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.

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,

There has been a raging debate inside and outside of Microsoft about the new security feature in Windows Vista called UAC. UAC stands for User Account Control. The debate has raged mostly about the effectiveness of the feature. Do a search on www.live.com for vista uac and you’ll see what I mean. The mainstream press has even decided this topic is worthy of “debate”. By effectiveness, I mean that most of the negative articles mention that your are prompted so often for elevation

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

Today was a blast!!! Webcasts are fun, nerve racking, exciting, tense, glorious, chilling… notice the see saw? My job is to make sure the webcast is smooth as Aero Glass so that any issues don’t distract you from the information I’m discussing. This webcast could have easily been four hours. There is soo much information related to Windows Vista Security, there’s no way to get much coverage in 60 minutes. So thanks for your time today and I promise some killer screencasts