Jeffrey Zeldman and I broke bread together tonight on board Steve Broback and Steve Roth's "never say never" boat. Zeldman and crowd was in town for Fawcette's Web Design World. Also on the boat was Joe Marini, Michael Ninness, Stephen Johnson, Katrin Eismann, Jim Heid, Carrie Bickner (Zeldman's new bride), David Blatner, Nick Usborne and son, and a few others I'm forgetting (blame it on the wine).

It was almost a "who's who" of the Photoshop and Web Design world.

I was planning to have a showdown of "Microsoft vs. the Web World" on Web Design standards and IE stuff, but sorry to disappoint. Broback brought out the wine and gave us a tour of Lake Washington in one of the most stunning evenings of the summer and the tech talk pretty much stopped there (although Stephen Johnson berated me for using JPEG mode on my Nikon, saying that the uncompressed "raw" mode was much better. I told him I couldn't tell the difference on my screen or on my prints, so I'm sticking with JPEG).

Highlights of the tour? When Zeldman was criticising the architecture and color choices of Bill Gates neighbors "that green shade has got to go." I think Zeldman has a future in interior design if his Web career goes south.

At one part where we turned geeky, I gave a little explanation of how Google gave me "Google Juice."

I told them out my friend Nick was able to get 25,000 visitors in a day a mere three weeks after starting his weblog. I started that fun out by pointing to his weblog. I have a Google PageRank of "seven" so when I pointed at his site, he got a good deal of "Google Juice."

Oh, and Broback threw down the gauntlet and said "I wanna see you match this $6 bottle of wine (Columbia Crest's 2000 Cabernet)." Steve Roth tasted it and said something like "that's pretty good, but I got a $7 French wine that's better." Indeed it was! (I forgot the name, though, cause I drank too much of the $6 Columbia Crest)

Now that's MY kind of party! Not to mention we went swimming in Bill Gates' lake. How many people get to say that they swam in Bill Gates' pool? Heh. That's quite a pool Gates has, by the way. The lake was 76 degrees. Several degrees warmer than it got all year last year.

Oh, I did learn one thing: Adobe is rumored to be preparing a new Photoshop that will run only on OSX and Windows XP.

David Coursey: "What Microsoft should do with all that cash." He suggests building a new operating system from scratch.

eWeek asks the question: "Is Don Box trying to take over the world?" OK, they didn't really ask that question, but close.

Internet Week: "Linux Desktops Not Good Enough for Information Work, Microsoft's Raikes Claims.

Computer Weekly: "Microsoft's Balmer Debunks Linux Cost Savings."

The Register: "So, what info does Windows XP send to Microsoft?"

Clemens Vasters: UDDI and OPML.

Karsten Januszewski: UDDI and RSS.

Political talk: MSNBC asks the question: "Is Howard Dean the one to beat Bush?"

Are the startups coming back? I found Convea today with an online demo here. Small startup, three people.

I do make mistakes. Last night I renamed Sarah Allen (formerly of Macromedia) and I also gave Eric Gunnerson a promotion. Grrr. And I wasn't even drunk. Although I've been having too much fun lately. I gotta start doing some real work.

Joi Ito is blogging from the Aspen Institute.

Macromedia's John Dowell: "usually we have to keep our mouths shut until very close to ship just because things can and do change as required."

Sun Microsystems says they are gonna steal all of Microsoft's developers. Hey, wait a minute, I thought they all had already switched to Java and we were trying to win them back.

I'm thinking of a new song titled "where have all the developers gone?"

The .NET Weblogs are going crazy over a new blog tool from Scott W (named .Text). Awesome!

Don Box was Slashdotted again.

OK, why is anyone searching Google for "Scoble and GAC." Yes, I get some weird Google search results in my referer page.