MapPoint 2009 was scheduled to ship July 21st, although a recent posting by a Microsoft blogger says the date will actually be September 1st.

The product is on the volume price lists.

MapPoint 2009 includes a host of new features and a whole new interface. It is a ribbon-ish or Fluent interface and gives the product a more modern look (some have said the old interface was from Windows 95, hehe).

You can now order MapPoint 2009 from MP2Kmag/MapForums for $269 which includes free shipping within the United States and a six month Premium membership on MapForums.com - the MapPoint and Virtual Earth discussion site.

Chandu Thota, formerly a Microsoft employee working with the Virtual Earth group, wrote a book Programming MapPoint in .NET.

Although the Virtual Earth section of the book is a bit dated, both the MapPoint Web Service and the MapPoint CD product sections (which together are about 9/10’s of the book) are still very relevant.

The book can be purchased new from the MapForums store at Map Store.

The forums are a key resource for learning about MapPoint and other Microsoft Geography products.

Both my husband and myself are Cher fans, so we are very glad to know that Cher is going to have live performance at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas from this May. As soon as we saw this news, we have booked our travels to Las Vegas, one thing is we really like her a lot, the other thing is that we would like to visit Las Vegas too since we have not been there for over 4 years. Apparently, Cher plans to stop in Vegas en route home to Hollywood after New York to meet all members of the Vegas media community and reveal further details of her spectacular. We both like her new look too, she always looks healthy and beautiful. I hope that she could include her song:” I Got You Babe!” on her new album, I really really like that song! I am sure Cher will bring lots of traffic to Las Vegas, so for those of you who would like to go to her shows, I recommend that you act fast! Cher tickets at Caesar’s Palace Las Vegas will be on sale soon at the end of this week. So if you want to have a good seat, better start to order now!

I never thought that shopping can make people tired, but this afternoon I went to Macy’s to try to get a few things for myself, maybe it’s Friday, there are so many people, you can not even find an available sales agent, I can’t imagine if I have gone out on the day after Thanksgiving, it must be more crazy!

I recently discovered Storage Pipe Online Backup, they do “Online Data Storage Protection”. While Mozy and Carbonite are really geared towards consumers, StoragePipe offers a more robust set up features for companies who have more rigorous data backup needs.

StoragePipe provides a lot of advanced features for companies in addition to online backups and recovery, ranging from an electronic archive service, business continuity, and an e-mail archive service.

In my view, the most valuable thing about StoragePipe is that not only do you have an offsite backup, but you also don’t have to deal with backup tapes or the capital requirements of your own backup server or servers.