Anyway, in the business world it was the same deal with the water cooler.  If you didn’t want to install a new bottle of water, don’t be the one to empty the cooler!

Well someone finally solved that problem.  This new water cooler sucks water out of the air, runs it through ultraviolet light to purify it, chills it, and then serves it up!  Five gallons per day.  Who wouldda thunk it?

This is even better than Tammy Faye’s air-conditioned doghouse!

Disclaimer: I have no financial interest in the company and do not recommend that you purchase this item

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2008-03-15-space-shuttle_N.htm

Instead I’m looking at a popular interpretation of Revelation 13:16-17

“He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name.” – Rev. 13:16-17

A number of people have looked at the idea that people would need the “mark of the beast” to buy or sell and have decided that it looks a lot like a barcode with a unique ID on it, or more recently, an RFID chip (a chip that can be read remotely with a reader) implanted under the person’s skin. Imagine the day when you can’t use a credit card and photo ID because the implanted chip is more secure…

The California State Senate passed a bill making it illegal for an employer to require an employee to “get chipped” as they call it. Check out the LA Times article. You might think that this is ridiculous and couldn’t possibly happen – except that it has already. Reportedly , in early 2006, Citywatcher.com required its data center employees to be implanted for security reasons (an article on it) – they can keep their jobs if they don’t get chipped, but they can’t work in the data center.

Now not everyone agrees that the “mark of the beast” is about the future. Verse 18 says, “This calls for wisdom. If anyone has insight, let him calculate the number of the beast, for it is man’s number. His number is 666.” One creates a person’s “number” in Hebrew by putting together the numbers of the letters of his/her name. So it looks less like everyone being implanted with a unique number and more like everyone being marked with the same number, a number that the reader should be able to match up to a person.

Ragardless of whether “chipping” people is the “Mark of the Beast,” it’s creepy and I’m glad the California Legislature is acting on it. At least people shouldn’t have to be chipped.

Can anyone top that? I wear it proudly as a badge of honor.  (Sadly, I didn’t fake it.)

Eleanor and I always used to take cameras along on our vacations and when we came home, we’d find that we had forgotten to take any pictures. Lately, with growing children, we’re more deliberate about taking the pictures. We want to remember each stage our kids go through. Since we don’t print them all out, we enjoy them by showing random pictures as the desktop wallpaper on our computer.

That all sounds fine, right? I’m not sure it is. Sometimes I’m so busy taking pictures that I feel like I’m documenting the event rather than participating in it. That can happen at the church too. I want to be able to share the pictures with others so they can experience a moment, but can I do that without sacrificing my ability to live in the moment?

Scrapbooking and digital cameras have made taking pictures more popular than ever as far as I can tell. But what are we giving up in order to hang onto the moment?  I don’t want to be a spectator in my own life – especially as a dad!

The phone-bot was programmed with a sacrastic response to being found out as an automaton! It was a little bit creepy to be honest.

Look out… The robots will probably call you soon!

According to an article by The Register, Cingular is trying to patent smileys (you know, like this “:-)”). Though I saw my first smiley in 1987 or so, they’ve been around much longer than that.

I wish greedy corporations would stop trying to pull this kind of stuff. Whoever filed it probably got a patent application bonus too.

Anyway, use ‘em while you still can (without paying a licensing fee).

But in 1993, Jurassic Park was released, and the role of SGI’s computers in animating the dinosaurs made the company famous. In the meantime, we were building some excellent computer and finding new markets for them faster than we could grow the company. Then two very bad things happened.

1) One of the things that had made the company successful was that it hired only the best and brightest. When it looked like company financial growth might be limited by staffing, the company made a huge announcement that it would 1000 (maybe 20% of the current size of the company) new people in a matter of months. (I may have the numbers wrong here, but point is, they committed to massive hiring in a short time.) This led to a reduction in quality of the employees of SGI.

2) They bought supercomputer company Cray Research in 1996. Even though SGI was on track to take more and more business from Cray each year, they bought Cray. Cray had been around since 1972 and was headquartered in Eagan Minnesota (just outside Minneapolis). SGI was a cutting edge Silicon Valley company and Cray was a fairly slow-moving, process-burdened beast. Even though SGI bought Cray, Cray’s culture took over and killed the spirit of high-end server development at SGI.

So why am I telling you this? Because Google is reportedly about to buy a 5% stake in America Online AOL. As part of the deal, AOL will get preferential placement in Google listings and AOL’s logo will be displayed on the listings. This is counter to the way Google’s search engine has run in the past. Also, AOL is a big, 20-year-old company that has been part of Time-Warner since 2001. That’s a huge culture difference.

I remember the beginning of the end of the good times at Silicon Graphics, and it looks like Google might be heading that way. The management at SGI thought that they could do no wrong so they ruined a good thing. This Google move has that same feeling for me. Only time will tell whether that’s where Google is headed.

That all changed recently. As result of a desire to get the stock price up, HP’s board hired CEO Carly Fiorina nearly six years ago. And she changed everything. I believe the layoffs started before HP bought Compaq, the low-end computer company. But when they did buy Compaq, they had to get rid of thousands and thousands of employees over several years – for a merger that was a huge gamble, a gamble that eventually failed.

You can’t blame the whole thing on Fiorina. She gave the board of directors what most of them wanted at the time – something big. But at what cost?

From the Associated Press article on the subject by business writer Rachel Konrad (February 10, 2005):

But, observers say, HP lost more than expenses and thousands of employees during the process. Fiorina erased the employee-focused culture once known as the “HP way,” focused single-mindedly on quarterly profits, and alienated employees. That, business experts say, ultimately may be her lasting legacy.

“This was a company that was the essential model of innovation, a great model of leadership style. Everyone used this as a model for the integrity of the engineers,” said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, associate dean of the Yale School of Management. “No CEO uses HP as a model for anything now.”

Jesus said, “For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?” (Matthew 16:26 NRSV)

People who sell out to “gain the whole world” usually end up losing the world along with their soul. In Carly’s case, she got a 21 million dollar severance package so it might look like she won after all, but she lost her job… and she destroyed a wonderful company and her own legacy.

What would you do in her place?