Fresh off that dinosaur-head campaign, Microsoft nearly nails it with the new "People Ready" campaign. But something's missing...can't quite place it...

First off, I've no idea why blogger-hater site Those Bastards tagged Robert Scoble as "Girlie Men." Not that it's insulting, more that it's conceptually confusing. Whatever.

Fortune headlines its Ballmer interview:

¬ The bubble stretches backward in time when Wil Wheaton quotes MySpace's sale value as $850 million (the real price was $580 mil). Can we keep the falsely inflated figures to future valuations? [Suicide Girls]
¬ Someone writes about a desolate post-Apocalyptic Silicon Valley — and it's not a disgruntled ex-SketchUp employee. [PR Web]
¬ Fake Steve Jobs: same as Real Steve Jobs? [SF Gate]
¬ Oh, New Media, you're so lovable. Where could the mysterious iPod phone mockup floating around the blogosphere come from? How about Business 2.0's April 2005 cover? [Mac OS Rumors]
¬ Hey wait, that stock photo on Microsoft's piracy page...isn't that an iBook? [Microsoft.com]

For Blackjack, "MSN" means "Evil Dead":

Wrapping up "Making fun of men from Seattle" Morning: Steve Ballmer used to be hardcore. When he ran out on stage, no one knew what crazy shit would happen — would he dance? Would he lose his voice? Would he bite the head off a live dove?

Blogger Chris Messina brings breaking video from Microsoft's Mix 06 conference. Bill Gates interrupts his talk with tech publisher Tim O'Reilly to take out an entire squad of enemy combatants. The action, blow by blow:

Now playing World of Warcraft can get you a job. Thrilling, really, to discover that a game played by destroying arbitrarily assigned enemies ad infinitum, rising up a ladder until reaching a disappointing top that isn't a top at all, commiserating with socially inept addicts with little life outside the computer, could prepare you for tech work. No, seriously, I am shocked at this news. [Wired]
It's funny 'cause it's petty: Just as Microsoft pushes Vista to 2007 and shuffles the whole Live department, MSN goes down for an hour. [Threadwatch]
AT&T doesn't really want to break your Internet. Sure, that's what it says while it's sober. [ZDNet]
Google Finance doesn't just disappoint Yahoo blogger (and "Expert Author") Jeremy Zawodny, it makes him sad. Jeremy comes this close to naming the folks who let Yahoo Finance rot, then praises the product manager in charge of Google Finance. "Not speaking for my employer" indeed. [WebProNews]
Idealab shareholders agree to pay founder Bill Gross's $50 million loan. And now he can't have that puppy he asked for, because that was the agreement about responsibility, Bill, and for now you can only keep your goldfish. [LA Times]
Songbird plays a good game of gotcha. Steve Jobs in 2002: "If you legally acquire music, you need to have the right to manage it on all other devices that you own." France fighting iTunes in 2006: "The consumer must be able to listen to the music they have bought on no matter what platform." Oh, they couldn't mean it the way he did, they're just the French. [Songbird]

So while Vista's delayed again — "Arrange the deck chairs this way, guys, we'll never sink now!" — let's see how all the OS-makers are faring with their deadlines.

Meet the new Products and Services Division team at Microsoft. In the second part of Kevin Johnson's leaked internal memo, the MS co-president outlines who's coming and who's staying in Windows Live, the Core Operating System Division, the Online Business Group, and several other PSD departments.

Executives have been dropping like flies (flies that are only taking a break! Honest!) at MSN. The Microsoft division is sinking as Microsoft's Live project takes over.

Microsoft's Vegas conference, Mix 06, keeps rocking, and still no photos of Bill Gates gettin' funky on the dance floor. In the meantime, blogger Paul Mooney shares his Flickr'd pics from yesterday:

Microsoft-fan forum LiveSide says Michael Rawding will follow senior VP David Cole out MSN's door. According to LiveSide's source, the MSN global sales and marketing veep couldn't nab Cole's old job, so he's "taking leave" instead.

Privateye strikes again. Ha! Ha! Jokes about Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie are the best!

TechCrunch startup-blogger Michael Arrington poses with Bill Gates after a well-blogged lunch. I can't pick the best caption:

This Casting the Valley selection comes from MyHeritage.

"In six months' time we'll be more relevant in the U.S. market place than Google."

Former Paypal CEO Peter Thiel recently joined the board of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a transhumanist org seeking to "help ensure a safe Singularity" by ushering in an age of self-aware computers. But he's not the only Valley exec investing in weird dreams of a super-intelligent race. Here are the top three:

Microsoft's moving into hardware again, but this time it looks painful. The software-and-one-hot-gaming-console company confirmed the authenticity of viral ads marketing its new handheld, the Origami. An in-the-wild photo from Engadget looks like the wallet PC that Bill Gates wanted back in 1995.

Here's some love for the gadget freaks fidgeting over tomorrow's Apple announcement. The loveable un-blogger (and would-be Microsoft employee) Chris Coulter sends in specs for the Microsoft iPod.