Ross Brawn is keeping Honda's goals for this season in check, saying he'll be happy if the team find themselves fighting for points at every race.

"Our target for 2008 is to get back to the position occupied during the second half of the 2006 season when Honda fought for points at every race," he said during Tuesday's launch.

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Arranging one simple meeting is an exercise that captures, perfectly, why Magedson is so good at getting results — and why he's infuriated the CEOs of several midsize companies to the point that they accuse him, flatly, of extortion. He overthinks every detail. And it would never occur to him to stop pushing before he gets what he wants, even if he's not sure what that is.

First there's where to meet. It has to be a public place. A dog park? A restaurant? Even after Magedson decides on lunch at Chompie's, he calls back with instructions about which bank of booths to pick. He's planning to park in the handicapped spot, he says, and from the right booth, he'll be able to keep an eye on his dog.

After discussing that issue for 15 minutes, he calls back to clarify: It can't be just any booth near the window.

Car commemorates Earnhardt's 500 win

Car owner Richard Childress shared a podium Sunday with Teresa Earnhardt, unveiling a 2008 race car with the famous No. 3 GM Goodwrench to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Dale Earnhardt's Daytona 500 victory. It will be on display the rest of the week.

The victory was one of the most moving in Daytona 500 history, culminating Earnhardt's two decades of incredible success marked by unbelievable frustration at his previous failures in the 500.

Earnhardt died in the race three years later. Before his victory, he had finished second four times and had 10 top-five finishes.

Even at 58, it's a Barbie world for Gillette woman

Linda Hanson has wanted a Barbie doll and a pink Princess telephone since she was 10 years old.She finally bought a Barbie for herself in 1992. She had to wait 50 years for the Princess telephone, but just a few weeks ago, her 85-year-old father bought her one of the cotton-candy-pink telephones.Today, she is 58 and her Barbie collection dominates the window display case of Cook's Nook, the store she manages here in Gillette. There are Barbies in black and Barbies in pink and Barbies in purple and Barbies in gold. There are Holiday Barbies and there is a Millennium Barbie. There are Barbie ornaments, dozens and dozens of them; on the tree, on the shelves, on the display boxes. There is a cream-colored, Barbie-sized Corvette driven by a blonde Barbie in a emerald-green summer dress. There is also, of course, her brand-new, cotton-candy-pink, dial-lights-up-at-night Princess telephone sitting right up front.As far as Linda Hanson is concerned, she's living her second childhood."Why, I just loved Barbie as a child but when I was growing up, we didn't have a lot of money," she says.

IBM Improves SameTime Telephony and Collaboration

IBM just announced and demoed new advanced group collaboration and enterprise telephony capabilities for SameTime here at its Lotusphere conference in Orlando. The two will be delivered as new SameTime releases, SameTime for Unified Telephony and SameTime for Advanced, due out later this year.

SameTime for Advanced extends the group collaboration capabilities of SameTime, adding persistent chat and screen sharing. SameTime for Unified Telephony will help reduce the cost of supporting and maintaining mixed PBX environments by providing a common interface to all real-time collaboration within the SameTime client. While this won't enable users to access some advanced features specific to a given PBX, they will be able to access 80% of the core features that remain common across most PBXs, Bruce Morse, IBM Lotus's vice president of unified communications, told me after the keynote.