Where are all the Microsoft fanatics? Oh, they're around, and one of them has just named his daughter "Vista." If she had been a boy, she was going to have the initials DOS. No kidding.Two months ago, one of my colleagues posed a question about the location of the elusive Microsoft fanatics. One of the company's most important groups of fans is its Most Valuable Professional program, a group of Microsoft experts that use, evangelize, and champion the company's technologies.

Evidently, that evangelism sometimes reaches interesting levels, as MVP Bil Simser's daughter Vista Avalon Simser shows. If you're wondering, Avalon was the code name for the Windows Presentation Foundation, the graphical subsystem of .Net 3.0. If she had been born a boy, the first name would have been Dev, short for developer, and the initials would've been DOS. But alas, a girl "would have be an upgrade," and so Vista was born.

I wonder if there are any kids named iPod or Linux out there. There's at least one geek who named his kid 2.0 instead of Junior.

Of course, Vista's name opens itself up to endless humor, such as having her own personalized gear, future upgrades in the form of service packs, that unlike the operating system she was actually ahead of schedule, that when she turns 16 she'll have problems with drivers and crash, and of course this gem in the comments: "Vista is asking your permission to see her boyfriend. Allow or disallow?"