Too Many Users of "Big Cloud" Big Suckers

I'm with Woz -- "Big Cloud" is not getting the wariness it deserves.  Too many consumers and businesses are inhaling the boundless volumes of hot, breathless hype and encouragement from providers and developers to skip due diligence.  Those users consequently place themselves at significant risk of significant harm without sufficient reason.

All it takes to avoid being a sucker is answering a few simple questions.  But Big Cloud is betting on today's users being too lazy, greedy, or easily distractible to answer the right questions sufficiently, much less ask them in the first place.  And so far it's been a winning bet.

     A clearer day for the Cloud.  For a PDF, click this.

Google Shopping Quits Web -- Time to Quit Google Shopping

Google Shopping.  Google Products.  Froogle.  Whatever you call it, it used to be the world's far-and-away most complete online shopping search engine.  That was by virtue of being simply another form of the world's far-and-away most complete index of Web pages, Google Web.  "Used to be" -- because by the end of fall 2012, Google will have quietly junked its decade-old service of giving shoppers the whole World-Wide Web filtered of only those pages lacking something for sale, and replaced it wholesale with a completely unrelated middleman "service" blocking any visibility between shoppers and sellers who do not pay (and pay, and pay, and keep on paying...).  While, of course, continuing to make it appear exactly the same...apparently in the hopes that nobody important will notice.  Sneaky-sneaky, sir...ole'.

National Cherry Blossom Festival 2011 - Grand Sushi Event, Washington, D.C.

After trudging around in the cold rain for 3 hours trying to participate in the 2011 National Cherry Blossom Festival, find photogenic views of the sakura, and express solidarity with troubled Japan in some small way, it was a relief at 6 p.m. to finally arrive at the National Geographic Grosvenor Auditorium for the NCBF / Nat Geo Live! Grand Sushi Event, consign my wet coat and hat to coat-check, and begin drying out.

Relief, that is, until I was informed that 7 p.m. was not the time to commence eating but the time to commence seating, and there was to be a 4th hour of standing in a line.  Not the conditions a $100 event would lead one to expect, and quite a damper of enthusiasm for future Nat Geo Live! events.

The theme of the dinner (I had to stop referring to it as the event) was sustainability, which much of contemporary fish consumption obviously is not, and it was hosted by chefs / authors / sustainability-advocates Casson Trenor and Barton Seaver and sponsored and supplied by Pennsylvania-based Whole Foods supplier Genji.

The menu, designed by Genji Executive Chef Miki Willis, consisted of 7 courses and a (non-paired) selection of 6 beverages.

National Cherry Blossom Festival 2011 - Day 5 in Pictures, Washington, D.C.

Sakura!

The National Park Service reported that peak bloom was yesterday, National Cherry Blossom Festival 2011 day 4 (of 15).  So here is my value-added photo tour of the Potomac River Tidal Basin on the day after, for whatever it may still be worth.