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I can’t remember when I was first introduced to chess. I suspect it was either David (my cousin next door) or myself who first owned a game and I bet it was probably from one of those 30 games in one boxes that we used to get for Christmas when we were younger.

I am pretty sure that David and I taught ourselves how to play back then too. Being next door to each other was a huge benefit for us and we would get together almost daily to play one game or another.

I became addicted to it almost immediately. Not so much “living and breathing chess” but enjoying a game whenever I got a chance. I went on to join the chess club in high school and used to play against some other friends during all night chess matches at the local coffee shop. When I joined the military I was given a portable magnetic chess set, which I still have, and still use from time to time.

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I received an interesting news article in my RSS feed from CBC today. It was all about an American report about how the Internet is nearing capacity. (You can read it here) I just loved their line…

The company is not predicting that the internet will collapse, but it will get very slow. “Overall, transmitting over a saturated broadband link will feel a lot like the bad old days of dial-up: Long pauses between request and response, with some applications just too painful to bother with.”

I guess I’m showing my age, because to me those were exciting days. I used to love listening to the beeps and pings between the modems as they tried to connect and I would watch the status lights flash quickly and slowly as the two modems negotiated their way through the transfer of a package I thought worthy of acquiring…. sigh. (Yeah I know, I digress…)

What I thought fascinating about this article, wasn’t so much what it said, but what it avoided! According to what CBC wrote, the blame for this future cataclysm was based upon the intensive use being put upon the Internet by such things as:

• Streaming and/or interactive video
• Sharing music files
• Cellphone and Blackberry accesses
• A lack of investment to expand the Internet

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So, I was mentioning to my wife this morning about the latest “Train Wreck” of an idea that Microsoft(MS) implemented. It would appear that they are trying to yet again rewrite a standard, this time with Outlook. Anyone who uses a different email package (instead of Outlook) has of course complained about the poor quality of emails coming from those who use Outlook. I knew MS liked to screw up everyone else with embedded code, I just never realized how badly they were doing it.

It would seem that they have taken it to the next level by now screwing up anyones email coming into Outlook from somewhere else as well… In other words, the only email package that will read properly in Outlook email is email created in Outlook! Strange but true… Here is a great article by Andrew Mckay covering the whys and the bizarre hows of what MS is now doing with their latest version of Outlook.

So all of that explanation led to a comment by my on how she really liked Outlook because of its calendar and how you could schedule emails that could be sent at a future time, which she said would really help her with managing her Kiwanis meetings and such… Suffice to say the gauntlet was thrown!

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So we just did a mad dash to Quebec City and back last weekend. Five hours there, four hours back. Suffice to say all those MP3 Vaudeville CD’s I made (you can read about that here) paid huge dividends. We only had to play “Geography” for 2 hours!

This trip created two technological challenges for me. One is a great fix that I will talk about first. The second, although simple and requiring to great leap or technological find will be closed with a comment at the end.

The first challenge…

Our plans were to stay at my Sister in Law’s. Unfortunately she doesn’t have any Internet access, so I had to do some research and find a viable dial-up source so that we still had Internet access for our laptop.

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There is a great Chinese quote out there, the original by Lao Tzu, I think:

Give a man a fish you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

I actually went searching for a slightly modified version of this, which many of todays great teachers use in their training.

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. Teach a man to teach a man how to fish and you change the world.

This is absolutely true, and while I have been picked up by a few anal types thinking that there should be yet another “teach a man to teach a man” portion in there, but the bottom line is This Will Work!

I have been following a story of late, of an amazing team led by Nicholas Negroponte, and their goal to change the world. This man is no dummy. He is an Chairman Emeritus of MIT’s (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Media Lab.

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