If every day feels like you are on a hamster wheel, maybe you are examining the wrong metric.

An interesting announcement today two weeks before thier customer summit, Cisco bought a stake in Parallels and gets a Board seat.

Parallels is the middleware for many cloud providers, customers that Cisco would like to sell a lot of stuff through. This might be a response to the cooling relationship between Cisco and VMware, according to reports.

Alltel is completely gone now. AT&T grabbed the leftover assets (customers 500K+ and spectrum) of Alltel for $780 million per VZW's divestiture of Alltel after their 2009 sale.

Google updated Panda again. SearchEngineLand has this to say: "Google has announced a new Panda refresh, making this version number 24. This refresh has a noticeable impact 1.2% of English based queries according to Google. The previous confirmed update was #23 and it impacted 1.3% of English queries on December 21, 2012. Prior to that was a refresh on November 21st that impacted 0.8% of queries. It seems like Google is now rolling out these updates every 4 weeks or so."

Panda is Google's algorithm for search results to " helping people find high-quality sites in Google's search results."