Don Park points out Microsoft's hiring hypocricy. Hey, I don't have a college degree (I'm three units away from graduating). Not something I'm proud of, but it's the education that's important, not the piece of paper -- and I'd never work someplace that believed otherwise. By the way, my educational experience was never raised during my interviews.

But, I don't think Don really needs to worry.

Marcus Mielke has a Longhorn Blog. He's working on performance on the Avalon team. Hey, if it ain't working well enough, now you know who to blame.

Ryan Lowe talks about the effect his weblog is having: "The great thing is that I have a solution to a problem and I can share it with others, creating a sort of ad hoc community around a specific problem."

So, today, took the missus and the kid and went to Walmart in Milpitas. If you want to see the huge cultural and ethnic shifts going on in the valley, this is ground zero. 20 years ago Milpitas was mostly white, with some hispanic, some black, and some Chinese. Today, whites are in the minority. Mostly Indian, Chinese, Vietnamese made up the throngs of people picking up deals. I counted at least four different languages (and a few I couldn't identify).

When I was growing up in Cupertino (about a mile from Apple's headquarters) my schoolmates were almost all white and were english speakers. Today my old neighborhood is so predominantly Chinese that some street signs are in both English and Cantonese.

In the Walmart, it was the busiest shopping day of the year. It was a zoo. You could hardly walk the aisles. Later, I went to the Apple store in Palo Alto. It also was a zoo, albeit the people there were mostly white.

Are you noticing the same kinds of cultural changes in your home town?

Update: I edited this entry to make my language clearer.