Yes after years of speculation Apple announced the iPod Phone and I got to say that it looks pretty sweet. I may have to revisit my stance on the Samsung SGH-i600 :) Unfortunately it won't be available in Europe until Q4.

Also the iTV was announced now called Apple TV. Basically a streaming box. Not all that exciting in my mind. They snuck out an update to the AirPort Extreme as well which enables 802.11n.

Do you wonder how the ADO.NET Entity Framework fits into the whole LINQ story? I did too. I actually didn't see the point in this framework with LINQ doing almost the same thing. Channel9 has a video which cleared the whole thing up for me and man am I excited about it. LINQ/ADO.NET Entities could prove to be the most significant feature of the Orcas release. I know it is for me. There are probably a couple of ORM vendors out there feeling the same way :)

ADO.NET Entity Framework: What. How. Why.

It took a while but I've finally gotten around to uploading the photos I took at TechEd 2006. Check them out at Flickr.

Here's something interesting to hosters and developers out there.

This document describes a series of performance tests conducted for Commerce Server 2007 using the Commerce Server 2007 Starter Site. The hardware and software configurations used in the testing are described and the results are summarized. Some recommendations for improving performance are also provided.

Commerce Server 2007 Performance Guide

I've been on the lookout for a new phone but I didn't really know what I was looking for. I'm pretty happy with my non-smartphone but it dawned on me that what I'm really missing is e-mail and Messenger support with which I could ditch the laptop in many situations.

Drool.

I'm surprised to find that Adobe has actually created a version of Acrobat Reader that doesn't suck. Yes you read that right: It doesn't suck. It's speedy loading up documents as quickly as FoxItReader. Another new feature is that you can select text in a PDF without clicking a button to do so first. Welcome to 2007 Adobe glad you could join the rest of us :) Also the UI has been revamped removing the ridiculous Yahoo toolbar and generally making for a much nicer and clean experience.

They're still trying to bundle all sorts of crap with the product when you download it but I'd still give it a whirl now that they're to par with third party products.

Once in a while I come across blogs which are truly different and inspiring. One such example is the Chief Happiness Officer blog by Alexander Kjeruff. It's very different from what I usually read and that makes it even better in that it gives me a different perspective that I wouldn't usually get.

Check out his latest post which highlights some of the best posts from 2006. I only recently started reading the blog but if the list is representative of overall content I think it's safe to say that I'm hooked. I thoroughly enjoyed each and every post on that list. I think you will too :) This post stood out to me the most How Not to Lead Geeks.

What better way to spend new year day than to create a logo for the blog? I've noticed that logos are popping up on more and more sites but I've never found them particularly useful. That is until I started reading feeds in FeedDemon. FeedDemon supports favorite icons and will display them next to the feed name. This makes navigating my subscriptions much easier as the feed itself now provides me with a visual cue by which I can remember particular blogs. Naturally I wanted one for myself :)

I like the Technorati logo very much so I took cue from that in creating my own logo. The simplicity appeals to me a great deal. Usually I try to stay away as much as possible from PhotoShop, for my own sake as much as others: Pushing pixels just isn't my thing. Give me some angel brackets and semi colons any day of the week instead :) In spite of my limited pixel skills I'm pretty happy with how the thing turned out. I wanted to create a fav icon only but when I first got going I figured I might as well do a larger version for an actual site logo.

In case you were wondering I created the logo using PhotoShop and used a service from Chami.com to generate the favicon.ico file. You need to clear caches in Firefox and Internet Explorer in order to get the file to display. IE had me do this in spite of the fact that no icon was actually showing.

"She turned me into a newt... I got better", John Cleese

Somewhere must have gotten pretty cold when a Mac user actually proclaims,

"It doesn’t suck."

And goes on to say,

"Vista has a few features that I wish I could use on my Macs."

Yes people hell may not be the warm place to go to this summer with statements like these flying about :) Head on over to MacUser and read the entire thing. He has some nice things to say about Vista.

Ihnatko: Windows Vista... doesn't suck