Last night Buzz Bruggeman stayed at my house. He had a book with him. I should have taken pictures of it. It was about 400 pages thick. It included tons of photos and other things from PopTech, the conference he had just attended. He told me every attendee got a personalized book. 500 or so.

It is simply the coolest conference swag I’ve ever seen. Google did the same thing from the Zeitgeist conference last year, but the PopTech one was better done and WAY faster (attendees had them within a few days of getting home).

Anyway, the rest of us don’t get a book, but we do get a Flickr music video that was played at PopTech.

Today was a day of working at home. Damn I have a lot of email. I didn’t get to my editing. Sigh. Anyway, glad the flowers showed up. That’s called “survival” for a married guy. Heheheh.

My Ford let me down, though. $600 for a 30,000 mile service, $500 for new brakes and rotors. $500 for new tires. And I have a bent wheel (I have no idea how that happened) that needs replacing too. Sigh.

Yeah, I’m paying a premium because it’s a Ford dealership, but not much. I’ll take it around and try to save a little bit on costs, though (Silicon Valley is expensive, keep that in mind). Maryam wants me to buy a new car instead. That’s called spending $20,000 to get out of a $2,000 problem.

John Battelle did the homework and learned that Google’s official statement is that the CIA story is untrue.

If you worked at a big company how would you fight rumors or stories like these? After all, it all started with someone saying something that can’t be verified as true or false. We don’t know the guy’s reasoning to start this story off. Maybe he is shorting Google stock. We don’t know. But we do love a juicy rumor. After working inside a big company I tend to believe the big company more than the rumor mongers, but I do realize that most people won’t take Google’s word on a story like this. So, not sure that Google or any big company really can do much to kill rumors like these.