Well, I won't be posting until Sunday. I'm off to take a vacation -- and continue the Iranian new year celebration. See ya on the other side.

A last-minute link: Bob Frankston writes about Tablets. (Hanan Cohen sent that along).

Chris, the 16-year-old, just found out that Chris Pirillo is listening to him. "My, all these celebrities," he says. "I've seen him on TechTV."

Now I have Chris Pirillo listening to Chris, the 16-year-old, playing piano. Let's see, that's three "Chris's" in IM all on the screen at once. Sorry, can't give you the link to the Web service. We'll put too much strain on his DSL line.

Hey, there's rewards for joining my IM world and getting Scobleized.

Well, I feel mighty digital tonight. I have three IM sessions open. One is to my friend Chris, who's talking to me about ActiveDocs -- he tells me it's the killer vertical-market app for the Tablet.

In window #2 I have Christopher Putnam, the 16-year-old. He's showing me his web service, which lets his friends listen to him as he plays the piano. I visit a URL, and my browser pops up a window with a Windows Media Player control embedded on it. Then my speakers start playing. It's him practicing the piano! Wow, he's pretty good.

I'm freaking impressed, so I IM up Sean Alexander, program manager of Windows Media stuff. He's impressed too. Then .Sean pulls up sonograms of his unborn son. I really like it when people live their jobs. I hate getting sold a line of marketing crud during the day, and then finding out that they don't use their own stuff at night.

Speaking of which, I am tooling around the Windows Media Plugin Site right now. There's some cool stuff there to add onto Windows Media player. Sean's day job is to run this site and he'd like feedback on ways to make it better.

An Iranian geek! Hey, Maryam, check this out. It's in Farsi and he points to me.

More MSDN goodies: heeeeerrrrrrreeeeeee'ssss the .NET show.

The folks who developed the .NET Framework, CLR, and languages just posted a chat session on MSDN. It's a revealing look into some of the things they are planning on doing for the next three years.

So far we've lost 22 military folks the TV blurts. We've probably killed hundreds of thousands of people already. What about them? Oh, I forgot, they are on the other side so they don't count. I'm so sick of seeing the biased one-sided reporting I'm seeing. You know, CNN, you really should have gotten reporters "embedded" with Iraqi troops too. I'm turning off the TV. It's just too depressing. And people wonder why I'm weblogging more lately?

I don't pray for peace, by the way. I pray for a world where everyone has a weblog. That's the day when we won't see this nonsense.

Question: what's more biased? Al Jazeera or CNN (or any of the American TV)? I can't tell the difference anymore.

Marc Canter points us at the O'Reilly and Kapor comments at PCForum. Common open source memes are discussed here. Particularly the meme that says that open source brings us better software. I'm not so sure about that. So far have we seen anything dramatically better about Open Source software? I'm playing with Lindows and other distributions and so far I can't stand using them. I keep playing, though. My Silicon Valley geek pass will expire if I don't use Linux at least a few hours a month.

Sean Gallagher: "it doesn't look like math is a family value right now."

I've been following JD's blog on New Media and he's really hitting stride with the war stuff going on. Lots of good links.

Chris Pirillo sent me to the feedroom. Oh, that'll keep me busy for a while.

Over the weekend I predicted that soon Silicon Valley's VCs would start investing in software again. I just didn't realize how soon. Jabber got $7.2 million. That's good enough to get them to 2005 if they spend wisely. One of my friends asked me on IM: "why?" He thought that IM was a bad investment. I disagree. I think it will actually get more important and that the sector has been stagnant since AOL bought ICQ. Now that AOL is getting to be less and less relevant, that problem goes away, opening up opportunities elsewhere.

Scott Johnson wonders how long it'll be before Microsoft charges ISV's to sell software for Windows. I wonder what the deal is at Office Depot. Of course, does anyone yell when Apple opens a chain of stores and controls everything sold inside?