only MSDN article on Layered Windows).

Welcome Lou!

RSS: The Furrygoat Experience
RSS: OoeyGUI (technically RDF but who's counting) ;)

Our friends at Niveus dropped me a line yesterday to note that the Niveus Denali Media Center PCs are now available at Magnolia and Tweeter home AV stores. In my estimation, the Denali is the "Escalade of Media Center PCs," and was recently named by Computer Shopper as, "...the Ultimate Media Center PC". The Denali has the attributes of high-end A/V gear, including an A/V-style form-factor, silent operation enabled by the passive cooling technology, and a complete A/V rear panel of high-quality connections, including gold-plated RCA and BNC connectors for Component Video. Additionally, the “Denali Edition” is built with only the highest quality audio and video components, including television tuners, and video processing certified by the Image Science Foundation (ISF).

So if you want to see one in person, drop by a store.  If you live in the Seattle area, drop by Magnolia in Bellevue and ask for Dennis- a 10+ year veteran of the AV retail biz, he's helped me and a few friends out from time to time.  Perhaps we'll get a geek dinner together.

Also be sure to see their Terabyte server- a best of CES 2005 Innovations award winner. It stores days of photos, music, video and more,  this integrated solution requires only power and a wired ethernet connection. Somehow I think Thomas Hawk will end up getting one of these.  Now we just need an RSS feed for their latest and greatest announcements ;).

More from around the world of Media Center development:

- mceSAPI - add Speech and Voice Recognition to your MCE apps (HowTo)

- DirectX Shell for Media Center (under development) - Developers are looking for a way to develop rich, animated UI for applications in Media Center.

- MCE Controller (v1.1, source available on SourceForge) - control MCE via TCP/IP commands over home network (all-purpose, designed for home automation)

Know of any other projects- shared or otherwise?  Drop a comment here.

Looking for tabbed browsing in IE?  Faster desktop search?  Check out the new MSN Toolbar with Desktop Search and Tabbed browsing released this week.  I've been running it through its paces and have to say, after using Copernic Desktop Search for a while, I really like it.  It even has a feature to pause indexing if you're running on battery power- I've hated this on laptops and it shows they're thinking through the end to end scenarios.

S lightning fast and if you have Mac Spotlight envy, you'll be sated in the meantime until Longhorn arrives.  MSN Desktop search gets the job done. The implementation is sound and faster than other solutions I've seen.

My favorite feature thought is support for a broad range of add-ins for searching everything from .zipfiles to .chm (compressed HTML help files).  You can get more at http://addins.msn.com.

In other MSN news, they've announced plans for a subscription service. Gee, I don't know how anyone saw that coming... ;)  MSN Music also has a buy 1 get 5 free deal on right now- no subscription required (heh, sorry I couldn't help myself).

I'm not a huge fan of Player skins I have to admit, but I do appreciate a well-designed visualization. Visualizations for Windows Media Player and Windows Media Center move and pulse to your music and are a good diversion when you're throwing a party or cleaning the house. The quality has been getting better- more responsive and reacting more to the music. Psychedelic visualizations are fine- but I like others with purpose, a theme, and a/or a mood.

Warner Bros. recently partnered with Gordon Williams, creator of the R4 Viz used in many popular nightclubs to create the new, "Batman Begins" viz for Windows Media Player and Media Center. While I can't give you the viz yet, here's a small taste that just hints at the coolness. 

One of these days, the video card manufacturers are going to realize that visualizations are a good way to promote their products and demonstrate what their cards can do (I've tried to convince a few of this). Game demos are great, but visualizations are easier and free candy for all. :)

The viz will be available in the next day or so.  I'll post here as soon as it goes up on WMPlugins.com or keep your eye on the RSS feed.

RSS Feed: WMPlugins.com Latest Additions

Mark Cuban (yes, that Mark Cuban) offers up a good blog post/manifesto on the decline of movie theater ticket sales and how to address.
His short answer: Let everyone watch what they want, when and where they want- but at a premium.  I'm not sure this helps the movie theater owner but agree they need to step up the experience. 

Here are some additional ideas:

- SkyBox Seating - people will pay a premium, just like they do for business or first-class tickets. I can see this being used for kids parties and more- maybe even corporate entertaining if the event is right just like a stadium event. 

- Cry Rooms - We amped up our home theater to HD and an improved surround-sound system for one main reason: Baby.  We cannot get out to the theaters.  Who wants to spend a stress-laden night with their child jabbering the whole way through the movie?  One of our local theaters has outfitted a soundproof cry-room next to the projector room.  Unfortunately they only have one screen.

- Day Care - Let's face it- baby sitters are hard to find and matinees are rarely sold out. It works at the Gym, Ikea, and our local grocery store.  The lumbering Ferries in Greece even had a kid's play room.  Why not offer an accredited day-care service? 

- Schwag - People love free stuff.  A movie poster, t-shirt, book, bobble-head etc.- they'll clamor over stuff for their favorite movies. Some Sci-Fi franchises used to do this with local radio personalities. Teens in particular collect movie posters and marketing material like life-sized cutouts. Why not do a better job of recognizing your customers have a choice in whether they wait a few short months to watch at home, or come in to sit in your plushy seats. Work with the studios to offer up free cheap stuff to make them feel wanted.  Sorry, a mint and a thank you from some pimply-faced kid with an "iPod stare" on his/her face isn't going to do it. Sporting events figured this out a long time ago.

- Retail tie-ins - Someone will figure out a way to get customers an instant discount on DVD/HD-DVD movie purchases as they're coming out of a good movie for pre-orders.  Partner with Best Buy, Amazon or another retailer to offer a simple way to preorder the DVD movie for their collection.  Oh and get rid of your own membership programs- tie them into Best Buy or another retailer and a solid recommendation engine with value.

- Soundtrack downloads - Get a discount or digital download of the movie soundtrack through a music service tie-in.

I'm sure there are other ideas out there as well.

RSS Feed: Mark Cuban's BlogMaverick

Well, my site provider took my site offline again without notice and I sent a tersely worded email to them (tech support is outsourced).  They've moved my site onto another server and hopefully things will stabilize.  Just in case they don't... I'm investigating other providers.

Thanks for your patience :)

Not sure how I missed this one. David Berlind exclaims in "Between the Lines, The blog for discriminating IT buyers":

...Is there any doubt that  Microsoft is not only poised to repeat its successful Windows formula, but that that success will, over the long run, actually dwarf the company’s success with Windows?  ...OK, you’re a doubter. The Podderati will surely eviscerate me for being a Microsoft sycophant. If you want to go into denial,  that’s your business.  The facts speak for themselves.  No single company has circled its technology wagons around the digital media universe the way Microsoft has.

That's a pretty bold statement. As one who worked on the Digital Media Division product team (left 1.5 years ago) I'd prefer the term, "partnered with the digital media universe". I'd like to see the "Gilmoor Gang (Reloaded)" duke it out with some special guests on this topic - (Welcome back Steve & co) :).  Say what you will, the PlaysforSure program makes it a hell of a lot easier for me to tell family and friends what devices and services to consider when deciding whether to go the Pod route or another.  Oh, and for the new readers, I own a Creative Zen Touch Micro and an iPod and actually use both. 

RSS Feed: "Between the Lines, the Blog for discriminating IT Buyers."
RSS Feed: The Gilmoor Gang (Reloaded)