Loic Lemeur posts a long and passionate post. Won’t appease everyone, but didn’t leave a stone unturned in last week’s Le Web 3 controversy, and had me cheering for Loic by the end.

Last night I was listening to Teresa Williamson at a neighborhood party where she was sharing her life’s passion: helping women travel (she runs Tango Diva and has a book coming out on that topic). She should be on Oprah. Seriously.

But she and Loic are coming at this from the same point of view. For us to really move forward we’ve gotta get outside the little boxes we all put ourselves in. Teresa wants to do it by taking women to places unusual. Loic wanted to change the Web by bringing in politicians and seeing if he could get a conversation going.

Heart is in the right place, even if mistakes were made (and Loic admits some were, and shares his learning with the world).

I like hanging around folks like Teresa and Loic (and it’s why I like having harsh critics here too).

It’s good for us to change our scenery and start conversations with people we wouldn’t otherwise talk with.

On this topic I wish I were at the Global Voices Online event. I rarely link to that blog, but learn so much from it and it forces me out of the Silicon Valley geek-centric bubble I live in and love talking about.

Anyway, I’m taking the rest of the day off, gonna go have dinner at Dave Winer’s house. Hope you’re having a great weekend.

I thought about linking to Time, but after reading all my feeds it turns out everyone else already has, so I decided not to link and my gesture/link blog is free of Time Magazine stuff. If you have no clue what I’m talking about, head over to TechMeme.

Buzz Bruggeman just called from Seattle. He says that Microsoft’s main campus is without power and trees are down all over the place due to a major windstorm there. Tons of trees down. He says he’s talked with several Microsoft employees and that reports are that folks can’t send email and stuff like that. It’ll be interesting to see what’s running tomorrow. Over on Blogs.msdn.com I saw a few pictures of the damage, sounds really bad.

UPDATE: Mike Hall of Microsoft says that his office has power.
Jeff Sandquist says he hasn’t had power for four days.
TDavid has some pictures of the tree damage.

Jeff just called from Microsoft’s campus and says that there’s power there, but everything else around Microsoft is a mess. He doesn’t expect to have power at his house for a couple of more days. Cell phone coverage is spotty due to the power outages.

He says Microsoft has a pretty decent generator system on its main campus, but did lose power on Friday morning, but is back now.

He says there’s a lot of big trees through people’s roofs. He says wind speed were around 70MPH at his house. He’s lived through lots of storms in Canada, but this one was a doozy, “I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said.

He says that KOMO 1000 radio station has been doing amazing coverage.