Will you be in San Francisco on Saturday, May 21? Don't miss the KFOG KaBoom concert. It's free. I'll bring my son. The Wallflowers, the John Butler Trio, and Kathleen Edwards are playing. 350,000 people are expected. One of the best fireworks displays in the country.

I'd love to meet up there with other geeks/bloggers.

Jon Husband: "It is NOT appropriate for Scoble to play cop, prosecutor, judge and jury all by his lonesome (especially in public) any times he thinks he sees or has heard of someone sneezing the wrong way..."

Excellent points. I went overboard. I was wrong. Jon is right. So is Dave Rodgers who also made similar points.

That's the neat thing about having so many smart readers. They educate you. If you're listening.

Thanks!

That all said, if I hear from anyone who feels they were discriminated against, I'll work vigorously on their behalf WITHIN the system.

Chris Sells cracks me up: "I am NOT a graphic designer!"

Seems that whenever people hear that he's redoing Solitaire in Avalon people automatically assume he has monsterous graphic design skills.

Chris, there are a couple of guys to recommend. Internally? David Shadle. He's the guy who came up with the Channel 9 logo. Externally? There's a guy named Jamie over on the Channel 9 forums who has awesome skills.

By the way, Adam Nathan is getting a rep as being a guru. Check out his MSDN article on Avalon.

On this topic, one of my favorite designers is still Bryan Bell. He does great work for an affordable price. If I remember right he's responsible for all those orange XML icons.

Upcoming this week, tomorrow I'm interviewing the hardware team at Microsoft. Can't wait to hear stories about how mice and keyboards are developed. Anyone have any questions you want me to ask them?

On Wednesday I'm speaking at Boeing.

This weekend, Maryam and I are blowing off some steam in Las Vegas with her brother and mom. Sounds fun. Anyone wanna get a blogger breakfast going there?

Brian Kennemer links to a cool PowerPoint multimedia tool that was created by a Microsoft customer/MVP.

Dave Ciccone, over on Dave's iPaq blog, has been giving away tons of stuff this past week. Cool.

Ole Eichorn is blogging again and is looking for some .NET-focused summer interns for his startup company.

Mike Kolitz just had his car broken into and is wondering if anyone has a suggestion for a car alarm. Particularly a geeky one (he's a developer, after all). Oh, and he just got hired by Microsoft too -- he's working in the Windows Server group. Congrats!

Oh, did anyone notice that the thief stole $60 worth of stuff, but left a Tablet PC in the back seat?

Well, last week was a very interesting one for me. I met so many interesting people. I wish I had more time with all of them. Yesterday I tried to decompress by hanging out with Matt Carter and his kids at Fry's. He's a group program manager over in Microsoft's eLearning division (they used to be called MSPress). Just to put a nice cap on the week we ran into Raymond Chen, one of Microsoft's smartest programmers. His blog is still one of my favorites, it gives a really geeky look at things in Windows.

By the way, does anyone have a business card strategy? What do you do with business cards? I have about 50 cards from the past week. Not sure what to do with them, other than they remind me of stories.

For instance, earlier this week David Teten, CEO of Nitron Advisors, invited me to dinner and Alan Kipust, Senior Vice President of Register.com was there and we talked about how important identity is to the world. Got his card, so if anything ever goes wrong with my domains I'll have someone to call.

At the geek dinner in NYC, there wasn't space in the main restaurant, so I, and a handfull of other people moved to a table out in the food court at Grand Central Station. Sitting next to me was Michael Dunn, Vice President of Hearst Interactive Media. Don't recognize the Hearst name? It's one of the biggest in journalism.

Also at the dinner was a couple of guys from MorganStanley's IT department. Ryan Barrows and Srikrishna Sridhar. Great guys and told me what it's like working inside a very conservative and regulated industry.

At the geek dinner in Minneapolis, I met Tim Broeker, of Mambofrog.com. He's an open source developer, who uses Mambo to build Web sites for companies in Minneapolis. At the dinner, I met a woman who has been programming since the 1960s. I forgot her name, does anyone who was at the dinner remember it? She was most interesting and told us lots of stories.

At Target alone I have a bunch of cards including the famous Bob Giampietro. He's Vice President of Strategic Alliances. But that doesn't do him justice. It seems like everyone knows who he is inside Target. We talked about what Target is doing to bring new features to their guests. Plasma and RFID are two things on his radar screen.

Going back to the session I did at my brother's law firm, I met a guy who went to high school with Bill Gates: Web Augustine who is now a general partner and co-founder at Xelerate Venture Partners. He told me stories of how a small group of geeks, including Gates, would hide out in the computer room to avoid doing physical education. The PE teacher would come in and force them outside to do their exercise.

At the BDI conference I met Vada Manager, director of global issues management at Nike, Inc. Really great guy, we talked about the famous Tiger Woods shot that was played up on the blogosphere (that post got emailed around inside Nike).

And I still have 40 cards that I haven't mentioned to you. I wish I had more time to tell all the stories from just the past week. But gotta work on the book. Thanks to everyone who I met, I have a ton of new blogs to subscribe to too, like http://www.smallbiztechnology.com/ , (cool video of the NYC geek dinner is up there. The video includes Mary Jo Foley and other famous bloggers who showed up) and products/services like http://www.blogharbor.com/ , which is a blogging tool, to check out..

Wait a second, is Nick Denton trying to mine a new vein of anti-blog-hype? Here, listen in:

"The hype comes from unemployed or partially employed marketing professionals and people who never made it as journalists wanting to believe. They want to believe there's going to be this new revolution and their lives are going to be changed."

So, Nick, are you saying you're gonna stop making a business out of this new blog thing and you're gonna get a "real" job? Heh! Of course not.

I think I should hop on the latest anti-blog wagon too. Heh. After all, I'm a guy who never made it as a journalist.

Dare Obasanjo talks about Microsoft's benefits packages. I too agree that Microsoft's benefits are top notch and that we take them for granted too often. Health insurance is really expensive (at one previous jobs I had to pay for my wife and son's insurance and it still wasn't as good as what Microsoft is providing).

It's funny. It seems tons of other people have seen the new Xbox. But not me. I guess they don't want Channel 9 talking about it. So, I'll be stuck watching the launch on MTV and reading TriXie's blog.

Larry Hryb, of the Xbox Live team, though, has been doing a great job of covering the latest stuff from the Xbox world. Including putting up podcasts.

Interesting marketing site for OneNote: Stationery is Bad.

I wish I could get an interview with Chris Pratley of the OneNote team for Channel 9.

Wilson Ng, who is a Microsoft MVP, wrote me about a conversation he had with an IT executive about technology and ROI.

I'm staying out of the ROI arguments, but Wilson brings up some interesting points to consider when drawing out ROI maps.

Business Week magazine's new blog about blogs makes for interesting reading. One post, though, interested the evangelist in me. They got a few letters from readers who still didn't understand what blogs were after reading their cover article on the topic last week.

I'm finding this too. When I talk with audiences I either find people who are very familiar with the blog world (if you know what Technorati is, for instance, you are probably one of those people), while most people just don't know much about our little world at all.

It's not just blogs, either. How many people -- even those who are advanced computer users or developers -- really can explain what Avalon is? Or what Indigo does? Or what Aero is?