There have been a few significant events in the past few days in the technology world.  Apple released the iPod Video.  Microsoft signed a deal with Yahoo to have interoperability of their Instant Messaging (IM) users and Google announced the Google Foundation.  With the Google Foundation, if the stock goes up, the Foundation gets more.  If the stock goes down, the Foundation gets less.  That's nice.  Its probably generosity just like a Bay Street stock trader would imagine it should be.

I am all for socially responsible companies but I do not agree with this.  First of all, it is not necessarily reasonable to expect the shareholders of Google to commit profit to a philanthropic arm.  Strictly speaking, profit is supposed to be divested between the owners of a company (its shareholders) and then those shareholders can donate as they wish (or as I would prefer it to be taxed on their personal profit and that money spent by the government of a liberal democracy).

The Bill & Melinda Gates foundation has assets of over $25 billion and is bankrolled by those two individuals.  Brin and Page of Google collectively have $11 billion.  As they are both under 35, I would estimate that they could live very comfortably (hey, go ahead and buy the Larry Ellison style boat) on say, $1 billion each.  So why not just donate $9 billion and kick off that foundation in style.  And maybe they could join other Americans in championing a reversal in the disturbing trend of a huge disparity between rich and poor.

Seriously Google.  Eye on the prize.  And Brin and Page (and other excessively wealthy Americans), please stand up for social democracy.  Let's not look to corporations to save us.

Small Island is one of the best books that I have read this year.  Get it.  Read it. 

Why is it so good?  It is profoundly written.  The author accurately portrays the perspective of four very different characters: Hortense, a young Jamaican woman who immigrates to England, Gilbert, a young Jamaican man who joins the RAF during WWII to serve in England, an English man, Bernard who serves in India during the war and Queenie, Bernard's wife, who takes in Gilbert and Hortense as boarders.

The novel is not simply about Gilbert and Hortense immigrating to England, the first wave of Jamaicans who would come to transform cities like London, but rather describes in intimate detail how WWII changed so many lives.  Thousands upon thousands of men and women became mobile because of the war or because of changes that occurred shortly after.  The world that emerged after WWII would change England and many other countries forever.  Small Island describes that world on the verge of its transformation into becoming a place in which people who grew up thousands of miles apart on the planet could suddenly impact each others lives, as the characters in this novel do.

Small World is also a great novel because the author accurately describes the immigrants' experience in a new country.  Gilbert and Hortense had spent their entire childhood being schooled in the greatness of the British empire only to arrive in its capital and find the reality of an Empire that was crumbling and fast retreating.
While Hortense and Gilbert were experts in British history, culture and literature, most Britons could not even locate Jamaica on a map.  If you have never had this experience of being an outsider, Small Island will give you a great sense of that reality for many people in Canada, particularly Toronto.

Small Island.  Get it.  Read it.  

if you like this book.

I am all for guilty pleasures and this book was the perfect gift for me to read while waiting in airports but its depedancy on paragraph after paragraph of descriptive text was poor writing.

Also, university professors are not like that.  And university classes are not like that.  You don't get to sit in the class and answer back while your professor asks clever questions to get that 'Ah ha moment'.  You sit, you take notes, you chase after them at the end of class, if you have a question.

I think we can all agree that the Sun – Google (Sungle) annoucement was a bust.  It was basically Sun reminding everyone that Sun is still the hip, cool, open-source, ‘we hate microsoft’ company it always was.  I think they just want to say, ‘See, we really are cool.  The Google guys will hang out with us’.  Sun has long been at the forefront of anti-Microsoft initatives.  Once upon a time a Sun workstation running Unix was considered the ‘real man’s Operating System’.  Then along came Linus Torvald to take Sun’s glory.

I am encouraged to see Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems discuss the end of the PC era and the beginning of the network era.  He certainly seems to be trying to get the expression, « The Netwok is the PC » to catch on in a McLuhan-esque way.  I agree that the era of the PC is over.  Laptop computers which seem to get cheaper every time my Futureshop flyer gets delivered are basically closed systems for 90% of users.  So how soon before I buy my computer from my Internet Service Provider ?

 Google is spending too much time doing these photo ops and re-assuring everyone that it will take on Microsoft.  My message to Google: Forget about Microsoft.  The era of the PC is over, and with it the era of Microsoft. 

 Google must focus on developing a next generation Operating System, a lean, thin OS that can be downloaded and installed via a high speed Internet connection.  Service Packs, OS upgrade cycles tied to hardware, Anti-virus patches… forget it.  I come home, I turn on my Box, it queries a central server run by my ISP, and dowloads the latest OS.  It works.  Oh and at the same time, it downloads a bunch of advertising and video programs.  After I view photos a friend posted on her blog, read the news headlines, I watch the latest episode of my favourite show.

 Microsoft who ?  Microsoft does not even factor into that picture.  Microsoft has built its empire on factory installed software and with extensive distribution agreements (read Dell) it took the Operating System market.  But as an organization Microsoft is entirely incapable of writing a thin client OS as I have described.  Google is entirely capable of it.  But not if they focus on beating Microsoft at their current game (PCs and laptops).  Please Google, look to the future of technology integration in the home and office.  Do not make the same mistake as Marc Andreessen and spend so much time talking about killing Microsoft, believing your own hype and spending your millions that you give Microsoft just enough time to figure out how it screwed up, fix that and develop a winning strategy.

Today is BlogACatMas and by tradition, we engage the bloggiest topic of all, pictures of cats.

In honour of BlogACatMas, I post this picture and a  BlogACatMas Tale: Lucky Day for a Chicken.



I was in Istanbul Turkey.  I passed the woman in the red vest who was walking her chicken.  I guess the chicken needs to stretch its legs once in while.  She regularly walked the chicken. 

The cat on the left hand side thought it had hit the cat jackpot.  It was slowly but surely easing itsself forward until the woman moved far enough away from the chicken and the cat could pounce.

I stopped to take a picture.  The woman noticed me taking a picture and she realized what I was taking a picture of.  She quickly pulled her chicken to safety.

The chicken lived to see another day of laying eggs and going for a stroll.  The cat kept on keeping on, the way cats do.

And he made it by hand, with things he grew in his garden and firewood he recovered on beaches.  Seriously.