Did I mention that you can make SOAP calls from JavaScript in Mozilla 0.9.9? If this API gets supported across IE and Opera you can kiss CGI scripts good-bye. Think of all the time you spend staring at a half-built web page while you wait for the cgi script on the other end of the pipe to finish its processing and serve up the rest of the page. Why make a complete round trip to the server to submit the data and get a whole new page to display when you can just make a SOAP call to submit the data to the server, get back a response and then re-flow only the part of the page that has changed.
One other topic of conversation yesterday was reading blogs in other languages and getting linked to from foreign language blogs. I really like Sylvain Carle's A Frog in the Valley blog, he covers tech I am interested in and I get to exercise those long dormant French neurons. It's been a long, long time since junior high and high school French.