Hey, Adam, your post reminds me. Have you tried a Tablet PC yet? Oh, wait, I’m not supposed to do GYM posts. Heheh. And with that nag, I’m off.

While I’m gone, there are lots of other places to watch. Microsoft has 2,000 bloggers. Most are at http://blogs.msdn.com/ but some are at http://blogs.technet.com.

My favorite blog news sites are
http://tech.memeorandum.com
http://www.digg.com

I’m not looking forward to being offline for 15 hours without a clue about what’s going on (British Air doesn’t have Wifi on their planes yet).

Hope to see you on the other side! Oh, and if you think I’m a shill, you can take a poll about just what kind of shill am I. That’s thanks to Topper Bowers, founder of Quimble.com, a new polling service. Ahh, it’ll be fun to see what that poll looks like after I get off the plane. I noticed that you can vote multiple times, which isn’t good. Oh well, vote early, vote often, I say.

Interesting how my productivity this morning is much higher than usual. We’re leaving in a few hours for Europe and am struggling to get everything done before I leave. Still got 138 emails. I’ll answer some of those on the plane, but I’m simply behind and am in triage mode.

Anyway, let’s get back to non-GYM posting. Interesting that since I’ve started focusing on non GYM stuff I’ve started getting more interesting email. For instance, I just learned about the Spatially Adjusted blog that focuses on the GIS world.

One great thing about traveling is that I get out of my echo chamber and see the world from new perspectives. I wonder who’ll be sitting next to me on the plane. Will it be a teacher? A janitor? An executive? An accountant? Will he or she hate computers? Love them? Be a Mac user?

I know one thing, Maryam will be with me and that always makes me happy.

Adventures ahead, albeit slower blogging and slower email answering. Also, not sure my cell phone will work. But, I’ll find broadband somewhere. We’ll end up in Wales sometime tomorrow. We’re staying with the People’s Poet (Maryam’s brother). He’s a bus driver in Newport, but he also is a locally-famous poet. I hear everyone in town knows him. It’ll be interesting to see Newport through his eyes.

It’ll be fun spending Thanksgiving in Wales. What am I thankful for? Thousands of things. I’ve been telling people that my life has now entered the surreal zone lately. It certainly has. All cause I type on a keyboard and carry a camcorder around. What a blessed life I have! Thank you Vic Gundotra for hiring me!

Yeah, I’m thankful for Maryam. I thank Tena Carter for hiring her at Fawcette and putting her into my life (she promptly stole my job, doing it better than I ever did, and later stole my heart).

I am thankful for my son, Patrick. We’ve had a much better year this year. I drag him to geek events, which bores him to tears, but lately he’s been turning into a geek himself.

I could go on and on, there are so many people who have made my life interesting. Dave Winer, Buzz Bruggeman, Jeff Sandquist, my dad, my brother Alex, are five that immediately come to mind.

I’m thankful for my readers, from the famous (hi Walt!) to the detractors (hi Chris and Goebbels!) Even the snarkiest comment makes me think and makes me a better person.

Well, I’m off, try not to trash this place when I’m away and have a great Thanksgiving if you’re American. If you’re not, well, have a great week and we’ll talk with you soon from somewhere in Wales.

In a few days I’ll be at the European Xbox launch in Dublin, Ireland. Lots of sad faces as people can’t get Xbox’s. The blogs are writing about it: Ars Technica. Guardian Unlimited. Memeorandum has more. One guy even had one stolen on Monday night after he bought it. A Microsoft employee promptly shipped him his personal Xbox that hadn’t been opened yet.

Lots of people are saying we did this on purpose. That we limited supplies to make hype bigger.

Yes, Microsoft has gotten its evil back! For a minute there, I thought Google had taken over our evil.

But, come on people. We’re making them as fast as we can. Our suppliers simply can’t make anymore. Have you ever worked on a manufacturing line? I have. There are physical limitations to how many boxes can be made. There are physical limitations to how many boxes can be shipped (ever study the world’s airline cargo capacity? We have.

We’re very sorry we can’t fill demand for our product. But we simply can’t buy more supply. A good blog to watch for more news is Larry Hryb’s at http://www.majornelson.com/. He works on Xbox Live and is tied into the Xbox group very well. Another is John Porcaro at http://johnporcaro.typepad.com/blog/. He works in Xbox marketing. We’ll get you more news as soon as we can.