BUS584 is turning out to be my fun BS class (this just means I really have to kick my butt into gear with regards to the paper I have to write for it). Two people gave a presentation today on John Rockefeller and his creation of the Standard Oil Trust monopoly. By creating a monopoly, he destroyed a working market for kerosene, and he directed all the large philanthropic flows of his money. I made the comment in class that he was a better socialist than a capitalist. He killed capitalist markets, and centrally planned all the uses of his resources, just like a good socialist would. ;)

We routinely work with TelCove, a local CLEC, as we purchase a large number of PRIs (digital phone lines) from them. They recently let go one of the people I used to work with a lot, and replaced her. She spent most of her time working with her phone, coordinating events, which made contacting her a pain. You either got voice mail or sent email and both were responded to at the end of the day. So, I was talking with her replacement, I asked if she IM'd and within 30 seconds, I had a direct connection to her. Since we are both desk-bound by our work, this is a huge performance gain for us. I wonder how many other people use IM for business-related inter-company communication. Probably lots, and I'm just dumb. ;)