This is neat--beginning today, there's a new charitable initiative from Windows Live Messenger. Join the inititative by going to this site, select the organization you wish to support (i.e. Red Cross, Boys & Girls Club, Aids Fund, etc...) and download v8.1 of Windows Live Messenger. Then, everytime you have an IM conversation, Microsoft will share a portion of the advertising revenue with the organization you've indicated.

If you already have 8.1, just add the following codes next to your display name to select the organization of your choice:
Text Code Cause
*red+u American Red Cross
*bgca Boys & Girls Club
*naf National AIDS Fund
*mssoc National Multiple Sclerosis Society
*9mil ninemillion.org
*sierra Sierra Club
*help StopGlobalWarming.org
*komen Susan G. Komen for the Cure
*unicef The US fund for UNICEF

Another review of Windows Mobile 6---this one with PPC screenshots if you're curious.

Quoted: Review of Windows Mobile 6.0 for PPC (Crossbow) operating system

Quoted: Just two years after Google launched its SMS search service, Microsoft has launched a beta version of its own SMS service that lets you perform Windows Live searches from a cell phone. The service is available to Cingular, Verizon, Sprint Nextel, and Alltel customers in the uS.

This is an old article but I forgot to dot it when I first read it. It's a neat piece on "How I Work" with interviews of various CEOs on their daily workstyle. In this piece, Gates talks about his desktop setup and how he manages email. If you click on the sidebar Photo Gallery for more photos, it lists some other execs (i.e. Vera Wang, Howard Schultz) where they also talk about their daily work style. Pretty interesting.

Quoted: It's pretty incredible to look back 30 years to when Microsoft was starting and realize how work has been transformed. We're finally getting close to what I call the digital workstyle.

Funny article on the process of triage---I do this every day at 3pm, now that I'm at Microsoft

Quoted: The joy of triage

Matt Joe--this is for you when you were asking me about Live hosting personal blogs.

Want to give Office 2007 Beta a try but don't want to bother downloading it? You're in luck, because Microsoft is doing a Test Drive program which lets you try the product in your web browser.

Interesting---an add-ons site dedicated to IE.

Here is the official website of the Ultra-Mobile PC, aka "Origami" project. I saw a prototype of this a couple months back and it's really lightweight and easy to hold. Curious how this will fare in the "mobile" market. Not sure when these will actually start selling in the market--but if the pricepoint is low, I think it might have a chance. We'll see.