OK, I've cleaned out the mudpit of the guy who was posting as me and I deleted a bunch of stuff over on Channel 9 and now that forum is back on track. I won't be posting until tomorrow in the mudpit (my comments area) so if the fake "Robert Scoble" comes back, you'll know it's not me.

Have fun out there!

Joshua Langemann talks about just some of the infrastructure here. There are hundreds of computers here and a sizeable network. It's much more impressive when you see it here rather than just look at photos.

One funny thing I have been doing is switching the home page of a row of computers to blogs. Want me to take a picture of your blog on the monitors? Leave me your URL here and I'll post it to the Flickr site.

Update: of course I set them back when I'm done.

Hey, Om, do you know where I could get one of those "Code is Poetry" t-shirts that you talked about today? I've never seen one and I want to add it to my Microsoft shirt collection.

Anyway, my comments are still messed up. I'll work on those later. If you see a Robert Scoble post assume it's not me.

The trolls are out of hand. Now they are impersonating me on my comments. I will delete any comments that are made in my name that aren't mine. Just gonna take me a while to do it cause they are over on Channel 9 doing the same thing. Ahh, the fun.

I won't delete any comment not made in my name, but doing it in my name is over the line, sorry.

More later. In the meantime, you can follow the PDC blogs here and the PDC Flickr site here. If you're at the PDC, add your photos and tag your site with the PDC05 tag.

Note: the comments made in the mudpit here were not made by me. I'm working on getting those deleted.

Dimitar Vesselinov just told me that on IT Conversations Stephen Lawler's presentation about MSN's Virtual Earth at the Where 2.0 conference is now up

IT Conversations continues to rock. Love what Doug Kaye is doing with that.

There's a new SD Forum Silicon Valley Search SIG. Oh, I love the SD Forum. Speaking at one of its user groups got me a new job and a $10,000 a year raise back about eight years ago.

They have a meeting on Wednesday night and it's a powerhouse meeting.

Just saw this post from Don Box:

I want Windows Vista
The new shell is nice.
IE7 is nice.
Glass is nice.
Transactional/indexed file system: priceless.

Oh, and Don, wait until you see (censored, censored, censored, censored, censored). Wow.

James Clark says that Sony has a Holographic Storage demo that is pretty cool.

You know, for a conference team, blogs have really changed how we can watch the customer's experience. We're hitting the blogs a lot to see what people are reporting. Since there's 1,000 bloggers here, if there's a problem it's very likely to get blogged before we even know about it. The scale of the PDC is just huge. It takes something like 15 minutes to walk from one end of the hall to the other and really the customer experience is all over the city. If you aren't having a good experience in your hotel, for instance, it reflects poorly on the conference. Often times we can help if we know but in the old days a conference team wouldn't be able to see these kinds of problems in real time.

Luckily, so far, the bloggers are happy. Dennis Mulder, for instance, so far gives everything a thumbs up. Here's another report from Johan Danforth. And another one from Mike Taulty.

So, I start up FeedDemon today. I'm using that for reading all the PDC blogs and am loving it. So, anyway, I was reading all the blogs of people who are coming to the PDC and I see Francis Shanahan says he's been Scobleized. Hmmm, I wasn't the one who pointed out his app. That was Jeff Barr. Francis' app was in the Amazon video I shot a few weeks ago. It's nice that we could close that loop cause his collage app is very cool.

Developers like Francis rule. Hope I get to meet him this week.

Sean Alexander is planning a PDC geek dinner for Tuesday evening. He's running a cool secret project. Well, it'll be secret until Wednesday, I think.

We need a Wiki for PDC geek dinners. Why doesn't someone start one over on the Channel 9 Wiki. Oh, heck, let's go off and start one right now. I love Wiki's for just this kind of stuff. You can add your own geek dinner here.

While looking at Norm Augustinus' site, I realized something. Sites with orange XML icons look cooler to me than sites that don't have orange XML icons. In fact, look at that site, now look at the Microsoft employee blog site. Norm's site looks cooler. OK, there's other reasons Norm's site looks cooler too. But, I wonder if anyone has done any research on that? Does having an XML icon make a site look more up-to-date?

I can't believe it's been four years already since 9/11. The feelings of sadness and helplessness come back when I look back and see my son's pictures on my blog for that day. To this day he's scared of going on planes because of 9/11. His world was changed that day.

That day kicked off radical personal changes in my life. A month later I was in a car wreck, which just accelerated the changes that were coming. Over the next few months after 9/11 I went through a divorce. Got engaged to Maryam. My grandma died. I laid myself off from UserLand.

That period of time was a serious inflection point in my life. And it led to my life today. Live life with your metaphorical gas pedal all the way to the floor. Why not? You never know what's coming tomorrow.

Might as well try to make life better today.

That day was also an inflection point for the blogosphere. It was the day that I realized our disaster experience had changed because now we could all share information -- no matter where we were in the world -- and have a global conversation. I remember getting up and talking with people in dozens of countries that morning on IM. Today I'm seeing that trend continue as geeks build systems to deploy volunteers to where they are needed (and, as other geeks build systems to let victims communicate with their families and the world).

All said, though. The pre-9/11 world is something I look back longingly at. I remember recently taking a Ferry trip in Seattle and having three police boats circle the Ferry. It made me feel very uncomfortable. Our world had changed.

Oh, geez, Norm Augustinus' site, a comic parody on Katrina stuff, is getting around.

Shows that if you have a little creativity your blog can get noticed.

Well, the PDC has started, and so has the partying (in that series of pictures are a bunch of customers partying with some of the CLR team -- the guys who are making the future Windows platform). Why do we still go to conferences when we know each other from blogs and other online technologies? Cause it's fun. Plus I learn a lot from encounters like these. Turns out both customers and MSFTies are willing to say things face-to-face that they wouldn't say on their blogs or online.