What's the best way to move Radio UserLand over to a new computer? Without breaking anything. Yeah, I've read the "backup Radio" site, but that's not what I want to do. I want to move my entire Radio license, copy, and all the data contained therein, to a newly-setup computer. I can't get it to work. Any tips?

Tonight I learned about MSDN's Hands On Labs, where you can try out Microsoft stuff remotely without loading stuff on your own machine.

A friend is writing a book about businesses and is looking for mission statements, particularly long and cumbersome ones. If you got some, let me know!

Darren Neimke and James Avery are discovering the Microsoft campus, since they are up here visiting the ASP.NET team. It's even better than that. They never show visitors the intranet here. It's overwhelming.

In fact, several employees told me to expect to feel overwhelmed for the first few months. I didn't understand what they meant. My brain hurts for the first time in a while. Like when you don't exercise and then you try to ski for a weekend.

Oh, I'm not losing all my Bay Area roots. Maryam and I will be flying back twice a month to visit Patrick and other family members. It's the downside of a split family, to be sure. But, it'll let me stay in touch with all the cool stuff going on down in the valley and elsewhere.

Well, I'm in awe of who I'm having meals with. Last night it was Robert Lantry. You've never heard of him. But he's written a bunch of stuff for the TabletPC. Today during lunch it was Steve Makofskey.

Dinner was Sara Williams, head of MSDN and Chris Sells, doing all sorts of Longhorn stuff for MSDN, and Tim Ewald. He works on the MSDN team too. These folks are all smart and we read their work every day.

Oh, cool, Sam Ruby is coming to town (Seattle area) and wants to have a blogger meetup. I'm in!

Dave Winer, in my comments, says "Actually that's the disconnect -- I'm not talking to Microsoft, but as usual Microsoft is acting like I am."

Oh.

Steve Gillmor, of CRN Magazine: "What if the economy never turns the corner?"

By the way, I think I'm gonna continue my policy of not posting to my weblog during work hours.

I figure that helps me keep some distinction between weblogging for fun (which is what this is), and the stuff I'm getting paid for. It's probably an artificial distinction, but oh well.

Randy Holloway: "Where's the buzz about Yukon (next version of SQL Server)"

I know the geeks here are very buzzed about Yukon, but the reality is that Windows is a lot bigger product for Microsoft than Yukon is, so the hype about a new version of Windows gets a lot louder than the hype about a new version of Yukon. But, don't mistake that for anything other than sheer market interest. Yukon rocks and it'll be another important thing to see at the PDC conference this fall.

I don't know about you, but I'm getting a vibe that the PDC will be one of the most important Microsoft conferences of the decade. Let's see, new OS. New SQL. New VS. And more. Does it get bigger than this?

Well, maybe. I'm going to Gnomedex. :-)

Dave Winer is trying to tell me (and all Microsofties) something but the message isn't coming across. I find myself agreeing with Adam Fitzpatrick -- his point is that if Microsoft comes out with a weblog tool that doesn't play well in the weblog world, it'll be ignored.

I agree that Microsoft's success in the weblog world is whether or not it'll work well with Radio UserLand, Blogger, and Moveable Type, not whether those three will be able to be made to comply with some new Microsoft standard.

But, I'm in a watching and learning mode.

Personally, I'm still trying to answer a co-worker's challenge: "why should I weblog?"

Ahh, I feel like I'm drinking from a firehose. It feels like I'm in college again. Microsoft has a corporate library. NEC didn't have one of those. Microsoft has an intranet that actually is interesting (and posts stuff about how badly Microsoft is perceived by the outside world). NEC didn't do that.

You know, my neurons are starting to fire again. First hour, my boss asked my opinion on something. Whoa.

Now, what I'm wondering is what effect this will have on my weblog. At NEC I never felt empowered. Indeed, I felt like I wasn't supposed to turn on my brain at work. So, I poured my creative energy into my weblog. I wonder what'll happen now that I'm encouraged to be creative at work too. One thing I notice already. I'm waking up earlier and excited. I never used to get up at 7 a.m.