File this one in the What Were They Thinking? file. Charles Memminger reports on Roslyn Catracchia’s big mistake.

Thieves broke into her Aina Haina home the other day and stole, among other things, two computers and a backup drive containing her life’s work of of musical scores and musicals.

Catracchia’s files were backed up on two computers and a backup disk drive. That’s better than no backup at all, but still leaves files vulnerable to a real catastrophic event—flood, fire, earthquake, and theft.

The incident is an important warning to every computer user to not only back up their computers on an external hard drive, but to make sure that hard drive is kept “off the property” (like in a safe deposit box) so that in the event of theft, fire or something like that, the files aren’t lost.

Off premise backups will become a big deal this year. It’s one thing to have files saved on multiple computers, something else again to have more important files on backup disk drives, but even better to have the non-replaceable files backed up off premise. That means CD, DVD, small disk drive, or online service—somewhere else other than near the computer.

It’s easy enough to replace a Mac or PC operating system and all apps, utilities, and games. But what about music, photos, movies, and documents? Memminger recommends an online backup service.

Carbonite could use this incident as a promotional tool because if Catracchia had backed up her computer using Carbonite, resurrection of the last files would be a simple download to a new computer.

Compared to other online backup services, Carbonite is expensive. Other choices for Mac users include CrashPlan, Mozy, iBackup, iDrive, Backblaze, BackJack, and Arq for Amazon’s S3 service.

To test whether or not you need an off-premise backup, answer this question:

“What would you do if your Mac or PC died or was stolen? Everything is gone. What would you do?”

If you don’t know, or you’re officially in Worry Mode™, you need a better backup plan.

UPDATE: In a good ending to what could have been a tragic story, local police recovered Catracchia’s computers. All the data was safe.

I’ve long held that Microsoft’s PowerPoint is evil. No, it’s not guilt by association. Yes, Microsoft is evil. PowerPoint makes it too easy to sell complex business plans which, during a PowerPoint presentation, look plausible and viable, but, in reality are not. In 2003 Edward Tufte wrote an essay in Wired—PowerPoint Is Evil. Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely. Matthew Lasar in Ars:

Government and industry bureaucrats addicted to spewing out mind-numbing PowerPoint presentations, be very afraid; Edward Tufte is coming to Washington, DC. The Obama administration has appointed Tufte to serve on the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel, which will suggest ways that the $787 billion stimulus program’s watchdog accountability board can do its job.

Worthy reading.

Tom Kaneshige in CIO:

Macs in the enterprise aren’t just cheaper to manage—they’re a lot cheaper, according to a new survey…

Sounds impressive, no? Who did the survey?

(The) Enterprise Desktop Alliance is a group of software developers who’ve bandied together to deploy and manage Macs in the enterprise.

So, a bunch of guys who use Macs surveyed IT administrators and found that Macs are less expensive to manage than PCs. They could’ve just asked me.

In another sign that change is coming to the world of computing, Google’s John Herlihy says:

In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant. In Japan, most research is done today on smart phones, not PCs.

Herlihy is based in Europe and obviously has never seen a Japanese PC keyboard. But three years?

The digital world is fundamentally different to the traditional business world. Things happen much faster, websites spring up from nowhere, a video could be a YouTube hit in hours.

I wonder what that has to do with desktop computers? Also, I note that the digital world is merely a subset of the so-called ‘traditional business world.’

At the end of the day it’s the customer who owns the cash. That’s why we construct our organisation to deliver value. The underlying framework is to make it easier for people to do business, solve problems and move on.

Google’s customers are advertisers. Over 99-percent of Google’s revenue comes from advertising. Google, so far, is a one-trick pony. A wealthy one-trick pony with a desire to disrupt the technology landscape.

For example, Microsoft and Apple create and sell mobile operating systems; the former directly to cell phone manufacturers, the latter on Apple products. Google’s Android mobile device operating system is given away free.

That’s disruptive.

Mobile makes the world’s information universally accessible. Because there’s more information and because it will be hard to sift through it all, that’s why search will become more and more important. This will create new opportunities for new entrepreneurs to create new business models – ubiquity first, revenue later.

Money quote: “ubiquity first, revenue later.”

That’s easy to say for a company with very deep pockets and a dominant market share on the cash cow product—advertising. In reality, Google remains a one-trick pony, self-annointed king of the internet advertising industry.

Meanwhile, computing—apps, games, utilities, connectivity—is moving from the desktop to mobile devices, but it’s an embrace, a dance of change, rather than a death knell for desktops.

This morning I received an email from American Airlines’ AAdvantage Reward Program:

Welcome to the American Airlines AAdvantage(R) program, the first and largest loyalty program in the world! We are proud to inform you that today, American Airlines launch a new reward program. Please take the 5 questions survey. For your effort you will be rewarded with $50 & 25,000 miles.

The sentences sound funny, don’t they? The phrasing is off. That should raise a red flag. Unfortunately, for many who received the email it might be too late. The message contained a link to an American Airlines phishing scam. Phishing, in this context, isn’t what most people think it is.

Phishing is the criminally fraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication.

This particular scam is a web page that looks like an authentic American Airlines web page, complete with a Login section designed to capture the AAdvantage number and Password.

The site looks legitimate, doesn’t it? Caveat emptor. Beware of what seems too good to be true.

Is Google making us stupid? Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic:

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

You feel it, too, right? The cause? Google.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after.

Nate Anderson in Ars:

Andreas Kluth, of The Economist, agrees that “people will read more in terms of quantity, but more promiscuously and at shorter intervals and with less dedication. As these habits take root, they corrupt our willingness to commit to long texts, as found in books or essays… This will result in a resurgence of short-form texts and storytelling, in ‘haiku culture’ replacing ‘book culture.’”

The internet may be a watershed moment in human history, the event which triggered the death of literature and ushered in the haiku century.