Sorry- this is geek humor.  Jeff has the details here.

Hot on the heels of their latest release, the MSN Video and the Soapbox teams recently announced their plans to move to Silverlight.  In their latest blog post:

What about the future?  One topic we’re talking a lot about is offering MSN Video and Soapbox with Microsoft Silverlight.  Silverlight just shipped a few weeks ago with a lot of benefits, such as offering - up to HD quality video on the Web for Mac and Windows today, and will support Linux later this year.  We’re excited to move to Silverlight in the future and are working closely with the Silverlight team, stay tuned for more details. ;) 

You may have also noticed that Microsoft's flagship homepage, www.microsoft.com has started delivering interactive content exclusively in Silverlight as well.  This is just the beginning.  Moving forward, interactive content across the site will be presented in Silverlight.  This has been a concerted effort by all teams, and our hats off to our creative agencies, McCann Worldwide, and Wunderman (among so many others) for helping to make this happen.

As promised, the little elves have have been busy working on new surprises. The official Halo 3 Game Guide is now live, powered by Silverlight.  Get a sneak peek inside the game, the characters, and the story so far is this first of sure to be many game guides for upcoming Xbox 360 and Games for Windows titles. 

In addition to the game guide, we've placed new videos including "Enemy Weapon", "Believe" in HD and standard def for Mac and Windows users to enjoy in the Halo 3 Silverlight Movie Gallery.

But we heard you couldn't get enough Halo 3.  So we also posted, "The Making of Diorama", a story of the enduring survival of our species as told over a 3D snapshot of the epic battle and "Museum".  These were only shot in SD but we think you'll enjoy the higher quality originals.

Watch them all here, powered by the same Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live network you can use for your own clips.  Get your 4GB of free video space here.

Roxio, the same brand that brings consumers DVD burning applications just announced the release of Roxio Buzz.  What is Buzz?  Roxio Buzz makes publishing video clips and photo-slideshows to the Web fun and easy, and now supports Silverlight Streaming.  So get your free 4GB of video hosting here, and go check out Roxio Buzz. (Note: I'm checking into a demo version of Buzz for you as well).

The Halo 3 freight train moves on.  This time, it's the Tafiti experimental search engine that's been reskinned for the Halo 3 launch and is powered by Silverlight.  You might even see some new videos start to show up in the MSN and Windows Live-powered Halo 3 HD video gallery as well as some other nice touches shortly.

Oh and in case you're wondering who is serving all that bandwidth?  We're using the Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live service you can also use for free.

Check out the new World Series of Poker site powered by Silverlight and iStreamPlayer. 

Intel just announced the USB 3.0 specification a.k.a. "SuperSpeed USB" aiming to deliver 300Mbytes/sec in real throughput (that's 2.4 Gbit/sec) though in simulations has gone as high as 25Mbit/sec.  In comparison, USB 2.0 today runs about 480Mbit/sec.  Reports by  EETimes state that the new solution coming from Intel, HP, Microsoft, NEC, NXP, and TI will be available starting in  early 2009 and offer quality of service (QoS) features for applicatons such as HD video streams.  New cables will be backwards compatible and include an optical link.  This is great news for boosting throughput on HD camcorders, HD tuners and of course, Hard Drives. Engadget is noting  this could be the end of Firewire (1394) as Sony puts USB on their camcorders and Apple and Intel are working closely together.

On Friday, I had an opportunity to attend the Halo 3 Launch Appreciation Team party at an undisclosed location in the Redmond area.  This was the core marketing and  product management team responsible for releasing the product and it was a fun time.  Jerett, the Group manager for H3 had managed to secure eight final copies of the game for us to play and I took third in one of the rounds as a veritable noob on the final product.  All I can say is that the game still has surprises in it and the feel is so refined, so much more authentic when compared to Halo 2.  This was a good reminder that sometimes the most important meetings you have are outside the office.

By now a whole lot of you have seen the Halo 3 HD videos via Silverlight.  A question I sometimes get is why all the properties aren't done in Silverlight?  Answer is simple: we just shipped and a veritable army of vendors, creative agencies, and content providers A) are responsible for efforts such as the Halo launch and B) are being trained up on Silverlight as we speak, starting with top agencies of record.  Most of these campaigns were underway long before Silverlight was ready to ship.  Rest assured though, we'll have some more Silverlight goodies for fellow Halo 3 fans shortly. ;)

Speaking of goodies, one of my favorites is the new Halo 3 "Believe" experience.  This interactive diorama museum from the future was moving and has led to some very well produced fan commercials.  I'm pretty sure one of the prizes given away at the party was a soldier from the diorama (with a broken thumb) but it's significance was lost on me until I saw the site.

I've now had the pleasure to be involved in all three Halo launches - helping to produce the WMP skin and promotional DVD's for H1, the unveil of the H2 video in HD and 5.1 audio for the WM 9 Series Launch, and now HD and interactive efforts around Silverlight.  In my estimation, the journey has been the biggest reward.  I'm looking forward to launch day - Sept 25th.

(These thoughts are my own and don't reflect my employer)

There are certain things that are hard to watch being built - meat products and software come to mind.  In the software realm, the ante goes up when you're talking about consumer software that is critical to peace and harmony in the household.  Of course I'm talking about the DVR.

As the Group Product Manager for Windows Media Center 2004-2005, I had an enlightening opportunity to see the sheer volume of work required to create a stable DVR application that runs on a multitude of OEM PC configurations.  At the time, I really loved the product and technology. Then a few things happened.

First, I was given an opportunity/challenge to join the Vista team and had to leave my beloved MCE team behind.  I became a consumer again. Then, we moved to an area where I could no longer get an over-the-air HD signal and Media Center had to take a back seat as our HD DVR.

The Comcast Cable Box Nightmare
The Motorola box from Comcast was our only option at the time for watching HD, something that my wife and I both really enjoy.  But the Comcast box was (and continues to be) infuriatingly slow.  My wife regularly complained, rather her head spun like a merry-go-round whilst flames spew out of her mouth at the lack of performance.  The upholstery was starting to get charred from this weekly occurrence.

Switching to TiVo Series3
Finally, a solution that delivered adequate performance and HD DVR plus a few other features I loved.  After a year of my wife ranting about the Moto cable box, and realizing  it was going to be a while before Cablecard was ready for Media Center (and vice versa) I switched to the TiVo Series3.  It was a hard move, like the breakup of a long relationship. The extenders were put away, the Media Center removed from the living room.  I have raved here about my Series3 but recently have found myself disappointed in a few key areas:

• Database performance. Dare I say the TiVo seems slower than the Comcast box when adding new recordings or pulling up guide data
• UI sluggishness.  The TiVo engine seems like it hasn't changed much in5 years and neither has the performance save for a modest increase in speed
• UX Idiosyncracies.  Since adding new features such as Swivel Search and Amazon Unbox (both of which are welcome additions) the UI doesn't appear to be able to handle these additions elegantly.  Add to this the fact that the guide displays in 4:3 instead of 16:9 when tuned to an SD channel, and I get strange flickering as the device switches formats between channels and guides and it still has some rough edges (not to mention the rough edges on the graphics- this is HD!)
• A year later, still no ability to stream video from one TiVo to another room, only vague statements of future support. I understand these are issues related to CableCard's requirements and the long times to get certification on any solution, but this was a reason I wanted to go to TiVo! 

So, a few weeks ago I was invited to try a new Vista Media Center w/ CableCard support.  I held my breath and dove back in. 

Vista Media Center, Cable Cards Grow Up
At first I was apprehensive. I knew how complicated Cablecard setup could be and didn't look forward to training Comcast's CSRs as I had to with TiVo.  I installed the new PC, plugged in the Drobo, the ATI HD Cablecard tuners and set up the cablecards.  I had one defective card which I returned and after a quick call to Comcast, both were up and running.  Next I paired my two Xbox 360's and curiously, everything worked. I was tuning channels, recording two stations without issue.  Now keep in mind I have a wired ethernet network in my house, which certainly helps things.  I had forgotten just how polished the experience is on the Media Center.  Setup is still not as easy as it could be (this is symptomatic of the entire cable industry who was forced by the FCC to add support for 3rd party cable boxes on their networks so the clunky CableCard was born.  At least Comcast's CSR's were knowledgeable when I called to set it up. What a difference a year makes.

I'm now entering the two-week period with my Media Center working as an HD DVR. With a little reprogramming of my remote, my wife is actually happy. Every program we've scheduled has recorded.  Amazon Unbox works with Media Center as well and the promise of new Vista Media Center extenders with multiple format support (thank you Dave Alles!) and free Internet TV programming mean I can enjoy around the house.  I've been testing the new Internet TV features and think users will be pleased.

In an upcoming post, I'll compare and contrast my experiences.

The folks over on HowardForums are reporting that AT&T will finally release the Windows Mobile 6 update for Samsung Blackjack users on September 17th.  I hope this is true...  While a beta was unofficially released on the web a few months ago, the lack of any Internet Connection Sharing was a big issue for me.