Today is the MIX07 keynote (watch it live right now).  Scott Guthrie is currently on-stage spilling the beans about what's been going on here.  He just announced that Silverlight (v1.1) includes a cross-platform (Mac/PC at the moment) version of the CLR and the .net framework. I'll be talking about this alot in the coming months.  It's incredibly exciting stuff.

The NetFlix guys are on-stage showing off a demo of their new over-the-web movie viewing experience.  I hadn't seen this demo before. Very cool.

Scott just did his chess demo where the CLR engine plays chess against the IE javascript engine.  Very funny.

Scott just demoed cross-platform debugging (Running a Silverlight program on the Mac and hitting a breakpoint inside VS running on a PC).  Fantastic.

Scott's doing his airline demo.  I love this one because he starts with a cheesy "Hello World" app, and ends up with a fully-functional airline flight schedule viewer with crazy animations of planes flying around.

Scott just announced open source Ruby for .NET (IronRuby).  He's developing a Silverlight app with Ruby on the Mac with standard Mac tools.  Good job, John.  Now he's showing the dynamic language console, that gives you an interactive REPL console with Intellisense that can use any of the dynamic languages, or even mix the languages together on the fly.  All in the browser.  Freaking awesome.  I think alot of people missed the announcement about the DLR (dynamic language runtime) that anyone can use to build a dynamic language on top of .Net.

Wow, I've seen the MLB demo, but I hadn't seen the version running on the mobile phone!

In all the busy-ness of the last week or so, I neglected to announce that my brother-in-law Ben and his wife Nicole had their baby.  Congratulations to them.  We're looking forward to meeting Cormac Anthony Patterson in person this summer.

Today is my friend Peter's birthday.  He and Jamie were up here last weekend, and we did a bunch of touristy things like go to the Space Needle.

As a result of them being here so recently, I have the most relevant birthday picture of him ever!

Anyway, I was so glad they could come out and hang with us.  If we're lucky, he'll get off his butt and update his blog with more than, "I made some food and it tasted good."

This weekend, I mowed my lawn for the first time since we moved here.  It needed it pretty bad, but I have been putting it off.  I just need to get used to cutting the grass when it's wet.  Mowing in the northwest is quite a bit different than mowing in central Texas. You can boil the differences down into the following:

• Temperature
• Central Texas - Pretty much sweltering at any time you need to mow.
• Seattle - I had a light jacket on.  I've never mowed when it was so cool out.
• Moisture
• Central Texas - You can usually wait until the lawn is dry to mow
• Seattle - No such guarantee that your free time will line up with a time where the grass is dry
• Grass Type
• Central Texas - All the lawn I've ever mowed have had st. augustine grass.  Wide, stiff blades.
• Seattle - Most grass around here is very fine, soft blades. (which makes for quite a mess when it's wet)  In addition, there is alot of moss in the grass, especially after the rainy season.
• Natural Variable Obstacles - Things that can move that you have to worry about running over.
• Central Texas - Fire ant mounds could get big enough to cause issues, as well as some pain if you weren't careful.
• Seattle - Pinecones can be big enough to cause problems.  Mole hills are also a new threat, especially since they often contain rocks large enough to be problematic.
• Cutting height
• Central Texas - You pretty much want to keep the grass as tall as possible so that it can retain moisture and keep from dying in the sun.  I usually cut on the highest setting
• Seattle - Most people I have observed cut it very low.  I started pretty low, and then raised it so I could get it through the tall spots without stalling the mower due to wet clumps of clippings bogging down the blade.  I think I need a sharpening, or a more powerful mower.

Right now, it kind of looks like a bad haircut. We'll see how it looks after the blades stand up again, and all the clippings die and turn brown.  It'll probably need another once-over soon to even things out. I was just happy that the mower fired up without difficulty after having been drained of it's vital fluids for the move.