Did someone say "free ice cream?" Oh yummy!

Dave Massy, a Longhorn Evangelist at Microsoft, answers the question: why wait for Avalon?

I was going to answer Joel Spolsky back about his comment earlier today in my weblog (about weblogging at Microsoft). But Dare Obasanjo did a better job than I could.

"Would our customers have access to this wealth of information if we restricted ourselves to traditional channels of communication (press releases, white papers, KB articles, etc)? I don't think so."

The Church of the Customer blog covers Guy Kawasaki's new book and the techniques Guy is using to get buzz going about it. If you don't know who Guy is, you don't know evangelism and Apple's history.

If you're missing Christopher Brumme posting on his weblog, you have Seattle's spectacular weather to blame. Man is it great here right now. Makes the winter of gray worth it all.

Beyond VC looks at the pending IPO of a Microsoft competitor and asks: "has the individual investor learned a lesson?"

A new MSN Messenger shipped today. Version 6.2. Some new mobile phone features and new games. I upgraded.

Ben Hammersley is so bored he's making up Microsoft rumors. About RSS. Of course, that gets me to link to him. So, it worked. Check out his latest cartoon too.

This is a great idea. Match up X1's search features with NewsGator's RSS collection features. Yeah baby! See the details on X1's site. Now you understand why I love these guys so much.

Now you know how I find answers fast.

Looks like my aggregator blog will be back soon. Kunal Das saw my problems over the weekend and went to work coming up with a solution for his OutlookMT application (that lets me drag and drop items to a folder and have them automatically blogged). He's already given me a demo, but needs to fix up some things before putting it in production. His new version will post titles, and some text from the body, and post that. Only a small portion, though, not the entire text. That should make everyone happy.

Oh, I also learned that Stefan is the guy to go to if you have Microsoft Content Management Server issues. He works for Microsoft in Germany in support for that product.

Dang, before tonight I didn't even know he worked for Microsoft. And, no, you don't need to work for Microsoft to be invited over for dinner either.

Why do I invite geeks over to my house? Because they show me beautiful pictures and tell Maryam and I what it's like to travel the world. Stefan has been all sorts of interesting places on all sorts of interesting adventures. In between the German on this part of Stefan's site, for instance, you'll see pictures of him navigating rapids, icebergs, rivers, snowfields, and various other obstacles on backpacking trips through Canada and Alaska.

Stefan's a particularly gifted photographer, which I didn't know before we had him over tonight.

So, how do you get an invite to Scoble's for dinner? 1) Be in Seattle area. 2) See #1. That's it. "Don't I need to be a CEO or someone worthy of dropping a name?" No. Although you won't have fun with me if you're not a geek.

Stefan also took us on a photo tour of South Africa. What an inspiring evening.

I was reading the blogs the other day over on weblogs.asp.net and noticed that Stefan Grossner is taking a multi-week vacation through the Western United States and that he's starting in Seattle.

So, Maryam and I invited him over for dinner and he'll be here tonight.

By the way, if you're ever in town, I'd love to meet with you if we can match up our schedules. Larry Larson (the guy who does the cool Art Rage pictures) will be here on Thursday.

Oh, and the guys who hang out on Neowin want to do a BBQ on May 8. I'm game, anyone else? (That's the Saturday after WinHec).

My boss's boss, Vic Gundotra, and the head of Longhorn Evangelism, Steve Cellini are on the current .NET Rocks show (recorded live on Friday).