Congrats Dan and Carolyn Shafer for thriving through 24 years of marriage! That's not an easy thing to happen. Women who stay married to geeks should get some sort of reward.

How's this for a wacky media experience? I am reading Linux Journal (hi Doc Searls -- I snagged a free copy at the O'Reilly conference -- Doc is one of the editors of this journal) while listening to Carl Franklin's ".NET Rocks" show. This month's guest (it's like a radio show done by two geeks) is Paul Sherriff.

I just visited Andrew Nickels and Tim Thew -- of Global Event Services -- at the Santa Clara Westin. They are the IT crew for the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. Basically they are setting up all the wireless access points and computers for the conference.

Lots of Macs are being loaned to the conference by Apple. Good visibility for Apple there! You know, I sure wish I could have given the conference a bunch of NEC Versa LitePads. The Tablet is an emerging technology that won't be represented at this conference.

For those of you who've never been "behind the scenes" at a conference, it's like building a virtual company up, running it for four days, and then tearing it down. Folks like Nickels are pros at doing this. They have all the logistics figured out for getting lots of computers and networking gear in, getting it setup on time, and then moving onto the next event.

A personal note? Andrew is one of the nicest guys in the business. If you have a chance to see him at the show, say hi!

Al Nevarez realizes that when I say a pizza place is good, it really is good.

This is a cool way to block popup ads on sites you visit often with Internet Explorer/Windows.

Joe Bork's Red Pill Updates: "Reports that his arrival in Redmond would be accompanied by an honorary parade could not be immediately confirmed, but an imaginary spokesperson for Microsoft did say that Mr Scoble would be more than welcome to help himself to all the free pop he wanted."

Ahh, today's date is interesting to pot smokers, it turns out. Oh, did you know it was Hitler's birthday too? How did I learn this stuff? See, the Pirillos are weird people who have weird friends who know weird trivia facts like these. Yeah, I'm weird too. So there! Have a Weird Easter! I'm going back to bed.

An Iranian blogger was arrested this morning, says Hossein Derakhshan.

While I was at Marc Canter's house, we talked about OneBrick.org, which is a volunteer organization in San Francisco. They mobilize people (150 at a recent beer festival) via email, web, and mobile phones. It's great to see volunteer organizations trying to use all this stuff to make people's lives better.

Dave Winer says "Yes, it would be great to have Microsoft embrace OPML. But sell softly. And review the canons of conduct of the Linux Advocacy Mini-Howto."

Hmmm, you haven't seen some of my "you're-an-idiot-for-working-at-the-evil-empire" email from Linux fans, have you? But, I think the advice in the Advocacy Howto is indeed excellent.

Oh, I hear I'll be in the Seattle Times on Monday. Just a minor blurb, but I guess another geek moving into town is newsworthy. Hmmm. Hopefully I don't get quoted out of context. It's sorta a little test to see if I should trust the journalists up at the Seattle Times.

Yup, Dave, it's time for me to go to bed -- 3:45 a.m. on the West Coast is enough.

A thanks goes to Gretchen, for inviting us to her wine-and-cheese shindig last night. That's where I got the OneNote question -- now that I'm taking a Microsoft job, I am getting lots of interesting feedback about products all over the company -- I can't wait to start an internal weblog so that I can pass some of this stuff along, but in the meantime, I'll post stuff here.

Question that I got tonight for the Microsoft Office team: why doesn't OneNote support OPML? (Chris Pirillo asked me this last night).

My comment (keep in mind, I'm not yet speaking for, or working for Microsoft)? OneNote is the coolest product I've seen in recent times. But, this is a significant hole. OneNote is an outliner. OPML is an outliner format that's being adopted all over the place (look at Scripting News for the latest, including some .NET projects).

When I get my Microsoft job, I'll be advocating for putting in support for formats like OPML -- where they make sense. I'll try to get an answer to this question when I start my job on May 12, but I'm sure someone smart will answer this within 24 hours anyway.

Don Box isn't even close, by the way. I wish I knew everyone in the valley. But, I have been fairly successful in meeting some interesting folks. Last night I spent two hours with Marc Canter. It's the first time I really understood his business plan. Either that means that his plan is getting better, or I'm getting smarter. Well, I don't think I'm getting smarter, so...

Seriously, we decided not to talk about our meeting in depth, but you can get a good idea about what Marc's thinking about by reading Marc's weblog. Marc is one of the guys who started the company that became Macromedia. I can't wait to see if he can move his ideas from the business plan stage to stuff we all use to communicate with, and keep track of, each other.

Later in the evening I met Kevin BjÖrke, developer evangelist for NVidia. We talked about the movie market (NVidia supports them very strongly, despite their small sales potential -- simply because that's where many of the great research and "status" comes from).

Don't ask why I'm reading a history of toilets on the Plumbing Supply site, but I was just telling my friend Chris that I wanna own a business like the Plumbing Supply one. I met the owner a while back (I wrote about him back in 2001) and he has quite a nice gig going.

Don Box: "[Scoble] seems to know everyone in the valley. Maybe he can convince the brothers Fry to open an outpost near campus.

Heh, John Fry actually gave me a tour of the Sunnyvale store on the day it opened. I asked him about why he didn't expand faster and he said he needed to grow his business controllably and so that the experience wouldn't go downhill.

Fry's isn't nearly as big a deal today as it was back in the 1980s. Back then you couldn't get a lot of the stuff that Fry's sold anywhere else. Fry's is a major reason the valley really took off in the 80s.

By the way, the day that John gave me a tour was the first day Fry's sold $1 million in one day in one store. They had 80 checkout counters going at the same time and you still needed to wait 20 minutes to get to a counter. Friday they had something like half of the counters going.