Jorgen Thelin asks "How Many Starbucks Does A Town Need?"

He's about to find out, because he's moving to Redmond to join Microsoft.

Seattle has a ton of coffee places. I've been on some street corners with three different coffee places on one corner.

Hey, Jorgen, when you get into town, I'll take you to the first Starbucks (it's in the market downtown) but really, you'll want to learn where Victors is in Redmond. That's my favorite so far.

Now that I live in Bothell (hey, I live in Bot Hell, I always think of that whenever I join Joi Ito's IRC chat room since they are always playing with bots there) I wonder if there's a good coffee place nearby my home. Driving 30 minutes for good coffee isn't my idea of fun.

I just got back from answering Microsoft support phone calls. Dozens of Microsoft employees are being trained every hour to help out because of the Blaster worm. Support call volume is extraordinarily high. I hear we're still getting more calls than our trunk lines can handle (translation: some customers are still getting busy signals). I helped five people in three hours. Yeah, I'm slow, so shoot me. Helping users isn't easy.

Actually, it wasn't that bad. The customers were nice (although the trainers prepared us for irate ones). The support folks were great. I sat in a call center with a few dozen computers. Each room had an expert in case you ran into troubles. They have a nice database so you can leave notes about the customer and their problem, in case they need to call back again (I lost a connection with one, and the database saved me, cause I was able to call her right back).

On the front of the room they ran a screen that showed how many calls were waiting, and how long they had waited to get to me. I don't want to talk about those numbers, but they weren't good.

Note to Microsoft employees, they are still looking for volunteers (email me and I'll give you the contact name, if you don't already have it). They need more employees to get trained and to answer phones for at least the next week. The support center will be open late too.

One thing I learned is how to keep a system from shutting down. Start/Run/type "shutdown -a". The biggest reason people were calling, it seems, is because they couldn't run the fixes because their machines would keep shutting down.

Other than that, mostly we were just helping customers through the instructions on the Microsoft page about the Blaster worm.

Bill Gates: "Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software."

Heh, how times have changed.

Here's a story about the Homebrew Computer Society:

Memoir of a Homebrew Computer Club Member.

EETimes: "ATI could reap $35 million in Xbox royalties in 2005."

CRN: "Microsoft Reportedly Testing Security Technologies."

Brad Wilson takes on the mystery behind WinFS, but I love Chris Sells' answer: "WinFS is lots more than that."

The Financial Express has an interview with Chennai .Net user group's founders. They have gone from 10 members to more than 1,100 members in about a year.

I'm a big believer in user groups. Silicon Valley really got its dominance through users' groups. When I visited the Smithsonian, artifacts from the Homebrew Computer Society were prominently displayed. That's the group that Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs participated in.