With all the news about "Rathergate" and the alledged forgeries of Memos from the 1970s (seemingly using Microsoft Word) you knew it wouldn't be long before the clippy jokes started. Here's a thread on Channel 9 with all the relevant ones and links.

Every night I pull my Tablet PC out of my backback. Open it up. It starts up from sleep mode. Then I click on the NewsGator button in Outlook and choose "Download News Now."

One of the first blogs I check is "the Blog of Death." I look to make sure my name isn't on it. Whew, made it through another day.

You didn't know about that blog, did you? They have blogs for everything nowadays.

Oh, I was just asking the Mappoint team for something like WorldBoard. This lets me add little notes on top of a map for you all to see. Not sure how good this is, but whoever nails this will have a killer feature. When I get my SmartPhone (soon) this is something I'll have to try. Thanks to Russ at the Mobile-Weblog.

Hmmm, Eric Rudder, Microsoft's highest-ranking blogger, blogged the other day again and now he's taking questions from the Spoke's members and over on Channel 9.

By the way, what's the power of blogging? If you do it your blog will go to the top of the list on Google for your name. Here, search Google for Eric Rudder. You find his blog. How significant is that? Well, Eric Rudder is one of the most powerful people at Microsoft. He's been quoted hundreds, if not thousands, of times. He's been talked about in forums and over on Slashdot. He's only blogged a handful of times. Yet his blog is the first thing you'll find now when you search on his name.

This works for both big shots like Eric Rudder, as well as people you've never heard about. Try it sometime. Find a blogger over on my linkblog that you've never heard about. Search for them on Google. You'll almost always find their blog at the top of the list.

Speaking of my linkblog, lately I've been uploading about 100 items per day. The blogosphere is getting more interesting again. Well, that and I've gotten rid of a bunch of feeds that weren't producing and found a bunch of great new blogs.

Some of you say you don't read my linkblog. That's OK. I keep seeing it get quoted on a wide variety of blogs so I know it's providing some value to some people and that's all I care about.

You'll find stuff from Sun's bloggers there. Apple's. eBay's. Oracle's. Autodesk's. IBM's. Various Linux blogs. And of course anything interesting that anyone says about Microsoft or other technologies. Plus highlights of political news and other news.

When you read 2000 blogs a night (800+ feeds now that I cut down the number of feeds) you find a bunch of random stuff that Feedster and Pubsub wouldn't bring back if you were just doing keyword searches.

AlwaysOn/CBS Marketwatch: It's far from game over for the Xbox.

HPClean has the first review I've seen of the new NEC Tablet PC. (in French). This thing is freaking amazing. I want one in the worst way. 1.8 pounds.

Unfortunately won't be sold in the US. At least that's what I've heard. Is that true? (The team I worked with at NEC that sold mobile devices was disbanded late last year).

Sam Bushnell shows off the T-shirt he wore as a nine-year-old. Convert it to ASCII and you'll see he really was a young geek.

He works on the QuickTime engineering team at Apple now.

What I want to know is how did he know he wanted to be a programmer when he was nine years old? My 10-year-old son isn't halfway as focused. Although when I got him a tour of the Xbox game lab last summer he thought that working there would be a fun job "cause all they do is play games." Still didn't motivate him to learn more about computers.

Sean Gallagher of eWeek told me in email that he thinks I'm behind a school that forces its students to buy Tablet PCs. Um, I'm not that good an evangelist, believe me. I can't even get my wife to blog, much less convince a school to do something like this.

Ahh, it's nice to be a private school with rich parents. That'd never go over in a normal private school, much less a public school.

Of course, maybe it was applications like xThink's MathJournal that convinced them. Watch the videos. Freaking amazing. I wish I had something like this in math class when I was a kid.

Need some fun rave-style music to get your productivity up? Mix Of the Week provides it.

Speaking of design, one of Channel 9's members has designed a box for Windows 2006. Fun!

OK, we're trying out a new design by Albert Hardy Tanutama. If you don't remember the design contest, last month I asked my readers to help come up with a better design for my weblog. I asked them to simply make changes to my CSS file. It's amazing how you can change everything about a site with just changing one file.

If you don't like the design, come back tomorrow. Something different will be up then.