We had a fun day. Tomorrow is travel day. Patrick and Dave are having way too much fun. They've been telling each other "you shut up" all day and generally driving me nuts. My son is outta control and he's only 11. Hope you're having a great weekend. I just uploaded six videos to Channel 9, including this one that demonstrates Internet Information Services 7 (Microsoft's next Web server).

So, how do you get an 11 year old back under control? They just left a message for Dawn and Drew.

One fun story: we were driving around Monterey and Dave said "CPM was invented here." He then told us all sorts of stories about pitching Gary Kildall on his early outliner software (around 1980). Said that his demo computer was a real pain to haul around (not like his little Sony laptop is today).

We stopped several times at Starbucks so that Dave could upload photos. If you visit scripting.com you'll find the evidence.

I'll be off most of the day tomorrow since we're mostly traveling. Have a good one!

Darren Neimke has come up with BlogML, a new markup language to describe blogs.

Jose Francisco has a report on a chat with the IE 7 team: the Future of IE7.

Update: Plazes is cool. Their locator is even a .NET app (they have a Mac version too). I promptly added the Hyatt to the database.

You gotta try it out. If we had a few thousand people add their details this weekend it'd make the system a lot more useful.

I love my readers. I take a risk, post something, and immediately they start writing in suggestions. Peter Rukavina, for instance, just recommended I check out Plazes, which gives me location-awareness in an open way like what I suggested. I forgot about that. I'm off to try it out.

MSN has a donate to the Red Cross page.

Note to Microsoft employees, you can volunteer your time here: http://katrinarelief (this link will only work if you're a Microsoft employee).

Alan Gutierrez and friends have setup a Wiki here that has tons of "want to help" information.

Paul Short told me that the Army.com Web site is helping victims of Katrina to find jobs by putting up a job board.

J Sawyer links to a project a bunch of MSFTies are doing: KatrinaSafe.com. A place to share information about evacuees.

I've been playing with Virtual Earth's "locate me" technology and I'm very disappointed. It works by triangulating in on wifi hotspots near you and using those to figure out where you are. One problem: it only works if the access points near you are in the database. When it works it's very cool. For instance, when I'm on Microsoft's campus it'll actually show you where you are down to what part of each building you're in.

But, I just tried it here in the Hyatt in Monterey and it says I'm in Seattle. Why? Because I'm using a T-Mobile hotspot and the database doesn't have good information for this access point.

Here's where an open to the public system would be far more useful. Sorta a "Wikipedia" approach. Why can't I go into the database and say "this access point is actually at XYZ location?"

Then geeks could build out the system and make it better over time. Heck, not ready to go full bore wikipedia style here? Give all Microsoft employees access. There's 57,000 of us. We could make this system far more useful in a very short period of time. At least I could make it work in the Monterey Hyatt.