Yup, huge in Japan.

I have a Motorola MPX 200 SmartPhone. AT&T sucks-ass and will only sell the phone with the SmartPhone 2002, quite possibly about as good an experience as airplane food. The next version is out, but AT&T refuses to sell it until its MPX 200 inventory is all sold out.

I got one anyway on eBay figuring I can flash it to SmartPhone 2003 at TechED or the MDC. Wrong. AT&T told Motorola to stop flashing the phones so people won’t upgrade. Well someone got pissed off and put the software to flash the phone up on the internt and my buddy the Toy Boy Richard Campbell downloaded it and gave it to me before it went away.

I pluged in my phone to my laptop and ran the software. It flashed to SmartPhone 2003 without incident.

Now I have two illegal phones that I did not buy from AT&T Wireless.

There was a party for the Regional Directors and the Microsoft Developer Evangelists on Friday night and let me say that it was epic.

It was on a boat. This was no ordinary boat. After they fed us and opened the bar, a DJ and go-go dancers started to rev us. Clemens and I pulled up chairs and pretty much held court.

Then they announced there would be a belly dancer. They started to play Turkish music. Then building on the RD belly dancing traditions (me in Cairo and Clemens in Casablanca), Goksin Bakir decided to get up and dance. He was GOOD. Unfortunately they asked him to stop and the real belly dancer got up and started.

While that was all fun and games (and Clemens and I still holding court, but now about 8 or 9 beers later), the DJ decided to play some awesome Punjabi remixes and that got fellow RD Sanjay Shetty and I on the dance floor pretty hard core. (It has been almost a year since I learned to dance to Punjabi music in India.) We danced our brains out. SQL Hera also got down with Goksin, Michelle and I.

Richard Campbell did his weekly Toy Boy bit for .NET Rocks via Cell Phone on the boat as we passed Bill Gates house. I was too drunk and drooling over the belly dancer to participate.

Hours later (and buckets of sweat later too), the boat docked (and I headed to the airport for a redeye back to New York.)

See the team at TechEd in Kula Lumpur in a few weeks!

A report from the front lines at the meeting on campus this week.

First Kimberly Tripp, aka the SQL Goddess, is mad at Clemens and I that we have dubbed her the SQL Goddess and now via the power of Google, she is now known as the SQL Goddess. So I decided to start call her SQL Hera (with the Olympics and all). But I need you help. Google works with links so you all have to link to her and use the term SQL Hera in your blogs and such so Google will pick it on up. So here is the deal: SQL Hera, SQL Hera, SQL Hera, SQL Hera. Put it in your blog. Make a web page. Kimberly will love us all for it.

Who’s bed did you sleep in last night? That seems to be a common question at the meeting this week since we are all sharing rooms. Clemens and I are sharing a room but NOT a bed.

So today Jim Allchin made a major announcement saying that WinFS is being pulled from Longhorn. The real good news is that it will make Longhorn released in 2006 and MS will ship Avalon and Indigo for WinXP and 2003. This is pretty cool! But delaying WinFS is ok if it will make it right.

Microsoft has gathered 300 of its top internal and 3^rd party (RDs) Evangelists in one place and have given us a brain dump on their 7 major categories over the next few years. I am sitting in on the Yukon/SQL Server category.

Many RDs are here and we of course are causing lots of mischief. Lots of info overload here today…

Northwind is oficially dead, it will not ship with Yukon. This is good, Northwind was bad, very bad.

 I installed Windows XP SP2. It ran without issue. Many people complain (most recently the Wall Street Journal) that SP2 does not include as part of the offering anti-Spam, anti-Spyware and anti-Virus. These are the same exact people who would complain that Microsoft is putting these independent third party people out of business. You can’t have it both ways.

XP2 is good enough. It automatically puts on your firewall and adds a pop-up blocker to IE, even though I run the google and msn toolbars, now I have three pop-up blockers. My  system seems stable and they have worked on the WiFi dialogs, lets see if it is any easier to connect to a local access point. The new “Security Center” may not be perfect but at least is a step in the right direction and future versions of Windows I am sure will build on top of this.

As for programs not working, we all knew this. If you are doing remote debugging with VS .NET or SQL Server you may have to tweak your system to accept the client requests, etc, but most non-developer and non-admin stuff will run fine. Microsoft has a list here.

So go install the damn thing.

I hate the RIAA more than Osama bin Laden, The New York Yankees and Communists combined. Why? There is so much to hate. (If you are counting I only hate OPEC, DeBeers and every telco out there more.)

The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) represents the most criminal elements of our society, the Recording Industry executives.  They sit in-between the artists and you and me-the consumer. When you pay $12 for a new CD how much of that money goes to the artist? Nothing. If you don’t believe me, read Courtney Love’s number crunching here (I’ll wait).

Yesterday the RIAA lost a major legal battle. File swapping companies Grokster, StreamCast, and Sharman Network were being sued by the RIAA to be closed down. This begs the question if I send you a mail bomb via FexEd can you sue FedEx? (No) Thankfully the 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals followed Canada’s lead and ruled in favor of the on-line swappers saying that since there is no central server, there is no liability.

So once again to the RIAA, why do you constantly try to litigate away technology. MP3 and downloaded music is here to stay. Find a way to monetize it instead of litigating it. Until you do so I am going to keep downloading for free. (I don’t pay for iTunes because I refuse to buy an iPod and Apple’s music won’t work on my current MP3 player.)