On October 28, 2008, in “Ominous clouds for Travelocity“, I wrote:

If I were priceline or Travelocity or Mobissimo or Expedia I’d be eyeballin’ Google Maps with a bit of trepidation.  What’s to stop them from adding cheapest and quickest airfare routes between destination A and destination B?

In today’s New York Times, in “Google Deal Divides Travel Industry“, Mickey Meece writes:

Six months ago, Google announced its intention to buy the company that made it easy for travelers to compare airfares, ITA Software, for $700 million.

Who needs a deLorean when you have ANP dot com?

In October of 2008, I had a very long conversation with an M&A veteran who thought that applying to doctoral programs was a no-good, very bad idea.  His view?

Don’t confuse _your unhappiness with being a major_ with _a lack of desire to fight the battle_.  You have passion for the war.  This is a good thing.  But you are meant to be a general.

My immediate thought was:

Oh, ouch! The truth.  How often have I considered the people above me on the food chain to be total morons?  “I could run this business better than they can,” I would tell myself, scanning their grammatical errors on a powerpoint and critiquing their presentation skills let alone ability to select an outfit.

He continued:

Your subject matter expertise in internet technologies, your intelligence, your presence, your credentials: you would have venture capital and private equity firms slaughtering each other trying to get you.

I, of course, brushed his thoughts as well as my immediate reaction aside.

(Why?  I have a 2011 plan to whip up and some MasX gifts to swathe so I won’t go into the lines of code in this post.)

But fast forward to today, and I’m definitively back in the war.  Upside?  I just earned some more stripes.  And for those of you who find yourself cringing at the patois of fluorescent-lit capitalists, that means: I recently accepted an important promotion.

So if you’re above me on the food chain?  Consider your outfit-selection skills warned.  ;)

And if you’re a friend of mine?  I’ll probably be blogging much more frequently in 2011.

• Community colleges have a marketing problem
• Let Cardinal Bellarmine design your website
• Lawyers: what’s the litmus test for price-fixing?

Mewonders if the same results could be replicated today.  From the April 3, 2006 AdWeek:

How low an opinion do Americans have of atheism? A survey by the University of Minnesota’s sociology department “found that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in ’sharing their vision of American society.’” The researchers note that the public’s disdain for atheists contrasts with its growing tolerate of religious diversity. The problem is less theological than moral: “Many of the study’s respondents associated atheism with an array of moral indiscretions ranging from criminal behavior to rampant materialism and cultural elitism.” (Not sure what to make of this, but my spell-check mechanism challenged the word “gays” earlier in this paragraph and proposed replacing it with “goys.” Maybe it’s an April Fool’s joke.)

Anyone know if this atheist rating has changed over time?