On this last day of 2008 I am keenly aware of the clock and the influence it has in our lives. Especially today there are 2 issues of clock and computers that have to be fixed.

Zune No More
According to this article at cruchgear Zune 30 GB all over the world are refusing to boot all the way. Mine is one of them. I guess all I can do is be patient until a fix or workaround comes out.

PDC CSD VPC
I meant to blog this last week but I didn’t. The VPC image from PDC with Oslo and the other CSD products has an issue where Visual Studio will/has expire on January 1 (It is already 01 Jan 2009 in some parts of the world). I don’t know if you can get it back after the expiration but if you haven’t run into the problem yet you need to disable time synchronization between the VPC and the host OS so you can set the time independently. If you have joined the VPC to a domain this will not work and you will have to wait for the CTP. You still only get 2 months of run time with the VPC so I wouldn’t leave it running 24x7 but this should extend your life for a little while.

Jeff Beehler’s blog post gives instructions on how to disable the time synchronization.
If you converted your VPC image to Hyper-V then this post will help you disable the time synchronization.

The keynote today was about Windows 7. I saw a lot of things that I think will improve the average day of most Windows users. I especially liked the MRU list showing up with the icons on the task list. That will save me multiple clicks each day.

I really liked the demos of synchronizing data between different office applications. I work with a lot of remote teams and sometimes Live Meeting doesn't seem to be the best environment.

I also liked the keynote on the Azure services and moving from a local service to one hosted in the cloud. I had seen a similar demo less than a month ago at an NDA event but it was still great to see.

I went to a "lap around Oslo" session and saw some good stuff with the modeling language "M", the tool "Quadrant", and the repository.

Most of this afternoon was spent working and talking to a lot of the other RDs. For me getting to see all these smart people may be the best part of a conference like this.