At long last, I've posted the photos of some of the many participants who tried out the Mind Balance brain-computer interface at the Dublin launch event. I previously chronicled the story of the resurrection of Cerebus, our wireless brain-computer interface, prior to the launch event. Many participants at the event, including Clare (as pictured below) had a chance to try Mind Balance, and successfully used only the electrical activity at the surface of their head to control the Mawg as he walked

In this week's MSDN Flash Ireland editorial, I reflected on Steve Ballmer's visit to Dublin and looked toward our next focus: the November launch events. I've been eagerly awaiting the official photos from the SteveB visit. Here are a few half-decent photos here I took of the various SteveB events I attended. Flash Ireland contains a bi-weekly summary of what we're up to here in the Developer and Platform group, and also includes customizable links to new MSDN articles of interest. Sign up for it

I'm down to Waterford tonight to talk about SQL Server 2005 at the local INDA usergroup . If you're down in the southeast, come on out and I look forward to seeing you at Dooley's Hotel. Just a bit of personal interest to round out my blog for today. Gamasutra (a site devoted to the art and science of making games) has an interesting write-up on the Games for Health conference . The piece works as a thoughtful survey paper on a number of ways people are using interactive techniques to contribute

The .NET Academic Library has arrived! This is the collection of books we'll be sending this week to the 20 largest Universities and IT Colleges in Ireland and Northern Ireland. Thanks again to all of you who helped us arrive at this collection! 24 copies of 21 books of about 500 pages each... we guesstimated about 100,000,000 words in the whole shebang. Somehow that seems a bit high. What's your guesstimate? Here is the book list, arranged by category: Introductory/Reference .NET intro: Introducing