US President-Elect Barack Obama was on an interview with Barbara Walters on ABC yesterday.

Among the things that was discussed, was his intention on keeping the Blackberry he currently uses.

What struck me was this quote:

"One of the things that I'm going to have to work through is how to break through the isolation -- the bubble that exists around the president.

According to Peter Nowak of the CBC, a hostile bid for Yahoo by Microsoft could change the future of the web.

The article says that the such a bid is likely and would have a good chance of happening too.

They also mention that Microsoft's "closedness" and the mentality of controling everything would cause a major shift, followed by a lot of Yahoo's talent leaving due to the differing cultures.

I use the Linux dump program to do backups. I use a set of scripts making the process as unattended as can be. The scripts send me an email with the result so I am informed of the outcome.

Viewing today's email status message in Gmail had a hilarious surpise in it. Look at the ad on the right hand side.

Google thought that the email subject and text here has "Dump" in it, an display an ad about "She dumped me" ... "Get your girl back".

Over the span of a few days, three undersea cables were cut in different areas of the world. Two in the Mediterranean, and another in the Perisan Gulf.

The site of the first cut is 8 km away from Alexandria, and was cut on January 30 by a wayard ship anchor. The third cut is 56 km from Dubai. The cause of that latter cut was not confirmed.

These cuts have affected Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Iran and India.

All over news outlets over the last two days is the fact that Microsoft has bid $44.6 billion for Yahoo.

The implications of such an acquisition are far reaching.

The OLPC has started deployment to schools in some countries.

The way the students interact with it, learn how to use it, and interact to each other is already amazing. There are stories of school drop outs coming back to school for the sake of the laptop, aggressive kids who become experts in the OLPC, and help others out using it, and more.

Two recent reviews of the XO One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) are very interesting. The first is by a 12 year old, and the other is by a 9 year old.

Last month, there were reports that Comcast is sending forged RST (reset) packets for BitTorrent file sharing, hence hindering users who use this protocol.

Now, the local newspaper, The Record, has an article about how a local company, Sandvine, supplied Comcast with the technology to do what it is doing.

Sandvine's sales and stock price have been doing well of late.

The Canadian Press had an article on how some members of Facebook are finding it annoying to the degree that they leave Facebook altogether.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Google is set to announce a set of software and services for mobile phones in the next two months. The service will provide search, Gmail, Maps, and YouTube.

Note that Google already acquired Zingku and Jaiku, two mobility oriented web sites recently.