Bunch of Eeyores Watching Your Success

Yesterday, we had minis, maxis, word processors, car phones, Tandy 1000 HX, digital diaries, Gayfers, Trader John's, measles and SunRocket.

Today, we have slouchy layered shirts, baggy shorts, netbooks, smart phones, unified communications, voip* layered with everything you can imagine, eBay, Craigslist, virtual Facebook parties, swine flu and viruses infecting space station laptops.

While I planted my vegetable, herb, and flower garden under the rising sun around 6 AM, I kept think about how we tend to not appreciate what we have right this second.

Humanity, our industry (IP communications)... We keep ignoring today and waiting for something cool to happen tomorrow. We mope because we don't have a job. We complain because we have one. We talk about how we don't work for anyone, not even ourselves. We hate those "other people" who are not like us. We talk about how no one is innovating as if we are all clones of Eeyore himself. (There's plenty of innovation around VoIP. I hear about the innovation every day from DIDX members. VoIP itself is nothing. It's what we do with it.)

We read the rules in order to use a service on the web. We click to agree. When a rule has to be applied to us such as a penalty fee, commission, minimum... we scream on the bleeding edge of voip murder.

We reek with fumes of revenge against those who we blame for every failure in our lives. We talk about how like to clean, but we don't clean. We don't say thank you to those who are there for us, helping us. We won't even take turns taking out the trash. We don't pay our vendors. And we expect our clients to pay us?

We just complain and watch others ...
work,
live,
smile,
laugh,
help,
argue,
debate,
make up,
make decisions,
pay bills,
solve problems,
and succeed.

I'm no one special, but I love today.

Braintel Brothers: Masters from Viruses to Triple Play

Pictured above are Amjad Alvi, Rehan Ahmed (CTO and President of Super Technologies, Inc), Suzanne Bowen of Super Technologies, Basit Alvi, ???, and of course, Shahid Alvi is taking the picture. Where and when? Dubai, United Arab Emirates in 2003.

Pictures of the Times Magazine cover and one page of the several page article on Viruses of a 1988 issue are included below.




(Time is trademarked, and I (we) do not have any relationship with Time. All credit for the magazine goes to Time.)

In 1988, Time Magazine published a whole issue about viruses and our friends at BrainTel (Brain Ltd). The Alvi brothers (Amjad and Basit) were highlighted for their little code added to their in-house developed software to catch those who were pirating illegally. (There's a third brother ... Shahid, thanks to him for the photos and the info on the Time Magazine article.) Braintel is known for its innovation in telecommunications and anything to do with IT despite the often suffocating atmosphere and vague criteria for legal versus legal voice business in Pakistan and in the Middle East in general. (Note TRAI has legalized voice over Internet protocol this past week. Pakistan's next door neighbor India took the brave step.)