Tom Raftery just took us out for a great dinner. We’ve arrived safely in Cork. How did I recognize Tom? He was the only one with white headphones in the airport. 

Hey, I’m on Channel 9. You can see how we make Channel 9 videos. Ken Levy was the one who filmed that interview and talks more about that filming on his blog.

I gotta go to sleep. Tom has a full day arranged for us tomorrow. Martin Fowler reports that John Vlissides died over the weekend (wrote a great book on software design, Martin says).

Speaking of Tom, he was raving about his podcast interview he just did with Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch. It’s a bizarre world I live in. I visit with Micahel often, and now fly around the world to meet Tom who interviewed Michael over the phone. Wacky.

Speaking of podcasts, Jeff Clavier, Silicon Valley VC, says that IT Conversations’ PopTech podcasts are worth a listen.

A quick tour through my feed reading (I read all my feeds on the trip today):

Bilal Haidar says he found a great Website for resources and tools for Internet Information Services (IIS): IISToolshed.com.

Ben Rockwood has a First Person Shooter Roundup.

Phil Wolff, over on Skype Journal, has an excellent Monday reading list, which includes a profile of Niklas, founder of Skype. I saw that in the local papers yesterday.

Performancing takes a look at Firefox Extensions for Bloggers. Kam VedBrat (works at Microsoft) reports that using Firefox on a Tablet PC just got easier.

ActiveWin reports that Paint.NET v 2.5 final release is now available.

Claire Giordano says she’s leaving Sun Microsystems to work for Amazon’s A9 search engine. I hope she keeps her blog going, I always enjoyed it.

Dan Bricklin is on NerdTV.

How did I miss Tabletology? That site is awesome. JKOnTheRun has the details.

Gary Price links to NetLibrary: Over 100,000 digitized and searchable books are available online.

Evan Williams Ten Rules for Web Startups was linked all over the place. It’s most excellent.

Happy Birthday to Renee Blodgett, Silicon Valley’s star PR’er.

I was just over at the Church of the Customer blog and saw that USNews and World Report wrote about corporate evangelists. I like Ben’s analysis:

“Have some soul. Tell reporters that your evangelists are the greatest customers in the world (and that you’ve restructured the public relations department). After all, what true evangelists crave more than anything is recognition.”

For the record, I appreciate everyone who builds technology to improve our lives, whether it’s as simplistic as adding an RSS feed to your Web sites, to something a lot more complex like making a game for the Xbox 360. If you use Microsoft stuff, even better! If you build stuff on Microsoft’s platforms, better yet!

And never hesitate to let me know how I, or Microsoft, can help you do any of the above.

Digi says Xbox 360s are a rip off at the prices they are selling them at in Europe. I’ll be at the Xbox launch on December 2 in Dublin, so I’ll check that out for myself. That does sound expensive. One thing, though, games on the Xbox 360 are a lot better than anything on a PC that I’ve seen and to get close you need a $2,000 or more PC.