So, what have I been up to for the last 10 days?
OK, let’s see. I waited till a blizzard blew past and then drove eight hours to Arizona. Saw more jackknifed trucks in 200 miles than I had seen in a decade previously. Also saw Barry Bonds hit a home run and sacrifice bunt in the same game.
Flew to Seattle for two days’ worth of meetings at Microsoft with various members of the Windows Vista team.
Did I mention the part where the notebook’s hard drive failed and, after running diagnostics for about two hours, I lost a week’s worth of e-mail and all my meeting notes from Microsoft? Do you mind if I skip that part? It’s still a little painful.
Came home, found the backups, reinstalled everything.
I’m not sure exactly when the fever appeared, but it was sometime over the weekend and it seems mostly to have passed now.
Oh, and in the most delicious irony of all… My co-authors and I finished a conference call this afternoon to finalize the outline for Windows Vista Inside Out. Not 30 seconds after I hang up the phone, Josh sends me a link to this blog entry and this Microsoft press release:
Microsoft Updates Windows Vista Road Map
Business availability for Windows Vista in November 2006, consumer availability in January 2007.
Something tells me this is going to affect our publishing schedule. Ya think?
Ed Bott 
Thanks for the reminder to always do a backup of my notes and other files, even (especially) when on the road. Over the years I’ve seen two notebook computer hard drives die right before my eyes and was so glad to have that little external USB drive (or in the old days a floppy) with the backups.
I even upload my financial files to a site on the Internet once a week or so.
With your wireless cell phone capabilities that might be a help on the road.
Interesting about the Vista delay. Wonder if they found a really big problem somewhere and need to fix it?
Do you think the Vista delay announcement portends something more serious? It sounds like the delay is on the order of weeks for “security” and “quality” issues, whatever that means. Seems like those kinds of things would require more than a few weeks, no? Are you aware of any major issues with Vista with regards to those items? What do you think of Vista overall at this point?