The Cutting Room Floor

Of Dilemma's

2005-01-22T09:43:00.000-08:00

During Friday night's dinner at this week's WebCred Conference, David Weinberger spoke of those interesting dilemma questions that come up in life (that drew much laughter). For example, if you're with a bunch of people in a life raft with no hope of timely rescue, who do you eat first? It reminded me of a similar and all too real dilemma I witnessed just the other day, one that I experienced difficulty in resolving. If you're speeding an ambulance to the hospital with your lights flashing and sirens blaring because someone on a body board in the back is hanging on to dear life, what do you do if you come across one of those 20 mph school zones while the yellow lights are flashing? Clearly, those lights are designed to protect kids' lives. So, do you risk killing a kid, or risk killing the patient? The driver I saw risked killing a kid.

ZDNet Podcast Central?

2005-01-03T13:39:00.000-08:00

My Desk
Originally uploaded by dberlind.

My home office: quite possibly the birthplace of ZDNet's podcasting operation.

Thank God it was a contraction

2004-10-31T17:59:00.000-08:00

The other day, my 9 mos.-pregnant wife said she was having a contraption when she meant to say (or maybe I heard it wrong) that she was having a contraction.

Update: Fortunately, she had a baby (a girl!). I'm not sure what I would have to said to her if a contraption came out.

Breaking news: The word "pain" found hiding in the word "painter"

2004-08-28T17:58:00.000-07:00

Meet Willie (name changed to protect the innocent). My nickname for Willie is "the residential Rembrandt." After this man is done painting your house, people you don't even know will stop and gawk at it as though it were a masterpiece. But there's one little catch. Like most great artists, he's nuts. Here's a typical phone conversation:

me: Hi Willie. The house looks great for being half finished. What time can we expect you tomorrow morning?
Willie: No later than 8 David.
me: Perfect. See ya then.

me (at 10:07am the next day, on the phone): Hi Willie.
Willie: David! How ya doin'?
me: Great Willie! I was sorta thinkin' you'd be here by now. You plannin' on stoppin by today?
Willie: David, David, David.. Gosh, I'm so sorry. I got held up. I'll be there this afternoon. Will you be there?
me: Great, sure will.

me (at 9:30am, the next day, on the phone): Willie, this is David.
Willie: David my man! How ya doin'?
me: Just fine. Was it my imagination, or were you not here yesterday?
Willie: David, David, David. I'm so sorry. I'm on my way right now. Give me a few minutes.

me (at 8pm that night, on the phone with Willie's voice mail): Hey, Willie.. if you're there, can you pick up? Willie? Willlllllieeeeeeeee. Alright, if you don't want to pick up, can you at least pick up your 60 foot ladder when you get a chance?

Needless to say, Willie has gone completely AWOL on us. What a bummer. The guy is so good.

So, we've turned the job over to an another painter. Unlike Willie the residential Rembrandt, this isn't just a painter. It's an entire outfit with fancy trucks, different crews, walkie talkies. The whole nine yards. You get the drift. So, when these guys returned every phone call and showed up exactly when they said they would, my wife and I were high-fivin' each other.

But, now that they've finished, my wife and I can't decide which we prefer. Do we take the kooky residential Rembrandt that's impossible to nail down, but will perfectly lay paint on your molding's edges without ever making contact with the wall with his paintbrush? Or do you take the smart looking outfit that's courteous and always on time (and calls if they're running be late), but leaves paint in places it's just not supposed to be. For example, on your moldings (where the wall paint isn't supposed to be), on the brass door hardware, and worse, on your furniture. When you step back, it looks pretty good. But they make smaller brushes for getting in those tight spots, don't they? It must be a pain for painters to use them.

Now we know why the word pain is in painter. What a pain.

Barney: The second most hated figure?

2004-08-19T20:33:00.000-07:00

This bit from a story in The Washington Post was irresistable:

'As the U.S. military edged closer to the shrine of Imam Ali and the rebellious Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada Sadr vowed "martyrdom or victory," the Iraqi forces that are expected to decide the matter trained in the desert wastes outside Najaf. They practiced marksmanship by firing AK-47s at targets of Osama bin Laden and Barney, the purple dinosaur.'

Under the thumb of a fish bowl

2004-08-19T19:18:00.000-07:00

Today, I realized that my life is being controlled by a toy fishbowl. It's a Fisher-Price fish bowl that hangs on the rail of the the two-year old's crib. It has real water with fake fish that, by virtue of the way a battery operated motor rotates the bowl, give off the illusion that they're swimming. When in operation -- something that's controlled by the two year old -- the bowl plays lullabyes. I'm beginning to wonder whether the baby has developed an unhealthy addiction to the fish bowl (I don't think I can sue anybody, can I?). As long as he's awake and in the crib, he keeps the fish bowl on. At bedtime, the fish bowl goes for an hour. At 2am, when something random wakes him up, on goes the fish bowl.

So what's wrong with that? Cute kid. Cute fish bowl. Cute music. Awww.. How cute. Until the batteries die. Then, suddenly, things aren't so cute anymore. The phrase "2 year old meltdown" barely scratches the surface of what happens when the batteries die. My wife and I live in fear of fish bowl battery death at 2am. So much so, that we make an educated guess as to the condition of the batteries before putting him to bed. We plan our shopping around the state of our battery inventory. It's the subject of nightly conversation.

me: "Did you hear that"
wife: "No"
me: "that note sounded flat"
wife: "we have batteries, right"
me: (trembling) "I don't know"
wife: "oh shit"

This is a typical conversation about the fish bowl. Bsaed on the cost of the newer model, my wife estimates that the fish bowl originally costed around $20. So far, it has consumed about $200 worth of batteries. I mean, this thing has an appetite for batteries. I should own stock in Duracell by now. Even worse? They're C batteries. Who uses C batteries anymore? Try waking your neighbor up at 2am for some C batteries. D batteries? No problem. Double A's? No problem. C's? Ha ha ha ha ha. Sleep? Ha ha ha ha ha.

Never step on a LEGO with bare feet

2004-06-11T05:12:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I received a note from one of my co-workers (Hi Ned) asking how he could get an RSS feed for this blog. I believe I've found the answer according to Blogger.com's help. I've added a new link to the section on the left that says "Useful Links." Let me know if it doesn't work. Ned's note surprised me since, if you've visited this blog in the last few weeks, it looks like I gave up blogging or died in May. Other regular readers of this blog have actually been complaining to me that I must be a slacker or something: a warning to any would-be bloggers that once you start, you better not stop or you're likely to get tarred and feathered by your friends and family.

Anyway, I'm not slackin' off (or wackin' off for that matter). I've been busy. Kids. House. Dog. Our cars. The garden. The lawn (actually, I haven't gotten to that yet). Oh yeah, and my job. Life got away there for a minute and something (the blog) had to give. But Ned's note was the straw that broke the camel's back. I figured that if Ned is getting ready to take a feed, then I should probably keep the feed active. So, to rev the engines up again, I've decided to write about something that happened an hour ago. If something worth bloggin' about happened before that, I might get to it.

This week, our two-year old blessed us with a new gift. He suddenly started sleeping-in instead of waking up at 5:30am. Apparently, he'll sleep until 7:30 or 8:00, maybe later, if we let him. You have to be a parent to understand how, after three years (including my wife's pregnancy) of broken sleep, this is an event of biblical proportion. Now, in the mornings, my main challenge is sneaking the dog out of my 13 year-old son's room before she starts beating her violently wagging tail into the walls long and hard enough for the baby to wake up. She's a Lab-mix and when she wags her tail, it's one of those Lab-like entire-dog’s-rear-end-shimmies-while-tail-swings-like-a-propeller movements that’s devastating to most knee-high breakables. The object is to sneak the dog downstairs before my son wakes up for school and lets her out of his room, leaving her to her own recognizance.

By now, you’re asking, “What’s this got to do with LEGO?”

Since my wife doesn’t work on Fridays, Friday is the only weekday that we can take advantage of the sleeping baby. Being that today would be the first official “sleep-in Friday,” I had this silly idea that I could sneak the dog downstairs at 6:45 (that’s already 1:15 of extra sleep), get the 13 year-old off to school by 7:30 (after waking him up four times), and let my wife and the baby sleep until 8:00 or 8:30 while I made some coffee and got an early start on my work. This, of course, is the optimal time for Murphy’s Law.

Somewhere around 6:50am, the neighboring town’s fire whistle honked for what seemed like an eternity. Instead of using modern technology (like radios, pagers, and telephones) to rustle the town’s firemen out of their houses and to the fire station (usually to deal with burnt toast at the local nursing home I’m told), this particular fire department uses a 50’s vintage ex-air raid warning horn. It’s so loud that I'm surprised the Boston Fire Department (40 miles away) doesn't show up. Anyway, the folks who live in the nursing home somehow manage to burn their toast at precisely the same time that we’re really depending on the sort of peace and quiet that gives the phrase “sleeping like a baby” the undeserved reputation that it has.

You can imagine what happened next.

The baby woke up. I went in to retrieve him from his crib and as I was lifting him, I stepped on an upside down (sharp edges up) LEGO part with my bare feet. After doing this, I can think of a lot of harmful things that I’d rather do to myself than stepping on an upside-down LEGO part. You see, when you step on a LEGO part with a 37 pound two-year old in your arms, you need to be a Hollywood stuntman in order to gracefully recover without anyone getting hurt. I learned that you have to do several undulating pirouettes just to stay on your feet. You also have to shut off the pain center in your brain because, as I also learned, where ever there’s one LEGO part on the floor, there are more. Doing ballet on them with size 11 ½ feet while keeping your off-the-charts-sized toddler from harm requires an act of God and a re-aggravation of those ruptured discs in your lower back. In fact, you know those cathartic coal-walking programs? They should try it with a bed of LEGO. My bet is no one can do it.

Where is he now? The "Ugly" from "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly"

2004-05-22T06:59:00.001-07:00

OK. If the ice-cream truck post didn't alert you to the fact that I'm not much of an intellectual, this one certainly will.

An updated version of the classic 1966 spaghetti western The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is now available on DVD with new footage that never appeared in the original. Even better for big Clint Eastwood fans like me, the remastered voice-overs are provided by Eastwood (the Good) and Eli Wallach (the Ugly): two of the three original stars of the movie who are still living. The third star -- Lee Van Cleef (the Bad) -- died in 1989. Like so many other Eastwood movies, I must have watched The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly hundreds of times (thanks in part to the several "Eastwood Weeks" that were aired in the 70's by the NYC affiliate of ABC on its afternoon staple The 4:30 Movie). Even today, regardless of how many times I've seen something, I inexplicably drop the remote when I happen across one of those legendary spaghetti westerns while channel surfing. Though some of them are not technically spaghetti westerns, I'm equally spellbound by other Eastwood classics like The Outlaw Josey Wales. It's like I've been brainwashed into this behavior or something. If you know something about this affliction, please contact me. Anyway, I was alerted to the availability of the DVD by an outrageously funny interview that NPR's Scott Simon did with Eli Wallach who is a much more prolific actor than I've ever realized. In addition to being a major force on Broadway, his filmography covers 98 movies including The Godfather III, The Misfits (which starred Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe), and the Jack Nicholson-directed The Two Jakes. But, as far as I can tell, the biggest accomplishment for this 88-year old pop culture icon is his 57-year-and-still-going marriage to actress Anne Jackson (discussed in the interview).

Random thought about the ice cream truck

2004-05-20T18:14:00.000-07:00

For most adults, the music being played by the ice cream truck is background noise. But today, a little voice in my head told me to pay closer attention. So, I did. The song was the famous theme from "The Sting." The best thing about the Paul Newman/Robert Redford classic is not that it was about a con. The movie itself is a con on everybody who watches it for the first time. Don't understand? Go rent the movie. Anyway, this question occurred to me: Would you really want your kids buying their ice cream from an ice cream man playing con-music? Hmmm.

Why people die on rollercoasters

2004-05-14T14:51:00.000-07:00

The last few times I was in Vegas, I had the opportunity -- thanks to vendors that rent entire night clubs for the night -- to go to the Ghost Bar on top of the Palms Hotel. The Palms will be forever emblazoned in our pop culture as the site of what was probably the most promiscuous season of MTV's The Real World. After all. A little Vegas here, a little Real World there.... and voila! There was only one direction a mixture like that could go. I was always impressed with the view from the Ghost Bar. That was until I stepped onto the observation deck of the Stratosphere this year. Christy (the producer for webcasts like one I did on zero-day worms) and I stayed at the Stratosphere this year. At $59/per night, the rooms were stockholder friendly for a public company like ours. The Stratosphere's rooms weren't that great and didn't have any high speed Internet access. But, the view from the hotel's observation deck -- the highest point in the entire city -- was worth a million bucks. Christy and I were stunned. It reminded me of the view that could be had from City Lights: the bar that was a part of Windows on the World (the restaurant that was on at the top of the World Trade Center in New York City).

From the Stratosphere's observation deck, one gets to see more than a view of all of Las Vegas. You also get to watch genuinely scared-to-death people as they ride on three amusement park rides that are perched on top of the hotel. If, due to some malfunction or "user-error," you were to be thrown from any of these rides like the way a man was recently thrown from a roller-coaster in Massachusetts, it would be a long way down. There would be no chance of survival. After that guy in my home state died at Six Flags, there was zero chance of getting me to try one of those rides. One of the rides -- the X Scream -- sends its occupants flying off the edge of the tower. Although I'm certain there's more to it, all that appears to stand between the riders and certain death are the ride's brakes. The ride is so close to the observations deck that I felt like I could reach out and shake the hands of its occupants while it paused between cycles. Instead of shaking their hands though, I just looked the riders in their already terrified eyes and said something about a loose bolt in the undercarriage (pointing to the underside of the ride). Cruel. I know. But so satisfyingly so. Christy yelled at me to stop. But looking at the terror in their expressions, I realized that, morbid as it may seem, real rollercoaster deaths have a purpose in the psyche of a thrillseeker.

Vegas must be my mecca

2004-05-14T08:29:00.000-07:00

I hear all the time about these annual pilgrimages that devout people of one religion or another make to their holy shrines. To make these pilgrimages, people are even willing to put themselves in harm's way. How sad that people who go on these pilgrimages must now gamble with their lives. After returning safely from my 25th pilgrimage to Las Vegas in 14 years, I have suddenly realized that Vegas is my holy shrine: that bi-annual destination from which my safe return is not a given.

Except for a stopover in a camper when I was 16 (in the parking lot of the StarDust), I have never gone to Vegas for pleasure. Since the early 90's when Networld and Interop merged into one event and moved from Dallas and San Jose (respectively) to Las Vegas, I haven't missed a Spring Networld+Interop (N+I) or a Fall Comdex in Sin City. At first, I only had to go there once a year. Then, once N+I carpetbagged to Nevada, I started making the trip twice a year. If I had to go to CES in January, which thankfully I don't, that would mean going to Vegas three times a year. For business.

For a lot of people, leaving Vegas satisfied means leaving with more money than what they came with. For me, I'm just happy to watch McCarron Airport's runways disappear from my view through the airplane's window knowing that I'm alive and still in one piece. These days, leaving with my life intact isn't as much of a miracle as it once was. Maybe I'm becoming a party pooper. There was a period of time where the apres show activities didn't stop until the sun came up. There were at least a couple of years where a handful of us stayed up for three or four days straight. We would go straight from some industry all-night party, dance club, or the $5 BlackJack tables at the Hard Rock to a breakfast briefing where it took an act of God to get just one brain cell (let alone the entire brain) to focus on what was being said. We'd go to briefings all day and start the cycle all over again. It only takes two days of that sort of abuse before you start to feel your body slipping towards death. Once you hit the third or fourth day, a strange numbness starts to overtake your nervous system, you lose control of certain organs, and there's a very real danger of leaving the city in a body bag rather than the seat of an airplane.

Now, after several years of almost killing myself while in Nevada, I have a lot of respect for the place. Each time, as I head to Las Vegas, I remind myself that my wife and kids are expecting me back in one piece. A few years ago, I made a standing commitment to get at least five hours of sleep each night without so much as a peep from my liver, kidneys, or wallet because of the previous night's festivities. After this last trip, I have a slight modification: make sure that when I get some sleep that I get it in my hotel room and not in a prison cell or somehwere else (hint: had I not been sober this year, someone would have gotten hurt). On those terms, I know I'm virtually guaranteed of leaving Vegas alive. Even so, I still breath a sigh of relief every time I hear the sound of landing gear retracting into the underbelly of my return flight and wonder if, sooner or later, my luck will run out. After all, it is Vegas.

Dog's brain: "Must have sandwich. Must have sandwich"

2004-05-07T13:48:00.000-07:00

My father-in-law ("Paps") is here for a visit and he's one of the few men that the dog likes. Somehow, she knows who is family, and who is not. If you're not family and you're a man, and there's a clear path between you and our dog, all I can say is, I hope you can make it to the nearest tree in time. Do not try to outrun her. We're rather certain -- by virtue of the low, ears-back, aerodynamic position she assumes when running -- that she's part greyhound or wippet (or is that "whippet"?). For an eight year-old dog, she can really haul-ass (and bite yours). The other thing she's a master at is finding and eating human food. She's got us trained perfectly. We never leave the kitchen with so much as a mostly empty cereal bowl on the counter. What we think is out of reach for her is really nothing of the sort and she knows that the first step to taking control of anything is to get it on the floor first. This, as you can imagine, has resulted in several ceramic and glass items getting broken. So, everything goes away before leaving the kitchen unattended. It took us years to master this basic principle of living with an ex-street dog. To her, visitors like Paps are sitting ducks. This morning, while getting started on my work day, I heard the "trademark" tingling of a spoon bouncing around a cereal bowl coming from the kitchen. This sound, caused by the dog's tongue working around the spoon, is well known in our house and is a warning that the next sound will be the bowl crashing to the floor unless someone moves like the wind towards the kitchen. Fortunately, I save the bowl from certain death. I explained to Paps the risks of leaving dishes and food out and it's always a funny moment when relatives discover this little idiosynchracy (my cousin wasn't laughing though when the dog took the Thanksgiving turkey she spent all day cooking).

Paps laughed, but unfortunately, forgot to heed my advice later in the day. Sometime between the point that he and my wife returned from the corner gourmet food store with some sandwiches and 4:00 in the afternoon, a sandwich was consumed. How did I know it wasn't consumed by Paps? Like most dogs, this dog has no shame nor is it very good at covering up its crimes of passion. It left the cellophane, wax paper, and a tomato on the floor. Yes, the sandwich was wrapped. But like I said in an earlier post, this dog can open a peanut butter jar.

Ga-ga over Google? Oy vey.

2004-05-04T10:47:00.000-07:00

Nowathesedays, you can't hide from all the excitement surrounding the forthcoming initial (and controversial) public offering for Google stock. If for no other reason, the Google IPO merits the attention it's getting because of the unorthodox approach the company's executives are taking in terms of structuring the stock and communicating with the outside world about the offering. I love how the company is saying "Look, we're not paying attention to the same high pressure quarterly mumbo jumbo that makes other public companies priortize tactics over strategics" (no one said those words, but that's the drift). Beyond that however, why all the attention? Google strikes me as a company that can be leapfrogged just like any other search company. Yahoo did it to Netscape. Google did it to Yahoo. Indeed, it's the best out there right now. But, if I were thinking about buying tech stocks (which I cannot), Google doesn't strike me as having a protectable business that will grow according to some other index. Google has a technology advantage that can be taken away. Other than the quality of the company's technology, what else "sticky" is there about Google. On the other hand, eBay is a company that's sticky. The bigger the Internet gets (in terms of numbers of users), the bigger eBay will get. Anyone that wants to participate in an online auction as a buyer or seller knows that eBay is the best place to go. The company's monopoly is virtually inpenetrable and it's not the technology that protects eBay's market. It's the need to do your business in the most vibrant marketplace on the Internet. I'm not recommending stocks. So do not take this as stock advice. If Google was the only stock you could buy, then it might make a good choice. But if you want to get back into DOT COMS as a part of your portfolio, I think there are other good bets that are equally if not more poised for growth.

America on Trial

2004-05-01T18:39:00.000-07:00

I just read on the New York Times web site where the finger pointing over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners is already starting and how John Kerry is struggling to find a campaign theme. Gee, if I'm not mistaken, a theme is being handed to Kerry on a silver platter. America is now on trial in the court of worldwide public opinion and just when I thought the evidence against us couldn't get any worse, it did. Am I alone, or does anybody else have the same feeling as me: that since 9/11, the US not only blows every golden opportunity that comes its way to sway world opinion in its favor (eg: Kyoto), but it seems to be unearthing and leveraging new opportunities to give people that never hated us before a good reason to hate us now (ie: Iraq, the prisoner abuse, etc.). If the people who run our country really want to protect it and secure its future for our children, then don't they have to address the hatred? Whatever there was for the world to like about America, it seems as though there's pretty much none of it left right now. If Kerry is looking for a theme, how about "Restoring America"? The America I'm reading about in the papers isn't the America I know. It's certainly not the America I want the world to know. But I never hear either of the candidates talking about why they think we're so hated and how they plan to address that problem.

2004-04-30T09:11:00.000-07:00

A dog with issues (and a serious shedding problem)
Before meeting my wife, she adopted a dog from a shelter that was local to her in Maryland: a dog that, as it turned out, sheds enough hair in one day to make a new dog, and, for some icing on the cake has a few issues. The worst of these, from our perspective, is that, as a former street dog, she was never reprogrammed to be satisfied with dog food. Or, for that matter, just to be satisfied with a full stomach (however it was acquired). If you were a street dog, you would know that you have to eat as much as you can whenever you can because you never know when you're going to eat again. "You must go above and beyond the call of duty to obtain food" according to the Official Street Dog Survival Guide, a reference book we found hidden under our dog's bed after we came home one day to find that she had removed the lid from a jar of Skippy Peanut Butter and cleaned it out. Though we're not sure how she got it (we've suspected alien abduction), we've also discovered that our dog has a gizzard. After several poultry-retrieving acrobatic feats that would make a Cirque de Soliel performer jealous, she has swallowed a bunch chickens (we're losing count) and at least one turkey (the one that was sitting on my cousin's kitchen counter just before Thanksgiving Dinner one year) whole. The process involves little if any chewing and a lot of worrying that she'll die because of what one chicken bone can do, let alone the entire carcass. We watch for anything unusual on the "other side" but miraculously, nothing unusual comes out which leads us to believe that either she has a gizzard or the bones are still in her. Watch this blog and you'll learn more about our psychopathic dog, especially on slow news days (since news is usually what inspires new entries).

2004-04-29T14:06:00.000-07:00

Screw speech recognition technology. Just outsource it to India with VoIP
Ask any major IT guru what the next biggest -- and I mean really big -- productivity breakthrough will be and few of them will disagree that it's speech recognition. If speech recognition worked really well on mobile devices, we could throw away our PCs (since the keyboard is really the only difference between the two). If only we could get rid of these stupid keyboards, then our productivity would shoot through the roof. So, building on a previous blog entry where I suggested having a Web services-based speech recognition service (with a grid-driven supercomputer behind it), I realized that with all this outsourcing going on, the better, and maybe cheaper answer is to keep the Web service, but replace the grid behind it with a dictation farm in India and use free VoIP for the plumbing. After all, the beauty of Web services is that, to the outside world, the underlying platform is transparent. Who cares if it's Java, .Net, or a few million Indians with headsets on the other end of the VoIP pipe? Even better, maybe this approach solves the brewing outsourcing dilemma (see IBM shareholders voice concerns). Keep the existing high-paying jobs in the U.S. and create new ones (that no one domestically has ever heard of) over there.

2004-04-29T07:03:00.000-07:00

Our brush with death (a.k.a "Why to drive as far as possible from the median")
Have you ever watched a NASCAR race and seen what happens when a wheel comes off a race car? It shoots ahead of the car at about twice the car's speed. Two weeks ago (before I started bloggin'), a Dodge pickup truck that was heading in the opposite direction of the SUV that I was driving (on a two-lane road) mysteriously lost its front left wheel which subsequently shot like a bullet into the front of my vehicle. A heavy chrome bumper absorbed the brunt of the impact (the damage totaled $2033) and my two sons and I escaped completely unscathed. Later, at the scene of the accident, Officer Murphy said we were lucky the wheel wasn't bouncing, which they often do. "If it went through the windshield, all of you would have been dead" he said. If we were both going the speed limit (40 mph) and the truck's wheel was going 1.5 times the speed of the truck (conservative estimate), I calculated that the wheel could have come through the windshield at an effective speed of 100 mph. This was one of those wrong place at the wrong time incidents. If we were at the same location one second sooner, or one second later, we may have avoided the accident altogether. Or maybe I should have been driving in the shoulder. I'm not a religious man. But times like this make me wonder about other forces out there.

2004-04-29T06:19:00.000-07:00

Of Pepsi, Apple, and the missing link
After CNET News.com's Ina Fried reported that the Pepsi iTunes promotion has gone flat, it reminded me that my 13-year old son scored a free music download the other day (according to underside of the bottlecap on a bottle of Pepsi I bought for him). With cap in hand, I decided to test the download process to see why the promotion might have gone flat. According to the top of the cap, downloads must be redeemed by 4/30/2004 and you must go to iTunes.com to redeem your download. Although I can't tell you exactly why the promotion went flat, I can definitely say why I wasn't able to downlaod a song before the deadline: there were no instructions on the the iTunes home page telling me what to do next. So, I called the 800 number on the bottlecap (800-418-9766) and was told by a recording that I need to go to iTunes.com and click on the link that says "Pepsi iTunes, Click Here." Unfortunately, to no avail, I searched the iTunes home page for said link yesterday and today. No link, no download. Somewhat outraged, it caused me to wonder, "Isn't Pepsi guilty of false advertising or something?" Ina Fried later told me that if the link existed, it would have taken me to http://www.apple.com/itunes/pepsi/. Once there, I think I figured out why the promotion went flat. To download a song, you MUST have Apple's iTunes Software (free to download) and in order to get it, you have to trade-in some personal information (a concession many Web users are afraid to make these days).

2004-04-29T05:47:00.000-07:00

Insert foot in baby monitor (a.k.a "How to piss off your neighbors")
We recently moved from a rural to an urban setting and althought we don't use our baby monitor much, our toddler's recent bout with the stomach flu motivated us to turn it on for the last few days. Baby monitors are consumer band radios and ours picks up every sound in the house including what we say. Forgetting that it was on, I said something last night that I didn't want shared with the entire neighborhood. My neighborhood is full of people with radio-frequency scanners in their kitchens. 'Nuf said.

2004-04-28T07:39:00.000-07:00

Dell-SAP-Oracle "partnolidation" synthesizes competition to one-stop shops like IBM, Sun
According to News.com reporter John Spooner, Dell will announce an expanded alliance with ERP giant SAP (see Dell and SAP sittin' in a tree). The announcement comes on the heels of an similar Dell-Oracle announcement that came earlier this year (see Dell, Oracle expand alliance). Long term, the trend worth watching here is one of consolidation through either M&A or partnerships as enterprises like Morgan Stanley develop more interest in the cost benefits of utility computing (see Morgan Stanley, IBM ink utility computing deal) and, short of utility computing standards (see Hardware vendors inch forward on utility computing), the only way to really get it is through one vendor (under the auspices of a pay-as-you-go outsourcing contract). In such a world, lone vendors like Dell, SAP, PeopleSoft, and Oracle will find themsleves increasingly more isoloated unless they "mergolidate" or "partnolidate." So, it should come as no surprise that this is happening. HP has a similar alignment with J2EE-based application server provider BEA (see What is J2EE?), a relationship that is especially important to BEA as its relationship with Sun grows increaslingly strained (see Turf wars on the Java front) now that Sun is getting more agressive about selling its own application server. Sources close to BEA tell me that the company has experienced a dramatic shift from Sun to HP in terms of the hardware that BEA's application server (WebLogic) is being bundled with for new customers. For some deals, partnolidation may end up being a precursor to mergolidation which is why I think BEA is a prime M&A target for HP as HP looks to gain and maintain ground against IBM and Sun.

2004-04-28T05:41:00.000-07:00

DB uprades P&G from "HOLD" to "BUY" due to toddler diarrhea epidemic
This has been a rough week. All of our dreams of returning to active duty fully refreshed after a family vacation in Ixtapa, Mexico were dashed when our two-year old came down with some sort of stomach flu that has kept him up for three nights straight and that has turned his mother and me into zombies. Yesterday was my day to take off from work and I calculated that the diarrhetic flow producted by our son's stomach illness has quintupled our family's rate of diaper consumption. We use Pampers, a product of Proctor & Gamble. Between diaper changes, we learned from friends that our son isn't an isolated case. Perhaps we should buy some Proctor & Gamble stock as a way of recovering the "investment" we've been making in Pampers.

2004-04-28T05:10:00.000-07:00

Mozilla-Gnome merger talks reveal strengths, weaknesses of open source
News.com's Paul Festa reports that representatives from the Gnome and Mozilla open source projects are hooking up to figure out how to deal with the threat posed by the way the next version of Windows (code-named Longhorn) will more deeply integrate the rendering of the desktop user interface and the Web. The most noteworthy aspect of this collaboration is not the chance that it will produce something out of the open source world to compete with one of Longhorn's features, but rather the open source world is recognizing both the benefits and the threats of a Microsoft's centrally coordinated big picture when it comes to operating system development. Longhorn's desktop rendering is but one feature that those promoting desktop GNU/Linux will have to deal with. There are many other features (including some that were pushed back to a later release) that reveal a key weakness in GNU Linux: lack of an integrated roadmap.

2004-04-27T19:41:00.000-07:00

Senator McCarthy woulda been proud
OK. So I stole the headline. But at least I stole it from my own story. My outrage of the day goes to administrators at Prosser High School in Benton County, WA who, according to an Associated Press Report on Foxnews.com were so alarmed by two pieces of artwork that a 15-year old turned in for an assignment, that they contacted the local authorities who in turn notified the Secret Service who in turn investigated the incident which ultimately resulted in disciplinary action (administered by the school). The artwork consisted of two pictures: one with George W "as a devil launching a missile, with a caption reading 'End the war -- on terrorism' " and the other showing "a man in what appeared to be Middle Eastern-style clothing, holding a rifle. He was also holding a stick with an oversize head of the president on it." So, let me see if I understand this correctly. It's one thing to ask a few questions just to make sure everything is OK. But, a 15-year old uses art to express free thought about a mature topic (a rarity by itself) and the school sends a message to the rest of its students that such free thinking and expression won't be tolerated? It's such an outrage, that I'm not even sure where to begin. So, I won't. I'll just let the story speak for itself.

2004-04-27T13:36:00.000-07:00

Is that a version 1 or 2 wocket in your pocket?
Ace News.com mobility reporter Richard Shim reports that IDC has released its findings that handheld shipments have dipped when compared to the same time period last year. About the only people this should be of interest to are short-term investors. I've always been bullish about the future of handheld devices (especially wireless ones). Somewhere down the line, most if not all PCs will give way to specialized mobile devices. For example, my son and I recently had a conversation where he argued that on-line gaming couldn't be much better than it is now with his tricked out Alienware system (note to self: do a family whiteboard session on Moore's Law). I begged to differ. If you ask me, Nokia's GPRS-enabled N-Gage gaming deck barely scratches the surface of things to come in terms of mobile, wireless, and task-specific technologies. It's no Alienware, but give it the sort of Moore's Law time it needs. Have you used a pocket-sized digital dictation recorder? Add some wireless technology, a Web services-based speech recognition grid (aka "supercomputer"), and an iPod like GUI and will we really need a keyboard to do email or word processing? I don't think so. For the handset companies like Nokia that understand this trend, quarterly hiccups like the one IDC just highlighted will be meaningless in the long run.

2004-04-27T09:45:00.000-07:00

Can your firewall stop this?
Today, ZDNet has a news story (see The black lining to Symantec's silver cloud) about the difficulties that Symantec is having in attracting enterprise customers for its security products. The timing couldn't be worse for Symantec now that Microsoft is getting serious about personal firewall and anti-virus technologies. Some time in 2004H1 (probably near the end), Microsoft is due to release Service Pack 2 for Windows XP (see Windows XP service pack gets face-lift) . It will include a significantly revamped personal firewall (the name changes from "Internet Connection Firewall" to "Windows Firewall") which I predict over time will render most dedicated personal firewalls from companies like Symantec and Zone Labs obsolete. It won't be better than the others but it will be good enough to the point that it's cost (free) and seemless integration into Windows will cause Windows users to keep their money in their pockets. Last year, Microsoft acquired Romanian anti-virus outfit GeCad. What do you make of that? In an upcoming Reality Check on ZDNet, Dan Ingevaldson, director of research and development at Internet Security Systems (ISS) (the guys that bought BlackICE) tells me that successful diversification into the enterprise is the key to survival of security vendors as Microsoft kills off more cottage industries. Today's story about Symantec may be proof.