Is obviously messed up. Wordpress’s great folks are playing with it. I’m off to go to Phoenix, so will be offline for a while.

UPDATE: back to normal. In the meantime, check out what happens when a famous book author, Roger von Oech, who wrote “Creative Whack Pack” (no, not the blogging echo chamber) came over and gave me a new toy to play with.

On the plane I was thinking about why some people just have more fun than other people. Roger von Oech came to mind. That dude has a good attitude, plus you can tell he’s smart. But I learned some other stuff too from him that he wasn’t even trying to teach me.

1) Take risks. He called me up, didn’t know if I’d be interested in him. Took a risk. Invested some time getting to know someone new.
2) Spread fun. Soon after meeting me he pulled out some of his stuff and showed me what his new product did. Was generous, brought several for me to hand around the office.
3) Listen and learn. He wanted to know all sorts of things about me. I noticed he was a great listener. You can tell that from the blog post he wrote about me. He didn’t take notes, but was mentally trying to learn something new.
4) A smile goes a long way. I found Roger to make me feel good. Why? Cause he was just happy. I don’t know how else to explain it. I guess that if you are creating products that try to get you to be more creative and innovative that you better be creative and innovative yourself.

Thanks Roger, love my new “Ball of Whacks.”

Two videos that got my eye. They won't change the world. They don't really communicate anything important. They won't get on Memeorandum or Digg or even on Google Video or YouTube. But, what the heck, neither will a flower.

Daniel Liss: Begin here. Great homemade music and visuals. Inspiring!

Michael Verdi is in a post Vloggercon funk.

Oh, Michael, I know what you mean. Sometimes I just get in a funk and don't know what to write. It gets worse after conferences cause I realize people are listening. Damn, it's so much easier to create and do weird shit when you know no one is listening.

It's a totally terrifying time in my life. And thrilling, too. So many changes coming that it's hard to just soak it all in. It's hard to get to sleep, to tell you the truth. Which is why I'm watching videos at 4 a.m. Thanks for making my 4 a.m. a little more fun than what's on the Discovery Channel at this time of morning.

I do feel naked, though. I gave my camcorder to Charles the other day so can't send video back. Can't wait to get a new one. Which one should I get? I want HD, but don't want to spend $6k for the Panasonic one, so probably will go with the Sony I had before (FX1).

I've been playing for a few hours with Opera 9 tonight. Nice browser. But not sure I'll switch. IE 7 and Firefox serve my needs well and don't leave a lot of room for a new browser. 

Will Langford, though, did a nice writeup of Firefox vs. Opera. I don't share his concern with RAM usage, my main thing is speed of opening a new window and completely rendering a Web site. Firefox is fastest here on my computer (which is running beta 2 of Windows Vista). I love the Bittorrent integration, I wish everyone would build that into their browsers. That's going to be how we're going to get HD video from my camcorder onto your screen, so I care about that a lot.
One other thing I care about: I'm going to be using both Mac and Windows OS's in my new job and I want a browser that's as close to the same on both OS's as possible. That leaves me with Firefox. 

On the other hand, Opera has a nice browser for cell phones that I'm using more and more. So, it makes the choice hard. 

Anyway, which browser do you like best, and why? 

While Patrick is playing Kameo on the Xbox, I'm catching up with feeds and things.

Just ran across this video of Jason Fried, 37 Signals founder, giving a talk at the Collaborative Technologies Conference.

I learn something everytime I hear Jason talk. He's a small idea guy. Small teams. Small is beautiful, he titled his talk, available in video here on Alex Dunne's blog.

Small is beautiful even at a big company. I look at the box Patrick is playing tonight. The original idea for that was pitched by two people. Four made up the original team.

Hey, Jason, your team is getting too big! Heheh.

Every Vice President should watch this one. I'm a Friedian. Are you?

I was just at Oren Michael's blog and he said "thanks Amanda." It's amazing how I didn't even need to read anymore. I knew he was talking about Rocketboom. 

Simply inspiring.

On my best day I'm not as good as this. Agree with her point or not (she's pro-network neutrality), this is a great use of the medium. 

Can you do anything like this? I'd love to talk with you, or link to you. Even if I don't agree with you.

By the way, Oren, just found your blog again tonight — I had lost track of it since I deleted a ton of feeds a few months back. Very nice! I can see why you're the CEO of a new Silicon Valley startup — I can't wait to visit the Mashery with my video camera! 

Seth Long writes that he just doesn't get HDTV and he's usually one of those crazy "early adopter" types.

Well, Seth, I see you're gonna be at Gnomedex. Jeff Clavier and a few other people are coming over to watch the World Cup games in the mornings. Come on over and watch them in HD and see if it still doesn't float your boat.

As for the price. Let's look at it a different way.

A few weekends ago I took Patrick to see Mission Impossible. Let's look at the costs of doing that.

1) Waiting in line for an hour. Cost? About $42 of my time (considering I got paid less than $100,000 a year). Every hour is opportunity cost that's gone.

2) Sitting through 25 minutes of advertising. Seriously.

3) $10 ticket to get in. $7 for Patrick. That's $17. Plus, $12 for a hot dog, Coke, popcorn. Whew. And I won't even count the exercise time to work that off. $29 to take just Patrick. Another $17 or so if Maryam comes along (she has a weakness for M&Ms). Not to mention that if you go to a movie you're far more likely to eat out. There goes another $40 to $100. More if a friend comes along. So, one movie can cost us more than $100!!

4) The movie itself. Cell phone went off behind us during the movie. They won't pause the movie while going to the bathroom. The teenagers talking behind us. The tall guy who goes to the bathroom in front of us during the movie. The sticky seats. You can't rewind the movie when your wife asks you "what did that guy say?"

Compare to the monthly cost of my video system: about $130 a month (you think I had $4k in my pocket? You must think I was one of those Microsoft millionaires. Heheh). We bought it at Best Buy and bought it on credit. Don't look at it as $4,000. Look at it as $130 a month (maybe $200, if you also need to buy a new audio system for surround sound).

So, for the cost of a few movies with Maryam, Patrick, and me, I get a humongous new TV screen that makes me the most popular guy with venture capitalists and interesting geeks during Gnomedex.

Heheh, by the way, now you know why Gnomedex's tag is "a higher resolution."

If you want in on the World Cup games, email me robertscoble@hotmail.com. First come, first served (you gotta have transportation since I live about 45 minutes away from Gnomedex).

Maryam just put down an offer on a house in Half Moon Bay. It's way too expensive. The commute sucks. But you'll all want to visit, believe me. Got an extra guest room and a cool sun room for doing video recordings. Walking distance to beach. And golfing. I don't golf. But, might have to take it up!

Anyway, that means we're putting our house up for sale next week. If you're looking to buy a house in the Seattle area, we should talk!

Oh, and I've been getting email about why I haven't changed my title tag yet. I'm a Microsoft employee until June 30th. Maryam and I join PodTech on July 5th.

My Microsoft.com email will work until Wednesday morning. After that there aren't any guarantees (my exit interview is on Wednesday afternoon).

For now it's safer to use my personal email address of robertscoble@hotmail.com.

I have a Podtech email already, but won't answer that until July 5, so let's use the Hotmail one for now.

We'll be working in both Silicon Valley and Seattle during July, not sure what our schedule will be yet, and then we're taking August off to relax a bit and get moved. 

Full time work at Podtech will start in September. 

Anything else I forgot?

Bummer, Maryam made me and Patrick a dentist visit during tomorrow's videoblog session at BloggerCon. I'd rather be at BloggerCon, but Christopher Coulter and Valleywag say that videoblogging is just bad TV, so maybe I'm not missing much. 

Anyone notice that Valleywag is funnier on a Friday night after a margarita or two? Certainly funnier than getting your teeth cleaned. Sigh.

Every big company employee should listen to "Users in Charge" from today's BloggerCon. Visit the MP3 downloads and click on "Users in Charge." Hear the anger? Good! Now are you gonna do something about it?

To the users: some people DO listen. They change the world. At Microsoft we got RSS, wikis, blogs into some of our biggest products (Sharepoint and Office).

The users can win! Especially with blogs.