The force is definitely strong with this one

Couldn't resist passing this along.

Obama as Luke!

http://waderockett.com/i-want-to-see-the-planning-whiteboard

Thanks Wade!

Changing tack

I changed the title of my blog today. Why? Well for starters, I haven't posted here for a while - in fact let's face it, I've been pretty slack since moving to Ireland two year ago (yes TWO YEARS!). I've also noticed, then most of my tweets and online conversations revolve around three things (1) living overseas (2) the kids (3) consumer technology.

While I was living in Seattle, most of my thought and posts were about my professional interests - specifically how the sales and marketing groups of large companies make use of technology. I'm still fascinated by the subject (sad I know), but it's now occupying a smaller part of my brain, so I thought I'd do a swap for a while, and post on what's going on in the rest of my head.

Hopefully I'll manage more than one post every year!

Ireland loses AAA status

Hot off the heals of the Times article on Ireland this weekend, S&P have reduced the rating of Ireland from AAA to AA+

I don't pretend to be a financial analyst, and this reduction has been widely predicted for a while, but I guess they may be in good company, with GE and Berkshire close behind!

Apologies

I foolishly thought that I'd get a chance to blog about my international rellocation. However, all of my time has been spent on the move, and I haven't had much chance to put virtual pen to paper. We'll be moving into our new house in Dalkey, Dublin this weekend, and our belongings should be turning up the week after. So hopefully I'll be able to draw breath and write something with a bit more substance soon.

Google Gears - any guessing who will come next?

Google have announced a platform for building offline capable web applications (Scoble covers the details well). I think everyone has noticed the inherant problem that SaaS desktop applications only work online (in fact, even I posted about offline problems with SaaS a couple of months ago), but this now removes that barrier.

This is a huge deal - it really challenges he traditional software model - and Microsoft must be a little concerned about how this impacts MS Office!

Scoble, also just posted an update that someone else is "going offline" tomorrow. With all the talks of acquisitions lately I'm hoping that it's salesforce.com. Now that would be something!

<update> So I guess I got that one wrong - looks like Real Networks have taken video content offline. I'd still love to see SFC do the same.

Google, Ireland and Yoshi

Seattle is a wonderful place. It's been my home for the last four years, and what a four years! I've got married, had a son and made many great friends. But with the implending arrival of Yoshi in November (we've nick-named him/her Yoshi in honour of the Flaming Lips song, not the Nintendo character of Super Mario fame) we've made the decision to return to Europe to be closer to our family.

Never one to make things easy on myself, rather than move back to our home-land (UK) we're actually going to start afresh in a new country - Ireland. I've been offered a job with Google in Dublin, and we're all very excited to be moving to such a vibrant, friendly and, let's face it, funky place (Dublin and Google).

We'll be arriving in Dublin on the 4 July, and I'm sure that I'll make a post or two on the move.

What do Star Wars and a famous river in Korea have in common?

I have a lot of respect for sub-editors.  Writing catchy headlines is a skill that amazes and eludes me (as evidenced above). With that in mind I have to take off my hat to the sub for the Benton Crier who came up with a wonderful headline to describe a high-wire act performing over a famous Korean river. The title? 

"Skywalkers in Korea cross Han solo"

What else :-)