Do you ever look to the past to see what the future holds? You should. I cut my computer teeth long before most people. My computer heritage goes back to my diapers. Dear Dad was a career IBMer and I was playing with IBM Selectric typewriters and dictaphones long before most people had ever seen Lotus 1-2-3 . During a recent discussion with Rodney Clark, a rising Microsoft executive and the leader of my org, I found out he and I have very similar roots in that regard. His Dad was also a career IBMer.

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,

An unique opportunity to get one-on-one time with our Windows Vista application compatibility experts during the Windows Vista Readiness Applications Compatibility Labs at TechEd 2006. Bring your own Applications to test and troubleshoot and/or try out our self paced labs to test and catch up on the exciting new enhancements and opportunities Windows Vista has to offer – all in a single room. Windows Vista Readiness Labs TechEd06 June 12th – 16th, 2006 Room 108, First Floor Boston Convention

Steve Riley sent me an email message about a post on his blog. He needs feedback from all of you on how to solve a challenging problem. The challenge revolves around using public computers or kiosks to access your corporate data. If we all used smartcards, and all machines had smartcard readers, then we’d have a nice multi factor auth system. However, smartcard utopia doesn’t exist. You can read a nice description of the problem at http://blogs.technet.com/steriley/archive/2006/04/20/425824.aspx