• As predicted when the new iPad release date was announced, throngs of Apple faithful waited in line to buy the new iPad last Friday, including the Woz. However, at least one store had more Apple employees than waiting customers.

• Are you on Google+ yet? Mike Elgan feels that after years of ineffectual social media marketing, Google+ is the best thing that ever happened to his career.

• The Sistine Chapel is now digitized and allows you to fly around examining Michelangelo’s crowning achievement. Does the Vatican have a CIO?

• In the mobile apps arena, PayPal has announced a Square competitor, PayPal Here. It’s essentially just like Square, only with the pain and anger issues from being a PayPal product.

• According to a Harvard Business Review survey, women are considered better leaders than men. However, looking at the reasons why, this is hardly a coup for women in IT.

• Think your Google Fu has what it takes? Maybe, but we bet you don’t know each of these 10 Google search tricks.

• our next Skype internet telephone call might have an unwanted visitor. Microsoft and Skype have built a backdoor into the Skype internet telephone application that allows for “Lawful Interception” — aka eavesdropping.

• If you celebrated the new iPad release with a fresh tablet device, here’s how to transfer everything from an old iPad device to the new iPad painlessly.

Certainly there isn’t much argument about how remote desktop virtualization increases worker productivity by giving them access on multiple platforms.  Furthermore, desktop virtualization reduces company costs and upkeep.  CIOs are definitely paying attention to the benefits of virtualization.

The main problem with this description is that it discounts the PC entirely and smacks of absolutism. CIOs live in the real world, and there are always differing use cases in every business. With judicious application, it’s possible to have your benefits of virtualization without damaging the productivity of some workers, especially around specialty-use cases and ergonomics.

Specialty-use cases come up when you have highly specialized software, as engineering or science professionals do. These highly technical workers have applications that simply don’t work, or work poorly, in a virtualized desktop environment. Overzealous rollout of a remote virtual desktop where the goal is 100% coverage creates an absolute — one that works counter to the company’s overall productivity.  Crippling your engineers in order to fulfill an unrealistic goal? Not good for the business. CIOs need to remember that achieving 90% to 98% coverage is fantastic, and that those stubborn last percentage points are desktop users who actually might be better off being left alone, post-PC era or not.

Smart CIOs are mindful of the physical well-being of their workforce. Everybody loves a lighter, thinner laptop, and everybody loves a sleek tablet device. However, for workers who are not highly mobile, smaller screens and slick, tiny keyboards are a recipe for eyestrain, backaches and carpal tunnel syndrome. CIOs need to make sure that the IT departments they run are aware of use cases and are not making one-size-fits-all decisions. Certainly, use cases cannot be allowed to get too complicated, but a few standard configurations based on role will make employees more productive and prevent long-term problems for their health and happiness.

What do you think? Is this really the “post-PC era”? Is 100% remote desktop virtualization adoption even feasible? Is it pointless to cut the cord for each and every worker? Is it possible to extract some benefits of virtualization without going all the way? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

• Honda managed to hit a whopper of a successful corporate social media campaign with its Ferris Bueller revamp for the Super Bowl. Alas, Cameron is nowhere to be seen.

• With a $50 device bought off eBay, hackers can lift credit card info from the cards inside your wallet.

• Move over Seattle and Silicon Valley, the hot new tech cities include San Antonio; Greensboro, N.C.; and St. Louis.

• How serious is Apple about maintaining corporate secrets? Way serious. It creates fake projects for new engineers to work on until they can be trusted.

• Does your corporation have a corporate blog? The corporate blogging trend is on the decline, according to a recent study by the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Don’t worry, you can still get your blog fix right here.

• In an effort to become one of the top tech cities, should a local government sell stock to raise money for a broadband network? What the Green Bay Packers and rural England can teach the world about raising capital for technology improvements.

• Fresh Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson is wasting no time cleaning house. The Internet company has announced it is whacking 10 of its big mobile apps, like Yahoo Deals and Yahoo News.

• Twitter announced that it was going to allow country-specific censorship of Twitter posts last week. The proposed #TwitterBlackout on Saturday, however, really didn’t do anything (as one might have suspected).

• The fancy new Facebook Timeline is now open to all, and you get a week to go through your old posts and hide anything you don’t want your neighbor or your old girlfriend to see. You know, stuff you did back in those naïve days when we thought that posting on Facebook was totally harmless. Ah, youth!
• We’ve all heard that the Internet is a series of tubes, but now Londoners will be able to surf the tubes while riding the Tube. The London Underground will have Wi-Fi coverage in time for the 2012 Olympics. We hope they don’t forget to mind the gap.
• With bigger and bigger data centers on the horizon, it’s always a struggle to find a place to put them. This developer has submitted a design for 36,000-square-foot data center solutions that hide in plain sight as a luxury mansion.
• Only days after we waxed poetic on the future of RIM, Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balisillie are stepping down as co-CEOs of RIM. Is there any hope left for BlackBerry at this point?
• “Stay hungry, stay foolish” is probably one of the best Steve Jobs quotes around, and now it’s going to be making the rounds on a Virgin America plane named after Jobs. You probably don’t even have to ask if it’s got great Wi-Fi coverage, right?
• Should computer science be mandatory for kids in school? Andy Young believes that all kids should learn coding along with their reading and ‘rithmatic, but first we need to make sure normal people understand what “coding” means.
• Have you ever experienced some of these stupid user tricks?
• Google recognizes its green data center solutions with solid ideas you could adapt for just about any size company.

 We’re still not entirely on board with the iPhone 4S voice-controlled assistant Siri; apparently Siri has a problem understanding the Indian accent.

 The half-life of a tech worker is about 15 years, according to Matt Heusser. We’re feeling old right now, how about you?

 Get ready for some BIG big data. The White House is open sourcing its Data.gov website and taking it global.

 With the holiday tech season in full swing, this year’s big mover and shaker is Amazon.com’s Kindle Fire tablet. The company plans to ship almost 4 million Kindle Fire units in Q4 2011. But can you use it for business?

 Tired of all of those blog posts about how to keep women in information technology? Here’s how to get those women to quit so you don’t have to worry about it anymore.

 You might want to watch your credit card statements over the next few weeks. The hacker group Anonymous is pulling a Robin Hood: It’s attacking the finance industry by removing funds from credit card accounts and donating the stolen money to charities around the globe. (If you see something odd, notify your financial institution for reimbursement.)

 Where do you fall in the argument about using the iPad 2 versus the Kindle Fire for business?

Our smartphones go from five bars to maybe two the minute we step inside the door. We also need to have two Wi-Fi hubs. They’re maybe 40 feet apart, but the signal just can’t make it through — literally — three walls of steel. Of course, old buildings being quirky is nothing new: A friend works in a rehabbed warehouse space, and deals with the constant issues caused by his overworked HVAC system not being able to chill the servers due to lousy insulation on the outer walls.

So, you move your operations to a new structure and problem solved? Maybe! Or maybe your problems are just beginning.

Modern builders employing green building methods tend to wrap the building frame — from floor to rafters — in insulated membranes like Protect TF200 Thermo or gold foil TyVek wrap. It’s a reflective surface, which is great if you want to prevent lost heat and cooling, but it might not be so awesome if you rely on wireless connectivity. And the worst part is that it’s already in the walls when you sign the lease on your new space, and you’ll never realize that you’re in a Faraday cage until your team logs onto their iPads and BlackBerrys.

Features Writer Laura Smith wrote last month, “IT may own the blueprint of the future, but facilities owns the blueprint of the building, and that usually determines where pipes and cables are laid, as well as where vents and access control points are located. IT’s involvement at the beginning of a data center consolidation and virtualization project helps eliminate the need for expensive retrofitting later.” You can’t really do anything after a building has been wrapped in environmentally friendly construction materials, but this is the kind of information that the facilities manager might not realize will impact the CIO’s bottom line. Sure, another AirPort Extreme isn’t going to kill anyone’s budget, but an unexpected 1,000 extra AirPorts and a need to change a telecom strategy most definitely will have an impact.

You never really know what you don’t know, especially when it’s bricked up inside the walls. Great CIOs have always been able to roll with surprises, whether it’s an unexpected system outage or a lost radio signal; but this is just one more reason why a CIO needs to establish a great relationship with her facilities manager.

But guess what? News did not disappear. Information and video still showed up on Al Jazeera and CNN and other outlets, and such ancient technologies as fax, dial-up modem and ham radio served as alternatives for the unplugged. The Egypt Internet shutdown did not appear to slow down the protesters. The oldest form of communication — word of mouth — may work faster on a local level than anything in our digital world.

It seems as if wired Americans in particular were the most derailed by the shutdown because they were no longer able to get news from Egypt via their preferred channels of Twitter and Facebook. And Frank Rich makes a lot of sense when he argues that we are affected by “the default assumption that the Egyptian uprising … must be powered by the twin American-born phenomena of Twitter and Facebook.”

There are still serious questions about how effective social networking tools can be in these situations. I wrote last year about how the revolution will not be Tweeted. This week, another Middle East hotspot, Syria, opened up Facebook and YouTube after a three-year ban. But really, what better means is there to keep an eye on dissent?