A bold prediction:  The iPad will exceed all but the most optimistic analyst expectations.

Here's why:

• Everyone I know who has held and touched the thing is in love with it.
• David Pogue and Walt Mossberg gave it the coveted NY Times and the Wall Street Journal Two thumbs up.  Where are you Roger Ebert? More precisely where is your thumb?
• Traditional publishers (like magazines and newspapers) love the device and they love the business model and they are already investing heavily in their iPad channel, a channel where they believe they can finally sell subscriptions and build a pay wall that won't be breached.
• Game publishers are going insane developing apps as you read this

And the number one reason I think the iPad will be successful…..

I've stopped watching TV and seem to spend my evenings in my big ole TV watching Barca Lounger using my iPhone.

I don't think I'm alone. 

Give me a bigger screen with today's newspapers and magazines, my email, my music, my "Risk" app.  Sign me and 10 million people up.  Must have iPad. Must have iPad. Must have iPad.

Tomorrow morning, we'll be blogging photos of the Ipaddies camped out by the Apple store at the Corte Madera Mall, I guarantee they will be there.

This is just too juicy to pass up.

Journeyman session drummer Josh Freese:

So he did it. He sold the album on iTunes for $7, and the double DVD set and download for $15. But then it got interesting.

• For $50, 25 fans could get the album and a five-minute “thank-you” call
  from Freese, during which they can talk about whatever they want.
• $250 would buy 15 people the music, a signed drumhead, a T-shirt and lunch with Freese at P.F. Chang’s or The Cheesecake Factory.
• And $1,000? The music, a T-shirt and a signed cymbal,
  drum head and Drumsticks. But also this (via the website): “Josh washes your car OR does your laundry….or you can wash
  his car. Have dinner with Josh aboard the ‘Queen Mary’ in Long Beach,
  CA. Get drunk and cut each other's hair in the parking lot of the Long
  Beach courthouse (filmed and posted on youtube of course)”
• I'm not even going to tell you what $10,000 would get you.

Freese has since taken down the promotion from the website, but says PR stunt aside, he'll totally make good on any of the high-end offers, should he actually get them.

So what's the moral of the story? Be ridiculous. Don't worry about the lawyers, don't worry about pissing people off. When ideas come out of conversations with your friends that leave you both laughing your ass off on the floor, not knowing what hit you, go ahead and do them. (Unless it's a stupid April's Fools joke, of course, and then do it, but not on April 1. That's for amateurs.)

The result will certainly surprise — you and everyone else.