Maybe, says D. Aristophanes from Sadly, No!

You know, I never thought about it from that angle, but it kinda makes sense.  It doesn't make it right, but it does make sense.

Regarding Judge Sotomayor.  Excellent read.  Read it!

Would somebody please explain to reporters that just because they buy everything Apple makes without question, that doesn't mean iPhone is dominant in business mobile communications?  The common refrain I'm seeing in online and print articles is that the new Palm Pre is taking the iPhone on!  No, it's not.  It's taking RIM's Blackberry on.  RIM owns the business sphere.  And the Palm Pre is very much a business phone, like its "in spirit" predecessor, the Treo.  Sure, the iPhone has business users and the Pre non-business users, but that's not the target market.

Apples and oranges, people.  The shocking conclusion will be: some people prefer the iPhone and some people prefer the Pre.  Shocking!!

I can't wait until a Windows Mobile phone has a portrait-oriented slide out keyboard like the Palm Pre.  I love the Blackberry/Treo keyboard, but not the small square screens.  The landscape keyboard that HTC keeps giving us are nice, but the screen orientation switching is a bit annoying.  The Palm Pre fixes this, but I'm too much of a Windows Mobile guy to defect for that small feature.  ;-)

This is so freaking cool.  I hope they can adapt this technique to ears so I can I get super hearing!  http://gizmodo.com/5277456/stem-cell-contact-lenses-cure-blindness-in-less-than-a-month

A coworker just turned me onto the Google Wave presentation.  I must say it looks like the coolest IM client I've ever seen.  But I am skeptical about it replacing email.  I'm old enough to remember when ICQ was going to replace email.  Uhm, not so much.

I'm not a technological luddite – I love new technology.  I just can't see this replacing SMTP email because it is so vastly different.  We haven't even replaced IP4 yet on the internet.  What makes Google think they seriously stand a chance replacing SMTP? 

In my humble opinion, the only way SMTP email will be replaced is if there is a multi-company standardized platform that's agreed on by all the big corporate players, the myriad of Open Source projects, as well as being completely backward compatible in some fashion for older systems that cannot or will not be upgraded for whatever reason.

Web standards, as bumpy as the road has been, is an example of this.  Finally, after years of fighting, all the major players are working very hard to find common ground and commit to it.  You will notice that HTML was never thrown out the window.  All current browsers will still render the oldest websites out there.  Plus, the oldest browsers can still render a lot of new sites, just without all the whiz-bang Flash/Silverlight or JavaScript stuff (but you can still usually at least get static text content and simple images). 

Wave wasn't designed this way.  It's a clean break.  IT standards adoption trends just don't seem to like clean breaks!

All that said, Wave is really cool looking and I'm sure it will be an excellent competitor to other collaborative technologies out there now, like SharePoint.  In fact, as it stands it looks like it is way ahead of Redmond in collaborative and communications aspects (especially if Grand Central is integrated into Wave), so it will be an interesting competitive fight to come!

Maybe it will inspire the replacement of SMTP, but it won't be the replacement itself.  Let's see if I'm right about this.  Bury this post in a time capsule somewhere. ;-)

Also, if you are a tinfoil hat type (not a bad thing when you work in IT security), this article is for you.

Not that I ever really spent much time watching and listening to the Sunday Bobblehead political shows, but this new blog I was turned onto absolutely pwns them.  Not only is it funny in a satirical way, it's also disturbingly accurate.  Now you don't need to waste any more time listening to pundits talk on Sundays!

I'm getting pretty tired of the BP Concern Troll commercials.  In amongst the very reasonable alternate energy solutions presented there is always, without fail, one Average AmericanTM absolutely insisting that offshore drilling must be a part of any future energy solution.

Just say NO to Sock Puppets.

I blog because I care.

Sadly, No! has a fantastic article contrasting the UK's conservatives with our own.  The article is light on snark, which is unusual for SN!, but the article is really really important to read.  So go read it!  GOGOGO!  The Shorter: Britain's conservative party's attitude on torture makes America's newest mostest ultra liberalest prezdent evah look like a torture appeaser in contrast.

Today I went out to eat lunch with my lovely wife.  At the table next to us were two businessmen who were discussing future plans for their business.  Of course, rather than using the word plan they kept using the word vision.  This isn't the first time I've heard this euphemism.  Marketing departments must stay awake late at night coming up with cute buzzwords to replace boring old words that everybody, you know, actually understands.  I think it's part of what keeps them employed.  I'm guess I'm not really one to talk because IT is also a department very famous for coming up with new complex words too, but at least it's not to replace perfectly fine existing words, it's usually just fancy acronyms for new technology.  I confused a manager the other day by saying KVM.  Either way, I'm sure it keeps us employed.  :-D

But, I digress…

I actually heard these two say things like, "we need to communicate our vision" and "can you explain your vision for this?"  The one that took the cake for me was, "Wow – that's a lot of vision."

No, I'm serious!  That cracked me up. 

What they were talking about were their plans for the business.  How on earth the word vision became such a buzzword replacement for plan, I have no idea.  I hear vision at work frequently, especially around review time when I have to help with the "Five Year IT Vision" or whatever they are calling it this year.  But these two guys really took it to the next level.  They certainly didn't make it up.  They were just trying to sound like the Big Boy CEOs that throw that word around gratuitously.  I guess it sounds more fun and exciting than a plan, but that's all it is.

About the only thing worse than using vision instead of plan is when businesspeople use the word vision instead of the word budget.  Now, this one threw me off the first time I heard it.  It was really quite odd to hear things like "the maintenance cost of this project accounts for 10% of the 2008 vision."  That's just silliness.

Oh, I forgot to mention what the vision actually was that the two aforementioned gentlemen were discussing at lunch.  They were building a new church.  I didn't even understand that until about halfway through the first gentleman finished presenting his complete vision to the second gentleman.  It all seemed very… un-Christ-like to me.  Let's just say it was an expensive and grandiose vision.  It's quite unfortunate when religion becomes difficult to distinguish from big business.  Personally, I'd rather see all those generous donations go to the needy, but I know -- that's just crazy talk!  The needy can wait!  These guys really needed that large field, huge buildings, fancy architecture, statues, and expensive windows!

Six thousand years ago, back in 2005, which was the dawn of modern democracy, this was the common thinking in the Senate.  Want to take bets on how many of these Senators flip-flop this year?

P.S. I can't wait to vote against Senator Burr in 2010.