This may have been a re-run given the recent writer strike, but it was new to me.

Last night, I came upstairs from my office where I had been toiling over the Entity Framework book I am writing (will need to blog about that here!) and my husband and niece were watching C.S. I. Miami which I don't watch very often.

Two CSIs comb through some rubble at the scene of a bombing and one finds a little SIM card from a cell phone. He takes it back to the office and places it on a table and the table glows around the SIM card. I said to my niece "hey, that's a Surface computer!". Next thing I know, a list of telephone numbers is displayed on the screen and another agent (was she paid by Microsoft?) says "hey, you really are getting the hang of that Surface computing".

Bingo!

Now. having had a really awesome upfront and personal demo of the Surface when I was at Microsoft in December, I don't believe that any random SIM card would be able to do this. Though we did see a few phones placed on the surface which then displayed all kinds of info about the phone (mostly sales info) and the Surface showed us all of the songs (and how we can buy them) when a Zune was placed on it. SO it's not far off.

I recently wrote an {End Bracket} piece about this for MSDN Magazine (not quite yet published) and how I will no longer laugh my butt off when I see the crazy things they do on CSI. Instead, I will think, hmm, that's a pretty good idea, even if they had to fake it. And that's exactly how I responded why I saw the Surface last night.