Wow, Joel Spolsky showed up in my comments. Interesting discussion.

Paolo Marcucci is working on Picture Blog software for .NET. Cool.

My wife just got a Sanyo picturephone from Sprint. It's small and cute. Cost $165. We'll setup a photoblog. I'll take it to Microsoft and send some pictures. What would you like to see? Don Box' office?

The Simple Guide to A-List Bloggers parody has been updated. Is anyone safe? Includes updates on Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Reynolds, Lawrence Lessing, Jeff Jarvis, Clay Shirky and Cory Doctorow. Note: I didn't do this parody. The guy who did still wants to remain anonymous.

Jeffrey Zeldman pointed to me and decried that IE won't be updated for at least two years. Jeffrey: it's worse than that. You're gonna be stuck with IE's "issues" for at least three years after that. Why? Most people don't upgrade their browsers as soon as something new is out (look at how many people are still using IE5). Is what you're asking for an automatic update capability that's built into the OS and that forces users to keep up with the latest technology?

Oh, now I know the weblog world has gotten too weird. John Dvorak is doing a "blog inside a blog" over at BoingBoing (look over at the right side of the page, that's Dvorak. He's guest blogging there.) What is Dvorak up to? I guess we'll learn at Gnomedex.

Phil Wolff has "blogging headlines from the future." My wife liked these funny headlines.

Mike McBride says his wife critiques his weblog too, but that his wife also has a weblog so he can critique hers. I don't see what Mike's wife would be able to critique, though. His small-business IT focused weblog is one of my favorites.

CNN is reporting on a new kind of memory chip called MRAM. The article says that it should let computers start up faster, among other benefits.

Calling all .NET Remoting geeks: Ingo Rammer will be hosting a chat today at 11 a.m. Pacific Time. If you're a .NET developer, check out Ingo's weblog.

Eric Norlin: "I wonder if the folks inside of Microsoft have studied the history of BankAmericard."

Real interesting read about the state of Microsoft Passport.

The most important news of the day is that there's a Fry's Electronics opening up soon in Renton, which isn't too far from Seattle or Microsoft's Redmond campus.

I smell a weblogger tour. Usually the Fry's openings include free hot dogs and soft drinks. Plus really long lines.

Marc Canter says "Now we get to see how well Mr. Scoble can achieve 'reach-out' into the developer community."

He points to an article on CNET that shows that SourceID made their code work on .NET. This brings the Passport competitors to .NET. Hey, ready for Longhorn baby!

Marc, we gotta get you to the show I'm not allowed to talk about anymore. :-)

A few people have written me begging me to add a home link to my weblog. Hmm, I wonder where the best place to put that would be.

Frank Koehntopp responds to my point that Microsoft's security culture has changed with this: "Robert, I don't think that's "public image" - it's just that the products don't reflect this culture. I'm ready to believe they are trying their best, but it just isn't showing yet."

Frank: have you looked at Windows Server 2003 yet? It's far far better in security than any other Windows version I've ever seen. It's not perfect, but it is a lot harder to attack that than previous versions of Windows. Remember, Microsoft is the most attacked company in the world. We care about security bigtime here.

Charles Cook tells me"don't mention the PDC."

Well, it's what I'm working on, so I guess I'm going overboard -- although we're trying to find ways for folks who can't make it to still participate. I'll find something else to talk about, though. Oh, are you going to Gnomedex? Heh.

Roy Osherove is holding a desktop contest. Sounds like fun. No, I'm not gonna send you a picture of the latest Longhorn build. Heh.

A friend is raving about Ximian's new Linux Desktop. Here's an interview with Ximian's co-founder. Oh, geez, there goes my "only writes about Microsoft PR stuff" bumper sticker. Sigh.

NewsMonster claims it's the cross-platform weblog manager with a brain. Yet another aggregator I gotta check out. Is anyone doing reviews of all these new aggregators? Anyone want to work together on a project to keep track of them and try to do an unbiased review? One disadvantage, newsmonster requires Mozilla.

Harvey Kirkpatrick tells me to check out ITopik, which will organize blogs/RSS feeds by topic.

Some of you might not know that I'm a technical evangelist on the Longhorn team. So, you might expect me to be gung ho about Longhorn, right? Well, I am, but I really don't want most people to get excited about it yet. I was prompted to write about this by this analyst report on Jupiter's Microsoft Monitor weblog. It is right: Longhorn is too early in its development stage for most people to worry about.

Longhorn (code name for the next version of the Windows client) is about two years away from being released (and that's if everything goes according to plan -- this is still software and software manufacturing is still hard to put on a schedule, especially when you have thousands of employees working on it).

So, who should get excited about Longhorn today? ISVs. If you're an ISV that is going to build software for release in 2005, you'll want to learn everything you can about Longhorn as soon as you can. Why? Because it'll be a competitive advantage for you to have your software done and on the retail shelf the day that Longhorn ships. So, if you're at a company like Adobe, Intuit, AOL, Symantec, UserLand, Google, SixApart, etc, you'll want to learn about Longhorn now.

If you're an enterprise IT guy, a corporate developer, or Web guys like the folks who build Nickelodeon.com, for instance, you'll want to start paying attention and learning things about the Longhorn wave of stuff that'll come out -- it'll be important for your careers to keep up to date on the latest stuff.

That's what the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference will be about this fall (PDC). See ya there!

Mike Strock is raving about Vonage -- a new phone service that for $40 a month gives you unlimited calls within the United States.

Michael Gartenberg asked me to give him feedback about Jupiter Media's Microsoft Monitor weblog. I wanna be as transparent as possible, so instead of answering him back in email, I figured I'd give him my feedback in the glare of the public eye.

I like it.

Will it make folks hungry for Microsoft information ignore sites like NeoWin, ActiveWin, WinSuperSite, Mary Jo's Microsoft Watch, Watching Microsoft Like a Hawk, or others (look at the bottom of the Hawk site for a bunch of links)? Nah, but so far it gives another interesting viewpoint on the 55,000 people who are working at Microsoft. I'm looking forward to more.

Just so folks like Timo can't say I'm 100% Microsoft PR focused, check out this link: "Reasons to switch to Mozilla Firebird." This is an excellent example of great evangelism. It got me to download it and try it out. And I work for Microsoft. Imagine that!

Roy Osherove just told one of the mailing lists I'm on about a new photo hosting site (PhotoNavy) that isn't charging yet.

I just don't see how this kind of site can stick around long-term. I have 12gigabytes of photos. You want me to put them all up here? How much money does this guy have? Imagine the bandwidth charges for all that. Imagine the hard drive charges if tons of people put up that much. Now you understand why PBase is charging now.