But not by me … my credit card number was stolen and recreated for a woman named Jessica. I’m covered, but a few comments about the situation. My data was stolen during a recent business trip to New Jersey. When folks complain about the security of online shopping, all I can say (and have said for years) … I prefer the online experience to the physical alternative of giving up my credit card at every "real world" business establishment.  On the web it takes a smart criminal to steal your data. At the local restaurant, anyone with a high school education and some minor training can steal your data. Here at the Hoeg family, I’ve trained my kids to never make an online purchase unless the url starts "httpS", and they can establish the validity of the vendor. Without the "S", I don’t buy.

In the end, low tech did me in ….

In closing, I leave you with a photo of my youngest son’s LAN Party (Wikipedia article) which was held Friday night.  I was impressed with the setup! Sorry about the photo being a bit fuzzy … in total we had seven souped up systems churning data! I had never realized that the guys wore a single unit headphone to monitor the computer’s audio … and left the other ear for real world conversations!
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During this Christmas and Holiday Season, whatever your faith, I wish you the most blessed time with your friends and family. Here are a few photos of "Hoeg Hollow" with my holiday greetings. I also invite you to view some beautiful Chinese Christian folk art, including a Chinese Nativity created by my friend, He Qi.
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During this morning’s drive to work I listened to a fascinating podcast from Business Week, Google’s Next Big Dream. Here is a brief description:

"They call it cloud computing. The idea is to deliver incredible processing power to students, researchers, and entrepreneurs—while expanding Google’s footprint well beyond search, media, and advertising" or "supercomputing for everyone".

This podcast is extremely interesting, and thought provoking. Given the source is Business Week, the story is NOT delivered in geek speak. I recommend you spend the fifteen minutes required to listen:

Upon completion of the podcast, I used Google (what else!) and discovered some additional resources:

• Introduction to Problem Solving on Large Scale Clusters
  (free online course with videos and lecture notes)
  .
• Google’s own Computer Science Curriculum Search Engine
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• Google Code Video Lectures
  (AJAX, C++, JAVA, Python and more)
  .
• Rich Hoeg’s Drivetime Podcast Tutorial
  (how I listen to podcasts in my car)

I will definitely add these resources to the software engineering section of the engineering learning wiki.
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Knol is not a typo, but a new Google term for "unit of knowledge". Via Ross Mayfield’s blog I learned this morning that not only does Google want to index the web … they appear to want to create it also! I’m not sure I like this trend. Anyhow from the "official Google blog":

"Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling "knol", which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project" … Google VP of Engineering, Udi Manber

More … Google – The Next Big Thing