Patrick has saved up $700. He was hoping that a new iBook would come out from Apple, but that didn’t happen. Now he has his eyes on a new MacBook (he hates the name, by the way).

Dang, how does a 12-year-old kid save up $700? I remember in high school working all summer to buy a $400 camera. Money isn’t worth what it used to be. Although the cool computers continue hanging around the $2,000 price level.

I hear I might have a new Lenovo Tablet soon. I’m going to tempt him with that. It’s lighter and would make a lot more sense for someone going to school. Personally I’m scared of him having such an expensive laptop, though.

For myself I’m intrigued by the new MacBook cause it looks like it’ll run both Windows and OSX. Let’s see. New MacBook? Or HDTV? Nah, sorry, HDTV wins. ;-)

Oh, and did I mention that Patrick really doesn’t like the name? Oh, Patrick, no biggie, just cover it up with a sticker and everything will be fine. I have a selection here for you. Let’s see, I have Technorati stickers. I have one of the very rare Mozilla.org stickers, and I have some Blogger stickers. I just realized we need a Channel 9 sticker!

Update: Tristan Louis has drawn up some comparison charts of the new MacBook compared to the old PowerBooks as well as to a PC model.

Ahh, I saw that Microsoft was on stage with Steve Jobs this morning. So did Nadyne who says “I’m not unemployed.” (She works on the Mac team).

John Furrier has a podcast of the keynote this morning on his PodTech.net site and MacNN links to the Quicktime video of the event.

Chris Pendleton pointed this one out to me. Fresh Logic Studios took the Virtual Earth map control and MSN Local Search API and created their own interface into mapping business listings. I like this one better than the Local.Live.Com interface.

This afternoon I spoke with Sean Lyndersay of the IE team to a bunch of Microsoft employees about RSS. Interesting conversation. These were mostly field folks, so basically were technical field people, premier services, MCS, tech specialists, and information worker specialists. Lorin was in the audience and he used to be CTO of Sprint and he calls himself a “sales guy”. Yeah, right. Heheh. Every single one of them used an RSS aggregator. That’s the first audience I’ve spoken to where that was the case.

But, that’s not my digital lifestyle story.

On the way out Jeff Sandquist called me about a meeting I’d have in about 35 minutes (I was in downtown Seattle, which is usually a 17 mile drive, according to Live Local. Jeff asked me whether I knew where the next meeting was. I looked at my phone to make sure the details were there. They were. And headed back for Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, WA.

Well, turns out it was raining cats and dogs. I wondered what the traffic was like. So, I start up SmartPhlow, which shows all of Seattle’s roadways and current traffic conditions (unfortunately that’s not yet available for public use since it’s still in testing). I see that there’s some slow traffic, so things aren’t gonna be too bad. I leave that on my phone, and soon I hit the traffic. I check SmartPhlow again, see that it hasn’t gotten any worse, but that I’ll probably arrive five to 10 minutes late.

So, I call Jeff up. But, wait, I don’t have his phone number programmed on my phone (bad boy) so I call Microsoft’s main switchboard. A computer answers and asks me to say the person I’m trying to call. “Jeff Sandquist” I answer. The computer answers “did you say Jeff Sandquist?” “Yes.” The voice then says “OK, dialing that person.” Within a few seconds Jeff answers the phone and I say “I’ll probably be five to 10 minutes late.”

Well, end of the story is I pull into the building 18 garage at 3:04 p.m. and am at the meeting at 3:06 and I realized just how dependent I’m becoming on my new phone.

Oh, when I got to my meeting? Jeff came and said another participant would be 10 to 15 minutes late. So, what do I do? Pull my phone out and start reading feeds.

I’m getting emails saying “I only get a blank white page when I click on one of your permalinks.”

I’m getting that too. I’m sending feedback to Wordpress right now. Sorry for the troubles.

UPDATE3: Matt says the problem is fixed. Thanks Matt!

It took me a while to track this rumor down, but the team just sent me an update/correction. Here’s more from Wayne Hickey, who is doing PR for the Windows Media Team.

“It is absolutely untrue. Microsoft provided the technology for this deal only, and in no way placed restrictions on design or the use of other audio technologies as part of the deal. Verizon intended to support direct MP3 playback at launch, but their primary focus was over the air delivery and one of their other tech providers was unable to do direct MP3 playback by launch. They do support MP3 playback via transcoding to WMA via Windows Media 10 and are working to deliver direct MP3 playback shortly.”

The original story was reported here on Engadget, Techdirt, and ZDNET and was linked here on Memeorandum/Tech.

Engadget is blogging and covering MacWorld too. I gotta go, have a presentation to give about RSS today to Microsoft employees. I’ll be watching Engadget’s coverage on my ssssooooooppppeeeeerrrrr ddddddoooooppppppeeeeerrrr Cingular 2125 SmartPhone. Oh, and if you see me in an Apple store today don’t pay any attention to that! Heheh.

Is this a preview of what’s coming later today from Steve Jobs? ;-) It’s ArtRage 2. The first one was only for the Tablet PC. The second one is for Mac and Windows. I hear it’s coming real soon. Hmmm, is Apple coming out with a Tablet? Using ArtRage with a normal mouse isn’t even close to as satisfying. I can’t wait to get my hands on this. I wonder if Larry Larsen is beta testing it (his gallery of ArtRage produced images is cool).

Anyway, I’m off to bed, just woke up in the middle of the night to see this.

I’m still beat from CES so taking the night off. Damn, there are so many interesting things on Memeorandum/Tech though. Riya gets big funding. Engadget bags Gates (a second time). And lots more. I keep meeting people who read my blog but don’t read Memeorandum. Here’s your chance. It’s a better way to see the hot tech news than to expect me to cover it. Oh, while you’re there, click the “preferences” — I like seeing all the headlines a lot better than the sparse default display. Anyway congrats to Riya!

Oh, and one of my favorite podcasts, ITConversations, is getting a Web overhaul and is now part of the Conversations Network. Doug Kaye, the founder, is one of the nicest guys I’ve met on my travels. This should be interesting.