It's Saturday, so there were the usual kids' sports events and whatnot. But there's no rest for the wicked.
I discovered a Marketplace notification on my Windows Phone this morning, so I'll need to write up my first errata/addition (this falls into the addition category) for the book. I'll do so on the Windows Phone Secrets blog later today.
New gear alert: Our Dell laser printer has been jamming a lot lately, and using better paper and cleaning it out didn't help. So we bought a new one. I'll add this to the next edition of What I Use, but for now, it's a Dell Color Laser Printer 3130cn. It's humongous--easily two and a half times the size of the previous printer--and equally heavy. But it seems to work well so far. They're $220 off right now, by the way.
New gear alert #2: When I heard Roku had completely revamped its line of excellent (and very cheap) set top boxes, I decided to grab one as a comparison for the Xbox 360 S, Google TV, and new Apple TV. I ended up getting the Roku XD|S, which has 1080p output, dual-band Wireless-N, and a USB port for (eventually) playing back local videos (that functionality won't ship until November, Roku says). My quickie initial reaction is simple: The quest for the perfect set-top box continues. This Roku is decent, but it's slow to boot up, slow to function, and lacks some basic features that other players have. For example, you can access your Netflix Instant Queue, but no other Netflix content, a far cry from what's available on the Xbox 360. Ah well, it is only $99.
I blew away my Aurora server today and will (re)install normal Windows Server 2008 R2 so I can get Hyper-V. I'll install Aurora (and SBS 7) in a VM today. Ultimately, I decided that what's more important at home is the media sharing stuff, so the Vail server will stay up and running as-is. It's working great.
And I've reverted to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 after a few weeks on Halo: Reach. What can I say? MW2 multiplayer is like crack. My gamertag is Paul Thurrott, I'm going through the sniper rifles right now, and I am no fan of campers. :)