I'm mentioned in a New York Times Article on the dangers of corporate blogging tomorrow. Usual stuff about bloggers who got in trouble with their bosses over something that they wrote on their blogs.

I see the EFF is telling people that they should anonymously blog. Well, if you followed that advice then you'd be called lame by Steve Rubel, like he just called character blogs lame.

But, there's another danger that you all aren't recognizing. What's that? Well, if you blog you might get invited to lunches or dinners with interesting people. Don't think that's a danger? Well, watch what happens when you go out drinking with geeks on a Saturday and don't come home in time.

Yes, the Scobleizer is in the dog house. You heard it here first. I just might be sleeping on the red couch tonight!

And, yes, I already tried flowers. And saying I'm sorry. Chocolate is not an option. And you thought Shelley Powers was tough!

Hey, Maryam, you didn't put THAT in your blogger policy! Oh, I don't think that'll work either.

Was it worth it? Well, hearing Buzz Bruggeman's stories is always worth it and hanging out with Matt Mullenweg is definitely a lot of fun. But, being in the doghouse is never fun.

Memorable story? A random guy came up to Matt and said "you don't know me, but I have a WordPress blog and just wanted to say thanks!" Dang, Matt is famous!

Anyway, I have no idea how I'm gonna get Maryam back on my side. It'll take some real work...

You can "Get the Betas" of Visual Studio 2005, code-named Whidbey beta 2.

A friend of mine who is a pretty well known journalist and is asking for help in learning programming with the new Visual Studio Express Editions. Particularly with VB.NET. Wonders where the best resources are for novice programmers. Where should I send him?

Jim Heid talks about sites that go to press with "fake text" in them. At Fawcette we had a rule. Fake text had to ONLY be a string of "X's." You know, like this:

Xxxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxx xxxxxx xxxxx xxxxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxx xxxxxx xxxxx.

Invariably when we broke that rule we'd get burned. Why? Because your eye is very good at recognizing that xxxxx is not regular text, but isn't that good at seeing a page with lorem ipsum text in it and deciding that's fake.

It's even worse if you try to use text like "headline goes here" or "replace this text." That stuff gets into print (and placed on pages on the Web) pretty often.

I'm listening to my son, Patrick, play bass guitar through Skype and I'm watching him through the new MSN Messenger. We can't get the audio working through our firewalls on MSN Messenger for some reason. I wonder why.

The video quality is really great, and so is the audio quality.

Now I gotta get Patrick to start his blog up again. Hi Patrick!

He's showing me his watch now. I gotta bug him to do his homework. "It's the weekend, why would I have homework?" he answers back.

Ahh, parenting doesn't change, does it? It is very strange having a conversation with him even though we're 1,000 miles away. Makes me miss him even more. But, I'm glad we got him a computer. He's getting much faster at typing I notice.

A weblog for CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) employees and their families / friends is up. Will more government blogs follow?

Congrats to the Visual Studio team for shipping beta 2 of Whidbey. I was in the build lab while the signoff meeting was happening upstairs. Quite fun and if you're an MSDN Universal Subscriber you can get Whidbey now.

Scott Guthrie has a very interesting post on the process (Scott's an exec in charge of the Web part of Visual Studio, among other things).

Richard MacManus has interesting commentary on how Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft are approaching RSS.

Dave Winer had an essay the other day on the same topic.

It's interesting to see who will do the most for customers, that's for sure!

Loic Le Meur blogged (and Skyped) from 36,000 feet over Greenland on his way to the MSN Search Champs meetings, starting tonight.

Update: he just posted to my blog too from the airplane.

A new Newsgator beta is coming? Sign me up!

Blake Ross (one of the developers on the FireFox team) speaks out for simplicity in software.

That's a great way to judge software, but I find that I also have to factor in how useful a piece of software is too. One of my favorite pieces of software, for instance, is Adobe Illustrator. No one would call that simple. But it lets graphic designers create all sorts of wild things.

But, overall, I'm all with Blake. The simpler you can make a piece of software the more adoption it'll get. And using Illustrator was 100 times simpler than methods of creating high-quality graphic designs than existed before.

Interesting video blog: RipMeOff. Guy gets ripped off at car rental place in Mexico and videotapes the customer service or lack thereof.

Oh, and over on Channel 9 I revealed that we're gonna interview Jim Allchin and we're asking for questions to ask Jim. That thread's been up for a day and the only voices I see there are male.

We'll read the questions to him off of our screen and you'll get to hear his answers. Open to the public. Open to everyone.

Thomas Hawk got Slashdotted about his writeup of the Jim Allchin dinner Thursday night. The usual anti-Microsoft comments were posted and Thomas responded over on Slashdot with an interesting post.

I also see that Shelley Powers has bashed me over the head with the "why-weren't-any-women-there" cluestick (she posted that in my comments yesterday). I invited a woman, Mena Trott, who never responded to my invite.

But, it is a problem. As I look at the blogmap for Silicon Valley, I see very few female names. And the ones I see don't write a technology-oriented blog.

Even worse, yesterday Matt Mullenweg hosted a blogger lunch. Open to the public. Anyone could come as long as they were happy talking geek stuff. Ten people showed up, no women.

So, in the future when I'm planning a Seattle geek dinner who will I remember? Who will have built a relationship with me? Who will have shoved a business card in my hand? Who will have gotten me to see their technology? Their passion for technology? Gotten me to link to them?

I'm not going to invite women to blogger dinners just to have gender equality there. Sorry. On the other hand, I am very sensitive to this issue. At the MSN Search Champs group this week there are several women attending and we went overboard to find women bloggers who are passionate about computers and technology. But, it was easier there because we are flying people in from all over the world and not just the San Francisco Bay Area.

If you are a female blogger and you're passionate about technology, please post your URL here. There will be more events in the future and I'd love to have you there.

One other thing: I tried to invite several other bloggers, but I couldn't find their email address on their blog. This is a huge mistake. Make it easy for us to get ahold of you.