Dan Shafer takes John Robb on regarding blog tools. I sure am hearing a lot about this iBlog tool that a developer did in India. Hey, maybe MSN should hire that guy!

Personally, no one has found the mother lode of weblogging tools yet: corporate webloggers.

Joi Ito talks about the belief that technology puts people out of work. Of course it does, but then it creates whole new lines of work too. Hey, one of my relatives used to shovel coal into a steam engine. Anyone want that job today? I sure don't. But that job was destroyed by Diesel engines.

Today I spent the entire day with the future staring me in the face. It is a future with an infinite number of possibilities. But, yeah, it might put some Win32 programmers out of work. So be it. In 10 years Win32 programming will look about the same as shoveling coal into a steam engine.

The new world, though, will have more customers than our Windows XP-based one does today. It'll have people doing new things, and people building new worlds.

After answering a bunch of "I hate Microsoft" comments over the weekend, I needed today. I won't say more, though, cause I'd just be accused of PDC or Longhorn hype again.

Anyway, one little sense that there's still immense opportunity out there: my son Patrick told me his school in Petaluma does not have a computer lab and the teachers there don't use computers or have one on their desks. That's in stark contrast to the private school that he attended in rich Los Altos. So, why is it important for "rich private" schools to have computers, but "public" schools don't?

Any question where the future leaders will come from? Any question why parents will shell out $6000 a year to send their kids to private schools?

A friend asked me what the best place to learn about all the Microsoft news is and I answered "the site with the long name that you'll never forget." What do you think is the best site to watch Microsoft news? By the way, the guys who do that site do it all in FrontPage. Someone show them .TEXT!

Yeah, I know about Google News. I use them too, but I find that watchingmicrosoftlikeahawk.com is better. Plus they have an RSS feed.

My relative is a chess addict. I watched as he played online against other expert players in a timed chess match. All done in Flash. All on Pogo.com.

On Saturday Maryam and I were honored to meet David Temkin, CTO of Laszlo Systems. It was an informal meeting, just something fun I try to do with people I respect. (Translation: I'll meet anyone interesting who invites me).

A little story first. A month ago Maryam and I were getting our new house repainted. She was looking for color ideas and Tena Carter told her "check out Behr's new color picker."

Let me tell ya, that little color picker made Maryam's heart warm and she was interested to know that David and team had done that for Behr. Now you know what to blame for the goofy pinkish color in our bathroom.

Anyway, David painted a rather interesting vision of the future of the Web. Laszlo's system is an interesting one and joins Java, XML, and Flash together to deliver compelling, interactive Web services.

Laszlo is something I'm keeping my eye on. Oh, yeah, and Laszlo is coming to the PDC as well. I really wanna hear what they think about all the new stuff in Longhorn.

Is Silicon Valley on the mend? I'd say trends are going in that direction. Next week Apple will announce its employees will get a raise. First time in three years that's happened. And traffic on 101 was horrendous. Oh, and it was warmer in Seattle. Something is wrong in the world. (Seattle broke all heat records yesterday with a balmy 85).

So, what did you do all weekend? Well, answered all the Microsoft bashing over on Philip Greenspun's weblog. Don't believe me? Look at his comments!

Just to keep everyone on their toes I was posting from an Apple employee's house. Hey, at least you know I sleep with the competition now! Oh, worse yet, I'm related to the guy. He did a part of the G5. Don't wanna get him fired. If Steve Jobs knew he was letting a Microsoft employee sleep in his house things might get a little nuts.

Here's a little funny story. He doesn't yet have a wireless network. So, I show up at his house, not expecting to get online, and I say "hey, your neighbor has wireless!" My Windows XP-based Tablet PC automatically found the wireless network and hooked up without me doing anything. I said "did you know your neighbor is giving you free wireless?" He said "no."

Then we both proceeded to try to get his Mac PowerBook onto it. Funny story, here's a guy who helped engineer part of the G5 and he had never used a wireless network. Seriously. He said "I just use the ethernet at work and I didn't care about being online at home."

So, we both try to get onto the wireless. I used to be a Mac bigot and was expert with system 6 and 7, but now we're on X and I don't know my way around. I couldn't get it on. Found the browser though. Grrr. He couldn't either. We played around with the control panels, and couldn't make it work.

So, what did I do? What else? I IM'ed a friend back at Microsoft who uses Macs and asked him. Heh.

Geesh, what a perverted life I lead.

OK, I still haven't told you my whole weekend story. Aside, now that I'm thinking of perversion: two weekends ago I ate at Asia SF. They have transvestites who serve you. Seriously. What a great place. Seriously. Food was awesome and the fun was even better (they do a little show for you). Two of the servers are on the front page. If I didn't tell you they were originally men you'd never have guessed. We shared the place with not one, but six bachlorette parties! Man, I've never seen women do some of the things I saw that night. It took me two weeks just to save up the strength to write about them.

OK, back to this weekend. Friday night, we arrived at Oakland International Airport. Picked up our rental and drove to Petaluma, where my son and ex live. Then we drive from Petaluma to San Jose, to stay with Mr. Apple employee. On the way, we're listening to Bernie Ward on KGO Radio. What does he talk about for two hours? Yes, nothing but hamburgers.

So, what did we dream about all night? You guessed it. Hamburgers.

On Saturday morning we woke up and Maryam and I looked at each other and said "we have to have hamburgers."

Luckily everything was just falling into place on Saturday. We had planned to meet with Maryam's friends Sam and Patrick (Patrick works at Yahoo, note a tech theme here yet?) and they live about 10 blocks away from Bernie's favorite hamburger place. It's called Bill's Place and despite doing about 200 different Google searches I can't find a site for them on the web. It's at 2315 Clement St., San Francisco, CA 94121.

Luckily we find the grease lives up to Bernie's hype here. Definitely a candidate for a future weblogger meeting.

Oh, that reminds me, there's a geek dinner on Thursday evening at 6:30 p.m. at the Crossroads in Bellevue. Chris Kinsman, Keith Pleas, and Jeff Julian. Everyone is invited. Jeff's giddy to see the Microsoft campus.

Hey Jeff, it really is a bore. Now if you wanna see something come check out Don's band. I saw it last year at TechED and zowie! Of course, that reaction might have been helped out by the alcohol I had consumed earlier in the evening, so take that with a grain of salt and tequilla.

What else happened this weekend? Oh, yeah, saw some killer demos when I visited the Laszlo Systems guys. More on that in the next post since their stuff actually deserves its own post.

Hey, what's this? A Longhorn blog? From Scobleizer? Hmmm, hints of fun to come!

Thanks to Robert McLaws for doing these. More to come soon on this topic.

Sorry for taking so long off, but I had "weblog block." A quote from Don uncorked the whole thing. Get your aggregators ready!

Don Box, in answer to David Stutz: "Indigo is software." Hmm, another intriguing look inside Don's world.