InfoWorld: Blog meets Print. Interesting article about blogging's role in one of Jon Udell's articles.

How can you tell hell is cooling down? Scoble doesn't post for 10 days and a Linux magazine is saying nice things about Microsoft. Heh.

One of the coolest things I've gotten to do at Microsoft is take a tour of Microsoft Research with Kevin Schofield as my host. Several videos are already up, including this one where you get taken on a tour of the social software group and the hardware design lab. Not to mention got to interview the inventor of the laser printer.

Tomorrow's video is just as cool. In that clip you get to see Research's large-and-multiple screen lab and research team. On Wednesday, you'll see some cool photo stuff.

How can we top that?

Well, late last week Charles Torre and I sat down with Iain Mcdonald. Don't know who he is? He's the guy who ran the Windows XP War Room.

We did the whole thing in the actual war room (you can see the room in this article from Paul Thurrott).

If you've never met Iain, let me describe him. He's a fairly large guy. Has this endearing Australian accent and the accompanying proclivity to use a bad word or two. You can tell that he's been beaten up about that, though. Instead of saying the bad word he'd just say "beep" to save me the heck of trying to edit his words.

One interesting story is that he claims he's the one who gave Longhorn its name. He settled it for all time: Longhorn was named for the Longhorn bar which is between the Whistler and Blackcomb ski resorts.

He also told us that Longhorn was just supposed to be a tiny little release in between Whistler (Windows XP) and Blackcomb (some big Windows release in the future).

It was an interesting interview with one of Microsoft's most interesting people (and that's saying a lot).

Anyway, if you can't sleep, watch the "late night with the Burton team" video. I've actually watched every bit of that thing twice and it has some interesting insights into how test-driven development will be done on the next version of Visual Studio.

Who do I want to interview? Brian Valentine. His direction is being felt throughout Microsoft (at least on those who work on Windows).

Randy Charles Morin finally shamed me into adding autodiscovery functionality to my blog for my RSS feed. So, now, he should be happy. Right Randy?

That was a nice vacation. Let's ease back into this, shall we?

First, I wanna tell Trevor Cook that his Blog PR Week was inspirational. Thanks! If you haven't checked it out yet, I learned more about PR in the past week than I have in quite a while.

My posting habits will be slow to start up. My dad and son are visiting for the next week, so will be slower than usual. That's OK, it's July. Go out and get some sunshine!