Microsoft Press is handing out 3 books: - Introducing Microsoft LINQ by Paolo Pialorsi and Marco Russo - Introducing ASP.NET Ajax by Dino Esposito - Introducing Microsoft Silverlight 1.0 by Laurence Moroney Silverlinght 1.0 is probably a bit outdated (with 1.1/2.0 close), but the others should be good, judging by the authors. Dino Esposito wrote couple of very good books on ASP.NET and .NET. See this blog for more details and download links.

It is a tradition to do crazy and wild things on New Year's Eve. Some people play with fireworks and other noise making devices, other tend to celebrate the end of year by partying and drinking. I am not big fan of explosives and to sacrifice too many neurons to honor randomly chosen point on Sun's orbit sounds like a pretty silly idea. But still, I wanted to do something out-of-line on December 31st.

=> Booting Mongrel (use 'script/server webrick' to force WEBrick) => Rails application starting on http://0.0.0.0:3000 => Call with -d to detach => Ctrl-C to shutdown server ** Starting Mongrel listening at 0.0.0.0:3000 ** Starting Rails with development environment... ** Rails loaded. ** Loading any Rails specific GemPlugins ** Signals ready. TERM => stop. USR2 => restart. INT => stop (no restart). ** Rails signals registered. HUP => reload (without restart). It might not work well.

A friend asked me this question today - and here is my take on it (slightly expanded) answer to his email :-): Hi Shane I have purchased the 8 GB because I had no choice - the 16 GB versions were sold out at the Futureshop at the time, and I was too impatient to wait for two more weeks until delivered from Apple Online store :-). From usage perspective - whether 8 GB is enough really depends how much video you plan to put on.