I propose a new practice to fight spammers at Twitter: #BlockMonday.

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SharePoint Saturday DC is collecting canned goods for donation to charities in the northern Virigina area. The organization is sponsoring an event on May 2 for developers, architects and anyone else who is interested in SharePoint.

The event itself is free, but the food drive is a competitive event.

Imagine, if you will, a person who has been laid off. I hope it's hard, but try. Just for a moment. Imagine this person is an agile developer. Imagine that this person has an interest in embedded systems. Imagine this person in Cambridge, MA this weekend. This person is in luck.

Robert Thomson, editor-in-chief of Dow Jones and managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, calls those who aggregate others' content "parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the internet," according to a report in the Australian.

Congratulations to Seth Weintraub on his win of this year's Best blog at yesterday's Neal Awards. The judges mentioned the excellent use of video as reason for the honor. I bet they loved the video of Seth snowblogging from the Alps.

The social media world can be a fun place to play, but it can also be very, very nasty. Digg's Kevin Rose is trying to find the right balance.

What if you created a community and everyone came? What if you told them to create networks and they did? What if your community was so successful that it started to do as it pleased? Would you step in and ban those who were most successful at using the tools you put into their hands? That seems to be what Digg did.

Warning: No technology here

It wasn't easy, but I'm okay with my iPhone now. After finally getting it to remember that it was a phone rather than a brick, I managed to manually push all of my music, podcasts, videos to it. I got my contact info to update, but I did lose my lists of favorites and recent calls. I got iGoogle onto it with no problem, but lost my notes. What did I want the handyman to fix? What was I thinking of buying my husband for his birthday?

Was Apple trying to compete with Firefox's record downloads? If so, they're failing badly. My surprise: an iBrick.

I successfully upgraded to iTune 7.7 (first prereq for adding apps to my iPhone). But the firmware upgrade to iPhone 2.0 (next prereq) failed miserably.

I spend a fair amount of time at Digg. Recently the general slowness, occasional downtime, and numerous errors are starting to push me toward other sites.

In the last few minutes, I gotten this twice -- one when I first tried to submit an item and then when Digg was supposedly checking for duplicates.

In the best blog category, the finalists were Computerworld.com, InformationWeek.com, and PCMag.com. And the winner is ...

Viviane Reding, the European Union's information society commissioner, thinks she has a way to help make up for a projected shortage of IT workers according to IDG News Service.

Cell phones, laptops, TVs. Drivers shouldn't be using them while driving. Forget slowing down traffic, bad as that may be. A runner up for the 2007 Darwin Award was apparently using his laptop while driving.

The article cites a AAA spokeman, "Anything that distracts you can kill you, whether it's eating lunch or working on a computer." How about using a GPS?

I have an open wireless at my house. Now I learn what good company I'm in. If it's good enough for Bruce Schneier, it's good enough for me. Our reasoning is a little different, though, and his is easier to use.

Whenever I talk or write about my own security setup, the one thing that surprises people -- and attracts the most criticism -- is the fact that I run an open wireless network at home. There's no password. There's no encryption.

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