But as the article points out, Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who wouldn't even comment on the BusinessWeek story, may not be that anxious to get the grey flannel business. Why? Because a corporate sales strategy would require both an expensive sales & support staff and a willingness to modify Mac product designs to suit the conflicting demands of corporate buyers. Apple is doing just fine without these hassles, making high margins catering to students and artists who will pay extra for the Apple cool. Budget-conscious CIOs may not be as accommodating.

If you were Steve Jobs, what would YOU do?

If you buy the journalists' story—and I can't see why one wouldn't—this was indeed WWI, and we are woefully unprepared, and in fact uninterested in being prepared on an appropriate scale, for what will doubtless be a Dark Black Swan in our collective futures, tomorrow at dawn or a decade from now. The results of said failure to prepare on an appropriate (BIG!) scale could be calamitous.

Sad to say, the lack of attentiveness to the cyberassault problem, like the ineffectualness of many of our anti-terrorist measures, heats up the "survivalist" in me—which ain't so pretty.

I do love that. Thanks, Googlers one and all.

Headline, right column, page 1, Wall Street Journal, 27 November 2006: "Seeking an Edge, Big Investors Turn to Network of Informants. Mark Gerson Assembles Web of Moonlighting Managers."

I suppose in the old days (pre-1995, say) investors or investors' reps could have hung out at bars near plants to ask hair-down workers or even bosses what was going on inside. In fact, there's no doubt they did just that. So "this" is not new—but as usual these days, "Internet Scale" dwarfs all that came before.

In this case it's Mark Gerson, "a networking wizard who has done for professional investors something akin to what Match.com has done for the nation's singles. He hooks up current and former middle managers from hundreds of companies with professional investors desperate for an investing edge." (The Journal reports that Mr G's network includes 180,000 members!)

Needless to say, some employers are duly concerned ... but this is one more genie out of one more bottle that, no matter how intense immediate pushback, is not going to be re-stuffed into said bottle.

Yes, this sort of thing is becoming commonplace. Still, every time I read a story like this, and see yet another barrier to transparency fall, I am both amused and amazed.

Welcome to Web 2.0.
Or Web 3.0.
Or Web 9.83.
What fun it all is!

(NB: Speaking of "transparency," I felt its bite a few days ago. I wrote an email that, I grudgingly admit, contained a "little white lie." Before pushing the send button, I realized that my likely Blog postings would give me away. Fortunately, the hovering finger was withdrawn in time. Yet another "lesson learned, circa 2006.")

When you are sitting on the can with a computer on your lap, attached to All Known Things (the Internet), and reading the Wall Street Journal online at 3 a.m.—and the subject is new cell phones dedicated purely to Skype ... which can cut one's (my!) mega-int'l phone bill upwards of 95%. New product idea, guys division: airport & restaurant urinals with embedded wi-fi/email capability.

(NB: Speaking of urinals, Urinetown may be the funniest-saddest-best play I've seen in a long time. Incidentally, I/we saw it at the Weston Playhouse in Weston, VT—one of those handful of amazing regional theaters where the quality of productions literally equals Broadway's.) (NB: Speaking of TechTime, our new puppy has an implanted chip.)

Speaking again of TechWorld, on a flight from San Francisco, I ran into my pal Kevin Kelly, tech uber-guru and founding Wired editor and, far more important, incredibly good guy. It's nice to see someone who's not as young as he used to be still waaaay ahead of most everybody in what's been declared (by me, among others) a "young man's/woman's game." Kevin is also "one of those people" with whom, even though you haven't seen 'em in 10 years, you take up the last conversation you had with them mid-sentence from where you left off.

"As long as there were no roads, you had to interrupt a journey at nightfall. Then, you had all the leisure in the world to recite psalms at the inn, to open a book and to have a good talk with one another. But nowadays you can ride on these roads day and night and there is no peace anymore."

In our age of 24 hour connectivity, the road really never closes. (As I write this at 12:15 A.M. in San Francisco.) Does it interrupt peace of mind? What would Mendel say today?

A+ in Usability. Motley Fool. I wanted to dig pretty deep, and as is often the case (and fair, as I see it) I had to register to make an archival search. The registration and confirmation process took les than 30 seconds—and I'm a very slow typist. Kudos!

Re PowerPoint discussion of a couple of days ago, fonts.com is very cool.

Web = Ubiquitous = Duh.

The entire way home I heard about poor play from the Bears' cornerback, missed calls by inept refs, and the unfortunate interception near the end of the game. And then he told me the worst part: "Now the Bears are going to be rated low in Madden 2007." "Why does that matter so much?" I asked. "Now when I want to be the Bears they won't win very often."

Then people dropped their hands from their headsets, assuming you'd know they were on the phone because of the cord dangling from their ear. After a while, the introduction of the bluetooth headset took away that cord, but by then nobody was self-conscious anymore, and it became commonplace to see people walking through airline terminals talking without shame to an unseen companion.

But now, at least for men, social norms have relaxed to a new level. Many times in the past year I've walked into an airport men's room and seen a lone man standing at a bank of urinals, actively engaged in a hands-free conversation with someone hundreds of miles away, presumably with a hidden bluetooth headset in his ear. These people inevitably speak in extra loud voices, as people speaking on cell phones in public often do. So, it's hard not to hear about the latest deal they're trying to close, or the new investment idea they're discussing.

I guess the call of the greenback makes it difficult to wait two minutes to make the call. After all, cash is king. But, I personally refuse to take part in this latest cultural development. And, I'll hang up on anyone who calls me if I hear the sounds of the airport bathroom in the background.

There's not a damn thing I can do, as far as I know, but it did send literal chills up & down my back ...

But as Jesse Sullivan says, "The Wright brothers' first flight didn't go that far, either." Jesse is one of Todd's research patients. He was a lineman who lost both arms at the shoulders when he touched a 7200 volt power line. The guy is an inspiration. Very funny. He's from Tennessee, and when Dr. Kuiken mentioned that one of his other research subjects was from the same state, Jesse replied, "I guess we're just accident prone there." More about Jesse and his work with Dr. Kuiken is here.

In a section of the conference called "Big Fixes" Cameron Sinclair, a Scottish architect spoke about Architecture for Humanity, a non-profit organization he founded that promotes architecture and design solutions to humanitarian crises around the world. Powerful speaker, and unlike a number of the speakers before him, he had really good slides. But we don't have access to them. One thing I'm going to suggest is that speakers' slides be made available to the audience. (Hey! That's what we do here at tp.com, right?) The current project he spoke about is the Siyathemba Soccer Club project.

The challenge is to create the "perfect pitch," a soccer field/outreach center for the youth of Somkhele, South Africa, who are three times more likely to become HIV positive than youth in other parts of the world. The field will be home to the area's first girls' football league.

Talk about passion. The way this guy talks about the projects they're doing around the world makes you want to drop everything you're doing to volunteer to work on one of these life-saving projects.

Hey, why not an implant at birth?

This evening, the conversation turned to the avalanche of emails people face every day at their jobs. She said, "Just because we can connect, should we? I hear people on their cell phones ask, 'What did you do today? Nothing? Ok, I'll call you later.' Are we just afraid that if we're alone we might have to think? If we have a bad thought, are we afraid we can't face it? Or are we afraid we'll have no thought?"

I just attended a WIT (Women in Technology) event where my friend, David Nour (www.nourgroup.com) spoke about his trademark concept, Relationship Economics. He told a story about introducing two colleagues to each other. One, a lawyer who'd been with a large firm for five years, had never met his colleague who'd worked at the same firm for nearly 10 years, until David introduced them to each other! (Obviously a very large firm.) But, think about it ... how much knowledge is wasted, talent goes unrecognized, best practices aren't shared in an environment where colleagues don't spend enough time out of their 5'x5' spaces to connect with their own peers. Then suddenly I’m struck by the irony ... I'm at an event whose target audience is people in the technology sector ... listening to how communication between individuals is broken. People don’t know how to establish, nurture, and leverage relationships. So, I ask you ... with so much "connectivity" how can we not be connected?

Friedman points out that our technological infrastructure is actually falling behind the rest of the world—in addition to frustrating cell phone coverage, our broadband connectivity has fallen to 16th in the world. As he points out in his book, The World is Flat, the advantages we've grown up enjoying in the U.S. are evaporating, and these technological deficiencies will have a direct result on our wealth and productivity.

Ask he asks in the article, do we depend on private companies to provide better connectivity for us, or is it not in their interest to make access easier and more ubiquitous?

A month ago I opened my laptop in a coffee shop in a 150 year old building in Jerusalem and was immediately connected to the Internet, for free, because the center of town has been set up for wireless access. The only place that has happened to me in the U.S. is the Roanoke Airport—not exactly the center of our universe.

Listening the to BBC's Radio 4 last week, I heard an animated conversation led by Dylan Jones, Editor of GQ magazine, who has recently published a book called iPod, Therefore I Am.

What interested me about the conversation was not the standard debate about the disruption that Apple has created in the music industry's business logic, it was the impact that this (apparently miraculous!) product has had on the lives of some people.

I say some people, because I am in the category of human being that has yet to succumb to the lure of the iPod ...! Jones contends that the iPod has transformed his relationship with music and the role that it plays in his life. Others in the studio enthusiastically agreed, which led me to wonder just how long I can continue to live life without one!

Are you an iPod enthusiast? What makes it special for you, and how has it affected your habits?

Or are you more like me? Wondering what the heck is so special about this little gadget? Surely it's just a modern day Walkman, isn't it?

What a bunch of bozos! (Lutz excepted—see above.)