The World's Greatest Links...Right After My Brush With A Crazed Swine Flu

I'm just back from a week's vacation in Mexico with my lovely girlfriend and I haven't dropped dead of swine flu yet. Sadly, I'm spending this renewed gift of life weeding through emails in my Outlook inbox, fighting trojans on my home desktop, catching up on the news and trying to re-engage with the world.

BTW, if you get some time to spend in sunny Cabo San Lucas, I highly recommend it. Here is a picture of Medano Beach, the main swimming beach in Cabo. Very nice. Notice the lack of swine flu...

One of the things I really don't like about vacations is coming back and having to go through hundreds of emails. Long ago, I had set up a number of rules on Outlook to manage the flow of emails and route them into various folders, but I ran out of space for new rules which resulted in my main inbox being overrun with spam, newsletters, etc. It took a lot of time to sort through them each day.

Today, on a whim, I created a new rule for the massive amount of emails I get from Twitter now. It worked! Has anyone noticed this? Is this some new upgrade from Microsoft? If so, I'm really happy. I'm going to be creating lots and lots of new rules from now on.

On a sadder note, I returned home to discover than my virus, trojan and spyware protected home computer had become infected with Virtumonde. I, being an experienced, spyware removal expert, spent many hours yesterday scanning, quarantining, deleting and repeating. No luck. Now, my computer has been taken over by the trojan and...get this...locked me out of my own computer. Looks like I'm going to have to do a repair installation of XP. Good times. I liked it better on the beach!

Here are some links I've come across yesterday and today that I've found interesting...

Om Malik shares some interesting stats of the usage of applications across PC, Mac and Internet platforms.

Microsoft has released the private beta of a slick looking emergency social networking thingy called Vine. Brier Dudley calls it Twitter plus Facebook on steroids.

I've read last year than super-hyped Dubai was going to be able to withstand a commercial and residential housing correction, now according to a story in the WSJ, not so much.

Those of us who own and love our PocketPC's tend to get snippy when people talk about how groundbreaking the iPhone is. Yes, the GUI is pretty slick but I've had a 3G touch screen smart phone for years and years now. It's not new. So, while I'm encouraged than Microsoft and Verizon are working together to continue to improve the experience, headlines like these, "Microsoft, Verizon in Talks to Launch iPhone Rival", drive me mad. Talk about burying the lede (emphasis added):

Verizon has performed well despite not having the iPhone. On Monday, the company reported solid first-quarter results in its wireless business, edging out AT&T in net customer additions.

Jeez.