Well I need to sell my barefoot boat so that I can buy a different boat for the family. This boat is fantastic for barefooting, slalom skiing and general driving around a lake pretty darn fast. It planes out sweet.

Scoble, soon to depart Microsoft himself just broke the news that Bill Gates is stepping down from a full time role at Microsoft. Wonder what he is planning. We’ll know soon enough. I wonder if it is distract us from the delay in production on Vista.

Update: there is a press release that talks of a two year phase out to July 2008. So the news may be a bit overstated by the Scobelizer. It starts out thus:

REDMOND, Wash. — June 15, 2006 — Microsoft Corp. today announced that effective July 2008 Bill Gates, chairman, will transition out of a day-to-day role in the company to spend more time on his global health and education work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The company announced a two-year transition process to ensure that there is a smooth and orderly transfer of Gates’ daily responsibilities, and said that after July 2008 Gates would continue to serve as the company’s chairman and an advisor on key development projects.

Wandering around ZoomBlast this morning, a new video aggregation site I guess you might say. Came across this funny little homemade ad for Firefox web browser.

While Australians almost never use the stereotypical Crocodile Dundee flavour of Australian English, It seems Microsoft have seen a pressing need to adopt “dinky-di ‘Strine” (translation: native-born Australian spoken English) in the Australian version of Office 2007.

According to News.com.au “Words such as g’day, sickie, jackaroo, dag, dinky-di, ute, sanga, wuss and cooee were among the list of words selected by a panel of Australian experts, who considered them to be most relevant to everyday Aussies, Microsoft said.”

A panel of Australian experts??? Who on Earth were they? Paul Hogan and Steve Irwin? Was Microsoft paying by the hour? Is Microsoft satisfied with the manufactured outcome that it sanctioned?

As an Australian resident for most of my years (I migrated from the US at age 2), I can reliably attest to Microsoft being waaaaaay off base on this one. While “g’day” is a common form of the greeting “good day” and a “ute” is simply a “utility vehicle” (pick-up truck), most of the other words are not spoken by Australians in every day life. Or “any-day life” for that matter! It makes us cringe to hear words like “bonza, ridgy-didge, dob, galah, cockie, onya, and motza”, but fortunately we only hear them in media targeted at US and UK audiences.

Microsoft you’ve gotten it wrong again, and now you’re embarrassing yourselves as well as the “fair-dinkum Aussies” that you want to sell your product to. Crikey!

Wow that was a good one. Watching Jimmy Kimmel live and he gets bit by a snake and taken off in an ambulance. It was done in a way that we sat here wondering if it was real until we realized what he was up to. He then interviewed the Dr. from Grey’s anatomy from his fake hospital bed. It was funny but it actually had you wondering for a minute if he really got bit. Well done bit.

This case is interesting because it involves the use of technology first to join two people who did not belong together, and then to break them apart. First an Indiana man allegedly met a 13 year old girl on the internet. She claimed to be 18 and had sexually suggestive material on the site according to the website. They agreed to meet and fortuitously the man gave out his cell phone number to the girl’s friend. When police decided to track them down, they then used the ability to track that cell phone to find where they were driving and stop the car. It is impressive that within two hours of the girl joining up with the man, the police can access this information and track his whereabouts with sufficient specificity to stop the vehicle.

The new Google Notebook will be released next week. It is designed to be a scratch pads of sorts where a user can copy content from visited webpages, collect them and then access those results via the web. This could come in handy as I often email myself links I want to look at later. Instead I can snip and clip to my notebook. I may give it a try.