Merry Xmas and get ready for 2010!

Well, another year, another Christmas time, another victory on the road to living a good life. Let's celebrate with friends and family while enjoying a delicious fruit salad of glorious pomegranate and smooth Granny Smith apples. For all you who read this blog I want to send my best wishes for this holiday season and for a great New Year! Hang on! The best is yet to come ahead for those of us who have persisted and endured through difficult times. Life's many rewards await us.

Spring Equinox, into the light...

Spring, Primavera, Printemps, Frühling is here! It came yesterday with an treasure of light to spread over the darkness... I always had this idea of wearing, during the first days of spring, a t-shirt with a picture of me wearing a beard that read: "I survived another New York winter!" It never happened, not only because I no longer want to grow a beard but because I prefer other publicity outlets rather than a piece of garment. Though, the message remains: We have survived not only the winter, but also the recession, the urban desert, the bout of unemployment, the odd jobs... We are here, sound and safe, with a job, thank God!, with renovated hopes, with the same big dreams, with poetry alive and kicking, expectant and optimistic. This is the time to fight and grow and prosper. Screw the bad news! Now, for some more info about the spring equinox...

My IT predictions for 2009

I am not a magician or a IT psychic but I'd like to venture some thoughts:

• Windows Vista will gain acceptance, thanks to the good reviews of Windows 7, which actually is an upgrade of Windows Vista.
  


• Windows 7 will be released in November 2009.


• Adoption of Netbooks, which I consider oversized PDAS, will grow by the summer only to drop sharply by the end of the year.
  


• The iPhone will continue to be the major player among smartphones, but Windows Mobile adoption will grow as well (expect previews of Windows Mobile 7 in the autumn) and the Palm Pre will definitely make waves.
  


• Users will start demanding more matte screens, as opposed to unsightly and unusable glossy screens (in laptops) which are actually a fad of the last 3 years.
  


• Interest in Cloud computing will wane to its deserved level: a good technology that certainly will not replace established data centers. They will simply coexist.
  


• Linux and its countless distributions will stay at the same level of acceptance as they are now, no fluctuations.
  


• The Internet will start to become less secure and at the same time less democratic. New laws will arise. Governments will start to intervene more.
  


• Japanese and Chinese will come up with new Internet paradigms and will also be able to start using their languages on the address line: URLs in Japanese and Chinese! Just another sign of the beginning of the end of the Western world predominance in science and technology.

A synthesis of memorable images

"Photosynth is a potent mixture of two independent breakthroughs: the ability to reconstruct the scene or object from a bunch of flat photographs, and the technology to bring that experience to virtually anyone over the Internet..." Photosynth was inspired by the breakthrough research on Photo Tourism from the University of Washington and Microsoft Research. How about some 'photosynths' from the the Obama inauguration event in Washington today? It's the coming of age of this new technology. You may need to install a new add-on in your browser.

A surreal marvel on the Hudson, a formidable homage to life!

Today was an unforgettable day in this New York where we live and survive and enjoy life. What happened is all over the media and the Internet, around the globe. Strangely enough, after digesting the news of what actually happened during this unusual episode in the midst of a chilly winter and an eerie economic recession, I felt a powerful jolt of energy, a swell of gratitude not before being profoundly moved by the miracle that took place over the murky and bitterly cold waters of the Hudson river. A formidable homage to life, no less! Another overwhelming proof that nothing should be taken for granted. [Photo: REUTERS, Brendan McDermid]

Winter solstice

There is an infinite supply of energy beneath the beauty of winter, its snowy-white clarity, its darkness and short days and long nights and glacial reality. As the Northern Hemisphere is ready to embrace the unequivocal change of season, amidst the traditional rituals of the Winter Solstice, the Unconquered Sun, let's embrace this newborn period, in which new poems and books and magazine articles will be written, and paintings painted and buildings built... perhaps new friends, and new jobs, all conspire to make of winter a cozier and warmer season. Simply a communion with kin, work, Creator and creation.

An extraordinary historic moment in the U.S.

...registered in an interactive mosaic, using Silverlight technology, showing 672 newspaper front pages from all over the world, collected originally by the Newseum, in Washington, "a 250,000-square-foot museum of news — (that) offers visitors an experience that blends five centuries of news history with up-to-the-second technology and hands-on exhibits." Assembled by Scott Hanselman and Scott Stanfield, this mosaic can be seen once you install the Silverlight add-on and using the mouse wheel to zoom in and out.

Just the new Laptop I need!

...and make sure is a Dell™ LatitudeTM E6500 Laptop with a MATTE SCREEN (this is very important!). I learned that some bloggers were getting new and free laptops in an article of Microsoft Watch™ of 31 Octuber reporting that "Microsoft handed out the laptops on Oct. 26 during a reviewers' workshop held before the official start of the Professional Developers Conference, held Oct. 27 to 30. The bloggers, along with analysts and reviewers, received notebooks loaded with Windows 7 Pre-Beta." But then, again, I did not even attend PDC 2008, to my chagrin. Anyway, I hope someone is reading my wish list :-)

Wall Street fat cats eaten by a sewer alligator

No, it's not Schadenfreude, but I am somehow 'glad' that the real estate bubble is finally bursting in New York and elsewhere as a consequence of the excesses of the Atlantic City, er, Wall Street, croupiers, er, investment 'experts'... Hard to tell the difference. Funny, the bubble was created by Wall Street greed and the burst was simply the expected outcome. A self-inflicted wound that reverberates throughout America and the world. And now the sewer alligator of harsh reality is here to bite these fat cats, and take them where they belong, who have been gambling with everybody's money for years and years under the purview of nobody in government... except to come to their rescue in a not so clear game plan, at our expense, we the taxpayers. Would there be a silver lining sometime? Let's hope. [The sculpture above, is one by Wichita, Kansas, artist Tom Otterness, a perfect way to illustrate this post. Actually this sculpture, found in Brooklyn's downtown MetroTech Center, where I currently work, inspired this post].

From sitting vidiots to walking vidiots and back

Sometime back in the '90s (or was it in the '80s?) someone coined the term vidiot, a combination of video + idiot, to refer to someone addicted to a video screen, be it TV sets, computers, and above all, video games. Well, today that expression can be aptly extended to some of, not all, the gazillions of people glued to their mobile phones screens. Don't get me wrong, with this post I want to allude ONLY to those who are so engrossed in their little screens that they completely forget about their immediate surroundings with unpredictable consequences. They are vidiots, period. The most glaring case of DWT (driving while texting, I just coined this, that is a 'sitting vidiot') so far, was the 'engineer' in Los Angeles who caused the death of 25 people, including himself, after missing a stop signal and crashing his train against another oncoming train. On the other hand, tell me if you don't find plain outrageous to see cashiers in supermarkets, for example, and other standing vidiots, texting while on the job! And how about those walking vidiots texting while walking on a busy sidewalk, while jaywalking in busy traffic, yes, they cross nonchalantly in front of your car... Just another example of our society's already short span of attention... Am I overreacting?

History in the making: democracy meets TV 2.0

Well, this time I want to share my enthusiasm for the democratic party we are living in the States. As I write this post, the 2008 Democratic National Convention is underway in Denver. I don't know much about politics, nor I am particularly interested in adhering to any political cause, but I am all for whoever and whatever may actually contribute to putting this country back in shape. Enough politicking... For the best Democratic Convention video experience, live, right here in your computer, your will need the Microsoft Silverlight plug-in, and the move networks media player, that acts as an operating system for video. Move networks (their slogan aptly says This is TV 2.0™) is a company headquartered in Utah, incidentally the same Rocky Mountain state where WordPerfect Corporation was born—and don't forget how they revolutionized the rising PC world in the '80s...

Message to Redmond: Yahoo!? Fugedaboudit!

Microsoft should forget about Yahoo! altogether. IMHO the future of Internet search-with-ads will be highly fragmented in just a few years and then you will end up with an overpriced technology. You will not only spread too thin but will be investing in a company which is itself overpriced. And how about cloud computing? Do not fall completely for it. The Internet will cease to exist as the do-it-all medium, not to grow; that's the IT mirage du jour. The P in PC stands for personal, meaning your computer, your home, your office, right? The desktop and laptop PCs will continue to exist for a long time. Like the automobile, an invention that is part of everyday life. Continue to work on virtualization, Vista, Windows servers, natural language... Open source? Another mirage. An alternative that is NOT gratis. A lot of fellows still don't get the fact that free is as in "freedom of speech" not as in "free beer."

Vista vs XP: a non-issue? Maybe

There is no need to conduct a scientific survey to realize that a lot of people are already using Windows Vista. Just go to a library, visit one of those ubiquitous cafés or simply peek at your neighbor wielding a laptop computer in the bus or train. It occurred to me that this sort of "debate" about upgrading or downgrading, better or worse, now or later or never, and so on and so on, are as just meta-realities created by the media... And you know what happens to your life when you pay too much attention to the media? Well, fill your mind and spirit with that sort of apocalyptic junk food that proclaims in a veiled fashion that "the end is near, repent". Precisely, that sort of veiled discourse cleverly intertwined with "be more beautiful and this is the formula just for you" and "buy more and save more"... Let's turn the TV and the Internet off once in a while as a matter of mental hygiene.

The dog days in bucolic New York, coming soon...

Believe it or not, New York is like a big small town in the summer where you can actually walk lonely and quiet streets and feel life passing you by as if you were an spectator of yesteryear, in the times of typewriters, perhaps quills... This year I don't even know when New York's PC Expo will take place or if it's going to happen altogether. I wanted to go back to Tech-Ed, this time in Orlando, but it wasn't to be. Perhaps I'll return to another bucolic town, Los Angeles, for Tech-Ed 2009. Time to have the most productive summer, ever. Seriously. (This view is from Long Island City at sunset, by the East river).

The modern Ada Lovelaces and Grace Hoppers

Just came accross some "news" about some "geek girls"
who do high-level engineering and some other "cool" stuff and obviously have a say on Windows Vista, actually they're full of praise. [Their site is not up-to-date, though]. These are the modern incarnations of those women who challenged society's machismo, very prevalent throughout history, like the mathematician and Countess of Lovelace, daughter of the British poet Lord Bryon, Augusta Ada Byron, after whom the programming language Ada was named, and the American wizard Grace Hopper, the first woman to get a PhD in Mathematics at Yale, and who was instrumental in the creation of the legendary COBOL programming language. Books seldom bother to highlight the fact that behind great science feats there were women. I'm just making this reflection on this "Father's day" weekend when I want to pay tribute to my late father, a winner against all odds...
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