You know, Steve Rubel almost every day has a group of things I drag to my link blog. I haven't linked to him lately, but really love his blogging. Tonight, again, I can't decide which one to link to. Just subscribe to his blog.

Hey, cool, did a real quick audio test with Dana Epp -- it's just a few seconds long. Dana was showing me Audacity. Don't tell anyone, it's open source and it's very nice. So we thought we'd test the audio on my new Toshiba Tablet PC (the one with three microphones). Very clear.

Watch out Adam Curry, here we come! :-) (I gotta find some place that'll have lots of bandwidth and space. Hmmm, I wonder if anyone would notice if I put a few audio files on that HP SuperDome?)

Don't wanna listen to a short worthless audio clip that doesn't say anything? Well, read the Get Fuzzy Comic strip. Turns out the strip's character is writing a book too.

A red couch first: Dana Epp just fixed a bug. It was bugging him all day long. I snapped a photo on my Audiovox phone right after he tested his new code and it passed the tests.

Our tour of the SQL Server team is complete. Part IV shows off a HP SuperDome. Terabyte of RAM. 2,500 18.2 gigabyte hard drives. 64 64-bit processors. Hey, can you put one of those in my house? That should keep me from running out of disk space for a while. I wonder. If you downloaded everything available on BitTorrent, could you fill that up?

Maryam passed her citizenship test/interview today (got 100% right). Next Thursday she'll become an Amerikun. I'm so proud of her.

How did we celebrate? Went to the mall, of course! Let's see, we needed a gift for my brother's daughter. Of course he's had a rule that for my son: buy something annoying with batteries.

So, we got him back. Bought him a Boohbah. Here's Maryam with what we got her.

David Berlind, in ZDNet: What's wrong with RSS is also what's right with it.

"Perhaps if he titled fewer entries, or none at all, we'd get more out of Scoble's brain.

That's an interesting idea. But it's so automatic to put titles on my posts that I can't not do it.

CEO Blogger's Club: When sales people are afraid to blog.

At the end of the dinner, even though I didn't know who Greg Bear was (see last post) I had figured out that he was a prolific and trusted author. So, I asked him "what makes a good book?" First he took on the reader's point of view. He said that you should read the first few pages, then a few in the middle, and if you aren't grabbed by then, that you should put the book back on the shelf and find another.

Well, that's OK, but how about from the writer's point of view?

He told me to write about what scares me. Then write about what I love. And if I'm really lucky, he told me, they'll both be the same thing.

I told him it sounded like blogging about Microsoft.

How do you learn to trust/like/love someone new in your life?

Tonight I was at a dinner of about a dozen people. I was asked not to blog the dinner. But, I only knew three of the people there. Now, these were people who I REALLY TRUST. Folks who are leaders in industry. Who've been very successful. Who have helped me out a lot. People who I would invite over to sit on the Red Couch without a moment's hesitation.

But, that left a bunch of people at the table that I didn't know. That I didn't trust.

One guy, sitting next to me, taught me how trust in groups works. He didn't know he was teaching me anything. I just watched how the rest of the table interacted with him.

This was a person that several people at the table obviously liked. I watched their body language. I watched how they listened to him. I last saw this behavior when Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer, spoke at Gnomedex. I turned to look at the audience and they were hanging on every word. Barely breathing. They were in a hyper attentive state. Eyes very focused. Breathing shallow.

So, anyway, I saw one of the three people who I knew walk over to the guy sitting next to me. Say "I've been such a fan for years."

One of his answers during dinner let it slip that he was an experienced author. Had written several books. I still didn't know his name, but by the end of the night I had transfered all the trust/love/adoration that the rest of the table had for my dinner mate to him too. I found myself becoming a fan and I didn't even know what kinds of things he wrote. I just knew it had to be good the way my already-trusted friends were treating him.

When I left the dinner I still had no clue who this guy was. I had shared a dinner with him and only knew him as "Greg the author that my friends really loved."

So, I rushed home, opened up my search engine, and searched on his name: Greg Bear.

What lessons does this have for blogging? Well, if three bloggers I know link to someone or something and say gushing things I'll be highly likely to follow along too.