Amazing video of a band called Corporeal doing a live rendition of the Halo theme song.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLt5_ME_2_M

I really like my Zune, except for one thing- I'm obsessed with battery life so I tend to keep the wireless radio off except when I want to actively look for others.  The likelihood of users to do this could severely diminish the "social" aspects of the device.  I want to be social, but I don't want to run two WiFi radios between my laptop and my Zune, unnecessarily using up battery power.

What I really want is a small utility that runs on my laptop and notifies me when a Zune comes into the area.  It's running WiFi so it must have some sort of broadcast/ID mechanism no?  I can see all sorts of interesting applications of this- mashups that show how many Zunes are available in a given area for one.  It would be interesting to see if I could use my laptop to broadcast the fact that I have a Zune, and take requests.  Then I'll turn on the radio and away I go. And with Vista support now out for Zune, I'm hoping someone will write the ZuneFinder gadget.   Anyone working on this (psst. Phil Torrone, psst) :)

Zune update 1.2 with support for Windows Vista is out.  More details at www.zuneinsider.com

Thanks to the intrepid work of my wife, we're back! She found a generator at 6am yesterday and we had it in-hand at 6:45am (tip: Home Depot expects to receive more Tuesday if you're looking). Like the famed Cabbage Patch craze, my wife called down lists of Lowes and HD stores (among others) from the hotel last night.  CraigsList failed us as we looked.  Thanks to everyone for their well wishes.

Our area was among the hardest hit in the storms.  Not directly thankfully (though I did awaken at midnight with other neighbors to help secure the home of a friend who had a maple tree hit their house and blow out all the windows on the backside.

It's amazing how scary and liberating it can be when you are forced to unplug from the grid. No net access, no power, no phone communication, only AM talk radio for 60 hours can get to you.  The lines at the gas station (and the civil yet

I'm on Cingular's EDGE network right now on my Sony VAIO laptop.  It has built-in EDGE so I just popped the SIM card in and away you go. 

This entire experience though minor in comparison has made me think about the plight in Darfur and others war, famine, and poverty stricken areas.  This holiday season, it's reminded me to do what I can to reach out to others and help in their time of need.

Update: We got power this afternoon. Thanks again to everyone for their help and research- it means a lot!

Cutting to the chase:  If you have a credible source for generators in the 5000 watt range without price gouging in the Seattle area, please let us know here. Our area was among the hardest hit and we're still without power in sub-25deg weather at night.  We were VERY lucky (our neighbors had a 30ft maple tree come down on their house, we were boarding it up at 1am on Friday).  I don't trust PSE's estimates - website says updated every few hours, they updated at 6am and 5pm tonight with limited information, KIRO 770AM has conflicting info. 

A number of us are looking for generators in earnest. If you have a legitimate offer or contact, please let us know here.  Thanks and god bless to others in similar situations.

A small gift for those of us who want to watch Knight Rider and Firefly reruns in HD as well as the occasional music video or Unplugged session.

Mike Taulty has posted an interesting sample showing 12 WMV media elements  all running in the same "WPF/E"-based web page.  Imagine being able to watch sporting events streamed in multiple video windows, mouse over a window and get the main screen view.

The uses for this technology are endless.  Imagine a device such as a Crestron-like touch screen control that has live previews of video across multiple channels.  Press the video feed you want and your TV switches.  It might be time to start playing with "WPF/E" inside Media Center's SDK too... ;)

One of the many reasons I like Flickr. 

Check out this game designed by DanC that has my wife salivating.  Remember, my wife loves puzzle games and thanks to her, my gamerscore on Xbox Live keeps going up (thanks hon).

From Danc's:

Pete, my old compatriot from Anark, was looking for a game design concept to turn into sample game for the Microsoft WPF/E samples they launched this Monday. He actually made it work with AI and everything. WPF/E is a lovely little web platform that Microsoft announced last year. It is in the early stages, but I have high hopes.

The game is a simple turn-based strategy game involving the capture of resources and the containment of enemies. If the response is good enough (and the programmer willing), there are quite a few more features I'd like to add.

• You can play the game here:
  http://channel9.msdn.com/playground/wpfe/Sprawl/default.html

• You'll need to install the latest WPF/E player. Yes, this runs in Firefox. Yes, it runs on Mac. Once you install the player, you can then play the game. You can find that here:
  http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/asp.net/bb187452.aspx

Internally a few of us call this the, "Al Gore Game"  (with respect of course).  Planting greenfields is a good thing.  The code to the game is available so feel free to create your own variant - theme it for whatever you want.

If you're thinking about Blu-Ray (BD) vs. HD-DVD this holiday season, something to consider- Blu-Ray isn't just suffering from PS3 backlash, the average BD player on Amazon.com is 41% more expensive than HD DVD. This weekend, I took a look at baseline costs on Amazon and determined you can buy the average BD player and zero movies, or get an HD DVD player and over four and a half years of NetFlix HD rentals at the same price. Even comparing cheapest models, you can rent nearly two years of HD DVD movie rentals from NetFlix before reaching the purchase price of the cheapest Blu-Ray player. 

Note this is at the lowest tier of NetFlix so there's an assumption you're only renting about 2 movies per month, but still, NetFlix is a great way to sidestep the whole HD format lock-in issue- I never buy an HD disc unless I expect to watch it semi-monthly for the next five years.  With NetFlix even at its lowest tier, you get the flexibility of watching movies in BD or HD DVD formats, effectively dropping the price of adoption to the cost of the player (because you're going to rent movies, aren't you?) <g>. 

Update: Note I've intentionally left out the PS3 and Xbox 360 from this list.  There's an impedance mis-match in terms of adoption and cost associated with the two- do you count the overall price, or just the price of the drive (in which Xbox 360 would win hands-down at under $300).

The last point to make is about availability of content and there, your mileage may vary, though studios are doing more dual-releases now. 

• Blu-Ray Historical List of Movies released: http://bluray.highdefdigest.com/releasedates_historical.html
• HD-DVD Historical List of Movies released: http://hddvd.highdefdigest.com/releasedates_historical.html

We're finalizing plans for sessions on "WPF/E" and rich media streaming for MIX07.  Do you want sessions on authoring, encoding, business value etc?  I'm curious what sessions you'd like to see at the event?  Drop me a comment here.

With Vista Media Center, you can do some pretty nifty 3D effects for applications built with the new Media Center Markup Language (MCML) and .Net 3.0's WPF (which "WPF/E" is also based on.

Mobilewares in Melbourne, Australia has released a series of five add-ins for Vista Media Center including a Flickr plug-in and Stock Ticker (seen above).  I'm expecting we'll see some pretty jaw-dropping applications for the technology shortly.  The Flickr add-in has a few bugs (it's beta) but you can easily see the value.

Don't have Vista Media Center yet?  Download stand-alone samples of most of the apps at the site above as well.

Note: Looks like the stock app beta has expired :(

Our thoughts and prayers go out to James Kim's family and friends. I just went numb when I saw the news.

Chandu wrote a cool utility to embed an arbitrary video into your Web blog with "WPF/E".  Yes, it's been done before, but here he has an interesting twist. ;).  We're just getting warmed up - more samples soon.

Cutting to the chase - the signup is here: http://www.halo3.com/.  And the Monday Night Football commercial was stunning - animated but captured with live actors and done by famed FX house Digital Domain.  It made for a nice treat after launching our CTP. You can download it in HD on Xbox Live now.  It's a teaser but here's what I think I know (spoiler alert):

• I'm convinced the two  kids at the beginning are Master Chief and one of the other Spartans.  The Spartans have been trained from a very young (pre-adolescent) age per the Halo books.
• We learn that first contact with the alien races had not been made when the Spartans were children, which means they exist for more worldly battles.
• The spot he's in is the same as the kids, but gone is the lush fields, replaced with sand and tufts of dead grass.
• We see a more  "human" Master Chief. His helmet was blown off by a grenade, the Warthog behind him thoroughly trashed and he's shell shocked.
• Cortana (Chief's AI) can be briefly heard whispering, "Chief" before the radio crackles with other groundchatter saying they've lost the chief.  He's still there.
• A little girl says, "Time to go".  It sounds like the little girl from earlier in the spot.
• New toys.  Incoming Plasma, some sort of geodesic super-shield.
• Once more into the fray.

Here's what we do know:

• Every object in the ad was taken from Bungie or approved by Bungie (creators of the game and owner of  the license)
• It takes place near the end of the E3 trailer
• The action takes place on Earth
• More details here on Bungie's site. http://www.bungie.net/News/TopStory.aspx?cid=9255

My love of Halo has waned (waiting for a new chapter) but with this ad, I had shivers like a kid again.  It got me to thinking - will the Halo movie be animated like this (using live action)?  The lines are blurring.

You can get a cool still frame from the movie in HD here: http://www.firingsquad.com/media/gallery_image.asp/1249/1