As a father who has been blessed with four healthy kids, I don't know what it's like to be the parent of a child who was seriously injured by being shaken as a baby. So I don't pretend to be able to fully comprehend the hurt and anguish those parents feel over the infamous iPhone Baby Shaker app.

Who says you can't have fun with storage networking? We had a great time talking to random people at our recent Storage Networking World conference in Orlando, including this saleswoman for Compellent, a storage networking vendor in Minnesota.

It's difficult to get too excited about lawsuits filed against ERP vendors, simply because they're so commonplace. ERP implementations are notoriously difficult, and more often than not, the customer is at least as much at fault as the vendor when projects fail. Still, I'm curious about allegations that have surfaced against Ross Enterprise, the ERP unit of CDC Software.

All of us should be on the lookout for helpful resources for unemployed IT workers, and I think I've spotted a good one: an IT training outfit based in Philadelphia called Training Camp. They appear to be genuinely out to make it easier for IT pros to get the training they need to stay employed or to regain employment.

When you think of what the fallout will be if IBM succeeds in acquiring Sun Microsystems, it's enough to make your head spin. If you're a reseller whose business is entirely dependent on Sun, this has been an especially dizzying week.

Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa is one of the most vocal opponents of the H-1B visa program in the country, and is a hero to many in the anti-H-1B crowd. But his clarity of thought has to be questioned in light of his suggestion that executives at AIG should kill themselves.

I received an e-mail this morning from a reader in Indiana who was prompted to write by last week's Editor's Note, in which I mentioned that a reader in Maryland had cancelled his print subscription because of my refusal to stop writing about the race issue. The latter reader's contention was that discussing race is pointless, and that such a discussion doesn't belong in a technology publication in any case.

I received an e-mail this afternoon from a reader who wrote to inform me that he had cancelled his print subscription because of my interview in this week's issue with Earl Pace, founder of Black Data Processing Associates.

In my Editor's Note that will come out on Monday, I wrote about Bill Corcoran, an IT manager in suburban Philadelphia whose tale of perseverance in confronting corporate arrogance and greed is reminiscent of the David-and-Goliath story that inspired the film, Flash of Genius.

My recent Editor's Note and a related blog posting on the H-1B visa issue have drawn quite a few comments, the vast majority of which came from readers who strongly oppose the H-1B program. Despite the large number of comments that I would characterize as mean-spirited, the discussion has at least been advanced. And no one has advanced it more admirably than Norm Matloff.

In my Editor's Note published today on the topic of the H-1B visa issue, I made reference to a discussion I had on "Bloody Monday" with Charles Johnson, head of Microsoft's worldwide manufacturing sector business. I noted that Johnson had spoken of the value of hiring foreign workers, which was likely to be construed by some readers as an un-American activity.

Last February, some students from a school in Harlem went on a field trip to the headquarters of CA in Islandia, New York. One of those students, a sixth grader named Larry Castellanos, engaged the CA employees - including President and COO Mike Christenson -- with some amazingly insightful questions. And then Larry had an idea: He wanted see what it would be like to have Christenson's job for a day.

Our coverage of Microsoft's recent announcement that it's cutting 5,000 jobs created an angry mob of readers when Patrick Thibodeau reported that H-1B visa holders would be among those losing their jobs, but that Microsoft is under no legal obligation to lay off foreign workers ahead of U.S. workers.

Shame on me. In my previous posting about Circuit City going down the tubes, I wrote that what killed Circuit City is "the same thing that killed CompUSA a year ago," namely: The people who worked there didn't add the value that's expected of a specialty retailer. But it turns out the comparison wasn't entirely accurate, because CompUSA isn't completely dead and gone after all.

When Circuit City announced today that it was asking a bankruptcy court to allow it to close its stores and sell off its assets, it's doubtful that anyone who has been to a Circuit City store lately was surprised by the retailer's demise.