Alex Dunne

You know inflation is skyrocketing in your country when you have to introduce the $100 Billion banknote.  The poor residents of Zimbabwe (despite most of the country being billionaires, they are indeed dirt poor) such astronomical inflation that they literally bring wheelbarrows full of cash to market to purchase basic groceries.  In fact, the new $100 billion note only gets you some fruit.  Rather than address the root causes of its inflation, the government of Zimbabwe responds by issuing more currency, and at higher and higher denominations.   I’m assuming that their government is readying the trillion dollar note, and eventually the Googol dollar note.

But hey, the new bill at least gets Earth off the hook easily with Dr. Evil, no?

An article in yesterday’s New York Times about the Chinese quest for gold at the Beijing Olympics game was a great read. The country’s drive to dominate the medal count at the ‘08 games will probably succeed, just like some other massive, nationwide efforts that the country has undertaken. The 119 project is the sports equivalent of the Three-Gorges Dam. To wit:

China has spent millions — perhaps billions — on personnel and infrastructure to accelerate growth in medal-rich sports in which it has had little success.

Americans (and probably other countries who fear that the Chinese will end up at, or near, the top of the medal count in August) will criticize the Chinese effort from various angles. Some will call the Chinese athletes automatons without spirit, slaves to the system, not “true” athletes for whatever reason, and so on. Some are already leveling charges that the Chinese are doping:

Mike Teti, the coach of the United States men’s rowing team, said, “We know they are cheating, but there’s nothing we can do about it.”

That is a very bold statement. Wow. What does Teti know that the rest of the world doesn’t, and why doesn’t he come forward with details to back up that allegation? If he has some evidence of cheating by the Chinese, he should present it. Otherwise, he is only looks combatitive and defensive - like’s he’s preemptively building a case to explain U.S. losses to the Chinese teams in Beijing.  (For the record, I think the Chinese will do well in the sculling events, but not as well in sweep events.)

Whatever happens at this point, you can bet that the Chinese are not going to welcome Teti, nor the American rowing contingent, very warmly.

An article in the WSJ yesterday discusses the effects of high gasoline prices on microeconomics - individual behavioral decisions. It’s something everyone with an automobile considers - when should I opt out of using my car for everyday driving? The Journal noted that at $4/gallon, people are already scaling back demand.

Consumers have already taken note, with U.S. gasoline demand down 0.6% this year compared with the same period in 2007, according to the Department of Energy.

The erosion in demand is likely to accelerate if gasoline prices shoot above $6, but a radical cutback in consumption will occur only if high prices weaken the U.S. economy further and contribute to increased unemployment.

So, what happens when gas hits $6/gallon? (IMO, we’re just a couple of years from that price.)  I think at that price, telecommuting and teleconferencing will hit hockeystick growth.  At a corporate level, businesses will probably be more selective when it comes to corporate travel, and will hopefully encourage virtual meetings and teleconferencing. I wonder if they’ll allow their employees more more latitude in telecommuting, too.

I don’t see why not - the technology is here today. For example, yesterday while up here in Tahoe, I took part in a three-way conference call between co-workers in San Francisco and a partner in Oregon. From my perspective, there was no drawback to being here in the mountains, nor for our partner to be in Oregon. All of us used Adobe Connect for screen sharing. It’s a no-brainer to use this technology, and in some ways, it’s faster to set up a screen sharing session between remote meeting participants than to gather a bunch of people in the same office into a meeting room and get a projector set up.

Our company recently moved from Lotus Notes over to Outlook 2007. While Outlook is better than Notes 5 (my God, Notes 5 came out in 1999, what took the company so long?), there are a number of things that stink about Outlook 2007. First and foremost is that it hangs when checking mail on the Exchange Server. I use a dual-core Lenovo T60 — a fast machine. But when Outlook polls the server, it hangs my computer for anywhere from seconds to minutes. I’m looking into what could be causing this lag, but according to Computerworld, I’m not the only one frustrated by Outlook’s performance. I uninstalled Xobni (which, despite my initial enthusiasm, turned out to be not much more than Outlook eye candy), but the problems persist. I don’t have Instant Search enabled in Outlook, so the hanging isn’t being caused by Outlook indexing my email. It’s just slow to check and syncronize with the server. Interestingly the lightweight Outlook web client I use (under Firefox) is snappy. But I shouldn’t be forced to use a web client from my desk at work. I long for Thunderbird, or even Microsoft without Exchange - that worked fine.

On a sidenote, I recently discovered how to fix something that has been bugging me for about a month in Outlook 2007: the prompt at the top of my inbox that asks me to install Instant Search. It got so irritating that I finally gave in and installed it, only to uninstall it about a day later. (Google Desktop search is so much better.) But then Outlook continued to prompt me to install Instant Search again.

Here’s how to remove that annoying prompt.

In Outlook 2007, go to Tools>Options, and click on the “Other” tab. Under “General”, click on the “Advanced Options” button. On the subsequent pop-up window, about halfway down, there’s a checkbox that says “Show prompts to enable instant search”. Uncheck it.

Whew, doesn’t that feel better?

Tomorrow I’m off to Las Vegas for Interop - the biggest show we produce all year. We’re expecting about 20,000 people at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center, and about 500 exhibitors. I’ll be managing the show photography and posting the best pics to the Interop photo gallery, encoding and posting the keyote videos, managing the “digital signage” (two plasmas running ads and content updates at the entrance to the expo hall), updating the event homepage with new content, and doing some other stuff as needed.

We have a bunch of people already on the ground at the show, and they’ve set up some cams streaming live video. Some cams are fixed, but others you can pan, tilt and zoom yourself, from your browser - it’s almost like being there. (They’ll be pulled down on Thursday.)

Also looking forward to celebrating Marco’s 40th birthday with some friends (Farino, Kuhns, Noble) who are flying down on Thursday night.

I was working over at the Web 2.0 Expo yesterday, and one of the guys I work with at Techweb, Fritz Nelson, came into the show office with an awesome balloon logo for the event. He said that the guy who does balloon animals for kids over at the Chevy’s restaurant on 3rd & Howard was bugging him to make an animal (not sure why, he was with a group of adults), and after initially blowing him off, Fritz thought better of it and commissioned the guy to make this:

Pretty cool. Fritz said he’s going to use it somehow in his video coverage of Web 2.0 Expo on Techweb.com.

Instant messaging has come a long way in the 10 years or so I’ve been using it. At first you were locked into a single messaging network, like AOL or Yahoo. Then IM clients like Trillian came along that bridged those networks, letting you message between networks. But there’s always been a lag between when a new messaging network comes out, and when the messaging clients would implement support. For instance, Trillian still doesn’t support Google Talk, which a couple of people at my company use (notably my CIO, and it’s important to be available to him). About a month ago I discovered Digsby, which is a new IM client which not only supports Yahoo, AIM, MSN, and Google Talk (big plus right there), it also integrates with Facebook and even a POP email account. If you use Facebook and have friends/colleagues on multiple IM systems, I highly recommend it.

I was reading an article in Web Worker Daily today about email inbox management, and the author says she absolutely has to keep her inbox empty. She reads, then archives or deletes every email as it comes in. Her goal is to touch an email once, and only once. This seems like utter paranoia, or at least some form of OCD. I’m all for personal organization when it matters, but when you have a searchable inbox, why does it matter? It would take me far more time to root around dozens (or more) of subfolders to find an email, than to just type in a search term to Google Desktop to pull up the email instantly. It’s why God invented search engines.