Wired Mag: "The year's best gear so far."

John Porcaro is heading off to New Orleans for a big Microsoft employee event down there. He's asking for tips on what to do. Dude, you definitely MUST visit Preservation Hall. Make a commitment to do that. Sit on the floor up by the band. It'll be hot. Sweaty. Crowded. But it's the real deal and it's like being in church. You can drink yourself to death anywhere else. But no place else has the musical heritage of New Orleans.

If you can, take Ernie the Attorney out for drinks. He'll take you to all the good places in New Orleans. He lives there.

Oh, and whatever you do, don't tell your wife you're having a great time down on Bourbon Street. Tell her instead "Steve Ballmer needed me to rework this demo, so I'm staying in my hotel room tonight." Trust me on this.

Marc Canter has talked me into using more new software/services lately than anyone else (today he pointed at Brian Dear's weblog where he details much of the social software scene). I've joined tons of "social software" networks. But, I hate them all. I just don't get what they add that weblogs combined with Google combined with email combined with instant messaging don't already do. Friendster, et al, just don't float my boat. I still am not sure why, though. Until I figure out why, I'm going to keep trying it, though. It's sorta like my hatred of eggplant. I don't hate it enough to not keep trying it, but whenever I try it, I realize I don't like it.

Anil Dash says he's frustrated a bit by people asking him for betas of Six Apart's Type Pad. Heh, I get a lot of email like that asking for news or betas of Longhorn. I look at it this way, though. Folks who are clamoring to try out your product are going to be your best evangelists. Be happy you have them! I can't wait for the day that I have 1000 people a day asking me for Longhorn betas.

I have Active Words setup with a script for the answer, just in case.

Harvey Kirkpatrick wants me to run for President. Um, sorry, I've inhaled. And my wife says I sorta look like Bill Clinton, except I have no cigar.

Ximian has a preview of what its' next Linux "evolution" UIs might look like.

Robert McLaws is a Strongbad fan. Strongbad is good. Good for nothing.

Last night I took Maryam to her first baseball game ever (she has been in the United States 17 years and never saw reason to go). Before the game she was grumpy. Not happy about being pulled to a game. Now she's a fan! Of course, I needed to bribe her with cotton candy, peanuts, drinks, etc. "It's all about eating and drinking," she says.

Of course, it helps that we had nice seats, thanks to a Microsoft mailing list where employees sell their tickets to each other, and the Mariners won again.

The real reason I think Maryam's a fan? I think she thinks Ichiro is cute. She won't admit it, though.

Roy Osherove is holding a desktop contest and it's mighty interesting to see all the various ways people decorate their desktops. I donated $30 of my own money in the Microsoft company store (which goes a lot further than you might think) for one of the prizes. I know this was a blatant attempt to try to get me to put my Longhorn desktop up, but no such luck. I even switched back to XP when the photographer from the PI visited me 1.5 weeks ago.

Heh, I see that Roy has pointed to another meme to the blogosphere: he found a weblogger chain letter where the weblogger wants to interview webloggers or something like that.