The Cleansing Fire: There is a natural phenomenon where an old growth forest gets hits with a fire and it is destroyed. A few months later God starts all over and new growth begins and the forest is usually healthier than it was the year before. No one really wants the fire, they even try to put it out when it is happening, but months later every says that it is great to see the new forest.

My laptop has just had that cleansing fire. I had it loaded up with everything under the sun and then it crashed last week. The solution from my service folks was to replace the hard drive and now everything is running wonderfully, albeit without anything that I had before. Part of the new way that I will operate is to do as much on the net as possible. I am no longer using my beloved Outlook, but instead use Gmail (with my domain) for my e-mail. I have my spreadsheets and documents being stored in Google apps. I planned a trip today using Mapquest instead of my favorite MapPoint. I didn't like this much and will probably reload MapPoint again on Monday though.

It isn't really fun to lose everything, but it is so fun to start over!

Growing up on the Web: The web is really an amazing thing. I have raised 4 kids so far who have never known life without the web. I got it when it was first available in our area 11-12 years ago and still have that same e-mail address. So cool! As I have watched it develop I am constantly amazed at what people are doing with it. It is used for 95% of our communication (just a little with cellular, even less with postal). A ton of our entertainment is derived from the web. Recently my kids put up their first YouTube video, it was so exciting. The next morning they all got up to see that 10 people had seen it (as I write it is 50). They have had a comment and a couple of links to some folks at MySpace. So now they are hard at work on their next mini film.

I just uploaded my latest photograph, and thought about how cool that is. I shoot a picture, hook up my camera to my computer and a few minutes later it is there for the world to see. I did a picture a week or two back that my wife made me take down, but my dad saw it (and loved it). Then I got behind and put up a couple of days back to back, but in the 5-10 minutes it took me to put together the second picture someone had already seen the first and commented on how much they liked it. That was so amazing! A couple of weeks ago I was bloggin while driving home (kids, don't try that at home!) and when I got home Mary greeted me with "Nice post!" Wow, I published the blog when I was exciting the Interstate, twelve minutes later I was walking through the door.

There was a discussion a couple of days ago on where internet video is going to go. I think that places like YouTube are going to be the new TV for the next generation. User Generated Content will be it. There are so little start up costs, and the imaginations of some people are going to really be where we are watching. The comment on the podcast was that some people are already doing a better job at attracting viewers than the major networks are.

So kids, develop great stuff. It is going to be a great ride!

Wrong business direction for Microsoft: I have been a loyal Microsoft user for many, many years. My first PC in 1986 an on MS-DOS 2.0 and upgraded to Dos 4 soon thereafter. I upgraded to Windows 3.11 having played with a previous version of Windows that came with a copy of PageMaker that I had installed. When Windows 98 came out I was one of the first to upgrade, and again with XP. I am holding off on Vista, but for different reasons than everyone else.

I was a beta test for Office in the early days, and again for the 2003 version. I love the stuff. I also have purchased MapPoint and Project. I think that I could be considered an avowed MS consumer.

But I have taken a hard look at Office 2007 and I think that it is time to get off this very expensive train. I really just don't see the benefits for upgrading, and I am starting to shift a lot of my thinking to web possibilities. My concern in the past is not one of security in that I don't want someone looking at that, I think that is a small problem. My concern was having it online and then having that web site shut down. The work around has been right before me, but now I get it. I can save the file to the server's storage, and then save a back up here. Then, if I want, I can save it to another online storage vehicle such as Xdrive. I really think that this is the way that the future will go. I keep a 1gig USB flash drive, and I can easily see me getting a larger one in the future and using that as my primary storage vehicle. Then I can keep a computer at the house, another at the office, etc. We shall see.