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Mike Nash, one of the VPs in the Windows Product division at Microsoft had a recent blog post announcing the new name of the next generation Windows operating system. Looks like this will be one of the few times that the development code name will be the full release name.

Personally, I’m not sure why I have ever known the internal development name of a product from Microsoft. In reality, it should stay internal if you have good security measures in place as the only people that need to know the name are the developers and engineers working on the project.

In the face of an economy in crisis and a deeply unpopular president, some analysts believe the situation is ripe to give Democrats a shot at a 60-seat filibuster-proof majority in the Senate in November.

It’s “the perfect storm,” said Stuart Rothenberg, editor of the nonpartisan Rothenberg Political Report. “You’ve got Republican voters angry at Republicans, many Americans just petrified about the future…wanting change. And right now change appears to be coming in the form of Democrats.”

Not so fast, say Republicans. And even Democrats admit it’s too early to say whether they can pick up the necessary seats.

According to Rebecca Fisher, a spokeswoman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Republicans are confident that they will, at the very least, keep their current seats.

Of the 35 Senate seats on the line this year, 23 are held by Republicans. Five Republican senators are retiring: Pete Domenici of New Mexico, Wayne Allard of Colorado, John Warner of Virginia, Larry Craig of Idaho and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska.

Democrats control the Senate. Although it’s split evenly with 49 Democrats and 49 Republicans, two independents — Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut — caucus with the Democrats.

Whoohoo! Its alive!

Below is a blurb from the press release for the project that I have been working on.

Hosted offering gives small and medium-sized businesses access to mobile communication and collaboration services through a cost-effective Scale-on-Demand model

DES MOINES, IA, October 7, 2008 – LightEdge Solutions, the leading hosted services partner dedicated to the full breadth of communications and IT needs for small and medium-sized businesses (SMB), announced today the launch of a new Hosted Microsoft Exchange 2007 platform. This fully redundant platform will enable SMBs to implement a mobile Exchange environment for their employees in a simple, hosted scale-on-demand model rather than an expensive and time-consuming on-premise implementation.

Microsoft Exchange, the dominant application for delivering corporate e-mail, personal and corporate calendars, task lists and contacts in enterprise settings, has been deemed too difficult and too expensive for most small businesses. This offering from LightEdge levels the playing field for the SMB by giving businesses of all sizes access to the communication and productivity tools in Microsoft Exchange in a monthly, “per-mailbox” fee structure that emphasizes the benefits of the service rather than owning and depreciating corporate infrastructure.

“We think that the timing of this offering couldn’t be more perfect,” said Jim Masterson, chairman and CEO of LightEdge Solutions. “Businesses fully understand the benefits of Exchange and access to Exchange from mobile phone, but the present economy is forcing business owners to rethink capital purchases. Given the instability in the market, Hosted Exchange really is the best option for businesses that are either ready to adopt Exchange or migrate from a legacy in-house implementation.”

As many of my close friends know, I have been working on a project that is a roll out of a new Exchange 2007 platform for LightEdge Solutions. This has been an exciting project for me and one that has had many challenges. Over the next several months I will be sharing some of the challenges that we have run into with the rollout and HMC 4.5 (Hosted Messaging and Collaboration) and how we have worked around them.

Berkeley Breathed is putting his penguin on ice. The 51-year-old cartoonist said he will pull the plug on his comic-strip career and “Opus” after Nov. 2.

In an e-mail to the Los Angeles Times, the 51-year-old Breathed wrote, “30 years of cartooning to end. I’m destroying the village to save it. Opus would inevitably become a ranting mouthpiece in the coming wicked days, and I respect the other parts of him too much to see that happen. The Michael Moore part of me would kill the part of him that was important to his fans.”

“Opus,” a 5-year-old Sunday comic with a madcap political bent, stars the pudgy penguin from Breathed’s classic “Bloom County” strip. It will end just before the presidential election.