Lawrence Oluyede: "Is there a "request for features" place on Microsoft website?"

Heh, probably more Microsoft employees just saw his request than if he did find a "request for features" spot on MS's website. But, does someone know where the official "wishlist" URL is kept?

Jeffrey Zeldman tells Dave to give up the anti-CSS attitude.

I agree. CSS makes my site quite a bit smaller than if it had font tags and table tags and all that crud mixed in. Plus, making my font different on every single page here means changing one line in one file.

Don't bash my site for being ugly. That's by design. I'm a lazy bastard and want my site to be readable, but not pretty. You want pretty? Go somewhere else.

Hmm, what's this RSS 2.0 spec?

A personal note: Maryam's mom lives with us. For two days now she's been cooking for the first of the "goodbye to Silicon Valley" parties (tonight's is for Iranian friends and family). Wow, does the home smell good. You all don't know the joys of being married to an Iranian family. They know how to cook and how to party. I'd try to describe all the dishes, but this blog isn't the place. I sure wish Maryam would start a blog and talk about the recipes. By the way, Maryam's mom doesn't speak English -- only Farsi. So, Maryam is my translator. Anyone need to hire a translator?

Now, consider if you are hiring project managers. Who do you hire? Someone who only has a decent resume, or someone who has a decent resume and someone who has a weblog like this? Well, duh! So, get writing!

A few people -- like Joshua over at the Boston Globe -- keyed into the fact that I got my job partly because of my weblog.

My number one advice to everyone around me who is laid off is "teach us something."

Why is this so important? Well, you are a brand. That's a Tom Peterism to be sure, but it's true.

How do you get to be better known in the industry? Teach!

Why do I think Don Box is the geek god of all gods? Because he got up on stage, time after time after time (sometimes naked even!) and taught thousands of people all sorts of things.

Listen, if you're laid off, you have a choice. Do I just sit on the couch and watch Oprah, or do I do something with my life?

Why not write a tip a day until you get a new job? Teach us something useful. Maybe nobody will point to it. Maybe no one will care. But, let's say you're laid off for three months, you'll have published about 90 tips.

At least you'll have something to look back on and feel proud about after you get your job. Now, compare that to watching Oprah. You haven't left any of your knowledge here. You haven't helped your "brand."

Oh, oh. Scott has YAAMR (Yet Another Anti Microsoft Rant). And you guys were wondering if I'd link to stuff like this after I worked for "the borg," right? ;-)

Hey, I've hit "OS-Rot" myself. I'm not gonna hide Windows' negatives under the carpet here, OK? But, on the other side, there are lots of people working hard to solve this problem. If you can provide us with details, that really helps us solve this and make the world a better place for everyone.

I wanna meet Sasha! I've always wanted to go to Switzerland. My mom grew up on the German/Swiss border, so I always feel an affinity toward the Swiss.

Rob Fahrni: "A Silicon Valley based company could buy so much more here in the San Joaquin Valley but they won't even consider it."

What, Rob, you want our industry to pave over yet another agricultural region? We already destroyed the world's greatest apricot and cherry orchard. Now you want us to write software instead of grow corn, cotton, and almonds? Watch what you wish for!

Personally, I wouldn't do well in the Central Valley. Too freaking hot. Great for growing things, but geeks need cold weather. Ever wonder why Microsoft writes more code than other places? It's all in the weather. I'm looking out at the pool right now, and boy is that hot tub inviting. Nice sunset. Nice weather. Dang, only 19 days of this left!

As for the Talking Moose? You guys are too funny! He's off in Montana on vacation.

Keith Pleas: "this week was VSLive Chicago. Pretty good turnout with lots of late registrations, which is encouraging for the industry."

Dotnet is picking up steam!

DotNet gurus: Julia is talking about opportunities to speak at user groups. Hey, maybe sometime I'll tell you all about the time I spoke in front of a user group and got a $10,000 a year raise! (One, by the way, that's still in effect and is a true story -- it's how I got my job at Winnov).

My lesson? Get up and speak! It's scary, yes, but the rewards...

Congrats to Charlie Arehart who just took a job as CTO at New Atlanta -- his role is to evangelize its BlueDragon product. Sounds like a good company and a good product (BlueDragon is a family of products for deploying ColdFusion® Markup Language (CFML) web applications onto the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE?) and Microsoft .NET platforms.)

God I hate the Web browser as a writing platform. I gotta switch back to using Radio's outliner. Or something.

I just had finished an entry about touring Fry's today during lunch with the two guys who started APress books: Gary Cornell and Daniel Appleman. Geeks to the core!

As we were walking in I turned to them and said "do you know what an honor it is to tour Fry's with you two?" They tried to downplay the compliment. But it was sincere. Dan started one of the only VB tools vendors to survive (Desaware) and they started one of the few book companies that's survived so far during the technical book industry shakeout.

During lunch we saw Al Nevarez. Heh, it's a new blogger hangout!

I'm playing with some new social software from Macromedia called "Intro." (Not public yet, but I didn't sign an NDA, so there). You'll hear a bit about it next week at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. It's cool, but is cool enough? More to come soon. I'm suprised Marc Canter hasn't talked about this yet. Marc, wanna get together this weekend to check it out?

Joshua Allen: "... Scoble has been assimilated!" (Joshua's a Microsoft employee and writes about "Radioactive Hiring" today).

Heh, if the borg meltsdown on May 12, you know what happened. :-)

Harold Gilchrist: "What is the role of the Valley today? Would I be as blown away today as when I visited the Valley 10 years ago or would people there have a hard time showing something new that I don't already know about or have seen on the Web."

My reply? There are still a lot of smart people concentrated here. But, one experience I remember from my trip to Microsoft. I saw three Segways in Seattle. I still haven't seen any here in the Valley. I wasn't sure what to make of that, but the Valley did used to be the place where you'd see cool stuff first. I think that's changing.