Got the geeks here at the house. It's geek movie night. We're watching anime.

Dave Massy and I just got out of an interview with Kam VedBrat. Who the heck is this guy? Just another unknown Program Manager? Nope. He's running the team that's designing the visuals in next version of Windows.

You know. The icons. The animations. The windows (small "w").

If you're using Windows in 2010, you'll be looking at work his team is creating today.

So, what's influencing him? I asked. Expensive sports cars. Fashion designers. And a recent trip to the Taj Mahal.

I notice he has one of those 200 dpi IBM monitors too. And a Toshiba Tablet PC. Ahh. One of the Longhorn themes: supports different resolution devices.

Anyway, another interview in the bag for Channel 9. To come soon.

Tim Zilla: The brain-deadest of brain-dead online music stores.

Tim Anderson asks Microsoft to fix the Windows Media Player.

I haven't looked at the images that are still coming in from the Mars Rovers lately. It still amazes me to look at these images that continue to stream down from the red planet.

The big news from CeBit looks like it's Nokia's new cell phone.

Here's Russell Beattie's report and Alan Reiter's.

I'll be speaking at RSS Neighborhood next Monday morning in Lafayette, CA. Here's the details.

Mark Cuban's weblog is just hilarious. Today he took on the press corp covering his team. Told them they could all read his weblog for quotes. Heh.

BetaNews is reporting that Microsoft will open Windows XP Service Pack 2 to a wide audience to test as many applications as possible. I'm using it here and so far so good on my systems.

If you haven't heard about XPSP2 yet, you'll hear a lot more over the next few months. This is a MAJOR upgrade to Windows XP. Not to be ignored if you're running XP.

Jeremy Wright wonders why Microsoft's chat events page doesn't have an RSS feed. I'm wondering that myself.

Jeff Sandquist explains his "seven day rule" for trying out new software. Recent survivors on his system? David Allen's Outlook Plugin, ActiveWords, and NewsGator.

I just watched Trump's "The Apprentice" on my Tivo. It's interesting watching this show. Two teams compete against each other. Trump gives them business tasks. They need to come up with ways to make the most money. Invariably the team with the most creative idea usually wins.

So, who's doing creative things in the blogosphere tonight? Well, this is pretty creative: a Business Book Blog Tour. Book authors visit various weblogs. Fun, easy way for book authors to get some publicity and for bloggers to get some content and some traffic. Current tour? Authors: Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba (they wrote "Creating Customer Evangelists.")