I really don't know how people have lived here and remained sane.  Maybe they haven't, which is why this area produces more serial killers than anywhere else.  Here is what I do know: the weather people in the Puget Sound area should just go do other stuff and they shouldn't bother trying.

A mere five hours ago, we were due 4" of snow with the possibility of rain by morning.  So the kids stayed up a little longer, we felt pretty confident of a late start in the morning, we watched a movie with them, etc. 

Insert now: whoops, boy were we wrong folks, no snow at all. In fact, it's going to rain and by morning everything will be gone.  We're sorry.  Our bad.  "But it's really hard to tell the weather here, folks."  Then don't bother.

I'm used to living in two different regions of the country.  The Bay Area, where I grew up, was pretty steady.  It was either going to be sunny, or it was going to rain.  And they were hardly ever wrong.  You got rain if they said it, and you got the sun if they said it.

Then in Boston or upstate NY, you may not get all the snow they said you were going to, but you got it.  And you could tell when thunderstorms were coming, and you knew when it was going to be sunny.

This area?  No.  We had a summer that wasn't a summer at all.  We are now having yet another maddening winter of "nobody can tell you what is going to happen."  It's the weather lottery, and you just have to be used to not knowing ever what is going on.

Insane.  I've lived here six years now and I can't wait to leave.

I just recently discovered a show that I found fantastic.  The show just finished it's second season, but you can get them on DVD and/or iTunes, etc.

The premise of the show is that Dexter is a serial killer who's cop father raised to only take out bad guys.  He works for the police as a forensics expert.

Michael Hall, who was awesome on Six Feet Under, is the main character and he should get an Emmy for this show.

Check it out, see how you like it.  Warning: based on the subject matter, there are some "disturbing" scenes, so if you are squeamish, find another show.

Okay, so after a lot of dinking around, I got the Blackjack II working better.  It seems to have needed to completely drain, then charge back up and suddenly I was getting massive battery life.  I thought we were past those days, but apparently we are not.  So goodness on the Blackjack front.

I have my second Xbox 360 dying on me.  Of course this comes on the heels of making the switch from Tivo to MCE, so it's more painful as it's the only way to watch recorded shows in the family room.  *sigh*  We turned it on this weekend and got 3 rings of red.  I reset the box, but now it's randomly freezing.  *sigh*  Can't win for losing.  I won't buy another XBOX 360 (two failed units is enough for me), so now I have to wait for extenders to come out.  They are late.

Growing up as a young boy, who could have known that one TV show could impact not only my love of comics (I am a Batman fan, after all), but my taste in women? 

Julie, meow back at you.

Remember though, she wasn't the only woman to have played Catwoman.  Do you know the rest?

It is no secret that I really detest DRM and find it reprehensible.  I don't like it in our products that require PIDS to install them, and I don't like DRM when it stops me from doing a perfectly reasonable thing.

It makes makes no sense that the music I buy from iTunes is DRM'd, but a higher quality file I get off of the CD I have isn't. 

My latest venture into this was deciding to try to take my house "All Microsoft" and give up my Tivo Series 3 for a Windows Vista Media Center PC that costs 4 times as much.  Yeah, I know, but I'm trying to be a good guy and I felt I could have one system where all of my content comes in and I could then get to it from every tv in the house as well as dump shows to my iPod (nee, Zune) and such.  So after a week of fighting with comcast and getting some great help from the MCE team, I got my nice system with cable card readers all working.

So pretty cool, right?  Well, not exactly.  I then went this morning to dump a few shows to my iPod.  Hmmm, the video convert isn't working.

Want to know why?

DRM.  Turns out that Microsoft bent over for the cablecard people and wrapped every file in DRM even if the show itself isn't DRM'd.  So as an example, if I record something off of KCTS, a PUBLIC station over clear QAM in beautiful HD -- that is fine.  No problem. But if I record the exact same show over the cablecard reader, no dice. We encrypt it and you can't touch it. 

Note that Tivo Series 3, which also uses cablecards, does not have this limitation.  So, once again, my attempt to embrace the Microsoft ecosystem bites me in the butt.  Now I have to implement some other tuner hack to just get unencrypted recordings so that I can put them on a device for the kids to watch on long trips.

Really, I don't understand why we embrace Hollywood's deep desires around DRM more than any other company on the planet.  If Tivo was able to ship with the ability to download and share unprotected content, why wasn't Microsoft allowed the same thing?

I hope the MCE thing works out long term. Otherwise, it was an interesting experiment. 

Note to the Tivo lovers: if Tivo had been smart and implemented multiroom viewing via streaming, I would have just bought a second TivoHD and called it a day.  It would have cost me $300 (a lot cheaper than an MCE pc) and I could still download content to my computer and save to my devices.  But they don't do the smart thing here either.

*sigh*

So today, a milestone.  I have left my 30's and begin a new decade.  I have a lot to look forward to. 

I have spent my entire 30's working for Microsoft.  I remember the night I turned 30.  We were working at WWDC (I was in the MSBay group at that time), and after a long day we all headed to some Irish pub across from the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose.  It was May 15th and as the clock struck midnight, we all toasted with a Jameson and welcomed in my 30's.  My Wife was 29, my daughter was 3, and we were living in San Ramon in an apartment, if my memory serves.

So I thought I would recount the highlights of my 30's -- the things I remember.

• Saw the birth of my two boys, Will and Galen.
• Met some new friends, lost touch with some old ones.
• Moved to Redmond, Washington.
• Moved back to California.
• Moved back to Sammamish, Washington.
• Shaved my head.
• Went from a dev manager, to a group manager, to a group dev manager, to a pum, to a general manager, to a group program manager.
• Started playing golf.
• Had 3 holes in one, in successive years, in the same month.
• Lived in 4 different houses.
• Set the record for the longest time ever living in one place in my entire life (Sammamish)
• Lead a design team.  Twice.
• Started drinking my coffee black.
• Saw Loreena McKennitt twice.
• Attended a bunch of weddings.  Saw a bunch of divorces.
• Left the country for the first time and went to London and Dublin with Rick.
• Went to Korea, Japan and China.
• Lost 30 pounds -- yes, I used to be even fatter than I am now.
• Became an uncle three times.
• Went to NYC with Rick and Thomas Reardon and sat in the shadow of the WTC.
• Watched in horror on TV as the WTC came crashing down a few years later.
• Lost my passport.
• Got the norovirus.
• Bought a company.
• Saw my father twice.
• Consumed a great number of gallons of beer and other adult beverages.
• Went on a Disney Cruise that was delayed because of 9/11.
• Scheduled another Disney Cruise that was canceled because of Frances.
• Had 3 bosses.
• Went through about 40,000 VP's

I will continue to add to the list as I think of things.  It's a good start though.

Oh, the frustrations.  Here is what I want:

A DVR with dual tuners that records HD, has a 500GB drive in it (60 hours of HD content), and doesn't crash every day.  Let's look at the units in the running:

MCE.  Nope.  No cable card support, thus no real support for HD unless it's over the air.  Maybe the vista version, but then I can start complaining about form factor, blah blah blah.  Scratch MCE.

Tivo.  Nope, HD Tivo not out yet.

DirecTV's DVR.  While it has what I ask for, it doesn't have locals for Seattle yet except for 2.  Not going to work.

Comcast DVR.  Don't even get me started on this.  That my own company put their name on this is embarassing enough.  Small storage, crashes all the time, and tonight, it lost all of my shows.  All the data is gone.  So now I hate the Comcast DVR with my soul. 

Maybe Apple will create a DVR that meets my expectations.  Who knows.   Right now, I just know I can't have what I want and I just have to suck it up.

• Must have central DVD storage accessible to ALL TELEVISIONS.
• Must have central TV recording (HD) accessible to ALL TELEVISIONS.
• Must have small boxes at each TV that connects to the central hub to get the job done.
• All my music, photos, etc must be grabable from each place as well.