…I graduated from Prospect High School in Saratoga. Thanks to fellow student Jeff Battaglia for reminding me of that.

Damn, it’s weird to realize that nearly everyone who works at Facebook was parented by someone around my age. It’s doubly weird to think that we’re bringing a new life into this world. Kids keep you young. Well, I certainly wouldn’t have known that World of Warcraft runs better on Windows XP than on OSX or on Vista if it weren’t for having a 13-year-old in the house.

Puts this whole age debate that has been raging this week over on TechMeme in a little different light. Damn, that’s the most worked up I’ve seen the Blogosphere in at least a week. Heheh.

Anyway, this debate between the youngins and the old is as old as life itself. I want to get involved in this whole debate, but I’m getting old and have learned that when it’s sunny in Half Moon Bay we best go outside and have a BBQ and enjoy the sun. So, I’ll leave this debate to the professionals. 🙂

Hope you’re having fun.

UPDATE: I couldn’t stay away. Anyone who thinks that old people can’t come up with innovations, or new ways of looking at the world, or can’t understand Facebook should go have dinner with Douglas Engelbart. He’s 82 if I remember right and I’ll put his brain against Mark Zuckerberg’s any day of the week.

Last night when picking up burritos at Tres Amigos in Half Moon Bay with Patrick someone came up to me (sorry, didn’t get remember his name and even if I had, I’d keep it secret to protect the innocent) and asked “are you Robert Scoble?” He recognized me from my blog. Turns out he’s an engineer on Adobe’s Flex team. We small talked a bit. I told him that I’ll be on the first leg of the Adobe AIR bus tour (doing a bunch of interviews and going to learn more about Flash and Flex and AIR). Said I was looking forward to talking with Kevin Lynch, and other executives and geeks who are expected to be on the bus.

But, I’ve been poking around Adobe for a while now and know from how they answer this question that something is up and that something has news value:

“How’s the work on the iPhone version of Flash going?”

He instantly answered “I can’t talk about that.”

This answer is so fast, and so consistent, that it just drives me nuts (it’s the fourth Adobe employee I’ve asked about this and got the exact same answer). So, of course, when I get on the bus, that’s the first thing I’m going to ask Kevin Lynch about.

Anyway, why is this Adobe PR’s greatest nightmare? Well, it’s every PR team’s nightmare to have an engineer meet a journalist, or worse yet a blogger, without a PR person around. Who knows what might get said?

In this case, though, they have this team locked down. It’s almost like they got PR training from Steve Jobs’ PR team. Oh, wait, that’s actually the case! (One of the head PR guys at Adobe used to work at Apple).

Damn, foiled again!

But, anyway, something is up inside Adobe regarding the iPhone. Post your rumors, innuendos, and spy photos here. 🙂

On Friday Patrick, my 13-year-old son, moved in to spend most of the summer with Maryam and me. His first question to me when his mom dropped him off was “dad, do you have an unused copy of Windows XP?”

I was pretty sure I had a copy. After all, when I left Microsoft I bought a bunch of stuff including a couple copies of XP “just in case.” (Microsoft employees get to buy software for far less than retail).

But I thought the request was weird. Why? Well, he has a cool MacBookPro and already has Vista running on it with both Parallels and Bootcamp. I figured he just wanted to collect OS’s to brag to his friends when he got back to school in the fall. “You think you had a great summer? Well I have four OS’s running on my Mac” Or something like that.

Anyway, when we got home he went through my stash of old crusty software and found an unopened box of XP. I remember he was very happy. Gave me a look like “finally there’s a reason my dad was cool for working at Microsoft.”

But I still didn’t understand why all this instant love was coming my way.

Snap forward to last night. We met a bunch of geeks at the Ritz for some fun times and a spectacular sunset. Eventually we ended up at the house to watch a movie and Patrick pulled out his MacBookPro.

Someone asked him why he was running Windows XP on it. They thought that was weird. I was just proud that maybe my Microsoft evangelism was finally having some effect on my son. I think he went Mac just to spite me and be rebellious. Heck, if that’s the state of teenage rebellion today I’m down with it.

Anyway, it just demonstrated how clueless I really was. His answer:

The latest patch of World of Warcraft that came out a few weeks ago took the framerate on OSX down to 10 frames a second in battle and 15 out of battle.

On Windows XP the framerate is 60 frames a second. He said about running WoW on XP: “it’s a whole new WoW now.”

I just asked Patrick, what about Vista? “Vista didn’t really work very well.” He says that Vista has better framerates than OSX, but gets unconnected a lot so wasn’t very playable.

So, I guess if you want the best WoW on your Mac, you gotta find an old copy of XP.

And, yes, I am now the coolest dad in the neighborhood again. Whew!

Happy Father’s Day!

PS: he’s been playing since February and is on level 48 and moving up fast. Watch out Joi Ito and Liz Lawley (they both are level 70’ers and have been playing a lot longer)!

UPDATE: James Au is reporting that World of Warcraft player numbers are going down. Maybe partly because of this issue?