If you’re even remotely interested in what Microsoft is up to, you should already have Mary Jo Foley on your must-read list.

Well, time to update your bookmarks. Mary Jo has left Microsoft Watch and is starting up at ZDNet (RSS feed here), where she and I will be colleagues on the Microsoft beat.

Mary Jo is a great reporter and a classy person. It’s a pleasure to be working with her.

No, I haven’t become a Bokononist. [*]

Just busy on updates to two books and posting some larger pieces at ZDNet.

Talk amongst yourselves for a while.

* From The Books of Bokonon: “Busy, busy, busy is what a Bokononist whispers ‘whenever [he] thinks about how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.'”

This site needs some spiffing up, and I don’t have the time or the skills to do it. If there are any experienced WordPress designers out there who can help me come up with a clean design relatively quickly, for not a lot of money, drop me a line: ed-blog AT bott DOT com.

I’m researching an upcoming story and need to see the original end user license agreements for MS-DOS (preferably versions 5 and 6) and Windows 3.1.

I have copies of the floppy disks, and the agreements are not on those disks nor are they invoked as part of the setup process. My dim memory of those days is that the licenses were of the “if you break the shrinkwrap on this box you accept our terms” variety.

Anyone got those moldy oldies hanging around?

At 3:33:03PM today, this site recorded its one millionth visitor, from a network belonging to a large corporation in Morristown, New Jersey.

A million! Back on April 30, when the turnstile clicked #800,000, I predicted that the count would flip to seven digits “sometime around August 1st.” Two weeks late isn’t all that bad.

Thanks for all your support.

(via Alex Barnett)

I installed a WordPress plug-in yesterday that had the unfortunate side effect of making all pages on the site unreachable. Oops!

Things should be working now.

Beautiful, isn’t it?

Photo: Michael Chow / The Arizona Republic

Unless, of course, you’re sitting in an airplane waiting to take off in the midst of this storm, as Judy and I were last night. For one awesome ten-minute stretch as we sat on the tarmac at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport, lightning was striking several times per second all around us, and microbursts were blowing trees sideways.

We sat on the plane for more than three hours waiting to take off, as the storm appeared to leave the area and then circled back twice to sit over the airport and deliver more of the light show. After the first two-hour wait, we had to go back to the gate and refuel. We finally made it home just before 4AM, nearly four hours later than originally scheduled.

When we lived in the Phoenix area, we saw storms like this one every summer. The amount of damage they can cause is truly astonishing. I don’t miss them at all and I would gladly have skipped this one. I also don’t miss the summer temperatures. According to the Arizona Republic, the Phoenix area has already set a new record this summer with more than 11 days where the low temperature – that’s the low, mind you – has been over 90 degrees. And monsoon season is just getting warmed up.

Something to think about while I continue putting most of my energy into book writing rather than bloggery.

Mr. T answers a question for a TV Land viewer: “Mr. T, why do you pity the fool?” Mr. T: “That is a good question and a legitimate question. And I’m the man to answer it. You pity the fool because you don’t want to beat up a fool.”

(Via Think Progress)

I’ve seen some bad pitch letters from PR people before, but Business Week’s Jon Fine has come up with the all-time worst.

The trophy is officially retired. Trust me on this one.