At least if everything goes as planned, you’re RSS reader should keep on getting regular updates without any work on your part. That’s if everything goes as planned, though, because big changes are afoot on the blogfront.

I just “retired” notstatic.com in favor of the more comprehensive nerdplusart.com. Faithful readers may remember this as the name of my talk at MIX this year, but the domain was actually registered way back in December after I wrote this post where the term was coined (albeit accidentally).

Now, to be clear, when I say “retired” what I actually mean is “forwarded” so if notstatic.com is easier to remember or already a subscription of yours, simply pretend that nothing changed. Feel free to stop reading now.

For the rest of us, nerdplusart is a lot more organized than notstatic ever was and it’s more comprehensive. There are complete subdomains (consisting of one page each) devoted to code samples (labs.nerdplusart.com) and talks I’ve given (speaking.nerdplusart.com) as well as some Silverlight goodness on the home page (more about that in a future post).

The new domain also brings along a new design (once again, see the homepage) and a renewed commitment to blogging. Ironically, I’ve got a pretty good blogging backlog built up since the transition took me about a month (a very sporadic month) so at least in the short term you can expect to hear a lot from me.

Let me know if you have any problems moving over subscriptions, finding stuff or getting old links to work. I’d also love to hear what you think about the new site.

I just CafePressed up a whole bunch of minibuttons to give away at MIX to the various Friends of Kaxaml that I may encounter.  For some reason, I’ve never kept stats on the number of downloads I’ve had, so I really don’t know how many of you there are.  Hopefully enough that I don’t end up with a lot of leftover Kaxaml minibuttons.  They’re too small to be coasters and too big to be thumb tacks so I really don’t have a lot of use for them other than giving them away. 

So…track me down.  I’d love to give you one. 

I’ll try to save a stash for our session on Friday (more details on the session in a later post, but it’s the second one down and called "Nerd + Art: Ten Code Snippets to Empower Your Inner Artist").

Serious Kaxaml fanatics are also welcome to purchase the newly designed Kaxaml T-shirts (or buy your own minibutton if you’re not going to MIX) from the now-open Kaxaml Cafepress Store.  Certainly no obligation here…the only who profits from sales of the shirts is CafePress (and you, I guess, as you show off your XAML savvy).

1. The Gakken Cup Phonograph Kit in Edison-style "allows you to record your voice through a cup onto another one."  Yeah, this one is low tech but, at least according the manufacturer, it’s not only an "ultra fun experiment," but also an "absolute neat gift idea."  I think they mean absolute in the same way one says "absolute zero."  In other words, the neatness of all other gifts will be defined relative to this one so if neat is your goal, look no further.

2. Ben Fry’s (upcoming) new book Visualizing Data.  If the recipient of your gift isn’t familiar with Ben, then just the introduction by itself is a high quality gift.  I saw him speak about Processing at Flash in the Can in 2005 and I was blown away.  His is the best version of data + art that I know of.  You can see a draft of the first six chapters here.  This is a great one for the WPF enthusiast because, as we all know, WPF is all about the data.

3. A poster by Jason Munn, band poster designer extraordinaire and proprietor of thesmallstakes.com.  His poster shop features all original, limited edtion posters that are not only amazingly cool but less expensive than you expect (only $25 a pop!).  He does the design and silk-screening himself.  I have 4 hanging in my office right now (those pictured below) and secretly hope to get one or two more for Christmas.  The cool ones sell out quickly, so don’t hesitate.  You can read interviews with Jason here and here and even see the sketches that led to the posters.

4. Allright, If you’re really on a budget this year, go for the paper bird.  Not only can you design your own (a personalized paper bird can go a long way), but your giftee could put his or her design and/or paper cutting skills to work as well and craft his or her own.  This, by the way, is a gift that targets a broad range of ages and has already been calendared in our home as a holiday project to be shared with my three year old.

5. Another option for the budget aware gift giver: Free fonts.  That link is to Smashing Magazine’s list of "excellent" and free fonts, and many (even most) really are excellent.  This is another great find for your friend or family member who dabbles in either WPF or Silverlight since both have great support for custom fonts.  It would also be a great gift for your school teacher mom (like my mom!)

Okay, so there’s a chance that even after going through that extensive list (of five items, two of which are free), you still haven’t found the right match for your giftee.  If that’s the case, do not fret.  Two other excellent (and much more extensive) lists which may fit the bill can be found here and here.  Even if mine didn’t, one of those should meet your nerd+art needs.  In the meantime, best of luck in your holiday pursuits.

It started right.  I think everyone was blown away by the CLR integration in Silverlight and the fantastic first-day keynote where that was announced set a tone for the rest of the (half) week.  The energy was amazing.  I came home exhausted and not because I had been living la vida vegas.  I couldn’t help but give whatever discretionary time I had to Silverlight.  I had to.  The excitement was contagious and it wore me out.

My favorite moment in the keynote–maybe at the event–was when Scott Guthrie showed C# bulldozing JavaScript through a game of chess.  You can actually see this yourself here.  That was the moment when I knew something important had happened.  CLR in the browser actually meant what it said–the power of a compiled, sophisticated language like C# actually running right in the browser.  I was blown away.

Other favorite moments were:

1. A great conversation I had with Lee Brimelow about animation in which he introduced me to Robert Penner’s killer easing equations for Flash.

2. The session I did with Nathan about the Comic Reader we created for WPF.   This project was so much fun.  We put it together in about 10 days.  It was a pretty intense effort, but it flew by because were were having so much fun!  The session turned out great and I got to imagine what I might look like as a super hero.

3. The IdentiyMine dinner at Zeffirino.  When I called my wife that night to tell her about the dinner, the only way I could think to describe it was to say it felt like eating at the cool kids table.  Thanks to everyone who joined us.  It was a blast.

4. This one isn’t so much a moment as a feeling.  When I was at Microsoft I used to go to a lot of Flash conferences and when I did, I could sense the comradery of that community.  You could tell that the it was a really positive thing.  As Microsoft guy, though, I wasn’t really setup to be a part of it.  MIX this year had that vibe, though.  It was awesome!  WPF seemed all grown up.  The conversations were about what were doing with WPF, not what we could or wanted to do.  And with real projects came real challenges and, overall, the conversations were interesting, hands on and real.  It was great.

5. Okay, one last Silverlight plug.  The final great moment I read came Wednesday morning when I started to catch up on the buzz outside of the conference.  I was blown away when I read this.  And then this.  Wow!  If you read the comments, Michael took a lot of flack for endorsing Silverlight.  I know he’s genuine though.  I spent 30 min. in an anaylst meeting with Scott Guthrie and I got 10 min. of Scott’s vision and his committment is obvious.  If Michael spent 10 hours with those guys like he mentions, then he I don’t see how he could have been anything other than blown away. 

There are many more favorite moments I’m sure.  It would probably be easier to start enumerating the moments where I wasn’t having a blast.  Great job Microsoft and and especially big congrats to the Silverlight team!