The update from my man in Japan is that Osaka is 'off the hizzle for shizzle.'

I like to think I am down with the kids, and I'm OK because it's all on urbandictionary.com.

So in summary - fo shizzle ma nizzle.

See Sean Gallagher - no idea what the truth of the matter is, but if the joke is "people are willing to believe the luminaries of the world's most successful software company", then I don't get it.

e-bay sold on Web services – E-bay are making web service interfaces available to all affiliates for 250 bucks, and PayPal are shipping a .Net SDK providing shopping cart and checkout functionality. Interesting because:

• of the technology choice, and a great advertisement for the .Net development platform.
• they are sprinting towards becoming a platform rather than a .com business. Ditto Amazon.
• of the implicit suggestion that someone out there will know how to do it better.

e-bay not an auction business – An old article, new to me. Key quote:

'EBay is well known as the leading auction business on the Internet. But in my opinion, this classification is wrong. EBay is really in the business of promoting a powerful network... based on making people happy. EBay is therefore an enabler that allows people to make money out of their hobbies.'

Various PLASers have indicated to me that integrating GPCP into vs.net was difficult, so I have approached the IDE with a great deal of trepidation. This morning I took the plunge and flipped through Johnson, Skibo and Young's Inside Microsoft Visual Studio.Net before attempting to build a simple addin for vs.net. And now I see where those PLASers were coming from.

It isn’t that integration is impossible, it is just that the APIs and programming model are unlike the .Net world I know and am used to dealing with. For example, integrating commands into the IDE involves implementing a dispatch interface (IDTCommandTarget), which handles any commands owned by a particular vs addin.

I found debugging said dispatch method a challenge, since my command kept disappearing from the tools menu. And reappearing after I removed the addin. After some experimentation I found that tinkering with the registry before each debug session fixed this.

Despite the weirdness, I managed to get a fun little addin working: I now have a tools command that will disassemble all project outputs in a solution, and send the IL to the output window:

I used iTunes for the first time on Saturday, snapping up "Long Train Runnin’" by The Doobie Brothers for a measly 79p. I don’t know much about the Doobies, but this is an awesome track. The purchase was smooth, but I nearly lost _it_ when I couldn’t copy my purchased track to my iPod. iTunes didn’t tell me why, didn’t give me any advice, it just didn’t do it. And that never happens with Limewire.

From the offbeat Broadway productions department, Gates et. al. now have their own musical (NY Times, subscription required).

UK news was dominated this morning with the story of Tim Henman's inevitable Wimbledon failure. The FT's headline was "Henman sees scant net gain."

I have long taken pleasure in the suffering of the locals, but I am beginning to feel twinges of sympathy. How much worse could it get?