News that an American tourist decided to return to the U.S. in a commercial flight despite knowing that he was carrying a contagious potentially deadly virus should have everyone outraged.

Selfish cowards like him will put the world population at risk if we were to face a worldwide health crisis like the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. We have to send a clear message that such behaviors are totally unacceptable. He should be thrown in jail as soon as he recovers (which I hope he does).

No matter how unethical this person’s behavior, the worse part of the story is that he decided to return to the U.S. because he believed that it was the only country in the world were he could be successfully treated. It is amazing how Americans are blinded by their own propaganda about the quality of their health system.

If this person had spent just some time researching, he would have found out that people living in countries like France and Italy, two countries he stayed in while knowing about his condition, have a better life expectancy than the U.S, which is tied for 33rd place with Cuba, according to a WHO (World Health Organization) study. Of course, longevity is the combination of a number of factors, which include diet and quality of life among many others. However, it is also true that no country with a terrible health system can claim a top spot in any longevity survey.

Countries in Europe in general have a healthier population because unlike the U.S. they offer a good health system that covers almost the whole population. Wealthy Americans may think that they can get better treatment at home because they can stay at hospitals that look like luxury hotels and sport the latest and greatest in medical technology but even then they may be wrong. Technology is great but experience is at least as important.

For example, if someone needs an organ transplant, Spain, a country generally associated with bullfights and flamenco, may be a better choice than the U.S. because of the high number of organ donors existing in that country (the highest percentage in the world). This peculiarity is one of the reasons why they have so many experienced specialists over there. In Europe doctors are also more likely to have chosen their profession for humanitarian reasons than for money. It is no surprise that the “Médecins sans frontières” (Doctors without borders) organization was created in France, and the Red Cross in Switzerland. This means that there is good expertise in treating diseases which are rare locally such as Malaria or TB, acquired by doctors that travel to remote regions to help those in need.

I understand that this person has made several poor choices by fear but that is not an excuse. He must be held accountable.

I have spent the last three days attending Basic Blue, a training program designed for recently promoted first and second line managers at IBM.

As a technical guy I must say that I have always seen management as a necessity but not necessarily as a great career move. The problem however with techies shunning this development path is that too often the position is awarded to power mongers, money hunters or engineers who are falling behind due to obsolescence. That was not my case. I just saw that something was wrong with the team and I wanted to fix it.

My declared objective is to make sure that IBM’s software group technical team becomes the best of the industry (at least here in Mexico) and that we get recognized as such even by our competitors. And I want to make sure we have fun while working on this objective. The mission can be summarized in three words, pride, recognition and great work environment. I realize that I still have a long way to go but I have great hopes to reach my goal relatively quickly as I see a lot of talent in my group.

To tell you the truth, I did not have great expectations for this course and I wasn’t totally wrong as some of the topics were a simple rehash of what we had already seen before in previous training sessions. The most interesting part was analyzing the results of employee surveys. This really helps to understand what is working and what needs to be changed. It would be great to be able to submit this survey once a year t monitor progress.

However, what really encouraged me was to see a group of fourteen managers really committed to the success of their respective teams as well as their individual members. Nobody complained about their survey results, even though you can believe me when I say that nobody got good grades on every measured competency. On the contrary, it was clear that all the attendees saw this as a great opportunity to improve their behavior and the organizational climate. This clearly demonstrates to me that since HR has professionalized the selection of new managers they have managed to start building a team of truly committed leaders that clearly understand that their position as people managers is primarily about people. This seems to be a result of the personal focus of IBM CEO Sam Palmisano on values. Too often such kind of initiatives sound shallow and useless. It seems that at IBM this is not the case.

Ok, enough about management. I have to return to XCode, I still have a lot of work to complete before WWDC.

The idea of becoming a Second Life user never made much sense to me. My current life is simply too busy to allow me to spend much time in any immersive virtual universe. However, it seems that many within IBM do not share my opinion. In fact, the company has recently increased it’s presence on this virtual world. The most recent proof of IBM’s interest in this technology was the life coverage of the inaugural session of the Impact conference on IBM’s virtual island. This conference is a major event for customers who are planning to deploy SOA solutions based on IBM technologies. Since I work closely with WebSphere products I thought that it could be interesting to participate and use the opportunity to discover this world everyone is talking about.

You probably know that even though I work at IBM I am a long time Apple user. So, logically I downloaded the Second Life Macintosh client on my 17” MacBook Pro. That was my first mistake. A big mistake. The Mac client is so incredibly slow that it is simply unusable. But the problem goes way beyond performance. This is a straight port from the Windows version with no concessions whatsoever to the Apple Human Interface guidelines. Frankly I do not understand why Linden Labs decided to develop (and release) such a crappy port. In my opinion they would be better off asking instead their Apple customers to use Parallels to run the Windows version, at least Mac users would not be so disappointed.

Since I do not have Windows installed on my Mac (why waste valuable disk space) I decided to try to install the client on my ThinkPad. There is no doubt that the client works much better on Windows. That doesn’t mean that the graphics are great, though. The Second Life client uses an old game engine to render the 3D world and it shows. However, what really made me mad was how complicated it is to get past the initial training island. The process is cumbersome and unintuitive. The first thing that you will see after landing on he island is a bunch of people who are totally lost, asking each other what to do to exit the island. If you have played games before that is not too difficult to understand, you just have to learn how to accomplish some tasks and earn stars for acquiring new skill. When you collect all the stars you can move on to the “real” second life world. The problem is that the training process is long and filled with bugs. You have to complete the tasks in order and without interruptions, otherwise you may be unable to get back in certain situations(despite many signs that allow you to retry a particular test).

The most frustrating part is that if you decide to leave your training session, when you come back you will find yourself in an inconsistent state with the objects collected so far and your last position but no stars (although it seems that the application remembers which tests you already passed, which causes additional problems). Be prepared to create a new character (and start from scratch) if you run into one of these situations. To make things even worse, there is no way to skip the training which is totally unnecessary for younger generations used to play online games.

To make a long story short, I was unable to complete the training in time to attend the event. It is clear to me that Linden Labs has spent no time whatsoever to make sure that newcomers have a great initial experience. They have a lot to learn if they want to grow beyond the geek population that is currently playing with their technology. As for me, I will never use it again unless they produce a decent Mac client and they offer true compelling content not available elsewhere on the Internet.

Last February I bought a PS3. That is right, a Sony PlayStation 3. If I were to believe what seems to be the general opinion on the Net, I would have to conclude that I must be extremely stupid because I could have bought a much better console for half the price. That is at least what most of the Wii fanboys out there would want everyone to believe. Thank God I am old enough to be immune to peer pressure and therefore able to take my own decisions.

The Nintendo Wii may sport innovative controls and offer some fun games but it uses graphics that will make it obsolete before the end of 2008. Just compare any Wii games to games developed exclusively for the PS3 like Resistance: Fall of Man or Motorstorm on an 1080p screen and you will understand. It is clear that the Wii is less expensive than the PS3, but I would argue that it is simply a cheaper device.

Wii gamers tend to dismiss the fact that the PS3 supports Blu-ray. They are wrong, dead wrong. Since I started buying movies in this new format, I have never looked back. There is simply no way for me to go back to the traditional DVD format, the difference in both image and sound quality is so incredible that you have to see it to believe it.

My PS3 lives in my TV room, and is placed just under my 42” plasma screen. Three cables is all I need to enjoy an amazing multimedia experience. That is really important to me because the proliferation of cables is something you really want to avoid if you care about aesthetics. How many cable would I need to use if I had to buy a Blu-ray player in addition to my game console? How-much would that cost?

If you ask me, I will tell you that I am extremely pleased with my PS3 and that I totally recommend it. So, where do the negative comments come from? Short answer, kids who do not have the budget to buy a PS3 or a big flat TV for their room. You simply do not care about graphics quality or cable proliferation when you play on a small screen in your room or dorm. If you add to the mix a sense of treason towards Sony for producing an expensive console that most teenagers cannot afford, you get what we are currently witnessing, a violent, systematic backlash against the console.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand these kids. They are frustrated because they feel that a product designed for them can only be purchased by adults like myself. Sony probably made a mistake by creating a console not targeted at their traditional customer base. However, that does not mean that the Wii is better than the PS3, that is not true, there are no facts to back that claim. While I am aware that sometimes a cheaper product can be better than more expensive options it usually is simply not true, even if a legion of loyalists say so.

That takes me to a comment Steve Jobs made recently at the annual Apple shareholder meeting. He said that if effective R&D depended only on money, Microsoft would have been able to release great products. That may have provoked some laughs in the audience but it concerns me. If Steve thinks that Apple is winning against Microsoft because the Zune failed miserably or because the Mac market share has increased slowly but steadily over recent years, he is missing the whole picture. Apple faces multiple threats from Microsoft and most are much more serious than what they have been battling so far.

One of these threats is the XBox 360. The device has sold well over ten million units and is therefore much better positioned than the Apple TV to win the battle over the living room. The other significant threat is Silverlight, a recently announced technology that has the potential to change forever the way we interact with web applications and move content creators to the Windows platform. Both products are good examples of healthy innovation coming from Redmond and are the result of investing billions of dollars in R&D.

When I read that comment I felt that Steve Jobs was trying to cover the truth and use us, Mac loyalists, to continue spreading that tale that you can do much more with much less, much in the same way that Nintendo fanboys spread the tale that their cheap console is much better than the expensive one. Apple has grown a lot over the last year but R&D spending has not benefitted significantly. In order to remain competitive, Apple has relied a lot on open-source technologies to produce innovation. In fact, some of the most touted improvements that will be included in Leopard (ZFS and DTrace) actually were created by Sun Microsystems. That has worked well so far for OS X , but it is clear that Apple lacks the R&D punch to create and push new standards in new areas, unlike Microsoft or companies such as Sun Microsystems, Oracle or IBM which are perceived to be much larger but have a comparable market cap value to that of Apple.

Right now, the big technological battles are raging around the technologies that will be used for the next generation web interfaces. Adobe (Apollo), Microsoft (Silverlight) and Sun (Java) are the main players that are fighting for this strategic market. Apple is not participating in this war or even endorsing one of these technologies. Come on Apple, we all know that you can do better. Spend more on R&D, you future is at stake. Unless you move the puck yourself, it may become harder and harder to know where it will be.

In my family we never talked about sex. That did not surprise me, I thought that it was quite normal. I have since found out that other families are much more open about the subject. Whether this is good or not, is not really relevant to this post. What I want to write about is that probably because of that, I always thought that a “don’t ask don’t tell” policy regarding homosexuality was enough to solve discrimination problems in the workplace. I was wrong, dead wrong. Problems do not disappear by simply avoiding talking about the subject.

At the company I work for, employees know that gays should inform their manager about their sexual orientation. The idea is that by disclosing this information, managers can make sure that they do not become the victims of discrimination.

Why would managers need to know the sexual orientation of their staff? After all, it is our responsibility to make sure that no discriminatory behaviors happen in our teams? I think that this makes it more personal. A couple of weeks ago I was in a meting where someone started to make inappropriate sexual jokes. Knowing that I had gay members of my team present made me stop her immediately. I knew that she was hurting them. If I had not known I would probably not have realized the gravity of the situation. That is why “don’t ask don’t tell” doesn’t work. Nobody should have to hide any personal characteristic in order to avoid discrimination while suffering in silence.

Don’t get me wrong, while the policy works it also generates some problems. Many straight persons in the company believe that gays are over protected and that some managers are scared to fire homosexuals because they can be accused of homophobia. I can see that happening with unexperienced managers but overall I do not really buy it.

Over the last few years, in most countries, statistics have shown that, in general the trend is pointing towards lower participation in public elections. In some cases, a particular election can break the trend, specially when important matters are at stake, people live in fear or when the country is highly divided on a particular subject. However, analysts usually assumed that citizens had progressively lost interest in politics. As a result, in some countries it has become usual to see participation scores well below the 50% mark. This obviously raises a lot of questions about the legitimacy of those elected under these circumstances.

Raising participation numbers in local, state and national elections should be the primary goal of every true democrat. Too often do we see a candidate win because it’s supporters are more committed than those who back the opposition. Some may consider that fair but I disagree. We should only be satisfied with election results when they are accompanied by high participation rates across the board. That is why I was so glad to see an amazing 85% participation rate in France’s Sunday presidential election. This result really deserves a standing ovation and we should all work in our countries to make sure that we obtain similar results in future elections.

Even though France cannot claim to be the oldest modern time republic (that honor goes to the Dutch), it is well known that many of the ideals that inspired both the US Constitution and the French Revolution, came from French thinkers. That leads many to consider France to be the cradle of democracy. Seeing that 218 years after the French Revolution, democracy is still alive and well in that country is something to cheer about.

According to this BBC article, the authorities in India’s premier engineering institute, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Bombay (Mumbai), have cut off internet access to students in hostels at night. They apparently feel that 24-hour internet access is hampering students’ academic performance and overall personality development.

I agree. I am most productive when I do not use the Internet. Opening a browser window is just like opening a chocolate box (if you are into chocolate), there is such a wealth of interesting and entertaining information available that it is hard to just look at what you really need. Fast Internet connections only make this problem worse. A slow connection helps people realize that they are wasting their time. With fast Internet connections, you do not have to wait and therefore time flies. Before you realize it, you have spent too much time surfing the web.

Shutting down Internet access is not a good solution to improve sound Internet usage. Reducing the bandwidth is. Modem speeds are generally decent enough to allow students that require critical information at 3AM to complete a term paper, to access Google and Wikipedia. However, slow access will make sure they do not waste their time on YouTube or other Web 2.0 sites.