I have decided to move my personal blog over to http://markgroves.us.  I have moved all of the current posts from this Live Spaces blog over there. 

Val has been wanting a new flash based music player, and of course me being the gadget guy that I am I had to see if we were going to jump the Zune given it finally has a flash player.  So on Friday before I left for my leave I decided to stop by the Microsoft Company store and pickup a couple new 8GB flash Zunes.  I have to say I am pretty impressed, the devices is much lighter than I expected and the screen is great to look at.  I actually like the new Zune software, the big issue I have right now is no ability to build auto playlists.  What I am looking for is the ability to customize what I put on my player based on how much I like the music and how many times I have played a given track.  I understand that the Zune team pulled the Auto Playlists in this version since they did research that most normal users just never understood how they worked.  Well I hope they bring them back, and better than in WMP. 

Today is my first day home being Mr. Mom.  Yeah, that is right, Val is back to work I am home with Evelyn for the next 6 weeks.  So far so good, 9:40 and the baby is still alive.  I do have a some help the next two weeks, my Mom is out from Pittsburgh, so there is little chance I will even get to hold my daughter. 

I am happy to announce that our daughter Evelyn Lucille Groves was born Sunday the 15th at 2AM.  Val and baby are doing great and are home resting.  Evelyn was born at 7 lbs 3 oz, just under 21" long.  Hayden is very very excited:

  
Video: Happy Birthday Evelyn HQ

Grand National, the latest John Butler Trio album must be doing great in the US.  It was just announced that JBT will be doing a full US tour starting next month in Baltimore.  I already have our tickets to the Seattle show.  Although this is where I wish we still lived in Denver, it would be cool to see JBT at Red Rocks. 

USA GRAND NATIONAL TOUR
5/22/07 Sonar Baltimore, MD
5/23/07 9:30 Club Washington, DC
5/24/07 Webster Hall New York, NY
5/27/07 Jam on the River Philadelphia, PA
5/30/07 Phoenix Concert Theatre Toronto, ON
5/31/07 St. Andrews Hall Detroit, MI
6/1/07 Headliner’s Louisville, KY
6/2/07 Riviera Theatre Chicago, IL
6/3/07 The Vogue Theatre Indianapolis, IN
6/5/07 TBA
6/6/07 Eagles Club Milwaukee, WI
6/7/07 First Avenue Minneapolis, MN
6/9/07 Wakarusa Festival Lawrence, KS
6/12/07 House of Blues Dallas, TX
6/13/07 La Zona Rosa Austin, TX
6/14/07 Warehouse Live Houston, TX
6/15/07 Revolution Music Room Little Rock, AR
6/17/07 Bonnaroo Festival Manchester, TN
6/20/07 4th & B Theater San Diego, CA
6/22/07 Wiltern Los Angeles, CA
6/23/07 Fillmore San Francisco, CA
6/24/07 Fillmore San Francisco, CA
6/26/07 Crystal Ballroom Portland, OR
6/27/07 The Moore Theatre Seattle, WA
6/28/07 TBA
6/30/07 Red Rocks Denver, CO
7/1/07 Taos Solar Music Festival Taos, NM

WOW, what a concert.  Val and I were lucky enough to get tickets to John Butler's concert last night at The Triple Door in Seattle.  For those that do not know the John Butler Trio, you are really missing out, they are this great band from Down Under.  The best way I can describe their music is a mix between Blues, Funk, Reggae, Folk, World music. 

If you have any interest at all in the above types of music I would highly suggest you check them out.  I have been listening to JBT for a couple years now, I happen to stumble upon them in searching for new artists a couple years back, and really dug John Butler's guitar playing, and to see it live was way more then I expected.  To see in person him play a 12 string acoustic, and the combination of sounds he is able to produce really makes their songs even more enjoyable. 

The Triple Door was a killer place to see a show like this, it is a intimate dinner style theater, I believe it only seats 300 people, with full service kitchen and wait staff.  The sound system was great, and with no seat more the 35 paces from the stage there is not a bad seat in the house. 

Check out Grand National releasing some time around the end of March. 

Well I have been holding off creating this post since I was not sure how I wanted to approach this topic on my blog.  But as many of you already know, Val and I are expecting another child.  Not that Hayden was not good enough for us, but we thought it would be good to try for kid 2.0.  

Hayden is actually very excited, he has always wanted to be a "big sister".   In our many conversations with him on this topic he is very convinced that the new baby will be a little girl, and that he is going to be a big sister.  I know he is just a little confused, but since we don't actually know if it will be a little boy or a little girl yet, the conversation has yet to make progress.  Needless to say he is very excited, although I am not sure how excited he will be to have a little brother (if that is the case) since he seems very stuck on have a little sister. 

Since Hayden blessed us by coming 2 months early we are considered high risk on this one, so that means we will be getting plenty of ultrasounds between now and when the baby arrives, hopefully somewhere around end of June (~+36 weeks). 

it definitely makes a sound. I had the pleasure of being awaken at 1AM Saturday morning by a 75' tree that blew over in our backyard. We had a pretty bad wind storm, 50 mph gusts. We were very lucky that the tree only took out one section the of our fence. It could have been much worse pretty much any other direction would have hit a house. over 40 bags of branches later the yard is back to normal. 

Val had a great idea to take a couple day off an go explore a part of Washington state that neither one of us has ever visited, before summer was over.  So we decided to take last Friday off and drive over to Sequim

on the north Olympic Peninsula.  We took the ferry, which Hayden loved, not only does he love boats, but to drive our car onto the boat, well he thought that was great. 

It was a pretty chill weekend, we got to hang out as a family, get some hiking in and I got to work on my photography.  There was some beautiful scenery with some great landscapes.  I think my photographs are getting better, but I still have a ton to learn.  

We first visited the Spit out on the Dungeness Bay, which basically is this natural sand peninsula.  It is 5 miles long, with a lighthouse on the end, and more huge pieces of driftwood then I have ever seen.  The waves were a little too much for Hayden, just too loud for him, but he did like the calmer side. 

On Saturday we explored part of the Olympic National Park, a very small part, it is a huge national park.  We drove up to Hurricane Ridge  it was a whopping mile high, I know that is not much for my Denver readers, but it is a big deal around here.   Then we went for a  hike up to Marymere Falls, which gave me some great photo opportunities.  

I was a great weekend, and we got to explore a small part of Washington State that we definitely will be visiting again.  Although I think we will try camping next time, that is if I get  around to fixing the brakes on my Rover. 

[By the way Windows Live Writer is pretty cool.  I was using W.Bloggar, but I think I have not found my new blog writing tool.]

I decided to try out the new blog writing tool that just came out in beta form Windows Live Writer.  So far it seems pretty good, I need to try it both with my MSDN blog also, but so far I like the potential. 

Maybe I will try out the image layout features when I get a change later this week.  I got to take a good number of photographs this last weekend while away on a short vacation (more on that in a later post). 

I will have to see how Live Writer compares with Word 2007, the spell checking inline within Word is a great feature for us engineer types. 

One of the great things about moving to the Seattle area is having family close at hand. Since Val's parents and sister live in Seattle they get to spend time with our son. And we get to go out do dinner now and then since they love watching him. So tonight Val and I got to go out for Sushi (another benefit of living in Seattle). To a place called I Love Sushi, ok the name is lame but the food was great.  We got the chef's special sashimi, it was nice not having to pick, our sushi chef picked out some great fish. 

I have been extreemly happy with my 2006 Cooper S, it is hands down been the best daily driver I have ever owned (my 928 Porsche was great but not a good daily driver).  Sounds like the major change in the new powerplant with a turbo charger replacing the supercharger in the current version. 

Scribes on the European side of the Atlantic were pounding the keyboards Thursday, eager to report on their test drives of a prototype of the MINI Mk2. The barely-disguised test car was wrung out by journalists at the ex-Formula 1 racetrack at Zandvoort in Holland, and first reports are encouraging, with phrases like "polish and precision," "greater civility," and "very quick" sprinkled through Autocar's test drive report.

The biggest change in the Mk2 is up front - the new MINI is powered by a 1.6-liter all-aluminum engine co-developed with Peugeot-Citroen, which in Cooper S trim features direct injection and a twin-scroll turbocharger, boosting output to 175 hp and 177 ft-lb of torque. (An overboost system yields 192 ft-lb of torque under wide-open acceleration.) The normally-aspirated version puts out 118 hp. What Car? is guesstimating a 0-60 time for the Cooper S of around 7 seconds.

(Full press release after the jump)

Power is delivered through a six-speed Getrag box, or an optional six-speed automatic. Paddle shifters will be optional.

While slightly longer, exterior changes to the Mk2 are fairly subtle. Interior changes, on the other hand, are much more extensive, with new seats, new controls and a generally higher level of fit and finish all around.

Other significant changes include electric power steering and much improved front-end ride, courtesy of the lighter engine and additional suspension travel.

Since I have been a Microsoft employee for about 9 months (WOW, 9 months already), I thought it would be a good idea to move my work related content over to blogs.msdn.com. Of course since I have been very lazy, on even updating this blog, I guess I now have twice as much content that needs published :)

My new work blog is: http://blogs.msdn.com/mgroves

One of the lesser know features in Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Architects (VSTESA), is the ability to run Validators over your models. The designers within Team Architect use System Definition Model (SDM) to model Systems, Resources and Endpoints. SDM provides a constraint validation mechanism to validate mutual conformance of application and logical datacenter designers against each other's requirements defined. This constraint mechanism can be extended to validate the design against best practices as well. A Validator is just a custom defined constraint validating the design against items such as security, performance or architectural design best practices. There will be an upcoming walkthrough and accompanying white-paper describing how to build a Validator in the coming months on MSDN, that Erbil is working on.

The ability to build validators that check models for known security risks are key to our ability to do Threat Modeling through tools like the Threat Analysis & Modeling v2.0. Although validators are great, not all countermeasures can be validated through our tool. Some items just need to be checked manually, to ensure that work is done and not forgotten, that's Team Foundation Work Items come into play. ACE is working on exporting the countermeasures into TFS as work items in their next release. This ability, along with Validators, really makes the ability to conduct Threat Modeling on your design traceable as you work through various iterations of your project.

If you are interested in some of the ways you can extend Team Architect, check out Dmitriy Nikonov and Erbil Yilmaz tomorrow (4/42006) at 10 AM Pacific time. If you were ever thinking of creating your own Models within Team Architect or wanted to understand how to create your own custom Validators this is a required Webcast.

I took off work a few days this week to spend time with my Mom, who came out to visit for a couple weeks, and son, Hayden. It was very fun, but exhausting; a 2 year old is one busy human.

I also got the chance to dust off my camera a take a few decent shots at the Seattle Zoo. I think I still have a ton of practice ahead of me, but I am starting to see some improvement in my photographs.

The Microsoft ACE Team has just released beta 2 of their Threat Analysis & Modeling Tool, Download Here. I have been working with Talhah Mir, and team, on some integrations between Team Architect and their tool that hopefully will show up in the RTM version in the coming month.

I am not a security expert, but that's exactly why I like the approach this tool takes, you are not expected to be a subject matter expert on Threat Analysis. You just need to understand the use cases of your application and the tool takes that data and calculates the risks based on known threats. Then you can decide based on business impact which threats are high priority for your business.

There is a great video that helps explain the approach.