Please join me in saluting the veterans of World War II. My dad and dad-in-law are but two member of this extraordinary group of brave individuals. They both celebrate their 87th birthdays this year. I take my hat off to them and all those who served with them in defense of our freedom.

BBC NEWS | Camels’ milk could hit UK shelves.

My son lived for two years in Mongolia.  We enjoyed the photos he sent of himself riding on camels and of camels hauling wood into little town where he lived.  It would be great to see camel milk to become a growing export for the impoverished Mongolians.

A great tradition of our family is to gather at the kitchen table after Christmas Eve festivities, drink hot chocolate and talk with each other. As we did so this year, we suddenly realized that we were all connected to the Internet, interacting on Facebook, Twitter and blogs using a variety of devices – extending our Christmas Eve chatter to people far removed from our physical home. Not shown in this photo are my iPhone and the desktop computer on the kitchen desk behind me as I was taking the photo.  Just another example of how technology has changed and enriched our lives. 

With sincere apologies to Holly for a very unflattering photo!

A Christmas Card from our family to yours. May you have a happy holiday season and wonderful new year!

My dear wife give me an Amazon Kindle for my birthday today! What an enjoyable little device! I am looking forward to loading it up with books and reducing the weight of my briefcase a bit. Plus, I’m experimenting with the basic wireless web access it provides and have some interesting ideas on how it will help me in more ways than just being a cool reading device.

Thanks again, Claudia!

Technorati Tags: Kindle, Birthday

Please let me introduce Olivia, the newest member of the Mark and Claudia Dixon clan. She is our eighth wonderful grandchild, but is clearly number one in the eyes of her proud sister Chloe.

Technorati Tags: Family, Grandchildren

• Business Card Scanning and Contact Manager – CloudContacts
  "CloudContacts takes your business cards and puts them to work for you. Instead of storing your business cards in a pile on your desk or in one physical location, CloudContacts provides transcription and allows you to access your contacts at any time."
  (tags: productivity scanning businesscards)
• TweetDeck – Breathing New Life into Twitter for Me
  (tags: Twitter TweetDeck)

In his NetworkWorld Identity column today, Dave Kearns quotes Ping Identity CEO Andre Durand speaking about the Golden Guardian comic strip. I particularly like Andre’s comments about “life, energy and passion”:

“I believe we’re at an important juncture in our industry, one that will require everyone do their part. If we fail, we could become like so many other industries where life, energy and passion have left, and all that is left is apathy. Identity is so important, it deserves our best.

Yes, Identity is important.  It does deserve our best.  This industry impacts so many facets of our professional and personal lives.  The threats to privacy and security are real.  But the benefits for successful Identity management implementation are also real.  It is a great time to be involved.

Thanks, Andre, for your profound words.  Thanks, Dave, for sharing these thoughts with us.

Technorati Tags: Identity, Identity Management, Digital Identity, Ping Identity

I recently received an alpha test invitation from chi.mp to try out their new service: “The dashboard for your digital life,” which offers “The simple way to manage your online life, on a domain of your very own.” 

So, I established my own domain, “markdixon.mp,” populated my profile with links to the social networking sites I frequent (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), my blogs and websites, and the instant messaging services I use.  This site allows me to provide some measure of integration among the different facets of my Internet presence, and gives me quite a bit of flexibility in exposing which details of my Identity I believe to be appropriate.

By coincidence, I met Tony Haile, the chi.mp Chief Strategy Officer, at Digital ID World earlier this week.  He has interesting perspectives to share in the DIDW session, “How Social Web will change Identity Management.”  It appears that Tony and the DIDW crew are making an important contribution to this change by offering steps forward in Identity integration and personal control.

Please take a look at my chi.mp profile and let me know what you think.  I’ll keep you updated as this experiment proceeds.

Technorati Tags: Identity, Identity Management, Digital Identity, chi.mp, Social Networking, Social Media

OpenSSO Master Shesh Kondi blogged earlier this week about how he successfully built an OpenSSO demo using WebLogic 10 on his Mac. He gives the disclaimer “THIS IS FOR DEMO PURPOSES ONLY !”, but offers a complete list of instructions in his post.

This illustrates both Shesh’s technical prowess and the flexibility of OpenSSO to run in many environments.

Thanks, Shesh for sharing what you learned!

Technorati Tags: OpenSSO, WebLogic, Mac