Most cell phones now have the capability to take pictures, even shoot video. But, what if they had a tiny projector on board to beam it out on the nearest blank surface?

The New York Times had a feature story in its business section over the weekend predicting the near-future arrival of the microprojector that's getting a lot of buzz in the techno-blogosphere. I might as well buzz too.

The article, based on recent research from Insight Media, makes the bold claim that although no one is really selling microprojectors as of yet; sales will hit 30 million units by 2012.

Uh, folks, that's four years from now.

Insight Media calls them pico-projectors (I think I like microprojectors better. I hope someone thinks of a better name by 2012).

I'm not doubting this will come to market and eventually become popular. Business users will love it, enabling them to give private impromptu presentations to a clients over lunch (using a white table napkin perhaps as the screen). High school and middle school teachers will hate it when naughty teens use it to beam inappropriate videos at their white board during the middle of a lecture.

For cell phone users who check their email in the theater half way through "The Other Bolelyn Girl" or take a call in a really loud voice for everyone to hear in a two table radius at an otherwise quiet, intimate restaurant, be warned. When miniprojectors, pico-projectors, whatever you want to call them start getting bundled into mobile devices, people with that mentality are going to take obnoxious behavior to new depths.

Having trouble visualizing this. Check out Microvision's vision of the pico-projector.

There are over three billion cell phone accounts worldwide. Realizing some people have more than one account, some are lapsed and never got shut down; that's still that's creeping up on half the world's population.

With that in mind, guess what advertising channel is growing like gangbusters?

Yup! MediaPost just published a new study projecting mobile advertising worldwide to mushroom from $2.7 billion last year to $19.1 billion by 2012. Here in the United States, companies spent some $878 million in mobile ad campaigns last year. MediaPost is predicting that figure will jump to $19 million by 2012 (smaller numbers, but a more dramatic percentage in growth).

The vast majority of mobile ad campaigns are through text messaging. Search and display ads on the little screen are showing up, but until 3G phones hit critical mass text ads will remain king.

Advertising through text messaging is something for small to midsize businesses to consider. It's relatively cheap and gets a higher response rate (12%) than desktop ads on the Internet.

However, before you consider taking the plunge consider the following:

- Currently, 72% of worldwide consumers that respond to text ads are under the age of 35. If this isn't your customer base, you can click off right here.

- This is optimal for repeat customers, not generating new leads. Most text ad services prevent companies from spamming through text messaging (rightly so, I say!). Customers have to opt in for the messages. For a willing customer base, it's a great way to announce promotions, specials, coupons, new products and services.

- Make sure your customers understand they pay the freight on text messaging charges as structured in their mobile plan. If they don't have a flat rate plan, they may opt out the first time they get their next cell phone bill. For that reason, be conservative in the number of text ads you send out in a given period.

- Write the ads carefully. There's plenty of resources on the web to guide you in how to write a good text ad. Rule number one: keep it short and sweet. Two lines, tops!

- Offer something they can't get through other marketing channels in your business.

This is how ridiculous Microsoft products have become. I made the mistake of upgrading (I use the term loosely) my Internet Explorer browser recently. Boy, do I regret it. I can't get into my own domain host account to update my professional web site.

How ridiculous!

My browser gives me a pop up that it's a site without a security certificate and won't allow me access. No clicks to over ride it. I'm just out. This has happened to me on a few other sites. The pop up explains a site with a proper security certificate would have an url that starts with a https, rather than just http.

I can get into the front page of my hosting company's site (which only has a http), I just can't log into my account to update my web site. I'm currently using a blogging tool to write this post that only starts with "http" and, obviously, it's working. In other words, no consistency.

I still use Windows XP. But, I know I will soon be facing more obstacles at upgrading various applications better optimized for Vista. I refuse to go there.

Memo to Microsoft: your "fort knox" approach to computing and using the Internet is driving me straight into the arms of Firefox and buying a Mac.

I'm not alone.

We've all seen this address a thousand times; blank@donotreply.com.

Spammers, newsletter authors and companies who legitimately send out mass emails to customers and employees use this as a default return address all the time.

There's only one problem; donotreply.com is a real domain and everytime someone ignores the obvious directive their reply goes to a guy named Chet that owns donotreply.com.

Chet claims to be a humble programmer from Seattle who's been through hell over this.

His servers have imploded from the overload of responses. He's been threatened with lawsuits for obtaining sensitive, private information through e-mails sent to him erroneously. He points out he didn't ask for those e-mails. Companies and, even the government, beg to differ.

Chet's answer to the problem; capitalize on it. When Chet gets a sensitive e-mail, he rats out the contents on his blog and then charges the sender's author to pay to take it down.

I believe that's called blackmail.

Chet claims he donates the money to charity. I believe that's still called blackmail.

Chet's owned donotreply.com since 2000. He's had eight years to just let go of the domain and not re-register it.

Chet is a lot of things; victim is not one of them.

Tag this under "only on the Internet".

Notice I'm not linking to anything on this post. That's on purpose.

One of the great ironies of the technology age is that all of this "stuff" was supposed to make us so much more efficient and paper-free that time would free up and trees would get a chance to grow ancient again.

It's not happening; quite the opposite, in fact.

Years ago now, I conducted one of the last interviews with David Packard, Sr. co-founder of Hewlett-Packard and asked him about this. As a pioneer of Silicon Valley, I asked him how he felt about all this technology and yet we, as a culture, are busier, stressed and more pressured to produce than ever.

He just shrugged with a forlorn look and said he didn't feel responsible. He was an inventor and how people chose to use his innovations was beyond his control.

Stream of consciousness #2

My mother was a child during World War II and remembers rationing very well; gas, sugar, etc. She would be the first to tell you that although those were hard times, they were formative in a positive way. Rationing made everyone value what they had and use it as efficiently as possible.
Many have asked during this post 9/11-era why we haven't been called on as a country to ration our resources (namely energy consumption).

Maybe the answer to that question that I asked David Packard so many years ago is that technology has freed us up too much. Getting more done in less time, being accessible all the time and being able to access more tools and information has buried in us excesses that we continue to abuse like drunken sailors on shore leave.

Maybe it's time to sober up.

If you want to make you and your staff more efficient in both time and resources, here are some areas to start rationing right now. It's another way of setting up some boundaries.

1. Ration e-mail. It's one of the biggest time wasters in the office. We get too many, write them too long and threads are deadly to productivity. Rationing strategies: set hours, set a time limit spent on e-mail a day, set metrics-based goals to lower the amount of e-mail.

2. Ration utilities. Don't just look at the monthly bill and moan. How much is the office consuming. Set company-wide goals (again metrics-based) to lower it. Let it factor into bonus formulas.

3. Ration paper. Audit just how much paper the company is plowing through each month. Appoint a committee of employees to come up with a organization-wide strategy to print less. Set goals and reward the troops for meeting those goals.

4. Ration ink. Have that same committee do the same to conserve ink and toner consumption. (May I suggest calling them the "pen & ink" team or "green" team).

5. Ration daily network time per employee. Set work hours both in the office and during off-hours. In may sound contradictory, but doing extra work from home is here to stay. I won't suggest eliminating that piece. It's a losing battle and workers today, need the freedom to catch up from home to make up for stepping out during business hours for a soccer game or parent-teacher conference. However, like everything else, it needs limits. The 24/7 employee is not the dream employee. Eventually, they all burn out and get cranky and resentful.

For years the FCC has set the bar at 200K bps (as in bits per second). Ten, eleven years ago that was considered really fast considering most of us were transitioning from 56k dial-up modems (remember when we used to call it the "world wide wait"?).

That was then, this is now; and 200k is really not so fast anymore. Outside the United States, it would be considered downright pokey.

This week the FCC agreed to redefine broadband as 786k and up.

Other steps in the right direction included:

- a mapping plan to get a better breakdown of broadband availability across the country.
- Specifically breaking down broadband definitions into five speed tiers, the fastest being 6m bps.
- Pushing ISPs to be more transparent about their upload and download speeds. (What most broadband customers don't realize is they're downloading stuff much faster than they are sending it out.)

I said steps in the right direction, unfortunately they are baby steps.

While our government now says broadband ranges from 786k to 6m, many other countries are offering connections at 25m to 100m. And, for less money!

My question: why do we call it broadband, instead of speedband or fastband?

My other question: Why is Europe and the Pacific Rim always ahead of us on deploying the latest technologies, when we are typically the folks that invent them?

Hal 9000, the creepy supercomputer from the book and movie "2001: A Space Odyssey", was Arthur C. Clarke's most famous fictional character and most recognizable icon from his long body of work. But there was so much more to Clarke, who died this week at the age of 90 at his home in Sri Lanka.

Clarke had been the king of sci-fi for decades, but his greatest contributions were his often dead-on visions of the future and his humanity. It starts out slow, but the video of Clarke reflecting on his life last December on his 90th birthday is worth watching.

Clarke predicted satellite communications 25 years before it became reality. Getting back to 2001, which actually debuted in theaters back in the 60's, Hal was artificial intelligence capable of face and speech recognition; and also murder. (Thankfully, computers haven't come that far yet). But Hal is looking less and less like science fiction, isn't he?

Just as Jules Verne wrote of submarine adventures before such vessels were invented, Clarke's visions and fantastical yarns inspired generations of scientists to literally reach for the stars. Here on earth, we have benefited from the technology created in its wake.

I don't believe we credit visionaries like Clarke enough today. But, I'm happy to report they are all around us. Just look at how the Internet has changed our world in a little over a decade. Literally half of the world's population now has a cell phone. My first car had an eight track tape player that couldn't get through "Stairway to Heaven" without making that ka-chunk sound between tracks. Now iPods can hold up to 40,000 songs. This is more than innovation and savvy business (although it's that too). Every one of these examples began with a vision; an incredible burst of human imagination.

Clearly, we are still a world full of dreamers and we are all the better for it.

Watching Blackberry and iPhone duke it out is the new black. Windows vs. Mac is soooo five minutes ago.

Ding Ding! Here they are coming out of their corners again.

RIM will soon be launching the latest version of the Blackberry Pearl. Updates include more muscle in the camera (2 megapixels) and Wi-Fi, although in 802.11b or "g"; not "n". Check out the specs and a picture of it yourself here.

Meanwhile, it's not often that Apple product secrets see the light of the day. But apparantly an Apple store in Switzerland let the cat out of the bag that the iPhone will soon have 802.11n support from an updated version of Airport Express. I'd give you a link to the site, but the information has already been removed (quicker than you can punch in an international phone number from Cupertino, CA) and it wasn't in English anyway.

Here's more about it from Alice Hill's Real Tech News blog. She has pictures of the product cached before it was taken down.

The Fed has worked through JPMorgan to rescue the enormous, ancient and eminent Bear Stearns brokerage from bankruptcy by intervening in the marketplace to provide loans to finance a 2 dollar per share buyout (for a company that traded at $80/share three weeks ago.)

This is not good. It sets a horrible precedent.

Small brokerage firms just fail. They don't get this treatment. So you would be wise to keep your brokerage account with one of the largest firms for this reason. The risk to you as an investor is lower. This makes it hard for small brokerage companies to be created and to succeed. Things that hurt small businesses are bad because small businesses create most of the innovation and economic growth in the global economy.

The taxpayers get to absorb the risk of default on the loan. Haven't the taxpayers been abused enough yet?

It sends a message to the global community of panic. This will further weaken the dollar, the stock market and the financial system.

This is a very bad precedent.

Perhaps it's time to start buying stock out there. A quote widely attributed to banker Nathan Mayer Rothschild, 1st Baron Rothschild, reads: "Buy when there is blood in the streets."

Could now be that time?

Curt wrote All Your Money in 2007

As in petty, selfish and shamelessly exploitative.

Here's a prime example. A California couple, the Fiddlers (let's name names on this story) is hawking a three million year old set of mastodon bones on eBay. It's an almost complete specimen (the tusks are missing). The bidding starts at $115,000, plus shipping and handling of course.

Here's a link to the auction page.

The Fiddlers actually discovered the mastodon remains back in 1997 and to their credit, loaned it out for display to the Oakland Museum for a few years. That's exactly where a find like this belongs, in the care of trained curators and researchers that can properly preserve it, study it and display it for others.

Now, undoubtedly, some master of the universe will buy it and have it shipped to display in their back yard as a status symbol or to amuse their over-indulged children.

I'd like to take this opportunity to name the names of those involved in this irresponsible abuse of our prehistoric past:

Shame on the Fiddlers, for selling out.

Shame on SoldOnline of The North Bay, a online consignment shop that specializes in selling other people's stuff on eBay for a commission. The store is based in Petaluma, CA and they've published their store number on the auction page. Feel free to call them and tell them how you feel. Maybe, they'll come to their senses and change their mind.

I find it ironic that they actually have the nerve to talk about the popularity of the mastadon with kids while on display for the Oakland Museum, noting many school children walked away from the experience saying they wanted to grow up to be paleotologists or archaeologists. SoldOnline uses this as a selling point; completely missing the more important point that these moments will forever end once the mastodon ends up in private hands.

For those of you that read this blog on a regular basis, you know I am a great admirer of American ingenuity and entrepreneurship and a champion of small business (which more often displays a higher level of ethics than larger soul-less enterprises).

This is not an example of that. This is a perversion of that.

... to make life easier when go back to work on Monday.

1. Make a "to do" list of top priorities for Monday morning and leave them taped to your desk. Then you don't have to spend the whole weekend trying to remember or angst over it.

2. Button up last e-mails of the week. Create a "Monday" folder for the e-mails you want to deal with first then. Send out an e-mail to your colleagues giving them a deadline today for last minute e-mails and calls; after that all bets are off until Monday.

3. Set up next week's meetings today. Don't wait until Monday.

4. Look at next week's calendar and tweak your committments now, so they are manageable next week.

5. De-clutter your PC. Kill out as many e-mails, files, etc. off your computer. This should not be a quarterly event. Make it weekly. Today!

Have a good weekend. We'll get back to business on Monday.

- Renee Oricchio

The Standish Group's 2004 Chaos Research report provided the following statistics on IT project failures:

"71 percent of IT projects are either outright failures or are only partially successful: 18 percent are either cancelled outright or deliver no value to the business, while 53 percent of IT projects are late, over budget or only deliver a portion of the expected features and functionality. As a result, organizations are spending about $55 billion annually on cancelled projects and cost overruns."

This oft-quoted statistic sounds extraordinarily high to me. And in fact a Journyx survey reports a much more reasonable number.

This is a pretty disheartening statistic for companies who invest a great deal of money, time and staff energy into projects that the market is not rewarding them for. This problem is one that automated employee time collection software works to eradicate through effective project tracking. In 2003, a Journyx Timesheet customer survey found that only 12% of their customers' projects were unprofitable. Not only that, but the data provided by that solution allowed roughly half of them to recognize this and fix it in time.

71% failure rate versus 6% failure rate. Could it be that automated timesheet software customers are doing something right?

Being a professional journalist who blogs, as opposed to a professional blogger who attempts journalism; I tend to get on my high horse about the dangers of dubious stories in the blogosphere.

Here's an example bopping around the Internet right now.

The Consumerist (a great blog that I read all the time, by the way) is reporting this week that AT&T is quietly launching a $5 surcharge on customers in the Southeast that pay their bills by phone with a live representative. Apparantly, this new policy will go nationwide in May.

Is it true? Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe it would have been, but given the stink on the Internet maybe AT&T will back off and pretend it never had any plans to do so. Who knows?

My issue: the story is based on an anonymous AT&T employee (who calls himself "Vernon") that tipped off The Consumerist.

With one anonymous source (not substantiated by at least one more source - Journalism 101, folks), with no confirmation he (or she) is really an AT&T employee (confirmation of the source - more Journalism 101) and with no word from The Consumerist that they even attempted to get a response from AT&T (Get both sides - yet, more Journalism 101); The Consumerist posted the story on its face.

That standard of reporting is good enough for:

Technorati

Broadband Reports

And..

Howard Forums

As a consumer of news and information, is it good enough for you?

Kudos to Alice Hill's Real Tech News blog for marking the 10th anniversary of the mp3 player.

As Alice reminds us, the first mp3 player only held about 8 songs (or three if the songs were "Stairway to Heaven", "Freebird" and "Paradise by the Dashboard Light").

The iPod with 160 gigs holds 40,000 songs, by comparison. I think this blows Moore's law out of the water.

It's not just capacity that has changed, however. Portable digital handhelds that store music (and now video) have become a business tool.

There's the obvious; podcasting. It's a new way to get your message out, connect with colleagues and clients, and position yourself as a leading expert in your field.

As a user, it's a handy way to pick up mini-professional development lessons on the fly, while multi-tasking.

So, where is this all going?

The mp3 has already found its way into many cell phone models. An analyst I spoke with just last week predicted off the record that the iPhone and iPod will merge into one device as early as this year. She is not alone. I think everyone is expecting that.

What are the opportunities and creative applications of this technology once it hits critical mass bundled in with other handhelds?

We're all used to storing a bajillion numbers in our cell phones. What could we do with the capacity to store a bajillion media files. How would we use them or need them on the go?

Imagine being able to download virtual tours of all the houses in MLS by a certain criteria (price, location, size) and then storing them to flip through later?

Imagine giving a power point presentation and then offering your audience the chance to download the .ppt file of your slide show onto their smart phones and look through those screens again on their own time.

Imagine going to a conference to network and, along with passing around your business card, passing around a two minute video of your elevator pitch for potential clients to go back and ponder at a later date. Do it in video and there's a chance they'll be able to remember your name and face together for future reference.

Think of similar possibilities to promote your business at a trade show. Wouldn't a mini-media presentation be more memorable take away than a brochure for folks visiting your booth.

Believe me, you won't have to wait another ten years for any of this. For many, the power to do it now is literally in the palm of their hands.

The smaller the company, the less likely there's enough budget to hire a full or even part-time graphics person. Still all companies need someone to be the gatekeeper of all public-facing publications, be they paper, electronic or digital.

Here's what most companies do in the beginning.

They hire a freelance designer to put together a basic package of marketing materials; starting with a logo and letterhead incorporated throughout sales folders, brochures, business cards, etc.

At the same time, a web designer is hired to to put together the company web site and gets a package of jpegs from the first designer to keep the look consistent online and offline.

Good start!

But, only a start.

Here's where the wheels fall off; PowerPoint presentations, fliers announcing events, a print advertisement thrown together at the last minute, etc. etc.

Employees from various departments usually think to use the company logo, but they just take it off the web site and it's not as clean as the original jpeg. They know the company colors are orange and blue and they eyeball the shades while designing a flier that will be copied off 2,000 times to be handed out at a trade show.

After a few years of this, the freelance designers are long gone. Nobody remembers who had copies of all the original art work last. The look has been copied and slightly changed so many times, there are now several looks and no consistency.

Sound familiar?

You need a graphics police, in house! I used to help small organizations put together their web sites and marketing materials. I had a constant mantra then and will repeat it now,

Someone on staff needs to be the keeper of:

- All original artwork and graphics
- All the original colors used in the brand (as in exact RGB shade and HTML color)
- The printing company that filled the first order and others that have followed since (try to find one and stick with them).
- The company hosting the company site and vital account information like the username and password to get in and make changes.
- Someone in-house needs to be trained to make basic changes to the web site (change copy, insert a picture, etc.)

In addition to that, someone on staff (perhaps the same person) needs to be the graphics police. They need the power to sign off on every PowerPoint, flier, tradeshow handout, company banner, print ad, company branded promotional giveaway, even the signage on the company vehicles.

The graphics police have only a few laws to enforce, but they're important to the success of the company brand.

1. Keep the logo, look, feel and color palette consistent across all media platforms from print to digital.
2. Make sure every tasteful opportunity to brand the company name, logo and web address is done so at all times!
3. Double check and triple check every piece of copy that is used in all those materials to make sure the grammar and spelling is perfect. Nothing looks more unprofessional than bad grammar

...though I'm sure that I am guilty of it all the time on this blog.

Do as I say and not as I do.

Businesses that use Adwords live and die by their "quality score". Google has announced that starting this month they will be adding a new benchmark that determines the quality score of your ad; how fast does it load to its "landing page".

The slower the load, the lower the quality score. The lower the score, the higher the minimum bid.

Here's Google's read-thru on the policy.

If you want a little help analyzing and/or speeding up your load time, here's a nifty little tool
(that Google actually recommends, even though its offered on the Yahoo! Developer's site). It's called YSlow, a firefox extension.

Get ready for The White Album, uh White Download.

I can't help but think of the Tommy Lee Jones' line from "Men in Black". He and Will Smith are in this lab looking at all the futuristic tech and spy toys at MIB HQ and looking at a mini-disc. WIll Smith asks, "What does it mean?" Tommy Lee Jones sighs and says, "It's means I'll have to buy The White Album again.

Tommy Lee you may finally be able to download it off iTunes soon.

Reports of a possible deal between Sir Paul and Sir Steve are running rampant. The Beatles have not been on iTunes previously as a result of age old fall-out from a copyright battle over who owns the Apple as a company logo.

This time it sounds like the rumors of a deal may have legs, originating in The Guardian over the weekend (read that: reported by a real newspaper and not a blogger pretending to be a news outlet).

Stay tuned... our younger generation could use a big dose of "All you need is love", as opposed to all you have is rap.

I am a human mashup of two traits; I'm a data nerd and I love visuals.

The treemap was made for me.

In English, a treemap is a rectangular display of various items in relation to each other by a certain benchmark and determined by size.

Huh? Okay, just look at one and you'll see what I mean.

C/Net, for example, uses a treemap to visually show the stories that are getting the most traffic of the day.

Here's another really cool one from Juice with unique visitor stats last Fall supplied by ComScore.

This treemap shows which web sites dominated certain categories (like retail sites, portal sites, etc.) and the change up or down in unique visitors. You can get more information by rolling over with your mouse or clicking on a block to drill down further. I could play with it for hours.

Well, more like several minutes.

It's worth a look see and taking a few more minutes to ponder how this app could be used on your company web site.

This is serious stuff, considering each battery only has so much life and can only be replaced by mailing it in to the Apple mothership. (Insert pained expression here!)

I found this tip on iPhone Atlas, which has a treasure trove of useful tips and dirt on everything you could possibly want to know about the iPhone but were afraid to ask.

Apparantly, if your battery is draining faster than you think it should; it may be your e-mail settings. Everytime it checks for new e-mail, it dies a little more.

For example, iPhone Atlas points out that if you use Yahoo! e-mail; it may be set to "push e-mail" which notifies the user every time something new hits the inbox. Check out your advanced settings, if you think this applies to you.

For other email clients, play around with the settings and see how often it's supposed to check for new email and change it to longer intervals.

For other possibilities that could be curtailing your battery time and fixes therein, read the full write up on iPhone Atlas.

It's like a curse. What happened? Did the Vista team open the wrong Pharaoh's tomb and doom themselves to humiliation and disaster at every turn. They can't even get the long-awaited service pack right!

You may recall SP1 (one being an ironic number, considering the number of false starts to get it out to users) was released and then suspended back in February, after too many customers complained one of the included updates kept their PCs from rebooting. Back to the drawing board, as they say.

Now, it is March and the fully intact SP1 is due out in just a couple of weeks and guess what? It won't be fully intact.

It's fine, if you only need the English, German, Spanish, Japanese or French language packs (I admit, I'm covered). However, if you do business globally or you happen to be reading this from your home on the Baltic. Bad news: the other 31 language packs won't be ready until, uh, until...

Well, Mircrosoft isn't so sure. Best guess: sometime later this year.

Sometime later this year in the technnology world is sort of like "the check's in the mail" or "we'll always be friends".

The Vista team gently says SP1 will be coming out in two waves. If Tagalog is your first language, don't wait under water.

As the saying goes, with friends like these...

The other Steve that co-founded Apple offered a few choice criticisms about the latest products coming out of Cupertino to reporters in Australia.

Steve (as in Wozniak), originally was boosterish about the release of the iPhone. But has since changed his tune.

Among his criticisms of the iPhone and other Apple offerings:

- He thought it was unfair to early adopters to drop the price of the iPhone by $200 just ten weeks after its release.

- He thinks it was a cop out not to use 3G in the iPhones, not buying the excuse it would eat up too much battery life.

- He still carries an iPhone. But also uses a Motorola Razr for making calls and surfing the web.

- As for the new Macbook Air, he predicts it will be a bust. Too many critical features have been offloaded for the sake of lightness; like the DVD drive, ethernet ports, only 80 gigs on the hard drive and a battery that can't be swapped out.

Comparing the two Steves makes for an interesting contrast.

Look at Steve Wozniak today.

Steve Jobs, the person, has become almost as recognizable a brand as the Apple logo itself. He's thin, with carefully trimmed short graying hair in typical male pattern baldness, with carefully trimmed facial scruff and always seen wearing jeans and a black turtleneck. Somehow, he is forever youthful though an aging boomer; and forever the captain of cool.

By contrast, Wozniak is real people. He too, has the turtle neck (only its a slate gray). How shall I put it; he's a little on the rotund side. His hair, both on his head and face are as unruly as it was 30 years ago.

If Jobs is style, the Woz is substance. Jobs, the future. Woz, the past. Jobs, the guy who kept coming back to rescue Apple over the years. Woz, the guy who retired to the Santa Cruz Mountains to enjoy his kids and his millions back in the late 80's.

Here's a picture from the mid-70s, when the two Steves were just starting out making their first Apple. No turtlenecks, no sleek designs or marketing hype machines. Just two guys who loved tinkering in a garage together.

What a difference 33 years makes.

Can you write your own biography in 6 words or less? I worry about my wordiness.

It turns out 6 words can tell a story and in this article hundreds of 6 word biographies are described: Memoirs from plumbers and a dominatrix (“Fix a toilet, get paid crap”; “Woman Seeks Men—High Pain Threshold”). The editors have culled the best.

Every sentence in the article has 6 words in it. Brilliant.

It's a great read.

This was pointed out to me by my friend, Chad Washburn, at the Naples Botanical Gardens in Florida.

Microsoft Word's default margins are set at 1.25. That's pretty wide folks. Think how much paper you can save by simply resetting all the computers in your office to, say, .75?

You can do it yourself, of course. Just click on "File", then "Page Setup". You'll see the fields for margins. Makes your changes and click "okay".

One midsize organization stands to save reams and reams of paper each year by doing this one simple thing. Imagine if Microsoft changed their defaults at the factory.