So, we went down to the Apple store and tried to buy an iSight. Turns out they are sold out. The salesperson said they can’t keep them in stock. A customer behind me was looking for one too and said that they are sold out everywhere.

Tim Bray (co-creator of XML and a Sun Microsystems’ employee) is taking on a bit of heat cause he said Sun Microsystems’ new product is “fucking cool.” That is causing a bit of controversy.

I tried to stay away from swearing when I worked at Microsoft. Mostly cause I represented a lot of people who probably wouldn’t appreciate my language. I said “fuck” on stage once at Les Blogs and Maryam thought it was inappropriate.

Personally I think it’s cool that Tim Bray thinks Sun’s new product is cool enough to use salty language about.

I paid attention to that new product launch BECAUSE of Tim’s language. (I linked to pictures of the Blackbox several times on my link blog).

But, what about you?

The Vloggies are coming up and you get to pick the winners. Voting is open until Friday.

Dave Winer has a new Sony 46-inch LCD TV. It’s smaller than mine, but thinner and sharper and his Mac plays full screen on it instead of just partial screen like on mine. It is stunning. He calls it a “life changer.” I agree.

Last night I was at a party where the host showed a video of him and his wife jumping out of a plane. That was cool.

But, we’re turning off the HD and going for a walk and a visit to the Apple store. That makes Patrick happy.

Dave Winer was just telling Patrick about going into a Tower Records recently as they are holding a going-out-of-business sale and noticing that only three people were there. I remember when I was a kid people would line up around the block to get into Tower Record in Campbell and buy records. Seriously. I also remember when they got their first CDs back when I was in high school. Patrick, of course, lives in a different world. He buys his music on iTunes.

Here’s a picture I took of Adam Curry and Dawn and Drew inside Tower Records in Mountain View, CA in 2004 after BloggerCon that year. That’s now only a memory. Tower Records is no more…

Fred Wilson, of “A VC” blog, who lives in NYC, says that things aren’t just happening in Silicon Valley. That’s true. Of the interviews I’ve done in the first month I’ve interviewed entrepreneurs from Australia, Seattle, Montana. The Valley is — by far- the best place for me to live, though. Why? Cause the money in the valley drags enterpreneurs in so I don’t have to travel as much.

But, the infrastructure here for people starting companies is something I’ll try to report on more.

One thing I’m noticing is that the CEO will live here in the SF area, while the development team will live elsewhere. I remember meeting Donncha O Caoimh in Ireland before Matt Mullenweg did (he is one of Automattic’s top developers and works for Matt Mullenweg, who lives in SF).

There’s a new gadget videoblog, thanks to CNET. Hmmm, I’ve seen co-host Veronica Belmont before. Oh, yeah, she’s Ryan Block’s girlfriend as seen in my tour of “the Engadget Cribb.” Gadget love runs deep in that house! I read this all on Andy Plesser’s site where he has an interview with FM Media’s Chas Edwards. FM Media, founder John Battelle told me on Friday, has been expanding very rapidly. One blogger I know said he just got a $2,000 check for his blog from FM Media and that FM Media just had its first million dollar month of sales. Battelle also told me that they are rapidly expanding into audio and video too and that they’ve gotten some hosting deals that are dramatically lower than the $.14 a gigabyte fee I quoted before.

Anyway, Patrick and I are on our way to Berkeley to hang out with Dave Winer. Talk to you later.

Here’s one sample, that uses CSS extensively, that does behave better on IE7 than on Firefox 2. But, I really don’t like inline text sites like this for some reason. Do you?

Tomorrow a big company (not Microsoft) is going to announce a new videoconferencing system. I got a preview last week and it blew me away — you’ll see in my video that it feels like (I’m embargoed from talking about it until tomorrow morning). I’ll have the video up sometime tomorrow.

Microsoft too has a new videoconferencing camera that’s pretty innovative (I got demos of this back when I worked at Microsoft) that’s getting a bit of attention on TechMeme. I want one for our conference room at PodTech.
It’s going to be an interesting week for corporate videoconferencing.

Sorry that the audio is a bit bad (note to self, when you take audio off of someone’s sound board you gotta test it out — but I had an excuse cause I was on stage and busy).

I just put my interview with Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer, that I did on stage in front of an audience (that gave Steve a standing ovation at the end). In an hour you’ll hear about a wide range of early Apple history, among other things that interest Woz, like playing Tetris and his music festivals (he’s doing another one). Pranks. Hacking. I mention Phillip Torrone and his TV jammer. Shyness. Building video games. First argument with Steve Jobs. And tons more. You probably have heard lots of these stories, but he tells a few new ones and it was fun. People afterward told me they wished he could go on for a few more hours.

I put this up on Blip.TV to test the video quality and uploading capabilities. This video is more than an hour long. Unfortunately it didn’t keep the wide-screen format of my video. I’m going to talk with Mike Hudack, CEO of Blip, about that.

It’s still amazing to me that Woz designed the entire Apple I and II computers. That’s a feat that probably can’t be done today. At one point I asked the audience how many had Apple II computers. About 60% of the audience raised their hands.

He told how HP turned him down five times cause he wanted HP to build the Apple II computers instead of going and starting his own company. Imagine how different the world would have been if someone at HP would have said “yes.”

Also, he told how an early employee didn’t believe the company would end up being successful so sold his stock holdings back to the company for a few thousand dollars. That ended up being about 10% of the company and now would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

This interview was part of Woz’s book tour for his new book, iWoz, which is most excellent if you want to learn more about how Apple was birthed. On Amazon is has a 4.5 rating, which for a book author is pretty darn good.

Speaking of books, our book, Naked Conversations, is still selling very well. It’s in the top 4,000 on Amazon out of all books (about 1.5 million books). Thank you all for your support!

Funny.

But, I’m totally in Jason Calacanis’ corner here where he argues about how to change the system. Do what you can to improve someone’s life. That’s far preferable to what Dana Gardner argues for on the Gillmor Gang.

I am now permanently addicted to Google Reader and am not using other news aggregators anymore. Why? Keyboard shortcuts. J, J, J, K, Shift-S, J, J, J, Shift-S. Also because I got a Mac and a Windows machine now and it’s just easier to use a Web browser to read feeds (and I’m not so anal about reading feeds on planes anymore).

Google Reader brings me a “river” of latest items that I use keyboard shortcuts to go through. It’s much faster to read feeds this way. I just wish they would allow me to see the river full screen and get rid of the list of blogs I’m subscribed to. Once I’m subscribed I don’t care anymore.

What did I just “Shift-S”? You can read my link blog to see. But the last thing is a TechCrunch post, which shows that Google has a full-size replica of SpaceShipOne and are putting it in their building 43.

That reminds me. This week coming up is Blog Business Summit week and there’s a few things that people who are visiting Seattle should go and see.

1) Museum of Flight.
2) Seattle Library.
3) The 747 plant. (Largest building in the world by volume).
4) First Starbucks.

Anyway, all the cool stuff is on other blogs. J J J J J J J J…

I’ve gotten to know Daniel McVicar a bit over the past month and think he’s a lot of fun. When we first had dinner I had no idea he was an internationally-famous soap opera star. Hey, I don’t watch those things. But Irina gushed when she learned I had dinner with him. She has a fun interview with him on Geek Entertainment TV where he talked about his Late Night Mash show. He’s gonna make us all stars. But can we all get on GETV?

Thank you Ethan Zuckerman for doing such wonderful blogging from the PopTech conference. Your humanity comes through and the detail is rich. I wish I was there. Here’s the official PopTech blog. I hear Rodrigo y Gabriela blew everyone away. Their Web site rocks. Here’s their MySpace page with even more music. They are playing in Seattle San Francisco this week coming up. Unfortunately I’m gonna miss them in both places.

I hope that PopTech will release all of its sessions in video format. There’s a lot more about PopTech on Technorati. Jason Kottke has good writeups too.

OK, so here’s what I just did. I opened TechMeme up, and Ctrl-clicked on every link on the main part of TechMeme. That opened every link up into a tab. Then I went to Windows Task Manager and looked at how much memory each took.

Firefox 2: 249,996 K
IE 7: I couldn’t complete the tasks, but after loading only about half of the links iexplore was taking 295,800K.

Firefox 2 was much faster on my machine to open up all the tabs and get me back surfing. In fact, on my little Lenovo X41 Tablet PC, I couldn’t complete opening all of the links using IE7. IE was just getting slower and slower.

Now, this isn’t matching what other people are seeing. Lifehacker says that IE 7’s memory utilization is much lower than Firefox’s. Which tells me something must be messed up on my machine and/or something else is getting loaded on my IE7 machine.

What are you seeing?

While drinking Scotch tonight lots of people have been emailing me about Scrybe. Download Squad links to a cool video. They say “wow” and I agree. The Ajaxian blog says “looks too good to be true.”

Can’t wait to see use it myself. I’m still more than 500 emails in email deficit, so need more organization.

Have you ever noticed that Diggnation gets better if you’re drinking hard-core alcohol? I can’t believe 200,000+ people watch that show. John Batelle told me that FM Media is selling tens of thousands of dollars of ads on it every week. UPDATE: I must have misheard him, cause I learned that FM Media sells ads on Digg, not Diggnation, sorry about that.

Actually, the fact that Diggnation is bringing in the ad dollars means I’m aiming too high. What a brilliant idea. Get together on a couch. Drink some beer. Tell people what you think. And collect cash.

I’m jealous.

That said, I’d rather watch Photoshop Online. Heck, mix Photoshop Online with good Scotch and you’ll end up with nicer photos while getting drunk. Beats listening to Kevin Rose while HE gets drunk on cheap expensive beer.

OK, I gotta fess up. Thomas Hawk and Jan Kabili, the guru behind Photoshop Online, will be here in the morning filming a Photowalking session.

I think I’ll show her the new Paint.NET, which is looking pretty good.

I see that John Lam just joined Microsoft and is working in building 42. That’s where Don Box works. Before I left Microsoft Don was working on something cool, but he wouldn’t tell me about it. Don has Chris Sells locked in an office with him. I can just see it now. Building 42 is where good bloggers go to escape the world.

In the meantime, Chris Sells linked to this Windows Vista website. Weird. I really don’t like sites like this. I think they are a waste of marketing dollars. But that’s just me. Just go into Don Box’s office with a camcorder and ask him about Windows Vista. He knows what it does.

If you don’t know who John Lam or Don Box or Chris Sells are, well, they used to be among the favorite speakers at Visual Studio Conferences. Smart dudes.

I wonder what’s going on in building 42. Hey, Charles Torre, take a camcorder over there and see what’s going on!

Oh, and Chris Sells, your site looks better in Google Reader than it does in HTML. Can you do something about that?

I was just reading feeds and saw that Northern Voice is on. This is one of those conferences that I’ll spend my own money to attend. It’s where I first saw video blogging. It’s where I met Kris Krug, who I’m hoping will take us on a cool photowalk. It’s where Julie Leung made me cry. Coming next February sometime. Please schedule it after February 11th, cause I’m going to LIFT 2007 in Switzerland.

Yes, my schedule is being booked for February already. Sigh.

Oh, Google, why do you do stuff like this? They turned off ZeFrank’s advertising/donation site. Lame.

UPDATE: Google turned back on Ze Frank’s service.