Today is the 13th day after the Iranian New Year, or Sizdah Bedar, which means Iranians get out of the house. It marks the return to ordinary life. It is believed that joy and laughter clean the mind from all evil thoughts, and a picnic is usually a festive, happy event.

Today is a nice day here in Seattle land, so I'm taking Maryam to the Tulip Festival. But first we're going to Maltby's cafe for lunch. It's a great place. Has the world's largest cinnamon rolls.

Hope you get away from the computer and have a good day. I'll post some pictures on my Flickr feed later.

So tonight Maryam and I were out to dinner with a bunch of Adam Kinney's friends and coworkers (it was his birthday) and Jeff was there. When I first got there he said "congratulations."

"Thanks, you know it was a joke, right?"

"Oh, it was? We already cleaned out your office and I have everything in boxes in my truck and your email is being shut off, cause the lawyers considered your post written proof that you weren't a Microsoft employee anymore."

"Good one Jeff!"

Of course I wasn't completely sure if he was pulling my leg or not until I got home and checked I could still get on email. Heheh.

Oh, I thought it was funny that Nick Carr won the annual hypocritical April Fools' Day "Dark Cloud" award.

Anyone notice that Hugh Macleod has been on fire lately? (He got a new Tablet PC and he's been kicking out cartoons at a much faster pace). He's the guy who did the little cartoon above.

Scott Guthrie is a general manager at Microsoft. One thing I like is his blog. It's been getting more and more popular with developers over the past few months. In the past couple of weeks he's been blogging up a storm with fun stuff for developers, here's a sample:

• Atlas presentation and samples
• Using .NET to build cool games for Xbox (cool pictures!)
• RSS ToolKit for ASP.NET 2.0 Updated
• Great Atlas Map Mashup Tutorial

Maryam was just watching me type this post out and says she likes Scott (she hosts Webcasts for MSDN). "Why?" I ask. "He always answers his email," she answers. She also says that two weeks ago Scott held a Webcast that had the most attendees they've ever had (about 1,000 people watching live, 5,500 registered but it turns out that the technology they are using, LiveMeeting, can only handle about 1,250 attendees if there's desktop sharing going on).

Since it's now April 2 in most of the rest of the world it's time to get back to reality. Sorry to Stephen Toub for helping the world get a little crazy over the past few hours. Yeah, Nick Carr, April Fools Day did jump the shark.

But, my day as head of Google's PR was fun. Hope I didn't cause too many ruffled feathers over there. I can only take fighting one company a week! Heheh.

On a more serious note, Rebecca MacKinnon continues her tracking of what's going on on the Chinese blogs and points today to Nina Wu, sister of the detained filmmaker and blogger Hao Wu.

You know, if the worst thing that happens to me is I get some pointed questions that I didn't answer well from a CTO of a public company, or get some nasty personal comments, then I am very fortunate. In many places in the world writing your thoughts can get you killed or thrown in jail. Or worse.

When people ask "does blogging matter?" I'll just answer "well, if it doesn't, then why is the Chinese government throwing people in jail because of their blogs?"

PS, tomorrow I'll change the time on my server to match Pacific Time instead of European time.

Wikipedia has, by far, the most complete list of April 1, 2006 stuff.