I use VirtualBox for building a test environment and it works very well. Also the graphics acceleration worked fine for the games that I tested with. Parallels Workstation 4.0 Extreme looks interesting, but the only "Certified hardware platform" is a HP Z800 Workstation, which costs $2000 to $5000. Add in $400 for the Parallels license and that gets to be a bit steep. Plus the announcer on the video sounds like he is trying to sell you a used car.

There was a video showing the features of Excel Web App, Powerpoint Web App, and Word Web App here on channel 9: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/dtzar/Office-Live-Applications-First-Look/ They look a little slow and not as responsive as Google Docs, but they do have more feature. Interesting to see the final product.

I have a Hauppauge WINTV HVR 1600 digital TV tuner card running on a Windows 7 RC x64 box with 6 GB of memory. Works fine in GBPVR. I did however have issues getting the onboard RAID controller working, but thats another story.

When Resolver Systems started their $25,000 competition for the best spreadsheet examples for Resolver One, I saw it as a great opportunity to learn IronPython and play around with a new program that looked interesting. I spent some free time having fun coding in a new language, and the Texas Holdem Monte Carlo Hand Evaluator worksheet that I made ended up being pretty useful. Oh... and it won one of the rounds, so I see it as time very well spent :-P

Now this competition is a bit more structured and has much less of a "fun" factor, but it still is a good incentive to look at the data that is available and try and think of new ways to visualize or use it.

I recently got a Logitech MX Revolution mouse, which has made it much easier to open and close a large number of webpages. It has a total of 11 buttons, and the SetPoint software lets you add customized keystrokes for different applications. My current setup is:

=Middle Click (Scroll Wheel) - force opening links in a new window in IE or Chrome
=Scroll Wheel Sweep Left - switch tabs (move left one tab)
=Scroll Wheel Sweep Right - switch tabs (move right one tab)
=Jog Dial Back - go back (same as browser back button)
=Jog Dial Forward - go forward (same as browser forward button)
=Jog Dial Click - close the current tab or active window (ctrl+w or alt+F4 depending on active program)
=Touch to Search button - re-open the last closed tab in Chrome using Ctrl+Shift+T (I LOVE THIS FEATURE!!!)

This makes it a breeze to open a bunch of new tabs and then flip through and close the ones you don't care about.

I did something similar for a senior project at the University of Utah that was sponsored by Micron. Our goal was to build a testing platform for NAND Flash memory, which would allow vendors to test the memory and analyse the failure characteristics. We never fully finished, but we did get a spot presenting at the 2008 FLASH Memory Summit.

I started using the free time management software from RescueTime.com a few months ago and have found that it helps keep me from venturing too far off track during the work day. I had previously been using a small app built by the Software Jedi (my hero! I still use it for making my time cards), but it is buggy and lacks any real analysis features (still not bad for being built in one day).

I was planning on building a bunch of macros and pivot tables in Excel for it when I ran across RescueTime, which is free for personal use and actively being developed. It keeps track of all the websites and applications you use on your computer and sends this data to their servers to let you tag each item as productive or not-productive. From all this tagging you get a bunch of pretty pictures saying how much time you spend working and how much you waste reading web comics or Slashdot. They even have a flash widget you can add to a blog. Haven't tried the Team edition yet, but it has definitely helped me keep from wasting too much time.