You can attend a seminar given by famous business author Tom Peters for free (Microsoft's picking up the tab).

Tom, when are you going to get an RSS feed? I'm not subscribing to any more email newsletters, sorry.

One of my favorite Microsoft news sites is "Watching Microsoft Like a Hawk." Over there I see an article that talks about Microsoft's hiring of Linux experts. They try to read too much into that. We hire smart people from around the industry -- that doesn't necessarily mean they'll be working on what they became known for. My official answer: we don't comment on rumors or speculation.

By the way, later this week Microsoft's JobBloggers, Zoe and Gretchen, take me on a pretend interview so you can see just what it's like to interview for a technical job at Microsoft (I give them the 50 questions and try to get into how Microsoft's workers think when doing interviews). We even get to sit in on a whiteboard session so you can see what the people doing the hiring are looking for. I wish I had had this video before my interview.

You know, every year when I helped put on the VBITS conference in the 1990s I'd do a bus trip the day after the conference to somewhere fun. Everyone was invited. It cost something like $1200 to rent a bus for the day (holds 40 people).

How about doing something like that for BloggerCon III? For those who haven't been to Stanford, it's about an hour south of San Francisco. There's tons we could do. Wine tasting. Geek tours of Silicon Valley. Even maybe a trip to Yosemite or something crazy like that.

I'm going to BloggerCon III -- November 6 at Stanford. I'm paying my own way (it's free, so it's not gonna break the bank). I'm also going to Gnomedex this year and hopefully PopTech.

On the plane I unsubscribed from the BBC and some other RSS feeds. Why? Because they don't give me full-text. I'm down to 720 or so feeds.

I think I'll play with a different system for aggregating commercial sites, since they obviously aren't willing to give us full-text feeds.

Either that, or I'll just rely on someone in the 720 feeds I watch (actually more like 2000 feeds because I watch the weblogs.asp.net group blog, which has 1300+ bloggers in it) to tell me what the important news is to pay attention to.

The Technorati News Page has a lot of promise, but personally I just visit Google's News Page or MSN's new NewsBot (which I'm getting more and more impressed with every week, how about you?).

What's ironic is that in the commercial site's rush to get me to visit their Web page so they can monetize my eyeballs they've pushed me to Google or MSN and away from having a permanent relationship with their site directly.

One last note: after cleaning out my feeds, reading feeds is fun again! I didn't expect that.

Scoble shuttle service thrives. Since the last post I've flown down to Oakland to drop my son off with his mom, and flown back with Maryam's mom.

Oh, do I have some travel stories to tell. Scott Van Vliet is doing the same and complaining about Avis Assist.

Along that note, here's my new pet peeve: People who read the Threepenny Review, elbow me multiple times, without saying a single word to me the entire flight. How dare someone have interesting reading material and not have anything to say about it! Heh.

I'd never heard of the Threepenny Review, though, so I read over her shoulder. Ahh, the literary journal. Uses big words like, say, erudite, which most of us will need to look up in the dictionary. That's OK, cause it +is+ a literary journal. But I noticed something else. The structure of the writing. They don't use very many paragraphs. One paragraph went on almost the entire length of the page.

This makes it very arduous to read. But, I bet they do that on purpose so that no one could mistake the writing for USA Today.

Does anyone blog like that? Hey, Maryam, you should start a literary blog. (She graduated with honors from Cal with an English degree).

While we're on travel tips, here's one: make sure you get to the counter more than 30 minutes before your flight is bound to take off. Alaska Air gave away my son's seat assignment (the damn line took 20 minutes just to get up to the front counter).

Here's a little tip I learned, though: get your boarding assignment at home and they won't give away your seat unless you aren't on the plane within five minutes of leaving.