This guy, over on Joel Spolsky's forum, claims he wasn't hired because he doesn't have a blog. Thanks to Hilton Giesenow for sending that along.

I've learned over and over again that the best employees are people who love their product. So, if I were building a blogging tool and was hiring developers I sure would be biased toward bloggers too.

Just like if I were building cars I'd be biased toward people who loved cars.

In fact, when I talked with Scott, the Plymouth Prowler fan, told me that when Plymouth was interviewing employees to work on the car they hired only the cream of the crop from the UAW's workforce. Most of the people who were hired (the pay was much higher than a usual line, Scott told me) had custom-built cars.

My favorite friends are the ones who love what they do. Just look at Dana Epp. He's sitting next to me debugging a problem he found today with his product. He finds time to blog AND develop software and he isn't even building a blogging tool.

Is this a first? A major company leaking an announcement to a blogger? Jim McKeeth got the first notice that there'll be a Microsoft Professional Developer's Conference in 2005.

The MSN Spaces team reacts again with this post: Who Owns My Blog Content?

This was posted on Michael Connolly's blog. "You own the content you post. Period."

They are working with lawyers to make the language reflect this.

You know, I wish every team reacted in real time like this to your feedback. I give a lot of teams a hard time for not listening to customers, but the MSN Spaces Team has been really delivering on their blogs.

Do you agree?

Bonus MSN link. The MSN Search Team is asking "how do you spell Levenshtein?"

John Howard just let everyone know that Windows Server 2003 SP1 RC1 is now available for download.

Help Tantek out with his girlfriend. (He's one of the technologists behind Technorati). His girlfriend, Amber, is a really good DJ, focuses on techno and tech-house DJ, and you can listen to her stuff and then help vote her up in a DJ contest.

Hey, Tantek, you should make a podcast for Amber. I'd subscribe. In fact, I'm copying her song to my phone right now.

I made a mistake about geek dinners. This week the Media Center geek dinner is on Thursday night, here's Sean Alexander's post about it. I'll be there. So will Jian Shuo Wang -- he's visiting from China (and is blogging about it).

Tonight Anita Rowland has a blogger dinner (both geeks and non-geeks welcome) tonight at the Crossroads too. Details are on her blog.

The talk around the dinner table on Saturday was about Cisco's big holiday party (first one in three years). KGO radio on Friday night spent three hours talking about it. They are paying Santana to play. Something like a $650,000 bill just for Santana. We almost got tickets from Maryam's friend who works at Cisco, but couldn't arrange to get down there in time. Drat.

Is your company having a holiday party? If so, how big a deal is it?

Me, I'm going to my first Microsoft holiday party this weekend. Of course I'll blog about it.