This is my new favorite weather gadget for Vista, it’s from the Weather Channel!

According to a Microsoft Evangelist Glen Gordon, this is the story of how this gadget came to be:

My colleague Chad Brooks worked with them, encouraging them to put a gadget together. According to Chad, the devs started tinkering around with building the Gadget and were amazed at how easy it was to put together. Some of the higher ups said “what would it take to put it into production” and the dev team said it was basically done. So they put it through acceptance testing and now have (in my opinion) the coolest weather gadget out there.

You can get the gadget here from Weather.com, or you can rate it and leave comments at the Gadget Gallery here.

Enjoy.

MSDN recently launched the redesigned pages under a code name Tobago. After a little browsing it appears they may be rolling it out in stages to different areas as some of the software sites under MSDN still had the same ole look and feel.

The new design provides a somewhat richer user and search experience along with consistent top-level navigation for Dev Centers and Tech Centers.

They’ve also revamped the Navigation controls for section tabs, eyebrows, content controls (left nav, multi tab control, search, etc…). And lastly, the library searching now has an auto complete feature.

via Sandcastle

All kinds of hero goodness coming to the silverscreen right now with He-Man and Wonder Woman on the way.

Well, it looks like “Speed Racer” is in pre-production now according to IMDB and starts filming in Berlin June 5 2007 with a release date in mid 2008. To top it off it’s being Directed and written by the Wachowski brothers (Matrix movies)!

If you’re not familiar with Speed Racer, the first thing you need to do is go to Netflix and get the DVDs of the TV series in your queue. The second thing you need to do is punish yourself for the lack of geekiness (you choose the punishment, talk to a girl or sit in the front row or something).

So far we know the cast consists of:

Speed - Emile Hirsch

Trixie - Christina Ricci

RacerX - Matthew Fox

Mom Racer - Susan Sarandon

Pops Racer - John Goodman

Casting Goodman as ‘Pops’ is spot on, good call. Fox as ‘Racer X’, I can see that, too. The rest of the cast is probably OK with the exception of Ricci, she just doesn’t strike me as ‘Trixie’. Ricci was chosen over Elisha Cuthbert and Kate Mara (!?!)

Speed Trivia coming soon…

• Speedracer.com - Official site
• Speed Racer Lives site
• Speed Racer at TV.com
• Speed Racer Lawsuit
• Speed Racer toys

While looking up info on He Man for the previous article I stumbled across an interesting little tidbit.

Apparently “Wonder Woman” is in production with a proposed release date of 2009. Here’s the WW IMDB page.

Oh let us pray this tale of our Amazonian superhero becomes reality

Warner Bros. and producer Joel Silver (’Matrix’) are working with Mattel to turn “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe” into a live-action film. They’re overhauling the 80’s superhero in an effort for Warner to compete with the upcoming Transformers release this July.

And for Mattel, success in this movie could mean an entire relaunch of their toy line.

From Variety:

The franchise has been reimagined by the producer and the writers and pitched to Mattel as a classic good vs. evil battle, using the kind of visual effects strategy employed in “300.” A warrior is touted as the last hope of a magical land called Eternia, which is being ravaged by technology and the evil Skeletor.

Link to Variety