I’m currently in Europe for the shortest international trip I’ve ever taken. I’m cruising through 4 countries in 6 days meeting with the Microsoft subsidiary in each country.  Dealing with the time zone changes while diving straightaway into work was tougher than I anticipated, and to make matters worse, I’m pulling double duty working remotely with my team in Redmond in the late evenings.

My sleep patterns are totally erratic with me being able to sleep some nights a full 8 hours, and other nights I’m waking up at 3am and unable to fall back asleep.

Even more disappointing, I haven’t been able to take more than a dozen photos while I’ve been here.  The weather was gorgeous in Madrid, which I saw through the office windows.  Arrived in Paris yesterday morning and the weather was complete crap with non-stop rain. Ugh.

I have a few blog posts currently in progress related to technology but are all on hold until I get back.  I leave for Amsterdam tomorrow on a 6am flight and return to Seattle on Friday.

If you have Windows Vista Home Premium or Ultimate and are a US Resident, you can watch the 2008 Olympics in a really slick way through streaming/downloaded video.  This is particularly useful if you can’t follow Olympics coverage live, or if you’re like me and don’t have cable at home.

The best part is that this scenario enabled for FREE.  When I first heard about this integration and support for Windows Media Center, I was skeptical that it would be better than just watching it streaming through the silverlight player on the NBC Olympics site.  I couldn’t have been more wrong.  After trying it out last night, I can say that this is freakin’ amazing.

The easiest way to get going, is just just go through the Windows Media Center menu to the new NBC Olympics option in Online Media:

Once you select it, you’ll be given a prompt to install components to get going where you’re given 2 choices – easy or advanced installation.

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The Windows Home Server (WHS)  team just announced that Power Pack 1 has gone RTM (Release To Manufacturing).  Power Pack 1 is not just a package of bug fixes, but instead, it’s a combination of bug fixes along with new features.  In addition to fixing the nasty data corruption bug, it adds the following new features:

• 64-bit Vista support
• Shared folder backup
• Improvements to remote access
• More efficient power consumption
• Improved performance

If you have been a participant in the PP1 beta and have a previous build installed, make sure you uninstall it first and reboot your machine before installing the RTM version.  You can download PP1 from the Microsoft Download Center.

If you have an HP MediaSmart machine, HP also released their version of PP1 which has all the above mentioned features as well as:

• DLNA compliant media streaming
• McAfee server side anti-virus (7 months free)
• Improvements to HP Photo Webshare
• iTunes Media aggregator

To install the update from HP, make sure you don’t have any of the beta releases of PP1 installed first, then go to the Windows Home Server console and select “check for updates”.

I was listening to the DL.tv podcast on my Zune in my car on my way back from work today and got to the final 5 mins of the episode.  I unplugged my Zune (which automatically paused the device), got to my desktop and plugged it into my PC.  The Zune software automatically opened and started to sync. 

I wanted to listen to those last 5 minutes I had left, so I selected the episode within the Zune software and hit play.  Amazingly, the podcast resumed exactly where I left off in my car!

Not sure why I was surprised by this, or if any other portable music player does this, but I definitely was impressed!  Nice fit and finish feature that made the whole experience seem really polished.  Kudos to the Zune team.

Great news from Greg about those nifty Sysinternals tools that I’ve been using for years:

The Sysinternals tools are a whole slew of great troubleshooting and analysis utilities for Windows. Microsoft acquired Sysinternals  some time ago. The tools are now available online for anyone that needs or wants to use them, via a web page (http://live.sysinternals.com/) or direct UNC link to each tool.

The simple web page lists the latest version of each tool, where you can click to execute. This is a terrific and eleganly simple resource. No more maintaining thumb drives or CDs of utilities necessary. I like it.
Ed Bott has the details on his Microsoft Report blog at ZDNet.