Tomorrow is supposedly Cyber Monday. According the Wikipedia article on Cyber Monday: “The term Cyber Monday refers to the Monday immediately following Black Friday“…” The premise was that consumers would return to their offices after the Black Friday weekend, making purchases online that they were not able to make in stores.”

They go on to say that “Although idea has not survived the test of time“. It has simply evolved into a marketing event.

Here on Long Island we are fortunate to have access to a relatively fast broadband cable network, and a number of people have faster internet at home than at work. That plus employer restrictions on internet usage could make it “Cyber Sunday evening” instead of Cyber Monday.

The term Cyber Monday has come under some criticism, according to the Wikipedia article:
“Some critics online and in the media have called for a boycott of the term, calling it a useless media buzzword with no basis in fact.” And: “At the official Cyber Monday site run by Shop.org, more than 500 retailers offered discounts for the 2007 holidays. As a Motley Fool article noted, many of these same deals can be found elsewhere.”

Motley Fool refers to Cyber Monday as a Joke.

There is also an article by Candace Lombardi of CNET News entitled: “Cyber Monday more myth than reality?”

One option may be to do your Cyber shopping whatever day of the week suits you with the Sony VAIO VGN-NS130E/S Notebook.

Before I begin blogging about Black Friday, here is a definition for those readers outside of the USA, from Wikipedia: “Black Friday is the Friday after Thanksgiving in the United States, where it is the beginning of the traditional Christmas shopping season” (see Black Friday (shopping)). If you don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, like the rest of the world, then you just have Christmas sales. Canadians have their Thanksgiving in October, but some make the trip across the border to take advantage of Black Friday deals.

Personally, I try to avoid crowds of people, and rather look for deals online. I’m not alone in this, and some avid deal hunters get online before midnight on Thanksgiving to look for online deals. To them “Cyber Monday” is a non-event concocted by the media. They started shopping before the weekend.

Laptops are always a hot item, but CNET News Blog warns us to “Beware (of) Black Friday Laptop Deals“.

Another way of finding a laptop on Black Friday is looking online. Manufacturers like Toshiba and Lenovo are selling them at directly from their online stores, with discounts of 15 to 30 percent.

Another one of the items a lot of people are looking for this year is the Nintendo Wii Fit.

So what is it about Netbooks and Clouds (Cloud Computing)?. Maybe it is like one of those tunes I can’t get out of my head. Actually, I’m more interested in the Client side of Cloud computing. Just giving the definitions of Cloud Computing was enough for me (see Cloud Computing)

The Dell Inspiron Mini 9 I mentioned in my last blog entry was one of a series of Netbooks from manufacturers as diverse as Hewlett-Packard (HP 2133), MSI (MSI Wind U100 Notebook), Asus (ASUS Eee PC 900), Acer (Acer Aspire One Mini A150-1006 Notebook) and the Dell. These are just a subset of the many Netbooks available.

Wikipedia defines a Netbook as “A netbook is a small to medium sized, light-weight, low-cost, energy-efficient laptop, generally optimized for internet based services such as web browsing and e-mailing.“. The internet-based services part is a hint of the Cloud.

Then there is the Nettop, a “term introduced by Intel to describe “low-cost” desktop computers“.

Microsoft today announced a new product for Cloud Computing, called Windows Azure, which is going to be a cloud-computing platform, or cloud computing Operating System.

Cloud Computing is a buzzword I vaguely understand, so I looked around for a definition of it.

Firstly, Cloud Computing has nothing to do with Microsoft Flight Simulator.

There were over 150 articles on Cloud Computing on Knol (Google’s answer to Wikipedia).

Sam Johnston of Australian Online Solutions wrote:
“Cloud Computing is the realisation of Internet (’Cloud’) based development and use of computer technology (’Computing’) delivered by an ecosystem of providers.”

The next definition, from Kirill Osipov, seemed to sum it up nicely:
“Growth in adoption of software delivered over the Internet resulted in the situation where people depend on Internet for services that enable everyday activities like document editing, photo sharing, banking and so on. To the users, the computing and storage resources needed to power the service software exist in the “cloud”, that is the users are spared the details of where and how the software actually runs.”

In my previous blog entry I quoted from Dian’s GottaHave blog, and will be doing it again, as she gave an interesting reference to in her Blog “Ultra-Low-Cost, Ultra-Mobile Computers, Part 1“: “..Expectations from some companies are that you’ll do your computing “in the clouds,” relying on free services from Google and a hundred other dot-com companies to give you productivity applications and maintain your data.”

Just for reference, the Wikipedia article on Cloud Computing is here.

That’s Opera. It has some advanced features, but just doesn’t seem to gain market share. Possibly the Windows version has too many features, overwhelming the user with what appears to be a steep learning curve?. (I would hesitate to recommend “Opera Web Browser for Dummies” until I’ve read it myself) Up until version 5 Opera was trial-ware; it had an ad-supported free version and a paid full version. Although I know it is a superior browser, and have it installed on some of my machines, I seldom use it. Where I do use it is on Mobile devices where the only other browser is Pocket Internet Explorer. Opera runs on a myriad of mobile platforms, ranging from handhelds to smartphones and even cellphones. Here Opera really excels.

Opera Mobile, which is targeted at smartphones and PDAs is not free. On some smartphones the price of the smartphone includes the Opera Browser, but on most PDAs it costs extra.There is also a version of Opera called Opera Mini. This will run on any device which has a the Java Platform, Micro Edition installed.

Occasionally I run Opera, but then I go back to Firefox version 3. I also occasionally run  Google’s Chrome browser, it looks promising.

A little over five months ago I mentioned Internet Browser Wars in “Browser Squabbles“.
Yesterday Google released their own web browser, called “Google Chrome”. Google used components from Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Firefox to develop Chrome.

Yet another browser? Was my first thought. Just recently Apple’s Safari for Windows was released, and I’ve almost completed the move to Firefox 3. Microsoft is working on Internet Explorer 8. That did not stop me from downloading Google Chrome and having a look at it. It is only the Beta version, but then Gmail has been in “Beta” for  number of years now.

The interface in Google Chrome is notably different from other browsers. Instead of the standard toolbar across the top, Chrome puts tabs across the top. The tabs contain controls like the forward and backward buttons. Each tab can be detached to become a separate window. Each tab runs as a separate process, so if one tab gets hung up for some reason it will not affect the browser. Each tab has its own address bar, which Google calls the Omnibox. The Omnibox handles searches as well as urls.

For an introduction to Google Chrome see the informative comic-book here.

Other pre-Chrome reading is “Planet Google“.

Yesterday I finally bit the bullet and updated Windows XP to Service Pack 3 on one of my machines. I’m still trying to find out what extra features it may have added apart from security patches and bugfixes. Microsoft just seems to lead you in circles on their website. I did make sure the machine I updated had a Pentium processor, as I had heard that Windows XP SP3 caused problems on machines with AMD processors. Of course Microsoft may have fixed that by now, but I wasn’t taking any chances.

Firefox 3 is a different story. After only using the portable edition for several weeks, I finally installed Firefox 3 onto all but one machine, which is actually the machine I’m writing this particular blog entry on. I’m having to jump through a few well-documented hoops to have Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 running on the same machine (but obviously not at the same time). The main reason is because a large number of my favorite Firefox 2 add-ons have not yet been upgraded for Firefox 3. Eventually I guess I may have to do without Tab Mix Plus.

A few days before the 3G iPhone was released I realized that I really wanted one. At first I thought it was a severe case of “iwantitis“, so I waited for it to pass. Since I’m not one to stand in line for hours for something, it was easy to let the release date come and go.

After a week I still wanted a 3G iPhone. To cut a short story shorter, about a week ago I finally got the iPhone from AT&T, after a 14 day wait. Getting one from an Apple Store would have required waiting in line – after two attempts at this I went the “Order from AT&T” route. Basically you pay for the iPhone with a credit card (only at certain AT&T stores) and they order it, which takes somewhere between 7 and 21 days. The card is only charged the day the iPhone is actually shipped to the store. You are then contacted and have 7 days to pick up the iPhone. When you pick it up, it is activated and you sign up for the two year contract.

One thing to be aware of is that you cannot return an iPhone, even within the first 14 days, without paying a 10% “restocking fee”. The restocking fee is waived if the box is unopened, but the box has to be opened in the store to activate the phone. It seems that Apple stores may do something similar. The reason I mention this is because the iPhone is not a regular cellphone or smartphone at all. The virtual keyboard takes some getting used to. That said the user interface as a whole is really natural and easy.

So what prompted me to join several million others and buy this micro-Mac-computer-cellphone? The excellent browser, email and internet on the go and the availability of third party applications were the main reasons.

Today I opened a checking (current) account. Big deal, you say. It was - the whole application and approval process was done online. It wasn’t with an “Internet Bank”, but with a regular Brick and Mortar bank. There is a branch about 3 miles from my house, and another one close to where I work. I’ve actually seen the one close to home, but the one near my work I found via the Bank’s website.

My intention was to go into one of the branches and open an account. However, I spotted the option to open an account online. Since I know this bank from their TV advertising, and the website was professionally done, I knew it was fairly safe.

Previously I’ve signed up for a PayPal account, and then for an excellent savings account online, but this was a first for me. Being a checking account, they have to get your “authorized” signature somehow. So in the first set of checks the bank sends out, a method is provided to capture your signature.

Part of the process is a credit check which is then turned around to verify that you are who you are claiming to be. I had to do some quick online looking up for that one. Once your identity is verified, it is just a couple of choices. The bank really impressed me with the “You should save this information” prompts, and downloadable PDF files of important agreements. The whole process was followed up with an email outlining the important points. Very slick and professional.

There are a number of books available on the subject (see here), including one from the popular “Dummies” series, “Banking Online for Dummies“.

Although it is frowned on by some, I personally find Wikipedia quite a good source of reference material for my blogging. Of course I have to use common sense, and will try not to refer to an article that is just way off base. The rule of thumb of when in doubt check the references works fairly well.

Now Google has started a web-based encyclopedia-like service called “Knol”. Knol contains a number of knols. A knol is defined by Google as “a unit of knowledge” or “an authoritative article about a specific topic“. So far there seem to be a number of medical articles (some about medical conditions I’d rather not know about).

Now, personally I’m a fan of Google in that I Gmail and some of their other free software, both web-based and downloadable. This doesn’t mean that I think that everything that Google does is wonderful. In the case of Knol I’ll reserve judgment and continue to use Wikipedia while keeping an eye on Knol.

There seem to be varying views of Knol, from it being a possible Wikipedia killer “Google’s Knol Finally Goes Public. A Wikipedia Killer?” from InformationWeek’s Google Weblog, to it being “Wikipedia-for-cash” as Jack Schofield refers to it in his technology blog on the Guardian newspaper website.

Meanwhile you can pickup the “Encyclopedia Britannica 2008 Deluxe” DVD right here on Pricgrabber.com.