I learned long ago (in Fawcette's off.ramp) that there are a few things that will get people to respond viscerally. Smoking, religion, and taxes. Glad to see they still work as ways to get people riled up.

Lenn Pryor thinks I'm a registered Republican. Well, I was a while ago, but not anymore.

InfoWorld's Jon Udell: Politically incorrect observations about Mac OS X and Windows.

Kraig Brockschmidt writes about the "name, fame, and guru game." Thanks to Don Box for that link.

John Robb is right. When I talk about webloggers, I'm talking about folks who 1) make it clear who they work for and 2) do their weblogging in public.

That said, I bet that Microsoft has the largest selection of internal webloggers (k-loggers as John likes to call them) of any company over 10,000 as well. Got an examples of companies that large who have more than 100 webloggers or kloggers? I sure would like to know about them.

Jonathan Alter of Newsweek writes something that strikes a chord with me: is it time for a new patriotism?

One thing I miss about California is the anti-smoking laws (in California you can't smoke inside in public places). Most of the time when I walk into a restaurant here in Washington it plain stinks. Really gross. I'd love to join up an anti-smoker movement here. And, no, your rights don't mean you get to do whatever you want in public. You walk around naked in public? Didn't think so.

Douglas Reilly points to a page that shows that not only are Americans not taxing gas like Europeans do, but they give SUVs tax breaks.

I was just over Rajesh's weblog and saw this interesting article about Commercializing Open Source.

Joe Friend and Maryam and I had lunch the other day. He says I'm really nice. That's really nice. The reason I'm linking to him is he's building a PC with his son and wanted some help on what to put into it. Also, he says that he knows of a Tablet PC Evangelist position that's open at Microsoft. Dang, why doesn't the Tablet PC team just hire the sister and brother team of Lora and Loren or Peter or Chris Coulter or the guys who run TabletPCBuzz or TabletPCTalk? Those folks do so much for the Tablet PC movement. I'm not on the Tablet team but on behalf of Microsoft, thank you to all of you!

Maryam and I rocked out to "Fuel" last night at the Experience Music Project. It was a standing-room-only-sold-out-concert event put on for TV (you'll see it soon on VH1). It was my first concert at the EMP. They filmed it in front of the big TV screen that wraps around an entire lobby as you enter the museum. Full bore light show and all. Fuel is no Nirvana, though (need to learn to use more dynamic range). But, they are loud and good. Definitely will go back to the EMP to see another concert.

The Star Wars kid is back, says CBBC Newsround. Well, not quite, but 83,000 people are trying to convince Lucas to put the kid in the next Star Wars. That can't be any worse than Jar Jar Binks, that's for sure.

Roy Osherove wants to know if PDC's content will be broadcast the same way that the TechED stuff was. I'll check again this week, but last I heard is that we wouldn't broadcast the PDC's content, sorry.