First meal of 2005? In-n-Out cheeseburger. Translation: hell with my resolutions! :-)

By the way, for those of my coworkers stuck in Seattle there are two things I miss about California and both of them are in this picture: blue skies and In-N-Out.

Rob Fahrni is still looking for a job. He's the guy who showed me around the pistachio factory last winter. He also worked on the Visio team.

Hey, Rob, how about posting some programming tips you've learned over the years? Turn your blog into something that demonstrates your authority and passion for software development?

Right now there are lots of teams looking for great developers (not just at Microsoft, either, I know of open jobs at Google, Yahoo, eBay, and Cisco). But, how can you demonstrate that you're an authority? That you can build apps? That you would be an asset on a software-development team?

Here's one. I know there's an open development job on the Internet Explorer team. Do you have a cool DHTML trick for IE? Or some source code that demonstrates that you know C++ and would be worthy to bring up for an interview?

How about this? Instead of posting quotes about movies, how about a programming quiz?

Anything that could demonstrate to your readers that you're an authority on software development.

Forget the resume. That won't get you a job in today's market. Your blog will, however.

But look at it the other way. Let's say you're a hiring manager on the Internet Explorer team. Why would that person hire you because of your blog?

Julia Lerman is working with Keith Pleas and Susi over in Bali and they have some technology needs. I'm already working with other Microsoft employees on some of this, but let's work together and see what we can do to help with technology.

A big part of the first few weeks of getting aid in will be finding out WHERE to send it. This disaster is on such a large scale that figuring that out is going to take technology resources. Can you help?

Dan Gillmor has a new Typepad-based Weblog.

He left his prestigious job at the San Jose Mercury News to work on grassroots journalism. Subscribed!

Dave Winer: thank you.

He deleted most of my comment spam. More work to be done, but that solves the short-term problem.

I see my link blog is back up. Kunal Das is looking for a new host that has unlimited space. We chewed through 25 gigabytes in 29 days last month. That's one reason I haven't turned on full text.

We'll find a more permanent home this month.

More weblog awards ahead: Bloggies 2005.

I am going to nominate Dave Winer's and Adam Curry's blogs. They proved their blog power last year when they launched Podcasting and got it into the mainstream press within a matter of weeks.

Results will be announced at the SXSW conference. By the way, SXSW seems to be the conference that lots of the geeks are getting ready for.

Geoff Taylor's URL is a good one: Opinionated Geek.

And today he gives us his opinion about Microsoft Passport. He says Microsoft charged too damn much.

I agree. We need an identification system, but one that any weblogger could use. How do you get adoption? I go back to ICQ or Firefox. Start small with a small group of very passionate users. Did Passport ever have that? I don't remember ever meeting a Passport evangelist.

On the topic of identity, anyone who cares should start reading Kim Cameron's "Identity Blog." Kim works here at Microsoft and is covering the field well. I hope to get Kim on Channel 9 soon. Whadda ya say Kim?

On the topic of opinionated geeks, I noticed that John has a New Year's resolution not to read my blog. He says I infuriate him. OK, what's the correct response when someone says "unsubscribe?" Why, subscribe!

Here's the principle behind that. We need to listen to people who don't like us more. Democrats need to listen to Republicans and vice versa. That's how we can solve problems and get movement.

One of the people I know says that he doesn't like it when I link to every blogger who says they are infuriated with me. He told me that I should only link to the important bloggers.

The problem with that attitude is: who is important on the blogosphere? Here's a hint: everyone.

Why? Easy: Technorati, Pubsub, and Feedster now build searches that can find anyone who says something on the blogosphere. How did I find John's post? In Pubsub.

Movements of people start small. Ignore the small movements and you might react too late. How many users did ICQ start with? 40. So, is there such a thing as an unimportant blogger? No.

As to his point "fanatic ramblings" and "poorly worded posts:" Well, I'll try to do better.

Jon Udell at InfoWorld says he looks to people like Michael Rys instead of to me for technical information. Hey, me too! Listen, my place in the world in the past few months has gotten totally overblown. There are far far more Microsoft employees that are smarter than me. I'm very grateful to the employees who've invited me over with my camcorder in the past 10 months for an interview.

I see my role more of as a talk-show host or a connector. I've been listening to a lot of news talk radio on KGO in the past week and it finally made sense to me that blogging is a lot like doing a radio talk show, but on a smaller scale.

Ronn Owens of KGO Radio doesn't pretend to be smart on every topic, but he has tons of very smart people on air every day. Ronn is a geek too. Someday I'd like to meet him, he's been a voice in my life for many years.

But, back to the topic at hand. Am I gonna be able to give you technical details like what Raymond Chen writes about on his blog? Heck, no. But can I link to him? Heck yeah! I wish I was halfway as smart as Raymond is. I've watched senior developers genuflect when Raymond comes up. That's respect that's earned and that I haven't even come close to and never will (I don't expect to be learning C++ or Assembler anytime soon).

Anyway, where am I going with this? Instead of trying to pretend to be technical (I'm not) I'll try to point out when something good comes up on one of the blogs I read.

First post of 2005:

Evelyn Rodriguez: God, There Must Be a Better Way to Build Blog Traffic.

If you hadn't heard, Evelyn (I met her at BloggerCon last year) rode out the Tsunami and survived.

We're glad she's still with us and still blogging.

Evelyn: I don't care if you ever blog the same again. You are doing a wonderful thing. Hope your leg heals well and I have a feeling that you'll be on stage at future BloggerCons. I imagine you'd have something new to say about the emotional life of weblogs. Among other things.

Evelyn's post reminded me of a blog post I made that I titled "It's Nice to Be Alive" and "A Seat Belt Saved My Life."

Someday my name will show up on the Blog of Death. We all will. But until then, I'm gonna try to do what I can to improve this place.

Well, anyway, since this is the first post of 2005, Evelyn, it's nice to have you here. Thanks for the reminder of what life is all about.