My thoughts are with Apple CEO Steve Jobs this afternoon. He just had surgery for cancer, according to Reuters.

Here's wishing Steve has a speedy and complete recovery.

Hmm, Dave Winer will be here in the Seattle/Redmond area next weekend.

Let's have a BBQ at my house (in Bothell) next Saturday (the 7th). Say from 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. First 15 people to RSVP get invites. robertscoble@hotmail.com.

Plus, we'll have a geek dinner sometime over the next week or so too. Probably Thursday night for the geek dinner would work best. Usual time, 6:30 p.m. at the Bellevue Crossroads food court. Everyone is invited to that.

Some quick blog hits:

36% of the Seattle PI's poll respondents say that blogging is just a fad.

Over there, Todd asks if Microsoft is actively pushing employees to blog.

I haven't heard of anyone being forced to blog. But I certainly am asking everyone I meet "are you blogging yet?" Just ask Daniel Appleman, co-founder of Apress. I put the are-you-blogging-yet pressure onto him bigtime. His first question? "How do you get into it?" I told him to read 100 blogs for a few weeks before he starts blogging. That's one reason I do my linkblog -- so that new bloggers have a pretty good cross-sample of blogs to check out.

By the way, if you read my linkblog, you'll see that I include Linux, Apple, Sun, Oracle, Macromedia, and IBM blogs in that. Why? Because it's important that Microsoft employees and executives keep up on what bloggers from across the industry think. I do it out in public to help everyone and to make sure I'm an authority on the tech industry, not just on Microsoft. Credibility. You get it by not just helping yourself.

Appleman says he'll start a blog soon. I can't wait.

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I was just setting up Maryam's new color Epson printer. And it got me to think back on 1989. I remember visiting Steve Wozniak in his office. He proudly showed me a new dye-sublimation color printer that he just had purchased. Cost? $20,000, if I remember right. He also had a 400mb RAM disk that he had purchased for about $40,000. Both so that he could play with the just-released Adobe Photoshop. I was so jealous.

Thing is, it's 15 years later and now you can buy both for about $100 each (and the color printer we have now blows away the $20,000 job from 1989). Sometimes we forget just how far this industry has come!

One of the Weblogs that I posted yesterday on my linkblog is Michael Gartenberg's first impressions of the Portable Media Center. I'm going to try to get my hands on one and get a demo for Channel 9 (Mike Hill, our new celebrity camera guy is working on that).

A couple of weeks ago David Weller (my neighbor) came to me and said "if you promise not to tell anyone, I'll show you something really cool."

I promised. Now that the secret is out (thanks to Peter Rysavy) I can tell you that my former employer, NEC, has done it again. Come out with a geek toy that has everyone who sees it slobbering.

A less than-two-pound Tablet PC that's even thinner than their previous model.

I want one! But, the way it works around here is that Vic Gundotra gets all the cool geek toys first. Being a Microsoft executive does have its privileges.

By the way, David deserves a raise or something. He worked his behind off to build the demos that were shown at a couple of conferences lately.