Speaking of Tablet PC, Wild Bill's Software is knocking the socks off of tablet users who've seen their stuff. Check out their demos.

AustralianIT: Tablets will take over.

This is funny! Here's a "Smack the Penguin" game getting the rounds inside Microsoft. What's your best score?

Stevie Case: Women in gaming. The best solution to these challenges is more involvement by women in the design and creation of games on the whole.

Jian Shuo Wang asks What if we combine Webcam, Windows Media Technology, GPRS and a SmartPhone together?

Here's the answer.

Eric Gunnerson revisits C#'s destructors and finalization. I like that he's answering questions from the community about C#. Do you?

O'Reilly's Ian Griffiths: Inside XAML.

There's another virus heading around (named Bagle). Brian Johnson covers what to do.

David Isenberg covers "What WTF means."

Michael Gartenberg: "the real problem, is that Microsoft has not done a really good job evangelizing folks to get onto XP."

If that's true, how do we fix that?

CNET News.com: Bush immigration plan could affect techies.

Like I said, offshoring and protection of American jobs will be a big campaign issue.

One advantage of immigation plans? Workers on American soil pay taxes and buy things from other Americans. Workers overseas don't.

Hmm, here's a .NET app that converts IE's favorites to OPML.

What is Niobe? It's a prototype project that allows managed, smart client add-ins to be developed for Microsoft Outlook 2003.

Bink reports that Microsoft is a finalist for LinuxWorld award. Oh, I bet that just goes over like oil and water.

I'm gonna get a SPOT watch. I sure hope this doesn't happen! Heh.

Chad Dickerson of InfoWorld and me are co-hosting a discussion on "Enterprise Applications for Weblogs and Content Syndication Technologies" on Thursday. Chad discusses our RSS Winterfest session here. Looking forward to it.

I'll also be on a panel discussion tomorrow. Should be interesting. I'd love your feedback!

Edgar Sánchez reports that next Thursday he'll be hosting the "Best ASP.NET Practices for Shielding Your Site from Hackers.

Did Microsoft make everyone with a weblog an MVP? Here James Avery reports on who has become a Microsoft MVP. Want to be an MVP? Help people learn Microsoft technologies. The current MVPs will be on campus the first week of April. Everytime I talk to a Microsoft employee I ask "are you doing anything for the MVP summit?" and invariably the answer is "yes." I wonder, should I do some fun bus trip for the MVPs? (Inside info, I used to do bus trips to various places everytime Fawcette held an VBITS conference in San Francisco. These trips were popular and formed many life-long friendships). Anyone want to go to Mount Rainier?

MSNBC's Jerry Nachman died, JD Lasica reports. Here's the MSNBC report.

Yahoo asks "What will the PC of the future look like?"

The question is, how far into the future?

Damn, I should have asked for one of these for my birthday: I love RSS T-Shirt.

Thanks to Jeremy Zawodny for that one.

Here's the "operating system sucks-rules-o-meter" Hey, where's Longhorn?

Matthew Mastracci: Twice this week I've seen a situation where a popular blogger has been pestered by his readers to change the content of his blogs.

I get pestered too. You can't post several times an evening without pissing someone off. Hey, you wanna control what gets written about? Get your own blog. I'll subscribe. Maybe.

ABC News reports on MUTE, a new P2P music sharing app that supposedly can't be traced. We'll see how true that is.

BBC News: Why digital cameras = better photographers.

My rules of getting better pictures?

1) Get closer.

2) Get closer.

3) Shoot until people stop posing.

4) Get closer.

5) Are you touching the subject? You're not close enough.

6) Touching yet? OK, now you can back up and get some other shots.

Oh oh. IBM is helping people move from Windows NT to Linux. Darn, if they won't upgrade to XP, what makes them think they'll move to Linux?

However, Jean van Laarhoven, systems manager for part of Amsterdam's city government and a Windows NT user, says that despite Linux's purported benefits, he's sticking with Microsoft.

Like I said, I wish them all the luck in the world, but if they won't move to an OS with better font handling, more security, better performance, more laptop features, than Windows NT, what makes you think they'll move to Linux?

Did you realize I'm now reading more than 1200 RSS feeds?

I can't keep it up. Over the next few days I'm gonna work at getting rid of about half of the feeds I'm reading. I learned I can handle 700 feeds, but not 1200.

Feeds.scripting.com still says that I am only reading 703, though.

Dave Hyatt at Apple talks about why Safari has draconian XML error handling and that Windows' Internet Explorer isn't.

By the way, IE needed to view pages that Netscape's browser would read -- back in the browser war days. It'd be nice to see the world move to a different system that's stricter. I don't know if I'll live to see that day, though. People don't tend to move from something that works to something that's perfect, but that requires work.

Thanks Marc Canter for the birthday wishes! It's weird seeing pictures of myself in action. That series was taken at the BOF at the PDC. I didn't even know he was taking pictures as I helped Robert McLaws get the audio working.

I don't like bowling, but I'm going to the Seattle Meetup anyway (Wednesday/tomorrow night).

GEEK DINNER ALERT

Anita Rowland has all the details.

Yes, I know Rory Blyth is on .NET Rocks. Yes, I know he said that I'm a "must read." Yes, he is funny. Yes, Roy, you're right. This one doesn't have much content, but it still is a good listen.

I can't wait for tomorrow night, cause I'm gonna meet Rory at the Seattle Meetup! More on that in a moment.

Speaking of Canadians, here's a funny page that tracks American myths about Canada. Oh, geez.

I signed up for a couple of feeds from PubSub (you can enter a search term and have it email you with new search returns). But, how is this different than Feedster?

By the way, Feedster brings back interesting stuff for "Longhorn" but not interesting stuff for other terms. How does Feedster's engine work?

Howard Rheingold: "Thierry, Lessig, Weinberger, Rheingold: ALL wrong?"

My take? Isn't this like arguing who owns all oxygen? To me, it's just a way to transmit sound waves from my mouth (which I do own) to your ears (which you own). Yeah, there are places where oxygen is owned (in a chemical plant, for instance -- or in military jingo of owning "airspace.").

That said, we really need to move to IPv6. There aren't enough IP addresses and until we move to IPv6 the world will seem like we're all breathing a very limited supply of oxygen.

I had a bunch of interesting meetings today. One was with Paul Thurrott and his colleague Joseph Jones. They told me that there actually are permalinks for WinInfo, but that they are hard to find. Here's the page where you can find the permalinks. Cool, I'll keep that in mind. Now if only we could have a RSS feed?

AustralianIT: ".NET takes lead for health industry."

Thanks to Frank Arrigo for that one.

O'Reilly's Adam Turoff gives us the State of Perl: Perl certainly is alive and well."

Heh, I was over at Jeff Key's weblog and saw this quote from Intel's CTO: "Intel CTO Pat Gelsinger predicts that by 2010, the chips at the heart of PCs will have 10 billion transistors, run at 30 GHz and process 1,099,511,627,776 instructions per second."

Hey, that probably will run Longhorn pretty darn well!

I knew this week would be interesting when Dana and Alan gave me a bit of heck on behalf of a 17-year-old Canadian. This was on Saturday night. They told me how a local kid (they live near Vancouver) was being sued by Microsoft.

When I got home, there were a few emails from my readers saying "hey, what happened to the new warm and fuzzy image at Microsoft?" There were even more notes on various folks weblogs. You know the story, right? Mike Rowe was the kid's name. MikeRoweSoft.com is his website. The Seattle PI's Microsoft Weblog has the details if you missed it.

I almost ripped off a blog rant on Sunday telling our lawyers off, but one thing I've learned is "do no further harm" when there's an "UPRE" (Unplanned PR Event) going on. So, I decided to wait, but I did send an email to our marketing and PR guys. I'm glad that within a few hours they decided to react. (I wasn't the only one who emailed them).

So, why did this happen? Well, for that, I go back to my college years. In journalism law class I learned that trademarks must be vigorously and consistently defended, otherwise the owner of that trademark will lose it. I remember getting a letter from a lawyer for the company who makes "Kleenex brand tissue" when I was editor on the school paper. We had used their trademark in a story, but had used it in a generic sense. Something like "the juror cried into her kleenex." They don't like that, cause that turns their trademark into a generic term.

So, anyway, I understand why our lawyers go after people with names that are close to, or sound like "Microsoft." (And "sounds like" is important, since many URL's get said on radio or TV). It's unfortunate that we went after a 17-year-old named "Mike Rowe," though. I'm sorry that happened to you Mike.

By the way, if something like that happens in the future, do give me a chance to get it fixed before running to the press. You never know what a blogger can get done on your behalf unless you try.