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,

Well I got all excited… I was poking around on the MSDN developer site and noticed they have this enticing link to become a member of the Windows Vista Beta program called the Windows Vista Beta Experience . The link takes you to a site where you can pick your country. Of course I looked for the country of Texas and to my horror it wasn’t listed. So I picked the United States and ended up at http://www.microsoft.com/betaexperience/enus/ . On that page they have a registration link that

Somebody has been doing some very nice work on microsoft.com. Take a close look at http://www.microsoft.com/rss/default.aspx . We’re starting to get our act togethor on the plethora of content you can suck into your machine via RSS. We have all kinds of nice little categories for developers, IT Pros ( the most stressful job in the world ), home users, etc. And of course, you’ll find this blog sprinkled across some of those categories. What I didn’t see was a category for podcasts

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

Most people are probably familiar with the military term, Blitzkrieg . According to Wikipedia, it means “lightning war”. Of course I’m not talking about previous military wars but instead I am referring to the war against viruses, worms and other malicious exploits in the various operating systems and web browsers on this planet. Well, let the Microsoft blitzkrieg begin. This week, Microsoft announced a number of changes to the product lines we have coming that will combat the bad