My home entertainment infrastructure, being assembled as part of my home renovation, is slowly coming along.  We have set up a 32” Sharp LCD set in the bedroom with an HD set top box from Time Warner Cable.

More to the point, however, is that we setup an XBox 360 Elite along with it.  This XBox has three important features: (1) it acts as a Media Center extender, for both Windows XP and Vista, (2) you can buy an HD DVD drive for it for $199 and (3) it has an HDMI output, making it the perfect delivery mechanism for even 1080p content from the HD DVD.

Oh, and last week, Circuit City had a promotion whereby you could get two HD DVDs (up to $60 in value) for free with purchase the player.  Since the player itself comes with a free disk (the 2006 version of King Kong), that means you get a 1080p HD DVD player and about $100 worth of discs for $199.  Yowza!

The verdict? Picture: 1080p-tastic.  Installation: dunce-cap simple.  And the Xbox is an amazing Media Center extender…even on XP, it offers the full client UI experience of the Media Center PC itself.  And given that I haven’t (yet) upgraded the Media Center to hi def, the XBox Media Center extender client actually looks better.

Microsoft has already sent out a save the date for next year’s MIX conference.  This comes just days after they announced an indefinite postponement of PDC ‘07.

Seems like the teams at Microsoft with the momentum are on the ASP.NET/Silverlight side of the shop.  And the show with the mojo is the one that builds bridges…to designers and thus to customers of other companies’ products.  It would be a bit glib to say “there’s a lesson in that,” so I’ll pretend not to say it.

Sonos, whose multi-room digital audio system I am about ito install in my home, is now compatible with Pandora.  Pandora, the Music Genome Project’s trainable Internet radio service, which until now worked only from a browser-based Flash application and the Slim Device/Logitech Squeezebox and Transporter devices, can now be dialed up sans PC, in any room in your home.  And unlike the Slim Device implementation, Sonos’ interface to the service allows you to rate songs and create new “stations.”

I had picked Sonos before it had this capability (but after it added support for WMA-protected tracks and for the entire Rhapsody service, including streaming content).  So this will just be a wonderful bonus.

Microsoft has just announced that it will be rescheduling this year’s PDC to an as yet undetermined date.  Microsoft’s reasoning for this, essentially, is that between MIX, Tech*Ed Orlando and Barcelona, and (I suspect) its Business Intelligence Conference held two weeks ago, and a slew of recent and soon-to-come alpha and beta releases, developers have enough to chew on for a while.  The folks in Redmond prefer to wait until we’re well into the next wave of technologies before launching a new PDC.  If my memory serves me correctly, Microsoft made the same decision two PDCs back and, with hindsight, people appreciated the decision and judged it wise.

Interestingly, Microsoft lists four events at which it will be presenting future technology content, and the first one on the list is VSLive! New York, to be held Sept 16^th – 19^th in Brooklyn, USA.  As the Conference Chair of that event, I’m gratified by this nice little promo.  We will in fact have content on “Katmai” (the next release of SQL Server) and very likely a keynote on Silverlight, all of which will be presented by product team members from Redmond.  Meanwhile, the vast majority of our content will be focused on technology that’s shipping today.  We think this strikes the right balance of “futures” and practical present-tense-relevant material.

Steve Berkowitz, the Microsoft Senior Vice President of Online Services, made what I consider to be a stunning admission of defeat.

Here’s the context: quoted in Mary Jo Foley’s blog, from his presentation at the JP Morgan technology conference, Berkowitz makes the distinction between “destination search” and “convenience search.”  Destination search, effectively, is search conducted at a search site.  Convenience search is performed in-place, through some context-sensitive search facility in an application or Web page.

Berkowitz believes Microsoft is more likely to have a good showing in convenience search than in destination search.  Implicit in this assertion is that (a) Microsoft doesn’t believe it currently has a good showing in either search area and (b) MS believes it is very unlikely that it will ever have a good showing in the destination search arena.  In other words, people who want to go to a search engine will go to Google, and MSN/Live Search’s (last?) best hope is essentially as a mashup Web service.

While I’m glad to see Microsoft admit that no one takes its http://search.live.com page terribly seriously, I have to say I’m a little shocked to see them write off the whole prospect of improving and competing in the “destination search” arena.  And besides, to admit that your search engine is second-class but to assume people will use it anyway as an in-place service strikes me as somewhat contradictory.  Select/Ctrl-C/Ctrl-E/Ctrl-V/Enter isn’t that hard.

Especially if it gives back better results.