We have about two months left of the year. Clearly it's too early to turn out the lights on 2007, but late enough to start getting reflective. What better occasion than Halloween to start teasing out which tech moments were tricks or treats.

Tricks:

- The starting price of the iPhone back at its June launch ($600), now dropped to $399.
- Microsoft Vista launched back in January. We waited five years for this? My XP is doing just fine.
- AT&T threatens to cancel any subscriber that disses them. (a little thin skinned perhaps?)
- Spam increases by 37% in 2007 according to Pew/Internet Research. Reports of the death of email premature.
- The new all-in-one Mac. It's sleek, it's light, it's too cool for school. Why not just get a laptop and then have the ability to fold up and go, too?
- Dell starts selling PCs off the shelf at Wal-Mart. This from the people who invented buying direct? I refuse to buy a computer from a guy in a blue vest with a happy face on the back.

Treats

- Microsoft Office 2007, also launched in January.
- Google's free web-based Office knockoffs: Docs, Spreadsheets & Slideshows.
- The Web takes it to the next level with Web 2.0. Very few people understand what Web 2.0 means, but most are enjoying it regardless. Blogs, social networking, endless youtube videos, RSS feeds and wikis. Woo Hoo!
- Mashups and open source. The natives are running the asylum leaving a trail of fun little aps for tools and play time.
- Fun rumors to distract me from getting anything done otherwise. My faves: Microsoft is buying Yahoo. Google will buy Facebook. Viacom will buy Facebook. Microsoft buys a little bitty piece of Facebook and finally shuts everyone up. Google is coming out with a google phone. The iPhone will flop. The iPhone will change life as we know it.
- The new Leopard upgrade to Mac OS X. Cool packaging, great new features for $129. Not bad. Mac-istas can afford it and Steve Jobs still gets a few new black turtle necks. Everyone's happy.
- Dell's IdeaStorm. It sounds like shameless, dopey PR window dressing. But, it's actually pushed Dell into doing some smart things this year. Namely, giving Dell customers the option to choose Linux, instead of Windows. Second, giving customers a choice to stick with XP and take a pass on Vista. Third, laying off the bloatware.
- One Laptop Per Child gains momentum and more importantly, goes into final beta.

First, Vista vs. Leopard

That didn't take long. The new Mac OS X (affectionately nicknamed Leopard) hit the shelves on Friday at 6pm. Engadget has put together a nice little infographic comparing features and tallying it up to see which comes out ahead. No surprises here. It's Leopard by a whisker (it's so not cool to admit Microsoft may actually have a better product. 90 something percent of us that use Windows and Office - well, we're just masochists I suppose).

I'd like to see XP thrown into that review.

Microsoft vs. Google

This round definitely goes to Microsoft. The 'softies just pulled off buying a major stake in Facebook to the tune of $240 million right out from under Google's nose. $240 mil, heck that probably came from loose change found in the break room sofa cushions at the Redmond campus. If nothing else comes of it, it was worth tweeking Google's nose for that.

It will be interesting to see what does come of it. What happens to Facebook? What happens to Google? Will it try to build up Orkut, it's social networking site that so far only plays in South America. It's hard to imagine Google sitting this one out - the social networking niche that is.

Stay tuned... more rounds to come.

My company has rolled out our web-based timesheet software to hundreds of large companies. Usually it is for the use of a department or two, or for one division. Later people start to understand their costs better via our technology, other departments want in on the action and they buy licenses too.

When these follow-on departments do their rollouts, it happens in one of two ways:

1. They start all over and do it the way they want it.
2. They have some central and more experienced group roll it out on behalf of the new department.

We've found that in many cases the 2nd way above works better. In fact I'd call this a best practice for rolling out successive phases of a large software installation. Have a central team do it so the learning can be captured and processes more easily repeated.

Curt Finch has some timesheet patents, runs a timesheet software company and wrote a book about project management.

Commscore has released it's quarterly ecommerce sales figures and Wow!

Online retail sales is up 23% across the board for the third quarter of this year versus last year. The breakdown of categories is even more interesting. Video game sales online is up 199% (thank you Sony Playstation 3 and Nintindo Wii). Consumer electronics, toys and hobbies and event tickets are all up more than 50%, as well..

Commscore says ecommerce is on a pace to surpass $200 billion this year. Wow! again.

Have a great weekend and we'll get back to business on Monday.

Meantime, Apple groupies enjoy your time in line this afternoon while waiting to buy your copy of Leopard OS X, which goes on sale at 6p this evening. The new Mac operating system retails for about $129.

Storm Worm has been the worm-du-jour since the end of the summer and by all accounts it's a bad one.

At first, the evil botnet was merely being used to spread spam. (which is bad enough). But now, Ars Technica (great site by the way) is reporting that its being used to launch denial of service attacks directly on those investigating it. In his keynote address at the New York INTEROP Conference this week, Josh Korman from IBM told attendees that Storm Worm is now launching retaliation attacks on any IP address that tries to delve into its servers.

This at the same time other security groups say the number of attacks are way down since the worst of it last month. Apparantly Microsoft's security patch that it posted back on September 11th covered most Windows users (and thus just about every computer user on the planet).

Reporting being what it is online, numbers of infected computers range from 15 million to, well uh, 20,000.

I would be remiss if I didn't say one more time, when you get funky email don't open the attachment or click on the links. Storm Worm's hook is a link in the email. Don't bite, unless you know what you're sinking your teeth into.

My company sells timesheet software. If I want to figure out which keywords I should be working my SEO magic on, one of the first questions is "How often do people use that search term?"

Google Trends offers an answer. Here is a graph of the keywords for "time tracking" vs. "timesheet" vs. "time sheet".

You can also figure out which of several companies are more often searched for, say Nike vs. Reebok vs. Converse (for shoes). If a company has more people searching for it, then it probably has more customers. Alexa is another great tool that act like AC Nielsen, except for websites instead of TV shows. All else being equal, more traffic to a company's site probably means more customers. This may influence your purchasing decisions.

Another tool I like alot is provided free by Yahoo. It provides related keyword suggestions. It's a bit slow usually, so be patient.

These tools can help you know where to aim your SEO efforts. Some SEO consultants will quickly make you strong on irrelevant keywords and claim victory.

For example, although we're very successful with architectural firms, I wouldn't want to spend alot of effort to do well on the term "architect timesheet" because nobody ever thinks to search for that term.

Have fun out there...

Curt runs a timesheet software company and has a new book out.

They say that death and taxes are inevitable, but I think you can add disaster scams to the list as well. When the news about the fires in Southern California broke it was only a matter of time before sewer-dwelling vermin would move in to attempt to inflict more misery. Floating on top of the sewage appeared an email titled “NEW: A second civilian dies in wildfires, U.S. Forest Service says”. Relatively benign, this one simply wanted to sell me Viagra and Cialis.

The results of a new survey on businesses adopting social networking is making the rounds in the techno-biz-o blogosphere (I just made that term up). I would love to join the breathless excitement and give you those results straight, but something makes me queasy about it.

Okay, I'll give you the results anyway.

Prospero Technologies conducted the survey and reports the following:

- 88% of businesses expect to increase social networking spending next year.

- 59% report their current social networking efforts are meeting or exceeding expectations.

- 35% reported a positive ROI.

- Most businesses reported direct sales was not their top criteria for determining success, rather it's the increase in site traffic.

Maybe it's a very helpful, realistic, insightful survey offering an accurate snapshot of social networking trends in the business world. Maybe.

But who would know.

First, the survey was put out by a company that sells social networking solutions to businesses. Conflict of interest perhaps? Bias in the development of the survey itself perhaps?

Second, 88% of what? Uh, well, the survey is based on the responses of 50, count 'em 50, businesses. Prospero explains it was a cross section of businesses including media, education, sports and gaming, health and financial services. No word on the size of those companies or locations.

Feeling skeptical yet? Me too.

First it was Wal-Mart, which led to Sam's. Now Dell has announced it will be selling desktops, laptops and printers through Staples starting November 11. Just in time for the holidays, of course.

Dell and the word "direct" have been joined at the hip for over 20 years. Dell was less about innovative PCs and more about the innovative way of buying them. Yes, Dell has always made good computers. But back in 1983, when Michael Dell started dinking with computer parts in his University of Texas dorm room (Dobie Towers. I was in the same freshman class and lived there, as well.), the big vision was a sales model. That model being selling direct: letting customers tailor their own specifications (how much RAM, how much memory, etc.) and order it straight from Dell. No middle man. No retailers.

When the Internet took off in the mid-nineties, so did Dell's business model. Selling direct online was a natural.

So what gives? HP has dethroned Dell in PC sales and Dell has blinked. Here's a sign of the times: check out www.delldirect.com.

No where on the page can you still find the word "direct".

Since time immortal (or at least since the 80's, maybe 70's), the software industry has operated on the EULA business model (End User License Agreement).

In other words, you buy the software off the shelf or download it off the Internet. When yoiu install it on your PC, you get that user agreement (and at this point in the process the most important requirement has already happened - you've ponied up the dough). If you accept, it installs. If you don't, it doesn't.

A seismic shift is happening in the software industry. More companies are chucking EULA or at least offering an alternative: subscription-based software.

The security applications are moving that way. Quicken now offers a subscription-based option, just to name a couple.

Enter Adobe. CEO Bruce Chizen was at the Web 2.0 Summit last week in San Francisco and let it slip that Adobe has a longterm plan to move all of its most popular applications online. We're talking Photoshop, folks, which retails for around a $1000. Chizen says eventually aps like Photoshop and Illustrator will be web-based and offered free with embedded ads or on a monthly subscription basis that includes tech support. Su-weet! This would make Photoshop affordable to a lot of small businesses currently at the mercy of fly-by-night graphics consultants who overcharge for a simple logo or business letterhead.

It means more people will have access to Photoshop, so more people will know how to use it.

It means more enterpreneurs and businesses can do their own desktop publishing in-house, have more control and do it on the cheap.

It means businesses can create their own graphics for their web sites and eliminate a very expensive line iterm on their invoice from the freelance web master.

Why it's too good to be true right now...

In the world of online advertising people get paid for each time someone clicks on an advertisement. If I can hack into the computer that is tallying the clicks on an advertisement I could artificially inflate the number of clicks on an advertisement I am getting paid per click on. Of course this is a bit tricky and risky. I would have to be able to hack into the computer, and I would have to provide a lot of different information that makes it look feasible that these clicks took place. If I just sit at my computer all day clicking on an ad the logs will show that all of the clicks came from one computer and I won’t get paid for all of those clicks.

Enter the bots. A bot can be programmed to simulate clicking on advertisements. The bot does not actually have to open Internet Explorer, Firefox, or any web browser. Some tips that click fraud is taking place can be computers from foreign countries “clicking” on things that don’t make sense. For example, if I sell auto insurance in Iowa I would not expect to see computers from Nigeria clicking on my ad.

Initially Google claimed that click fraud was not really a problem. In recent times Google has done a complete about face and decided it might really be serious business.

One has to wonder how these botnets have time for click fraud when they are so busy sending spam!

Randy Abrams is the Director of Technical Education for ESET LLC

In my last post I talked about botnets being used for distributed denial of service attacks. I mentioned that sometimes the botmasters are paid by other people for the use of their botnets. The last figure I saw was that a botmaster could get about $1 per bot per month. If I have a 25,000 bot botnet I may be able to get $25,000 per month in rental fees.

Spammers are probably the biggest customers of botmasters. If I want to send out 30 million spam emails it’s going to take me a while to do that on one or two computers. If I try to send that many spam emails my email address will be blacklisted and my computer will probably be blocked from accessing the internet. I may also get a visit from some members of the law enforcement community.

Enter the botnets. If I have a 25,000 bot network distributed across 30 countries it becomes much more difficult to track down the source of all of the spam. Blocking the 25,000 email address and blocking access to the internet for 25,000 computers is much more problematic. For the bad guys the risk of getting caught is significantly reduced as well.

Aside from the “normal” spam we all know and loathe, there is a lot of money in the “pump and dump” spam. Some spam pretends to be offering a great stock tip. The people behind these scams will buy up large quantities of an inexpensive stock, promote is heavily through spam, and then wait for gullible people to buy the stock. The stock doesn’t actually have to rise very much in value for these people to make a lot of money. The sale 500,000 shares of stock at a profit of 5 cents per share yields $25,000. With stolen brokerage accounts the investment is close to nothing – but that’s a different story.

Randy Abrams is the Director of Technical Education for ESET LLC

I don't want to put to fine a point on it, but Windows Vista is a dud.Customers have pushed back on PC sellers demanding to stick XP in their new computers. Sales of the new operating system are a disappointment. Even PC manufacturers are openly dissing it.

Microsoft, on the other hand, seems to have hit one over the back fence with Office 2007. Office 2007 was released the same day as Vista back in January of this year. Released to go hand-in-hand, both have gone their own way on completely different trajectories.

According to the NPD Group, Office 2007's sales figures for it's first six months are double that of Office 2003's first six months. Microsoft Office sales are up 60% the first six months of this year compared to last year. The Vista team at Microsoft would kill to switch places. Their figures run in the opposite direction. Vista sales for the first six months are down 59% compared to the first six months of XP, when it was released a few years ago.

Speaking of Office 2007...

Here's a Word 2007 tip from my buddy Pat. Make sure you go into tools and click on the option to convert your document into a 2003 Word document when you're done. Otherwise when you email it around to others that haven't made the upgrade, they won't be able to open it.

Another way: click on the F12 key. You'll see a "save as" window. Click on the drop down menu on the right side. The third choice down is Word 97-2003. Select this option and then save the document.

In discussing the uses of botnets I have talked about attack bots and spam bots so far. Another use for botnets is to store illegal contents on computers. For child pornographers it is much safer to store the illegal images on somebody else’s computer. A bot infected computer can be made to download illegal content and then serve as a location the content can be downloaded from. Unfortunately, in many cases law enforcement is not savvy enough to realize that the owner of the computer did not download the content and did not know it was there. There is a serious shortage of law enforcement officers with the technical skills and knowledge required to realize that malicious software can be a culprit. Innocent people have been wrongly convicted because of the lack of technical expertise throughout the entire legal system. Porn is not the only illegal content that can be stored on someone’s computer by using bots. Copyrighted materials, such as songs can be stored. Trade secrets can also be stored. Pretty much any computer file a person would not want to be caught in possession of is a candidate.

The use of botnets for storing illegal content is not believed to be nearly as significant as the use of botnets for spam and DDoS attacks though. The risk to innocent people when bots are used to store illegal content is significantly higher than it is for spam and attack bots.

Randy Abrams is the Director of Technical Education for ESET LLC

Two answers: a lot and not enough.

Every computing device that accesses the Internet has its own unique internet protocol (IP) address. To date, there are about 2.8 billion of them in existence. A new study put out by the Information Sciences Department at USC not only tallied them up, but sent out a 'ping" to each one to see if they are in use. This was not a sampling survey. USC actually sent out a ping to each and everyone of those 2.8 billion addresses. It took about two months.

What they found is only 7% were in use. You can read more about their findings and even, better yet, check out their mapping of Internet activity.

For the past twenty years, going back to the Internet's modest days when it was only known and used by government and academic types, IPv4 has been the standard internet protocol. IPv4 can only handle so many addresses and the ugly truth is it's running short. In fact, many in the industry expect IPv4 to run out of IP addresses by 2010.

Make way for IPv6, which has already been adopted by some. It's supposed to really hit big next year. Two pieces of new technology will help make that happen. Windows Vista and the new Mac OS X, coming out next week. Both operating systems support IPv6.

I don't know about the product itself, but no one stages or hypes a launch better than Apple.

The highly anticipated Mac OS X (sixth version, if you're counting) was originally supposed to come out months ago, but got sidetracked so Apple could redeploy it troops to fast track the rollout of the iPhone.

Mission accomplished, only I mean it.

But I digress. So the new Mac OS X (code name Leopard) will be available for sale starting on October 26th. 6pm to be precise (a time that worked well for the iPhone last summer).

With only days to go, we're learning more about all the new bells and whistles on Leopard. Steve Jobs claims "it's the best upgrade we've ever released."

Upgrades that intrigue me that might make a business owner on Windows think twice:

- Screen sharing with other Macs on the network. An easy way to access a co-workers desktop from your own.

- Easy to make widgets for your desktop. You can literally clip out any part of a web page, for example, and turn it into a desktop widget.

- Tabbed chats, so you can keep track of multiple on-going conversations.

- RSS feeds directly pushed into email.

- Quicklook: a way to peak at the contents of files without actually opening the application.

Can't argue with the price either: $129.

At the very least, it's a mystery. It all started last week on what is affectionately called "patch Tuesday". The first Tuesday of every month Microsoft releases its latest roundup of patches and updates. Nothing unusual there. However, last week, complaints came in from Windows users allover the world that their systems were self-updating and rebooting without permission.

At first, it appeared the problem was exclusive to Vista users. But now it appears XP users are having the same problem.

Microsoft says it has no idea why it's happening and is still looking into it.

Creepy Part #1: The idea that Windows is programmed to have the ability to overide the users set preferences..

Creepy Part #2: The idea that Microsoft is installing unsolicited software on a privately owned PC.

Creepy Part #3: Imagining what in the world would be the motivation for such a thing.

Spammers to the Slammer

Spammers are the bottom feeders of the Internet, a scourge of these modern times. So it is with great happiness I'd like to report that two notorious spammers got sentenced to five years in prison and ordered to cough up 1.3 million dollars of their illgotten gains.

The duo, James R. Schaffer of Paradise Alley, AZ and Jeffrey Killbride of Venice, CA, was found guilty on charges of money laundering, fraud, conspiracy and transportation of obscene materials. In English, what they did: they bought lots and lots of email lists and then sent millions and millions of unsolicited emails to all those addresses advertising porn sites. They got paid for every person that clicked on the links and visited those sites.

Score one for the feds. The justice department gets credit for bringing them down. Hopefully when they get out five years from now, we'll all have better spam blockers.

Microsoft says there are 450 million Excel users. I don't doubt it. It's a flexible easy to use readily available tool. It might be the best piece of software ever created from the perspective of productivity gained per hour of training.

But it's lame for some things, such as tracking time. First of all you have to have each person mail you a separate Excel document with his timesheet on it. They will figure out a way to change them and customize them for themselves. Excel makes it hard to govern this.

There is no approval mechanism or ability to prevent changes to an Excel document after it has been approved.

Since Excel is pervasive it feels 'free' but the manual overhead required to administer all this is not free. It's like an iceberg. The effort you don't see is causing a large problem, hidden under the surface.

Emailing of large spreadsheets clogs communications channels and necessitates backup space usage on servers and tapedrives. And there are data security risks. Spreadsheets are hard to protect. Password crackers for Excel are free on the net.

If you're running your business on Excel today, consider something cheaper, like a real timesheet system.

I won't tell you my age. But this posting will inevitably give it away. I came of age professionally in the 90's, hitting the emergence of the Internet just right. It was an exciting time to be in Corporate America. Communication, research, new ways to do business, new ways to have a life around business, new ways to network and all of it thanks to this new thing called the world wide web: the rocket ship taking us all to the moon.

Just a little over a decade later, people my age talk about those days like my parents used to talk about poodle skirts and The Ed Sullivan Show. I'm guessing to the average early 30-something (who has no idea that's actually a pop culture reference to a very popular TV show 20 years ago) or 20- something hearing about dial-up connections and Netscape 2.0 is about as quaint.

Web 2.0 is a very hot topic. It refers to the seismic shift in web technologies currently underway. It's widgets, social networking, mini web aps, mashups, wikis, blogs, the emerging mobile web and how all those things are making the web infinitely more dynamic and interactive.

Where there is a new technological wave a sociological one is soon to follow. I see it happening and creating a gap between the Gen 1.0 folks like me and the Gen 2.0 folks like,well, those a bit younger.

The Google phone rumors have been around for months.

This time it's Sun and Samsung. According to Engadget, that got the rumor from CNet, that got the rumor from The International Herald Tribune, that picked it up off AP, that got it from a South Korean newspaper that quoted Scott McNealy, President of Sun Microsystems... give me a second. I'm out of breath after all that.

The story goes the two companies are developing a "Java" phone that will offer more than the iPhone and cost less (taste great, less filling!).

Stay tuned...

One of the uses for botnets is to perform a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. Here’s how that works. A denial of service attack is an attack that is designed to prevent a computer or service from being used. If you have a lockout policy where after three bad logon attempts your computer can not be accessed for twenty minutes, then I could deny access to your computer (for twenty minutes) by intentionally attempting three bad logons.

A web server can only handle a limited amount of connections from other computers. If that limit is exceeded then it becomes difficult, if not impossible to connect to the web site. It’s virtually impossible to overwhelm a web site with one computer, however if you can control 5,000 computers then there are a lot of web sites that you could make inaccessible by focusing the 5,000 computer on the web server and sending it large amounts of data. This is called a distributed denial of service attack because the attack is distributed among many computers.

Why DDoS a web site? Money or revenge is the typical answer. If you run an online gambling service you require visitors to your web site to make money. Some botmasters (the people who control the botnets) will start a DDoS attack against such a site and then tell the owner that they will only stop the attack if they are paid $10,000 or $20,000 or whatever amount of money they think they can get.

Sometimes security sites are targeted to try to stop them from fighting spam and other illegal money making internet operations. Sometimes a botmaster will get paid to attack a website because their client is a competitor of the attacked site – corporate espionage. Occasionally revenge is the motivator for DDoS attacks as well.

Distributed denial of service attacks are just one of the uses of botnets. Next up will be spam bots.

Randy Abrams is the Director of Technical Education for ESET LLC

Intel launched a social networking site this week called Cool Software. Borrowing from the Digg concept of allowing visitors to rate the story (only in this case, it's software) and rank them according to popularity, this is a place to buzz about new software and web aps.

Apparantly, the site has been up and in use internally for Intel employees for a number of months. So, there's already a bit of content on the site even though it just went live for the public earlier this week.

Software recommendations are divided into several categories, including 'Enterprise'.

Cool!

There’s a good chance that you have heard about bots and botnets. Most people who have heard of them are not really sure what they are, other than another internet pest. Bots, short for “robot” actually began their lives as useful little tools that UNIX system administrators used to automate routine tasks. They did not start with Microsoft Windows! I’ll go into a simple description of modern bots and in future posts I’ll talk a bit more about them and how they are used.

Many of you probably have programs that automatically download stock quotes, sports scores, weather reports, or other useful information. The fundamental rule about useful things is that they can also be used for malevolent purposes.

A bot is a program that once installed on a computer automatically performs tasks. There are lots of good things a bot can do, but there are also a lot of bad things that can be done. If a bot is installed on your computer then your computer can be made to do almost anything. A modern bot will run silently in the background and wait for instructions or seek instructions from the internet. The bots may get instructions to send spam, copy illegal files, or attack other computers.

Just as a stock ticker program awaits instructions to display stock quotes at predetermined intervals, a bad bot awaits instructions to perform nefarious tasks. We call the computers infected with bots “drones” or “zombies”.

A botnet is a set of computers that are all running a bot that reports to the same command and control center. Just as soldiers in different armies report to different commanders, and there are lots of different armies, there are lots of different types of bots and botnets.

I’ll go into some of the uses of bots and botnets in my next post. For the time being, your best defenses against bots include anti-virus software, firewalls, and lots of discretion about what web sites you visit and what programs you install.

Randy Abrams is the Director of Technical Education for ESET LLC

Just returned from the PMI show in Atlanta. Traded a copy of my book for Clark's book, which I read on the plane and here's what I have to say about Clark Campbell and his book The One Page Project Manager:

Jimminy Crickets Virginia! Holy spreadsheets Batman! Clark, you are a complete genius. That's the best project management book I've ever read. Will you marry me?

Seriously, buy his book if you manage projects or generally find execution a challenge. It's awesome.

Also it was wonderful to find that only a couple of the 200 people who came to hear me speak got up and walked out (probably not in disgust - but who knows?)

The speech was "What's web2.0 and how does it affect you as a project manager".

It was fun - it needed to be since I had the last presentation of the whole conference.
Batting "cleanup" I suppose.

See you next year?

Curt runs Journyx

...as in your laptop battery that is now lifeless as a lugnut.

I dunno if this really works. I haven't tried this myself. But...

Apparantly, there is hope for the hopelessly dead laptop battery. Throw it in the freezer for about 12 to 14 hours and Voila! It lives again.

Here's a how-to video from Metacafe (in case the instructions "freeze the battery" need clarification). Actually, I did some noodling around some of the techie message boards, etc. and researched this one and there are a couple of warnings to heed if you try this.

First, make sure you let the battery warm back up to room temperature before you try it or you'll risk it exploding. (Good safety tip!)

Second, store it in a freezer bag to keep out moisture.

Lemme know. Personal testimonies are welcome on this blog.

As we all know, the dark side of technology is that information is now so easliy accessed there's just too much of it to deal with.

The biggest time eater has got to be email.

Here's a five minute piece of information that is worth your time. Check out this youtube video of Timothy Ferriss, author of the Four Hour Work Week, giving a talk on how to "get rid of information, instead of consume it".

The highlights: batch your emails - meaning check email twice a day and set up an automated response putting your contacts on notice. If they need you before either of those two set times, call instead. The other tip I really liked is a variation on the 80/20 rule. In the case of email, 20% of your contacts should make up 80% of the relevant part of your work.

As for Ferriss' book on the four hour work week (a sexy title that surely does not live up to it's promise unless it's specifically written for lottery winners and trust fund babies), I would give you a recommendation on it. But, I haven't had time to read it. My work week is substantially longer than four hours. I'm guessing Mr. Ferriss' is too!

I'm not one to talk stocks on this blog. Financial news is not my department anymore. But, I can't resist commenting on Google's ascent into the nosebleed section of Wall Street. Google closed at 609 bucks a share today. Yow!

I would just like to point out that is ten dollars more than the starting price of an iPhone when it launched just a few short months ago in June. The iPhone's price has since dropped to $300.

Is an iPhone worth $600 or even $300? Is one share of Google worth $609?

The one thing that is never in short supply in the tech industry: Hype!

Speaking of Google, for more than a year there have been rumors circulating of a possible Google phone. I believe it's a rumor that has legs. We'll see.

But this one.. I dunno folks. Engadget is reporting they have it on good authority from a Google legal counsel that the Big G (as in $609 bucks a share) has trademarked "Google PC".

Let me say this about that. If Google really is contemplating going into the PC business (they'd have to be truly nuts!), don't plan on that stock price staying above $600.

In a recent article at heise Security it was reported that several applications have vulnerabilities that can allow arbitrary programs to be run on your computer in some situations. Skype, Acrobat, FireFox and Miranda Instant Messenger have been found to be vulnerable. Skype and Firefox are known to have issued updates, but this doesn’t help if you don’t update. Most people now adays know that they need to keep their operating systems up-to-date, however there has been a major push by black hat hackers to exploit popular applications. Whenever you use a program, be it instant messaging, a music player, a picture editor, or anything else, ask yourself “when did I last check to see if there is an update?” If it has been more than a month or so it might be worth taking a look. In some cases, rather than a security fix, you might find that some really useful new features have been added.

It isn’t enough to keep the operating system patched, the applications need attention too.

Randy Abrams is the Director of Technical Education for ESET LLC

It's a debate that just never goes away. I have been convinced for years that Windows and Mac people are like dog and cat people. It's not about which is better or worse, it's a personality type and, perhaps, irrational loyality for folks on both sides.

I have to share this with you from the Apple Matters site, a Mac person's rare validation of Windows users (albeit backhanded).

Give "8 Reasons Windows Users Don't Switch" a read.

I would like to add a few more reasons to that list:

1. Years of accrued knowledge of Windows and Windows-based applications. Yes, I know you can get a Mac version of Office. But, why would you? Office is made for Windows. It's always going to run best on Windows. I've been using Microsoft Office for many years. It's what I'm comfortable with. If I were learning how to use an operating system and suite of office tools for the first time, I'll give the Mac faithful the benefit of the doubt that theirs is easier to learn. But, I'm past that. I've already learned Windows and Windows-based software applications.

2. I'm not unhappy with Windows. It has all the functionality and features I need. I'm not ignorant, as Steven Leigh, says. I'm just content and have no motivation to seek out something better.

3. Strength in numbers. What is it, 90, 95% of computer users are on Windows, not Macs. That's a lot of people putting pressure on Microsoft to get it right and when they don't, to fix it fast.

Now all that being said, I think the whole debate has long since grown ridiculous. The operating system is becoming less relevant everyday. Many would argue that the real operating system is increasingly the Internet itself. I think we're definitley heading in that direction. Software applications are increasingly web-based, along with data storage. If you're accessing your software and files from somewhere else, then what does it matter what system you use?

1. One single PC left on over night during the week and over the weekend creates an additional 920 pounds of CO2 a year. It would take 60 to 300 trees to absorb all of that.

2. It costs up to $15 a month per computer to keep them on after hours. Think about how many PC's you have running in your office and then do the math.

3. Now, add to that cost the extra cost and emissions from the air conditioning system that has to be cranked up after hours and over the weekend to keep all those computers cool.

4. Setting your PC on hibernate isn't good enough. In fact,an estimated one out of two American workers that use a PC on the job think that either their hibernation setting is on when it isn't or it's off and they don't care.

5,Would it kill ya?

(all stats and figures in this posting came from a recent survey, The PC Energy Report 2007, conducted by IE, a software company that develops solutions to automate power usage by computer equipment.)

Well I'm finishing up the final touches on my speech that I'm giving at PMI in Atlanta next week. It's entitled "Web2.0 and How it Affects You as a Project Manager".

As you can see I've written alot about Web2.0 here and I'm hoping that I can be interesting enough to be fun and educational for people at the show.

I have the last speech of the show. So I better not be boring because they'll all be tired and ready for happy hour. So I'm putting in lots of graphics and movies and stuff to try to spice it up. Luckily it's an interesting topic anyway and should be fun for all.

Wish me luck!

Curt is a CEO and wrote a book recently.

If you use Microsoft solutions for your small business (50 employees or less), this might be the ticket for you. Microsoft has launched a new database of IT consultants around the country who are certified as a Microsoft Certified Small Business Specialist. There are some 5000 consultants in the database, which you can search by zip code.

Small businesses are often poorly served by IT consultants. Either they're not qualified to do the job, don't have the right skill set (a web master isn't the person to hire to do your network security too!) or lack the committment or professionalism to complete the job as promised.

If your company uses Microsoft tools, this is probably a great resource and worthy of bookmarking.

Keep in mind, I said "if your company uses Microsoft tools". Part of the training required to get the Microsoft certification includes drinking the Microsoft Kool-aid. This is not the IT person who is going to steer your company towards open source technologies, for example.

If you are building your network from scratch, better to hunt around on your own for an IT consultant who is both qualified and technology- agnostic. There are lots of options available out there for small businesses. Not all of them bear the Microsoft name.

Well, it's in beta at least.

Google's web-based suite of office tools (docs, spreadsheets and, more recently, slideshows) has been jangling nerves in Redmond, WA (home of Microsoft) and given tech reporters like me fertile ground to til for months.

Google's office tools are web-based! And free! Microsoft Office is neither.

Well, it still isn't free. But, Microsoft took a big step over the weekend launching a sign-up site offering a web-based version of Office that will soon be available in beta.

For those signing up, the online version of Office is expected to launch in about a month or so. Once it does go live for beta testers and beyond, Microsoft says the service will be free for up to 1000 stored documents. Keep in mind, that's for storage: not the purchase of the software. No word on how pricing will work if you max out your documents.

Stay tuned...

Windows XP isn't going anywhere, anytime soon.

When Microsoft launched Windows Vista back in January, the original plan was to phase out the sale of Windows XP by January 2008.

Because Vista has laid such an egg with users, XP just got a stay of execution. Microsoft says it will now keep XP on the shelves until June of 2008.

Once more, the stripped down Windows XP (the starter edition) designed for cheap computers distributed in developing countries will now be available until 2010 (originally it was to be phased out in January, as well).

This says less about XP than it does about Vista, of course. Keep in mind, Microsoft rolls out a new generation of Windows every three years, roughly. With XP still on the market until June 2008, that means it will be sold alongside Vista for 18 months of it's three year tour of duty before the next generation of Windows comes along in 2010.

Me thinks Windows Vista is well on the way to joining the tech hall of infamy alongside Microsoft Bob, the Apple Newton and WebTV.