This is a Patrick weekend, so I'll be offline until Sunday evening. Down in Silicon Valley. Have a great weekend!

Feedster and the Washington Post are holding a blogging contest.

Marc Canter: "video is MUCH BIGGER than just blogging." Oh, I totally agree. I feel so fortunate that I get to play around with the medium in a very public way on Channel 9.

I've found three things that people respond to well there:

1) Good storytellers. Folks like Bill Hill, Iain McDonald, Ward Cunningham, Robert Hess, Pat Helland.

2) Tours of things that haven't been seen yet. Anders Hejlsberg showing off Microsoft's museum. Chris Sells showing off MSDN. Don Box showing off Indigo team (second part coming next week). Zoe and Gretchen showing off the interview process. Mike Hall showing off the Windows Embedded lab. Stewart Tansley showing us around Microsoft Research's faculty summit. Kenneth Spector showing how he codes without being able to see. Kevin Schofield showing us around Microsoft Research's Next Media and VIBE (monitors) group.

3) Demos of things people haven't seen. MEMS at Microsoft Research. New Tablet PC features. Next Visual Basic. Next Visual C++. Next Visual Studio's ClickOnce deployment feature. Automotive prototypes. Visual Studio Tools for Office. C# Express. Visual Studio Team System. Threat Modeling Tool. Windows Media Connect. MSDN Product Feedback Center. Tablet PC's new multi-language features. XAML. Windows XP Service Pack 2. XBox Live. SmartPhone.

But, this is video designed to put a human face on a corporation. How about you? What do you find you use your camcorder for?

PS to Microsoft employees: if you wanna be on Channel 9, drop me a line.

Chris Kinsman and Andrew Brust, founder of Progressive Systems Consulting, were just here at the house for dinner. Maryam and her mom cooked up a nice Iranian meal. I wish I could share some with everyone of you. Yummy.

But then Chris pulled out his laptop and was raving about his AT&T UMTS card and connection (it uses the new 3G cellular service). This sucker gives you 300kbps connection almost anywhere in Seattle (and a few other cities) for $80 a month, unlimited. The card cost him about $150.

He says it's a lifesaver when visiting Microsoft (since we don't let outsiders onto our WiFi network). He's attending a conference in Bellevue right now and said that while everyone's WiFi is up and down his connectivity was solid all day long.

Sounds like the perfect thing for people who are on the road a lot, albeit in a limited number of cities right now.

Over on Channel 9 someone asked "what computer would you recommend for a home user?" I answered back with a series of questions. But, I enjoy a good discussion about computers. How would you answer that question? I find that choosing a computer is a complex question.

This reminds me a bit of a conversation I had recently with Steve Broback, founder of Avondale Media. He told me his "the time I met Bill Gates" story. This was back in the early 1980s. He met Bill Gates in a Bellevue drug store back then. Figured he'd ask Bill about what computer he should buy. Steve got a half-hour answer and a memory of a lifetime.

I wonder if Bill still gets asked that?

Yesterday Fred Dixon, Vice President at Serence showed me their latest KlipFolio 2.6 which has a news aggregator that plugs into Hotmail (among a whole lot of other things). Wow. The UI is nice. This makes Hotmail a lot more interesting.

Anyone using this? What do you think?

Brendan, over on the Firefox team, talks about the importance of "view source." I totally agree. I learned HTML back in 95 by viewing source.

Now that I'm noodling around with Visual Studio (the Express Editions are cool and very low cost: cheaper than beer right now) I find I'm learning again by looking at source code that other developers have shared.

Ward Cunningham, the guy who invented the wiki, talks about the revolution coming in the way people communicate with each other. I see it all the time on the Microsoft blogs. Developers put their code on their blog. Excellent way to learn.

I'll apply another new design tonight. Sorry for the boring old design. One thing, though. My boring old design is noticeably smaller in size than some of the other designs I tried so it loads faster. Noticeably so here. One design that I used over the past week or so had tons of indenting done with spaces. I removed those and the templates got 2K smaller. On a 56k modem that can sometimes mean two seconds. Seems that more designers could do with reading Andy King's Web Site Optimization book.

Design is a combination of both how cool it looks as well as how fast it loads. Think this isn't important? Tell me what company has one of the most consistently fast Websites to load? Google. I know people who use Google's home page as their home page just because it loads so fast.

Speed +is+ a competitive advantage. Even on blogs.

Plus, since the only time a human needs to read the HTML is when designing the templates, there's absolutely no reason to keep indenting in your code when you deploy it.

Microsoft has released a guide for deploying Windows firewall settings for XP with Service Pack 2.

Last night I uploaded 86 items to my link blog. Lots of interesting things. Here's a sample.

Microsoft.com redesigned and got a little closer to standards compliance.

Jackie Goldstein was sitting in the lobby of one of our buildings and saw Steve Ballmer and Scott McNealy walk by.

Adam Kinney reports on the XAMLON beta 5 (brings XAML to all .NET clients).

Joel Spolsky notes that Dare Obasanjo listened to his plea. Yes, the Raymond Chen camp is very strong inside Microsoft. Joel's weblog post earlier this year caused more discussion internally than any other weblog post combined.

The geeks are gearing up for Burning Man next week. I met Brady Forrest yesterday (to talk about MSN Search, since he's the PM there) and he was very proud that the Burning Man Project (GravityBowl) he is involved in was written up in Gizmodo.