Usually we discuss hurricane or typhoon force winds in the warm tropical climates of the world. Well, unless you haven't been paying attention, Seattle and surrounding areas got hammered about 24 hours ago and a lot of essential services are still being affected. People got killed and the area will take days to recover. I am sad about that. From an IT perspective, it's been interesting to watch from 1600 miles away. It has effected some of our services. We canceled the webcasts on Friday. My blog

Get your frozen margarita, dual core laptop and favorite rubber ducky and head to the pool. Might as well since this year you’ll be able to watch and listen to the festivities on the http://VirtualTechEd.com website. It’ll be interesting to see how much of the show, seminars and “social” events are actually broadcast. I would recommend tuning into the opening keynote on 6/11 at 7pm EST. We’ll have Ray Ozzie, Bob Muglia and Chris Capossela showing off some kewl stuff.

So I missed the date by a few hours, but you can help us bring the internet to it’s knees by downloading Windows Vista Beta 2 today!!! Ok, depending on your connection, maybe not today but hopefully shortly there after. After the download is complete burn the .iso image to DVD and you’ll have a shiny new operating system to test. Go to http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/preview.mspx and decide if you want to order the DVD kit or download the bits right now. As you can see,