Since You've Been Gone...

Well, I'm back from a month of changing diapers and spending some quality time with my two little ones.  One month...  it goes by so fast, seems like it was so quick that nothing significant could have happened. But, my oh my...  what a month!

Let's see, since my last post, what's happened?

• There's a war going on in the middle-east
• A new drop of the .NET 3.0 framework came out
• My home state of New Jersey closed down for a week, leaving millions without access to bare essentials: Lottery tickets or the Atlantic City casinos. (Don't worry, they’re open now! But we're still paying these ludicrously high taxes!)
• The patterns & practices team released a bunch of cool new things.
• Stephen Forte & Andrew Brust finally finished their multi-year long opus: A SQL Server 2005 book.
• The Jersey Shore (along with most of the US and Europe) has been baking in record heat waves the past month.
• Yahoo & Windows Live messengers tied the knot.
• Kevin Smith released Clerks II, which starts off with a drive down the main highway near my house and finishes up with something, uh-- something probably not appropriate for this blog. J
• The cat came out of the bag and Microsoft announced it is building a music player called Zune. (Sorry, I don't know anymore than you do right now.  Honest, I don’t!  I wish I did!  But this guy does.).
• MSDN Library is now free to download.
• The first pictures of the long-awaited baby "Brangelina" were sold for $10 million, giving the people of the world their first view of the new savior.  Blasphemy, you say?  As if that were not enough, the most anticipated child in the world was immortalized forever in a statue at Madame Tassaud's in NYC!
• Microsoft acquired WinInternals, the folks who make all the SysInternals tools.
• No public sightings yet of that other famous baby, Suri Cruise. Although various "sources" claim they have seen the child and it is fine.
• A new drop of the Atlas framework came out.

Well, that's just a short list of the things I could actually remember.  I know there were a lot more. Now that I'm back, I should be posting more frequently again.  I've got a bunch of things lined up.  In the mean time… it’s back to the grind!