Author Douglass Rushkoff blogged at The Huffington Post on Why Johnny Can't Program.  His title is, of course, a glom of Rudolf Flesch's book Why Johhny Can't Read.  Flesch published that book in 1955 and followed almost thirty years later with Why Johnny Still Can't Read: A New Look At The Scandal Of Our Schools.  Now over fifty years after the first book, with the cost per public school student skyrocketing, the problem Flesch described has worsened, not improved.

Seth Godin wrote a great piece a few days ago about our current economic condition. It's short, just go read it.

At the client company where I'm working just now, my desktop monitor is smaller than my (personal) laptop screen.  Obviously I'm working waaaaaay too cheap.

My favorite project of all time began eighteen years ago at IBM’s Toronto lab on a product called ImagePlus.  It wasn't my favorite because of the technologies we were using or the thing we were developing.  It was the joy of working with that particular team. 

We completed the project on time, within budget, and with an unusually low defect rate.  Two doctoral students from the University of Guelph somehow heard about our project and came out to study the team and find the secret to our success.

I watched a great video by Tim O'Reilly about the importance of (he says data, though I would choose the word) information,  Because O'Reilly is a veritable fountain of knowledge in many areas of computing he said a lot of good things along the way.  His main point though was that tremendous market pressure is focused toward a single-source for data - by Google, Microsoft, or whomever - and that we need to actively resist that force.  He raised this as the question, "Who

Two days before Christmas someone was kind enough to break the window of my trucklet and steal, among other things, my main laptop.  It was a year old, but more than adequate for another year or so.  I was parked less than two hours in an office parking lot in a relatively "good" part of town.  Bummer.

I went for two months with a borrowed laptop (thanks Paul!), but finally replaced it last week.  The new one's a screamer with an i7 quad-core processor, 500Gb drive at 7200 rpm and 4Gb of quick memory.  

I'm doing some SSIS upgrade and PCI compliance work for a retail client.  As I connected to one of their database servers there was a database named TrustedLink.  That rang a bell and when I asked they told me it was "for their EDI program, did I know anything about it?"  In fact I did, I had helped write it.

With Apple's iPad and Google noises about a tablet (Microsoft, where are you?), I had a thought today.  A lot of the old (old like 1950s & 60s) sci fi futurist stuff had some kind of screen in every room that was a communication and information interface.  At the time I think they were envisioned as terminals, since a "computer" would obviously take up a whole room.

This is a suggestion for Google, Bing, and anyone else still attempting to compete in the search engine space:

Provide a user configuration option to exclude domains search results.