So what do the three topics listed in the title have in common? In a nutshell: there is a whole lot going on with each. Beijing appears to be prepared to host the Games of the 29th Olympiad. For a great slideshow on Beijing and China in general, take a look at this:

The Olympic opening ceremonies have already begun and here in the states we will get a chance to see them tonight at 7:30 PM (EDT). For a sneak peek take a look at the photo gallery on NBC. I’m not normally a huge Olympics fan, but I do enjoy watching the events and hearing about the competitors and what they had to do to reach this elite position in the sporting world. Of particular note I am keeping a very close watch on Dara Torres, the 41 year old swimmer (50m free, 4×100m free relay) who is making a comeback after shoulder surgery. Torres is already the oldest swimming gold medalist, and she could raise that record from 33 to 41 by winning gold again in Beijing. She is also the oldest American swimmer to qualify for the Olympics and the first to make five teams. Pretty amazing story.

For those of you who are really “into” the Olympics, here are a few video sites worth keeping an eye on:

• The Official Website of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games - Videos
• CCTV.com - Official Internet/mobile phone broadcaster of the Beijing Olympic Games
• NBCOlympics - Official US online broadcaster of the Beijing Olympics
• International Olympic Committee’s cahnnel on YouTube™
• Universal Sports YouTube™ Channel

I will also be watching cycling a bit more closely than usual - road, track, mountain, and BMX - and pulling for some hometown favorites: Bobby Lea of Topton, PA and Giddeon Massie of Bethlehem, PA, both of whom are track cyclists. I wish the two of them and all of Team USA the best of success in bringing home the gold for the US.

Internet

A rather obscure fact but nonetheless worth mentioning, the idea of networking computers is 40 years old this week, marking the delivery of the technical paper which coined the phrase “packet switching”.

Donald Davies was working at the UK’s National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Middlesex when he delivered a paper in August 1968 which detailed how distinct packets of data could be sent over public telephone and later dedicated networks. Davies then set about actually building what is claimed to be the world’s first local area network (LAN) at the NPL, which consisted of approximately half a dozen nodes each with three or four machines attached.

Additionally, 17 years ago, on this week (August 6) in 1991, Englishman Tim Berners-Lee, an independent researcher at the CERN institute in Switzerland, published a summary of the World Wide Web project and this date was taken as the day when commercial Internet (WWW) became available to the public. The project started out as a philosophy stating that scientific information should be available to everyone. The goal was “to enable the exchange of information between internationally dissipated groups and spread information among support groups”, Berners-Lee wrote in his summary.

Pretty exciting stuff, especially considering how entrenched the Internet has become in our daily lives.

Me

Finally, with regard to where I have been and what I have been doing, all I can say is that I have been exceptionally busy and in the midst of some significant changes. Many of you saw my tweet stating that I had left PMI and begun a new gig this week. That’s part of the story and I will dedicate a full post to where I have moved to and what I am doing. As for the rest of my activity, most of it is related to Jeff DeCagna’s recent blog post. If you haven’t see it, you can read it here: Ready or not….

More to come soon. I promise. Until then. Happy Friday!

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