So (yes, Microsoft employees are required to start at least one sentence a day with the word "so") yesterday Patrick and I were tooling around Sunnyvale in our hot rental car. It was a Chevy Malibu Maxx. Maryam and I (and Patrick too) noted it's the best rental car we've had so far (and we get a different one every other week so have had dozens -- I still like my Ford Focus better, though).

Anyway, yesterday we were headed into a Starbucks for a latte and we saw this really cool car go by. We had never seen anything like it. My son is almost 11, so of course he loves cool cars. We saw the guy park and went over to talk with him. Turned out it was a Plymouth Prowler, photo here.

We spent half an hour talking with the guy who owned the car. His name is Scott (wouldn't give out his last name) and he's known as "Obi-wan" on the Prowler-Online Assocation Web site.

Now, that's all interesting and all, but Scott's another one of those customer evangelist stories. See, Scott, pictured in his car here, is the kind of evangelist companies can't buy.

He was passionate. To the point that he's spent $60,000 on his car above and beyond the purchase price to mod it out.

He's authoritative. He used to customize Ferraris and Maserati.

He's knowledgeable. He knew more about Plymouth's business than I bet most Plymouth employees know. For instance, he knew how many were built (almost 12,000). How much the workers made who worked on the car ($75 an hour). How many people cleaned up the line every night (60, they kept it white-glove clean, he said).

I asked him to start a blog about his car. Said he already spends too much time on the computer as it is and would rather work on the car.

Anyway, meeting Obi-wan and getting to see his car up close and personal was a real treat.

Om Malik says that the personal blog is dead. Oh, yeah! Well, personally, I know a whole lot of people who are publishing blogs for just their friends and family. You wanna read some blogs that have very few readers? Just click randomly on the page at Weblogs.com. You'll find lots of blogs you haven't heard of yet. The question is, are any of them interesting?

Or, visit MSN Spaces and look at the "just updated" part of the page.

But, sadly, OM is right. It's getting harder and harder to keep up with the rapidly-spreading blogosphere. In the end, it's going to be automatic tools that really help you find the good stuff.

In the meantime, I'll just keep muddling along.

Tonight I'm working on a couple of things. 1) I'm finally using my new Mirra box. Very nice OOBE. That's "Out Of Box Experience." More about that later. You'll see some photos on my photo blog, though.

Also, I owe Shel a few things on the book too. Now reality is starting to set in. Gotta do a book. Did a fun little interview on Sunday, though. Tell you about that in the next post.

We got a blog book war going on. Jeremy's doing one. So is Hans Henrik Højberg Heming.

Anyone else doing one?