tinamsteele.com

We all know that I’m all about the computers, technology and learning.

However, Saturday I had the most fun and gratifying experience when my husband and I took two young ladies with us (ages 13 and 15) to the local Washington County SPCA to go through volunteer training.

We learned how important it is to spade and neuter animals. We learned the whole process of how the animals are brought in, separated, determined to be adoptable, and then made available for adoption.

In the past about 50% were euthanized, but that number has been reduced by about 25% because they now have workshops for people who need low-cost spade and neutering. They also have a program with Boulder and Denver where they don’t have enough adoptable animals in their shelters. They actually transport animals to Colorado and they are adopted there.

Our goal as a volunteer is to make the animals more friendly and adoptable by socializing them. We played with several dogs and bathed one. They were all great dogs.

One dog we played with Oso, a Border Collie. He was very shy. I picked him because he looked like my “Little Girl” who was recently hit by a car. He was very sweet, but timid, which worries me because I am afraid he won’t be as outgoing and adoptable as the others. Border Collie’s are great dogs. They are often regarded as one of the most intelligent breeds. You can read more about them here on Dogster.com.

The girls also learned how to wash Annette. Annette is a Shepherd/Dachshund mix. One of the girls had never washed a dog before. Annette was very patient and sweet. She was very affectionate. She was beautiful and loved to give lots of kisses. She was calm and gentle. I wanted to take her home! My husband told me no, right now. We already have 3 dogs!

Before we left, the girls wanted to see the puppy building. I found another dog that I wanted to adopt. My husband told me “no,” sort of… It was a Weimaraner. His picture is not on the website yet. I am sure he will be snatched up soon. He was darling!

We did all this, to give back. Two of our dogs, Puppy and Duke, we adopted from the SPCA. They have been wonderful dogs. You can visit their pages on Dogster.com.

One last final note. Our SPCA has adorable calendars for sale for $5.00. They are wonderful! So, if you are like me and haven’t gotten one for 2008, hurry and get yours now!

They also have a wish list of items they need.

I am writing this post out of great concern. For the past year, we have been planning the implementation of a new email system. Our network administrator is an advocate of software based on open source and I support that philosophy, especially in the school environment. He worked for Williams for four years, solely supporting Microsoft Email Exchange Servers and intimately knows its flaws.

Our plan has been to change from Novell Groupwise to Zimbra (read more here). Many of our co-workers don’t understand why we aren’t going to Microsoft Outlook. It’s been a tough sell. Then, this past September of 2007, we heard that Zimbra was being bought by Yahoo (see article). This actually was seen as a good move by some in our school. It seemed to add legitimacy to our plan.

Now, the news is that Microsoft may possibly buy Yahoo. WOW! My heart failed when I heard the news. It sounds like a shot-gun wedding. All I could think of is what’s going to happen to our Zimbra. We are implementing it this very month. Is it going to be eaten up by Microsoft and go away? After all of our hard work? Yikes?

Saturday, I received this email from the Zimbra folks:

Dear Tina,

I am writing to communicate and discuss the unsolicited proposal that Y! got
from MSFT. This is a proposal that our board is considering and this may or
may not be completed. This is a very early unsolicited preliminary proposal
and even if the board did decide to go in that direction there is a long
road ahead.

At Zimbra, nothing has changed. We will remain utterly and thoroughly
committed to making our customers successful. We will continue to innovate
at a great pace. We will continue to disrupt the market with products that
are years ahead of our competition. We will continue to embrace open
standards. That’s our DNA. And we remain committed to doing that.

Many businesses, partners, Higher-Eds and ISPs have committed to Zimbra by
becoming paying customers. And there is an even larger set that is part of
our open source community. We just made an irrevocable contribution of
Zimbra 5.0 to the open source. No one can take that away. We will remain
true and faithful to our contractual obligations and will do everything
possible to make sure that our biggest assets - you - remain confident that
we are here to stay and execute. Thankfully, I can confidently say that the
Zimbra movement is bigger than any one company.

We are going to raise the bar exceptionally high next week with the
announcement of Zimbra 5.0 and the release of Zimbra Desktop which
consolidates many different mailboxes into one user interface. It’s the
first client-only play by Zimbra where we allow you to use our client to
talk to gmail, yahoo! mail or any IMAP/POP source. We are pretty excited
about this because it will be ages ahead of its other desktop companions
while also being open source.

Thank you so much for allowing us to serve you… we are not planning to
stop serving you. I will pro-actively communicate as and when I hear
something official and tangible.

Best,

Satish Dharmaraj
Zimbra Co-Founder

I hope this is a prediction, but when Microsoft throws money at projects and decides they are taking over, it is hard to fight “Big Brother.” I certainly hope so Mr. Dhamaraj.