Geek Dinner alert. Sorry for the short notice. Mike Kolitz, MVP for the Windows Setup & Deployment team, and Bob Stein (he is keeper of ActiveWin, which is one of the sites I go to learn about Microsoft news) wrote me and said they wanted to invite me to a geek dinner. So, we set it up. 6:30 p.m. tonight. At the Crossroads in Bellevue again. Everyone's invited. Free WiFi. Fun times. (Tonight is Monday night, just in case that isn't clear).

Hey, Buzz, I enjoyed hanging out with you on Saturday too. Riding in John's new (used, he got a great deal) Mercedes on the 405 and recording a podcast (which didn't come out all that great due to the road noise, so not sure it'll get used) was something I'll never forget.

Today Maryam and I were guests on Scott Karren's new boat (he's the CEO of Channel Ventures). We putted over to Bainbridge Island, via Seattle. Also on board was Channel Ventures' vice president, Bill Weir.

Hey, we were boarded by the Coast Guard. They do random searches of boats. I didn't know they had the right to do that. Either way, we weren't about to argue for our rights. Not worth it.

Maryam cracked us all up when she said something like "they can board us anytime, they were cute!"

What a fabulous weekend. Of course I am way behind on getting things up on my linkblog now (and I have a ton of email to go through).

Fred Wilson, a Venture Capitalist, wrote on his blog that he's sold all his Microsoft stock because he thinks the open source community will run circles around Microsoft.

One thing he doesn't note is how fast Microsoft can learn from the best things in the open source community. For instance, did you notice that MySQL, an open-source database, is switching to using Microsoft technology for its installer?

But, Fred's post just motivates me, and hopefully my coworkers. Hopefully we can win Fred back.