My friend Andrew Brust's company, Progressive Systems Consulting, merged with Citigate Hudson. Here's the details.

Andrew spoke for years at the VBITS conferences I, and my wife, helped plan (always was well liked, well rated, and dressed sharp!). Citigate Hudson is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner for Business Intelligence Solutions.

Congrats Andrew! This merger has resulted in one of the best Microsoft partner shops with Financial Services expertise and a New York City location.

Engadget has a great review of the new MSN TV 2. I'm getting a look of my own tomorrow for Channel 9. This is the new "WebTV" for those who remember that gadget.

I knew it! Virgin Digital just opened an online music store. Hollywood Reporter has the news here.

Why did I know it? Because in San Francisco the Virgin Record store is right across the street from the Apple store. It always seemed lame to me not to put a huge sign in the store taunting new iPod listeners to come in and "fill up their pods."

Of course, Adam Curry has done more to fill up our MP3-playing devices lately than anyone else. I'm addicted already to his Daily Source Code.

In today's Daily Source Code, Doug Kaye sent in an audio guide to audio bit rates that you should use on your audioblog. Doug knows a bit about that topic, since he publishes the also awesome ITConversations.

Nathan Gold sure knows how to make me jealous. He took a bunch of pictures at the CEDIA show (high-end audio/visual home theater show) and sent them to me saying "don't drool too much." Lots of big screens and fun toys for the home.

You know, people who help 11-to-14-year-old kids learn technology, like Eric Mack, who coaches the U.S. First Jr. Robotics team #1144, are great people in my mind. Kudos!

PC Pro reviewed eight Tablet PCs.

Wanna learn about developing mobile apps with .NET? Well, Microsoft is bringing the .NET To Go Mobility Roadshow around the US soon.

Tomorrow Nick Bradbury of Bradbury Software and Mark Fletcher, of Bloglines will announce that they have developed a way to synchronize FeedDemon 1.5 (coming soon) via Bloglines. FeedDemon 1.5 will be a free upgrade for all FeedDemon customers.

Nick gave me the exclusive via email earlier today and said I had to wait until now to reveal it. Here's what he told me:

The best part is items you read in FeedDemon don't show up as unread in Bloglines, and items you read through Bloglines don't show up in FeedDemon. In other words, feed state is synchronized so that you don't read the same item twice. This provides the best of both worlds, IMO - you get the easy synchronization between multiple systems found in a web-based app, with the rich UI of a Windows desktop app.

Update: Mark Fletcher has already posted about this news. Oh, he says NetNewsWire and Blogbot are working with him too! (Nick told me more announcements will be coming at the Gnomedex conference this weekend too, but he swore me to secrecy).

Can't wait to try it.

Tony Perkins launches a "blogozine." He's the guy who started Red Herring and Upside magazines and lately has been doing the AlwaysOn set of Web sites, blogs, and services.

Got a Microsoft mobile phone? Myers' mobile site has lots of information for you -- all formatted for your phone.

Greg Hughes: Proof that Windows can keep up with them all.

David Ornstein confirms the rumors. Microsoft is releasing another thing (FlexWiki) into Shared Source. This is the Wiki technology that Channel 9 is using.

I'm uploading 170 or so items to my linkblog right now. I also upgraded my Bloglines with my latest feeds. Over the past month I've put a lot of time into care and feeding of my feeds. Back up to 915 feeds now. Whew. But all are high quality and update often. Got rid of all those people who only post less than once a month. No reason to ping them everytime I want to read feeds.

Be back tonight, sorry for taking the past few days off, but had a great weekend with my son. Took him to Silicon Valley's Tech Museum where they have a new exhibit on roller coasters that was fun (lots of physics lessons).

By the way, Steve Gillmor, I poll for new feeds once everytime I read my feeds (he wrote today that I only would ping once per day, that's usually true, but not always so -- I turned off automatic polling in NewsGator and now only poll right before I start reading my feeds -- or right before I head off to an airplane so I can read the latest feeds on the plane). So, if I get three times to look at my feeds today, I will do three rescans of all 915 of my feeds.

Gillmor wants to have RSS ping automatically every second. He says that's just what email does. Nice idea. I don't see how that's possible with the current system, but he thinks there's a way. What do you all think?

We had a nice geek dinner on Saturday night in San Francisco. About 15 people showed up. Thomas Hawk has some of the details. We'll hold another geek dinner in about a week or so up here in Microsoft-land. Details will come shortly.

My step mom, Sharon Bosley, is an amateur clay artist in Silicon Valley (has a kiln in the garage and all that). You can see one of her pieces here. She's very active in the Silicon Valley art scene, and also is politically active. For the past few weeks she's been working with other artists in the valley to put together an art auction to help John Kerry's candidacy. Their site shows the vibrancy of the art scene there.