Microsoft Empower for ISVs and Silverlight. I'm into my second year as a member of Microsoft's Empower for ISVs program. There are a few requirements, but it is really an excellent service, essentially providing your home-based developer business with an MSDN Premium Subscription for $375 bucks. The reason it's Everyman material tonight is the fun Silverlight ad they're currently using, what you can do for your developers with the $375. Complete with glassy buttons and everything.
Speaking of Glassy Buttons. Apple is now number three in the US Desktop Market, behind Dell at 31% and HP at 25%. Apple is almost tied for 3rd place at 9% with merged Acer-Gateway. I had to laugh at a post comment, "Apple fighting with Acer on their own turf. LOL"
Visual Studio file deletion tip. If you've suffered from long delays deleting a file in Visual Studio like Matt Hinze has (and me!), try Matt's tip of emptying the recycle bin. I'm definitely going to empty my recycle bin tomorrow and check out Matt's tip.
Master Page knowledge deficiency. Master Pages are one of those basic ASP.NET precepts that I'll probably always feel way incompetent about, so I appreciate Scott Mitchell writing up a tutorial series on them. No one writes 'em better than Scott.
I like my TV and I like remote scheduling. We've been very happy with our recently modified entertainment package: expanded Comcast cable (no On Demand or premium channels anymore), TiVo and a Netflix Roku box. And we're paying $50 less a month than previously. As for some TiVo love, I was at the beach when I read about Ted Koppel's 4-part China series on Discovery in USA Today, so I logged in to "My Tivo" and scheduled it. There it was in our Playlist when we returned. That was a first for me. Very cool! I watched the first 3 episodes in the series, by the way, and it's very enlightening and well done. Definitely try to get it into your playlist, either remotely or while in the same room.
Summer Billing Days in Vermont. Light billing day today, only 3 hours billed. I usually try to bill at least 6 hours, but summer is such a special time in Vermont. Today I hiked through a University of Vermont forest reserve in the morning, biked through Burlington communities in the afternoon that I had never biked before, and did my daily hour on my Nordic Track, today reading Ted Sorenson's Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History. Vermont's a great state to be a freelance developer, but I guess that depends on your priorities.