Jason Calacanis, founder of Weblogsinc.com and Engadget.com, in an open letter to me: “At this point you’re basically slandering them and spreading lies. You’re acting like a spoiled jerk and as your friend I feel the need to tell you that.”

I just took a couple of hours away from the computer flying down to Demo and spent most of that time thinking about this and I have to admit that the past four days have not been my best professionally. So, I’m going to pull back here, and hope we can all shake hands here at the Demo conference and get on with giving our respective audiences the best content possible.

Man, it seems like everyone on Alaska Air from SFO to Palm Springs is going to Demo. I’m sitting next to Sunil Tara, marcom manager for Zoho, who just announced a new Notebook. One place to store all your documents on the Web and share them with people. I can’t wait to get a demo of that at Demo. Booth #10 is where they are.

Wow, Jim Gray, Slashdot reports, is missing.

He’s one of Microsoft’s smartest researchers. I did a video interview with of Jim back when I worked at Microsoft.

He helped build the internals of SQL Server, one of Microsoft’s most profitable products. Among other things. In the database world Jim is regarded as a God.