Last week, my husband and I spent part of the holidays with his family. On this side of the family I have 3 teenage neices and a teenage nephew. I've known them all for about 10 years but never really connected with the nephew.

That changed this year thanks to Microsoft.

At one point when we were all sitting around talking about not much of anything, my nephew mentioned somehting about beta testing the new version of Live Messenger. He mumbled it in that way that teens tend to. But I didn't miss that little piece of info and started asking him some more questions about it. It turned out that he's letting Microsoft track his use of the application so they have a better understanding of how people interact with it.

Even though he was beeing teenager-cool about it, I could definitely sense his pride.

After lunch everyone headed out to go hit the post-Christmas sales. I stayed in to work on my book edits and my nephew also hung around, glued to his PSP.

I asked him if he had ever seen PopFly and his answer was no. So we sat in front of the computer, I logged in, and quickly did a Facebook friends photo gallery mashup. He definitely thought that was way cool.

Then I browsed over to XNA Creators Club to show him about writing games with XNA and explained that he can get Visual Studio Express and XNA for free and start learning.

He was really excited about this and started realizing that his elderly aunt was pretty darned cool after all. The icing on the cake was browsing to my blog post of the picture with Bill Gates from last year's Mix 'n Mash event. But it didn't end there.

It turns out that he had Visual C# 2005 Express and a book on the topic. "A red book with a big guy on the cover", he told me. That easily narrowed it down to WROX, so out of curiousity, I cruised over to WROX's site and we looked at books. As we went thorugh and I pointed out many of my friends on the covers of the book, he was a little astonished. It was funny because these are just the geeks I know, but my nephew's perspective was different than mine.

So when my husband and I left my mother in law, I left my nephew with a list of links - PopFly, XNA Creator's Club, VS Express Editions downloads, as well as a big grin on his face and a new geeky friend he can brag about to his classmates.