Best IPOs: Isilon Systems Inc. and Riverbed Technology Inc. got US$1.5 billion and $2 billion in market cap respectively, and CommVault Systems Inc. and Double-Take Software took $850 million and $300 million. Not bad for the last month of the year; that will make for some nice presents. Look for a ton more registrations and offerings in short order.

Most awesome new acronym: ARSE. This article appeared in December on the British Computer Society Web page. Alcohol Related Security Emergency -- i.e., getting looped at lunch, copying some files to your iPOD and then leaving it on the Tube. Brilliant.

Second best example of why everything needs to be encrypted: The revenue agency in the state of Wisconsin sent as many as 170,000 forms to taxpayers with mailing labels "mistakenly printed with their Social Security numbers." Paying taxes is hard enough without the government helping to add identity theft to the equation. I guess I shouldn't feel so bad that my newspaper company sent my information to a bunch of folks in western Massachusetts, or that Marriott lost all my stuff.

Best products of 2006:

The MoGo mouse from Newton Peripherals: rests and charges in your empty PCMCIA slot, pops out and is an optical mouse that runs wirelessly via Bluetooth.