Remember the blackout?

Well apparently the chinese have precipitated the blackout. I don't how much of this is just FUD but it's an interesting read. Did China's Hackers Shut Off the Lights? | Danger Room from Wired.com.
The Chinese are a force in counter intelligence, ok I get that. The web is used in so many ways, and to read that states are using it to perform attacks on other states, and I'm sure it's not just one way by the way, ie just from China to US, but also the other way - is both exciting and scary to me. Exciting because it reads like a sci-fi book and scary because just like Ender's realizes at one point - it's all real, it's not a game.

FaceBook, MySpace, LinkedIn, SecondLife, blogs, IM etc...

I was at Gartner's Outsourcing conference last week, one of the keynote speaker Dov Seidman was on the new ways we have to do business. It goes like this

We're extremely connected. We're in a world of extreme transparency. Connectivity somehow is now transparency. What we do/say as an individual or organization will stay around forever. Rarely now when I meet somebody new I won't google the person's name, or check things our on linkedin. Did you know that MySpace was the 11th most populous country on earth! The reputation game is now more than ever worth gold. As Warrent Buffet once said: "if you loose 1$ for the firm I will be understanding, if you loose reputation for the firm, I will be ruthless".  The connectiveness is an opportunity to find new ways to lead. We know that unlike in the past, information can't be controlled, can't be accumulated just like land or cash could be controlled, and to top it off information is infinite.

We're going into an experience economy, and you can't automate experience it's so human. If you connect to people in this world of extreme connectedness - you get to influence, and this is the new green. Influence has always been important, it just seems on steroids with all things social on the web. As a an individual, one can always coerce, motivate or inspire - but the last one, getting people to buy in the vision as their own is the only one with a long term potential when one is in a connected world.

When sync goes off the rails - Blackberry/Google/Outlook

Today something very bizarre happened, 95% of my calendar went missing. My setup for syncing is not simple, but it has been working flawlessly for the last several months. Just before boarding the plane today, I noticed my calendar was missing. I looked at my blackberry last sync log it was saying 89events deleted. needless to say I was sweating. I don't know what went wrong, what I did wrong, or what conditions the software figured it could just go ahead and delete. Somehow my google cal got into this state where it thought all the appointments in outlook were to be deleted, and so the sync deleted them. Thank fully Outlook has a trash, and I was able to sort deleted items by type and I think I was able to undelete all the events that were deleted, but i will never know until the said event is supposed to happen. Anyway I had to reset the sync - re-upload all my outlook into google, and re-set my bb to re-download all my google data, and now we seem to be back to normal... I think.

Empower your BlackBerry

As you know already I come from the palm world. Since I have switched from the Treo to BB, there is a piece of functionality I had to give up that I found more painful than others. On the treo I had the ability to create task/appointment from a call, an email, or a contact. I finally got my hands on something that has a similar kind of functionality as a side effect. Empower HTML email viewer allows me to get my emails in HTML which is much better than the std viewer on the BB, but also, from an email I can now create a task or an appointment, and Empower sucks the content out of the email to populate the task or the appointment with the right information. It's by no means perfect, because it could use the from field to give a little more context to the appointment or the task, but it's one step in the right direction. Give it a shot.

MagToo -creating panorama shots

Over the weekend I shot a few pics at the cottage that I wanted to stitch together. I happened to read a review of MagToo  on webware, they recommended it, I gave it a shot, and it works well.

HP Press Release: HP to Acquire EDS for $13.9 Billion

After trying to acquire the consulting arm of PWC, HP has decided to swallow EDS HP Press Release: HP to Acquire EDS for $13.9 Billion. This is a large transaction by all means. From the press release HP is seeing an opportunity to improve the operational sides of EDS by consolidating, but all in all the two businesses will stay  the way they are.

SouthPark - no internet clip

I got this clip from startup ottawa, funny!

Valuations for Indian IT Companies Hit New Lows

From Business Week 

According to Capitaline data, since 2005 India's largest IT company TCS has seen a decline of almost 52.5% in its P/E ratio while Infosys has seen a decline of 39.5% during the same period. In fact, Infosys P/E ratio has come down from 202.92 in fiscal 1999-2000 to 19.73 in the fiscal year ended March 31, 2008, a decline of 90.2%.

That is truly interesting. As they say earlier in the article P/E ratio the investor way of saying how much growth this comany has in store, P/E going down is not a growth slowing down indicator. Where are those concerns for growth from the investors coming from. The Recession in the US, to the contrary wouldn't that drive more outsourcing. Or maybe investors don't see india as cheap anymore and in recession time money is king. The recent quarter numbers among the big Outsourcers in India were still very good. On the other hand Infectious greed mentioned recently he had heard from two Indian outsourcers business was down.

Is Your Neighborhood Making You Fat? - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog

This blog always make the number speaks in a surprising way. Is Your Neighborhood Making You Fat? - Freakonomics - in this post though it hits close to home. I was listening on the radio just this week, while eating my bag of chips and drinking my can of coke, that the region of Gatineau, where I live, is the worst in Quebec among urban regions for obesity among women, and 5th for men.I can't say if it's related to the fact we have less grocery stores, or more junk food outlets as they state in the post than anywhere else in the province.

from TechCrunch:Is Yang Still In Control At Yahoo?

Is the Yahoo Microsoft thing a great soap or what. Now a rumour Yahoo wants to go back and negotiate with MS Is Yang Still In Control At Yahoo? This is better than watching TV.

the states of affairs with wireless, cellular and gadgets

When I read a story like this one, where in the US wifi is free for iPhone users apparently AT&T Providing Free Wi-Fi Access to iPhone Users [Updated] - Mac Rumors
I just feel depressed, because here in the land of the habs(who have lost by the ways yesterday) we have no such free things, and worse, I don't even see a glimpse of a trend pointing at something remotely similar. We're archaic, we will have the iPhone sometimes this year. Rogers is charging an arm and a leg, their plans don't make much sense. Tivo is still not shipping the HD capable device here in Canada, because our cable companies are using old technologies. Another one - Apple TV is next to useless since you can't buy or rent content from it in Canada, because Apple hasn't been able to secure the rights for that content in Canada. So where does this leave me - It leaves me with a absurdely high cel phone bill, a wi-fi capable BB that is next to useless, a tv experience where I still need to go to Blockbuster in my care to get a good flick, and the habs are loosing 3-1... Anyhow there are bigger problems I know, this is my rant, but heck you would think that we could be further ahead with all the talks going on.