Robbio's Blog

Tablets

2011-01-06T21:24:00.005Z

With the Consumer Electronics Show under way, there have been a number of new technologies that have been demonstrated. Not surprisingly, with the recent success of Apples' iPad, a number of these has focused on the emerging tablet market. As the now out-of-favour netbooks were three years ago with everyone and their brother trying to get a piece of the pie, the tablet is the new wunderkind.

First off was Google, who demonstrated Android 3, aka Honeycomb. They've confirmed the specs for this and all those who have jumped onto the Android tablet wagon will not be getting this operating system on their current tablets. But for those who have the patience to wait for the second wave of Android tablets, it looks like you'll get an experience that is more pleasurable than the current square peg in round hole scenario.

Secondly, Microsoft has confirmed that while hell isn't frozen over, it is getting a bit frosty there. After decades of Windows being only compatible with Intel processors, they've announced that the next version of Windows will work on ARM processors, which currently power almost all smartphones and most tablets. So while this announcement surprised most people, it makes logical sense if Microsoft wants to remain relevant in a post-PC era, which is where we are quickly heading.

Finally, Asus, arguably the founder of the netbook market, has announced a whole slew of tablets, with some models built upon ARM running Android and one model built using Intel running Windows 7.

And what of the company that started the recent tablet craze, Apple? To no one's surprise, they are being Apple and will wait to announce the iPad 2 in their own time.

Website

2010-10-05T21:11:00.008Z

After two years of relying on Facebook being my sole presence in the online world, I've decided that it was time to branch out again. While I do not know how often I'll blog, I am hoping that it'll be at least once a week again.

I've done very minor updates to my personal website. I doubt I'll do much more though with it. I might update the news page as lots has happened in the past two years. Anyway, I'm not sure if anyone is reading this blog anymore, but if you are, then welcome back and I hope you enjoy it. I will endeavour for my future posts to be a bit less dry than this one!

A Brief Update

2008-11-06T17:22:00.002Z

It's been a while since I've been able to blog. Suddenly my life has gotten much busier and I've found that I don't have anywhere near the same amount of time as I used to have in order to blog. Not sure how much longer I'll continue to blog, but I just wanted to let you know that I am still alive and haven't completely abandoned this. Thanks for continuing to sticking with me.

10 Simple Rules

2008-09-21T11:49:00.001Z

I'm not too bad when it comes to making friendships with women. So I thought I'd share 10 rules for men to follow when wanting to be friends with members of the fairer sex.

1. When speaking to women look only at their eyes, not elsewhere on their bodies, no matter how much talent they may have elsewhere. This makes it clear to them that you are interested in them, not their bodies.

2. Compliment their shoes. Women like shoes and they like that men notice them. Men don't understand shoes outside of a primal need to protect their feet, but this doesn't mean that you can't think of something nice to say about a woman's shoes.

3. Ask questions about them and listen. Women like to talk and given the opportunity, they will do so. Be patient and give her lots of time. And make sure you are listening attentively. This will require you to keep your arms at your side and to lean in toward the woman while she is speaking.

4. Remember what she says. You don't have to remember every little detail, but if you can remember some of it (and if you've paid attention to rule 3, you'll have plenty to choose from), women appreciate it. Slip in little things into future conversations. Even if a woman doesn't comment on it, she will definitely notice it.

5. Be vulnerable. Disclose something that is close and personal about you. It gives the woman the feeling that you trust her. It also gives her something to sympathise about for you. Women like to sympathise, as they are more in touch with their emotions than men are.

6. Don't be ambiguous. Women like to read things into statements. Don't give them the opportunity to do so. Be transparent and don't choose actions or words that can be taken the wrong way. Make your message clear. In this way, it avoids the woman wondering if you're playing games with her.

7. Appreciate women for who they are. Women like to be individuals. They also like to be affirmed in their own self worth. Let them know how much you appreciate them for who they are, and not what they can do for you or how they make you feel.

8. Talk emotions, not facts. Women like to talk about feelings. In this way, they can get inside and try to understand what makes you tick. As previously mentioned, women are more in tune with their emotions, and therefore like to explore and discuss them more often than men do. Facts bore women.

9. Don't expect women to forget things. Women have extremely good memories, often for what appears to be insignificant things. She will be able to remember ten years later what the colour of your socks were when you first met her. Don't be surprised by this. Instead, show that you appreciate her ability to remember the little details. After all, it is the little things in life that make it worth living.

10. Be patient. Sometimes women can act irrationally (and so can men). If you feel that a woman is acting irrational, do not ever tell the woman that you are thinking this. Instead, let the woman vent. Whatever it is that is bothering the woman will eventually pass. If you try to reason with a woman while she is in this state, it will only end in tears.

I'm certain there are more rules. And at some point I'll write some of my tips for women who want to be friends with men.

Brokedown Palace

2008-09-18T19:49:00.003Z

'Brokedown Palace', made almost ten years ago, stars Claire Danes and Kate Beckensale as teenagers who go on holiday to Thailand during their summer between high school and college. While in Thailand, they meet a mysterious stranger who invites them to Hong Kong for the weekend. En route to Hong Kong, the two girls get arrested by the local police and are found to be in possession of about four kilos of heroin. They are found guilty of drug smuggling and are both sentenced to 33 years in jail, in a place sarcastically referred to by its inmates as 'Brokedown Palace'.

They then employ the services of an ex-pat American lawyer known as 'Yankee Hank' (played by the ever under-appreciated Bill Pullman), who does his best to try to free them from prison.

With a storyline that sounds like it should be gripping and a very capable cast of actors, why is this film often found in the bargain bins at the local supermarket instead of gearing up for a special edition 10th anniversary release on DVD?

First off, the directing (provided by Jonathan Kaplan) is weak. There are moments where, under a more capable director, there could have been real suspense that would have engaged the audience. Secondly, the storyline is weak, which is saying something considering the plot. There's no real sense of purpose and it meanders without really going anywhere. Finally, the characters are unengaging, which again is incredible to believe given the cast. This actually is more a reflection of the screenplay and directing than it is on the actors. We all know that Claire Danes is a very capable actress and given more freedom, she could have made something of her role here. Unfortunately, her acting is stifled due to the many shortcomings of the director.

Brokedown Palace did have good cinematography and initially is very beautiful to look at. It shows so much promise at the beginning which is why it's all the more of a disappointment when it fails to live up to its potential. In short, we at FilmQuest can't really recommend watching this film and give it a meagre 3 out of 10 QuestMarks.

Table for 4

2008-09-11T21:07:00.001Z

As the only horror film to date that Jeon Ji Hyun has done, the Uninvited is a rather forgettable film. While Jeon Ji Hyun looks as beautiful as ever in it and her acting is top notch, the storyline is weak and the lead male, played by Park Shin Yang, is unengaging.

Park plays an interior designer by the name of Jung Won, who is coming home one night on the underground. Right before he gets off, he sees two girls sleeping on it. He tries to wake them up, but is unsuccessful at it. He then hears on the radio the next day about two girls that were killed the previous night on the underground. Lo and behold, he sees these two girls shortly thereafter at his dinner table, which was just given to him as a gift from his fiancee.

Jung Won is working on renovating a psychiatrist's office when he bumps into a girl named Yun (played by Jeon Ji Hyun). Through a series of events, she ends up at his apartment and is able to see the two dead girls. Yun has a history herself though, hence the reason why she's going to see a psychiatrist.

As far as stories go, this one isn't anything special. In fact, as far as horror films go, while the storyline is rather convoluted, it is extremely tame. The cinematography is unusually flat and unspectacular. In fact, the one redeeming quality of this entire film is the performance put in by Jeon Ji Hyun. We at FilmQuest give this film 4 QuestMarks out of 10, which is unusually low for a film with Jeon Ji Hyun in it.

Searching for the Next Engine

2008-09-09T20:05:00.001Z

Back in the days before the World Wide Web came along, there were a handful of search engines that helped you find the information you needed. Even in those nascent days of the Internet, the need for a search engine was apparent. Previously, you would just telnet into someone's server, and have a peek around their directory to see what they had. Of course, back in those days, there wasn't that much to be found on the Internet.

The first and biggest of these pre-web search engines was Archie in 1990. The staff members here at TechWatch had spent many of nights on Archie thinking it was the best thing since the creation of the Internet itself. Soon thereafter, Veronica and Jughead popped up (along with Gopher), all of which did nothing but find the information you were looking for.

So it was no surprise that some of the names that first became big on the web were the early seach engines such as AltaVista and Excite. This was at a time when Jerry Yang and David Filo started their own directory of the web, eventually calling it Yahoo, and promising their users that they would never sell out and put advertising on their website. A whole slew of search engines/web directories were born during the heady days of the mid-1990's, most of which today are nothing but curious footnotes in the history of the Internet. In fact there were so many of these search engines, all working in different ways, that aggregator search engines sprung up. These sites would automatically do a search on a number of the biggest and best search engines and then bring all the results back. Of these, the most notable was mamma.com ("the mother of all search engines"). Of this first batch of search engines, Yahoo quickly rose to the top of the list and dominated the field. It seemed like their reign would last a good long while.

And then Google came along in 1997 and changed everything. By this point, the search engines had morphed into 'web portals' and became hulking masses of confusion that were in the middle of an identity crisis. Google, with it's very simple layout and minimalist design (not to mention a superior search algorithm), slowly but surely started rising to the top of the search engines, all the while refusing to call themselves a search engine company (even though that was the only thing they did in those days).

And now, just over a decade later, Google is still king of the search engine. But is it time to start speculating if their reign is coming to an end? With new contenders such as Cuil (pronounced 'cool') and SearchMe (both of these engines look like the anti-Google with their black screens) trying to get into the game and older players like Microsoft and Yahoo trying to catch up, will it be long before a new champion is declared? Having used all of the aforementioned search engines for a while now, we feel that none of them are up to the challenge yet of being crowned the new king. Therefore we think that Google still has some breathing space yet in which to keep ahead of its competitors.

The Spitfire Grill

2008-09-04T20:21:00.003Z

Percy Talbot is a girl who's trying to escape her past by moving to a town that offers her a future. She is a young girl who has just finished serving time in prison and manages to find a job helping a crotchety old lady (Hannah Ferguson, played by Ellen Burstyn) run a well-loved diner (called 'The Spitfire Grill') in a sleepy community. While there, her fresh perspective manages to not only shake things up in a town that loves not having surprises, but it also endears her to most of the community's townsfolk.

As the storyline develops, we learn more about Percy and her past. We also learn about Hannah and a secret that she's been carrying around for years. It is an engaging story that has very fleshed out characters. Alison Elliott turns in a superb performance in the lead role of Percy. This is a feel-good film that runs deeper than most. It is no wonder that this 1996 production was turned into off-Broadway musical a mere five years later.

One of the weaknesses of this film is that the story runs a bit slow at times, but we at FilmQuest wonder if that was to let the audience absorb the full impact of the story. And amidst the four major characters in the film, there are a number of two-dimensional people which detract some from the richness of the story. Despite these nuisances, we would still recommend this film for viewing on a cold winter's night, when you're curled up in front of a fire with your loved ones. It was a close call, but in the end we had to give this film just 6 QuestMarks out of a possible 10, despite wanting to give it a higher rating. This is mainly due to the fact that although we loved the film, there were a number of shortcomings that detracted from the overall enjoyment of it.

Open Computers

2008-09-02T21:38:00.001Z

We at TechWatch have been finding the current tussle between Apple and Psystar to be very interesting. For those of you who haven't been following, here's a brief recap. Psystar back in April of this year announced that they were going to sell computer configurations that were capable of running unmodified versions of Mac OS X.5. Had they only sold the hardware, they might have gotten away with it. But they also offered to sell retail copies of Mac OS X.5 and preinstall it for you. This is clearly against the End User License Agreement (EULA) of Mac OS X, which spells out that it can only be installed on genuine Apple hardware.

So Apple did what they thought they needed to do in order to protect their intellectual property (IP) and sued Psystar on the ides of July this year for eight counts of copyright infringement. This came as a shock to absolutely no one in the IT world. In fact, we at TechWatch wondered why it took Apple three full months to do so. Apple, in asking for a full recall of all of the computers sold by Psystar with their operating system on it, was going for the jugular.

Psystar this week has decided to not roll over and play dead. Instead, they've decided to go and countersue Apple claiming they (Apple) have violated the antitrust act and had monopolistic behaviours. The resolution of this conflict could set a precedence for years to come. If Apple is successful, then that paves the way for IT companies to build exclusionary products that all but guarantees a market segment will be locked into buying their products. If Psystar is successful, however, then it means that no matter what you try to innovate, someone else could come along and steal your work and sell it for less through channels that you don't control.

We haven't seen a lawsuit with so much riding on it since Darl McBride of SCO sued IBM for a billion dollars back in March of 2003 for allegedly incorporating Unix code into Linux. We anxiously await to see what the next steps will be between Apple and Psystar.

Wall-E

2008-08-31T16:29:00.007Z

It's finally time for us to get around to do a review of the latest film by Pixar Animation Studios, Wall-E. Having read a very long article over at the Harvard Business Review written by the President of Disney Animation Studios and Pixar Animation Studios, Ed Catmull, on how Pixar fosters creativity, we had a better idea of where Pixar was coming from with their latest foray into feature-length animated films. In short they're not afraid to take wacky ideas and play around with them.

The premise behind Pixar's ninth film, and the second released since they were bought by Disney in January of 2006, is that a lowly robot, the eponymous Wall-E, is tasked with cleaning up a post-apocalyptic Earth. He then meets and falls in love with another robot, Eve. Before we even screened the film, we had serious concerns about how Pixar could take this concept and make it work when there clearly couldn't be much in the way of dialogue. While the trailer showed humourous sight gags of Wall-E and Eve, we doubted that these could carry a whole film for an hour and a half.

Having actually seen the film, we were right in having been concerned about the lack of dialogue. The first half hour, while entertaining, was a bit on the slow side. Things picked up a little once they made it into space, however. The lack of a clear villain in this film meant that there was very little in the way of dramatic tension. Also, we strongly dislike it when a film tries to moralise to us, which we felt this one tried to do.

Being Pixar gave birth to the now very-prolific artform of feature-length computer animated films, we had expected them to lead the field in this area. With Wall-E, we weren't disappointed. There's a reason why their first eight films grossed an average of $240 million at the American box office ($540 million internationally) and Wall-E is tracking to hit just under this level. Wall-E (the film) is beautifully rendered and at times it's easy to forget that this was all done with computer animation. When Toy Story came out in 1995, they had apologised for the lack of realistic looking humans in it. The animation in Wall-E shows just how far Pixar has come in the past thirteen years, and how much the other studios still need to go to catch up.

In conclusion, Wall-E is a very solid film produced by a studio that has had nothing but solid hits. While the story is slow at points and could have easily been told in a half hour, the stunning visuals and sight gags help fill in the weaknesses of this film. We at FilmQuest give this film a very positive 7 out of 10 QuestMarks.

With Pixar's next five films being Up (2009), Toy Story 3 (2010), Newt (2011), The Bear and the Bow (2011) and Cars 2 (2012), it looks like they have a rather full slate of films ahead of them. We can only hope that they don't become a victim of their own success and that the quality of their films remains high. We also hope that they don't get too wacky with their storylines (which they were in danger of doing with their last two films) and alienate their audiences. Pixar does like to gamble, but can even their Midas touch last much longer? Only time will tell.

Privacy On, Record Nothing

2008-08-27T21:24:00.003Z

The second beta of Internet Explorer 8 was released today. It's heartening to see that Microsoft has finally decided to try to play catch-up with the other major browsers as far as privacy goes. They have introduced a new surfing mode, one which erases all your cookies, visited websites and form data as you surf. This allows a person to surf the web without the fear of it being recorded and then discovered later.

Microsoft says that this would most likely appeal to spouses who want to buy each other gifts online without the fear of the surprise being spoiled. This could be a real reason why one would need such privacy, but there could be other reasons why one would not want others to know their surfing habits. While Microsoft calls this new surfing mode 'InPrivate Browsing', we at TechWatch have dubbed it the 'Privacy On, Record Nothing' (PORN) mode.

Regardless though the reasons why one would need to surf the web without leaving a trace, we do applaud Microsoft for finally trying to do something about implementing a feature that has been widely available in their competitors' products for quite some time now.

Casshern

2008-08-14T21:06:00.011Z

As every molecular biologist knows, the holy grail in human genetics is being able to revert a cell back to totipotency,which is activating the latent ability of a cell to turn into any other kind of human cell possible. This ability is only found in the cells of embryos, but is lost after the third or fourth division (when the embryo consists of between eight and sixteen cells).

Casshern is a 2004 Japanese film where a doctor has discovered totipotency, though the term is never used in the film and instead he calls his discovery 'neo-cells'. The events of the film happen in the near future after there's been 50 years of war between Europa and the Eastern Federation. A new federation, called 'Eurasia' is formed after the Eastern Federation wins the war. However, the war has taken a terrible toll on the environment, what with the various weapons used over the years being of the nuclear, chemical and biological varieties.

The neo-cells are seen as a way of ensuring the survival of the human race. However, after a terrible accident in the lab (are there any non-terrible lab accidents in films?), fully-formed human creatures, calling themselves neo sapiens, emerge from the neo-cell vats. The humans present during the accident immediately try to destroy the neo sapiens, but fail to do so. The neo sapiens thus are understandably bitter towards their human counterparts and eventually send out an android army to destroy them.

Amidst all this, the biologist's son is killed in the war. The biologist resurrects his son by soaking his son's body in the neo-cell vat. The son is reborn, but with super powers and becomes known as Casshern, after the name of a local deity.

The film is an interesting remake of the 1973 anime upon which it is based. The acting is extremely well done considering it was all done in front of green screens. The look and feel of the film is gorgeous if rather surreal, which is done to great effect. The soundtrack adds emphasis to the story and contributes greatly to the epic feel of this film. Where the film really lets the viewer down, however, is in the disjointed storytelling. We found the plot to be difficult to follow and greatly stretched our ability to suspend disbelief.

We at FilmQuest really wanted to like this film, but in the end after much debate we agreed to give it four out of ten QuestMarks. We recommend seeing this film only if you have no expectations of enjoying it and if you are prepared to spend the evening camped on the rewind button going back to try to figure out what's been going on.

Why DRM Is Evil

2008-08-12T19:16:00.004Z

We at TechWatch have never been fans of Digital Rights Management (DRM). This is one of the reasons why we cheered for Diamond when they released their Rio PMP300, the second mp3 player in the North American market (the first was Eiger Labs MPMan F10). With 32 mbs of memory, it could hold about 12 songs and could run 10-12 hours off of a single AA battery. What differentiated the mp3 format from other would be usurpers of the CD market is that there were no propriety methods that prevented music to be copied from one device to another (i.e. DRM).

We weren't the only ones to notice this. In the 10 years since the first mp3 player was released, the mp3 format has become wildly popular, enjoying a massive growth in the early millennium, thanks to Napster. The record companies were resistant to digital distribution of their music, instead trying to force consumers to be tied to the CD. To this end, instead of developing new revenue streams through legitimate online distribution channels, they sought to stop the illegal ones they found on the Internet.

It wasn't until Apple released their first iPod, on 23 October, 2001, and opened up the iTunes music store a year and a half later (28 April, 2003) that the music companies saw that there really was a market for digital downloads of their music. But even the iPod and iTunes had one over-arching weakness, the FairPlay system (Apple's DRM). To be fair to Apple, they wanted to release the music without DRM, but the music studios would have never done business with them had that been the case.

Once everyone had their eyes opened, they tried to figure out how to make a working business model out of selling music online. The problem was that all of their attempts failed due to the insistence of DRM. It was the customers who got burned when these business ventures fail. Microsoft is shuttering it's music store at the end of this month, but promises to keep their DRM servers (without which the purchased music would become unplayable) running for an indefinite period of time. Worse yet, Yahoo is shuttering their DRM servers at the end of this month, leaving all their customers with loads of files that are no longer good. Sure, Yahoo is offering people coupons to get their music in mp3 format (without DRM) from their partner RealNetworks. But surely, this is a hassle to get something that they should have gotten from the very beginning.

And let's not even start on the whole Sony escapade that introduced the term 'rootkit' into every music lover's vocabulary. This is why we applauded Amazon when they were able to cut deals with the four major music studios (Universal and EMI in September 2007, Warner Bros in December 2007 and Sony BMG in January 2008) to sell unprotected mp3 files from their music store, the first ever time that this happened. Sure, this is only available in the United States, but this is due to change this year as Amazon rolls out their music store internationally.

All in all, we think music companies should start assuming that most of their customers are honest, instead of the other way around. What kind of business model succeeds where the basic assumption towards their customers is "we know you're going to try to steal from us at every possible opportunity, so we're going to severely limit what you can do with the products you buy from us."

We leave you with this. It's a video produced by Microsoft on what the original iPod packaging would look like if it was designed by Microsoft.

The Dark Knight Ascendancy

2008-08-07T20:25:00.014Z

Christian Bale has certainly come a long ways since 1992, when he did a solo performance of the song 'Santa Fe' in the film musical 'Newsies'. With such light-hearted fare as 'Swing Kids' and 'Little Women' following that up, it appeared that Bale was in danger of stereotyping himself. And then 'American Psycho' came along and it made people really take another hard look at him and see him for the versatile and heavy-hitting actor that he truly was.

On the 15th of June, 2005, Bale played the titular hero in 'Batman Begins'. Under Christopher Nolan's vision of Gotham, we finally had a film that was focussed on the hero, rather than the camp villains of yesteryear. It was the story about one man's journey to become the hero he was destined to become. It had an intelligent and entertaining storyline, one that was often lacking in other super hero films.

Expectations were high for the latest Batman outing, 'The Dark Knight'. But due to a number of reasons, the second Batman film under Nolan far exceeded anything the studios had imagined. It set a record for the largest opening weekend ($158.4 million), and became the first film this year to lead the American box office three weeks running. It only took 18 days for 'The Dark Knight' to reach the magical $400 million mark, a feat that took the next closest competitor ('Shrek 2' in 2004) 43 days to attain. And with weak films opening in the next couple of weeks, there's every chance that it'll continue to lead the box office. In fact, there's talk of it becoming the first film since 'Titanic' in 1997 to break the $600 million mark.

So is this film as good as everyone claims it to be? While Nolan's second Batman film isn't as precisely executed as his first film, it was still richly engaging. We have a new hero in Gotham in the form of Harvey Dent (played by Aaron Eckhart), the new District Attorney who will do whatever it takes to clean up Gotham. We have Bale becoming more of a brooding character who is thinking about giving up the whole Batman gig. To add fuel to the fire, Batman's previous love interest, Rachel Dawes, is in love with Dent. Oh, and have we mentioned that there's the Joker (played terrifyingly psychotically by the late Heath Ledger) as well.

This film runs the razor edge of comic book film pitfalls. While Heath Ledger steals many of the scenes and could be worthy of the posthumous Oscar people are tipping him to win, it is a danger to have a a comic book film focus too much on the villain. This was a lesson learned painfully through the first series of Batman films. And then there's the love triangle. Maggie Gyllenhaal does a fantastic job as Dawes, the part played by Katie Holmes previously. Gyllenhaal does something that Holmes was unable to do, and that is to make the character interesting, one that has depth. But there's a danger of making the love story too melodramatic, which was the eventual Achilles heel of the Spiderman trilogy. And then you have the stoic protagonist who has a crisis of conscience, a superhero cliché if ever there was one.

With all these potential traps to get mired in, Nolan does a fantastic job of navigating through them and around them. His sense of direction paid off extremely well (both figuratively and literally). What is evident in this film is that Nolan really cares about the Batman mythos. No wonder Nolan has agreed to do a third Batman film. Rumours have it that Johny Depp is the front runner to play the villain, the Riddler, in that one. We at the FilmQuest offices hope that Batman will finally be the one to break the curse of the comic book film trilogy, that being that the first two films will be spectacular while the third one will be a disappointment.

In conclusion, we give 'The Dark Knight' an exceptional 8 out of 10, which is rare for a film to achieve and even rarer for one based on a comic book. If you get the opportunity to see this one, by all means do so, even if it means having to sell a kidney.

The Rise of the Netbooks

2008-08-05T18:55:00.005Z

Back on the 16th of October, 2007, Asus released arguably the first mainstream netbook on the market, called the Eee 700. This first iteration had a 7" screen, 256 megs ram and a 2gb solid-state drive. Adding on a keyboard that was designed to be comfortable to use for a person no bigger than a 5-year-old and this netbook was more of a notbook. When we at TechWatch first heard about it, we (along with most of the computer industry) were very skeptical of it and saw no future for it. It's not often that we're wrong in our prognostications, but when we are, we freely admit it. And boy were we wrong about this one. It far exceeded everyone's expectations.

Flash forward a mere ten months (just over half of a Moore's law cycle) and the netbook market is becoming saturated with everyone jumping in on the bandwagon. Of the current batch, there are three notables to mention.

The first is the HP 2133 Mini-Note. This one is by far the best looking netbook on the market. A very solid chassis and a keyboard that is actually comfortable to use should combine to make a very good computing experience. Right? Wrong. HP in an apparent bid to save money decided to use the Via 1.2 Ghz processor, which runs as slow as molasses (treacle) in January. Couple this with trying to run Windows Vista, and you have an extremely frustratingly slow experience, making video watching reserved for only the truly masochistic. Add in a battery life of less than 2 hours with a BrightView screen that makes it all but impossible to use outdoors and you have a truly sorry excuse for a netbook. They say beauty is only skin deep, and this one proves the old addage like nothing we've seen before.

The second netbook on offer is the MSI Wind. With a 10" screen and a nearly-full-sized keyboard, this has certainly ticked some of the right boxes. While it does look nice in an Apple-gee-I'm-smug sort of way, the build quality seemed a bit subpar. It's equipped with an Intel Atom 1.6 Ghz processor, 1gb ram and an 80gb hard drive as standard. In our test machine, running Windows XP, we noticed no noticeable lag in performance, easily handling video playback like there was no tomorrow. The only thing that prevents us from whole-heartedly recommending this one is the 3-cell battery, which means there was a less-than-stellar battery life of just over two hours in our testing.

The final netbook is the Asus EEE 1000H. It has basically all the same specs as the MSI Wind. But what sets this apart from the Wind is the 6-cell battery, which meant our test machine was pushing seven hours before finally giving up the ghost. What's not to like about this machine, outside of the ugly logo on the cover? If you're wanting a netbook to buy right now, then this is the one for you.

However, if you're patient, the next few months will prove interesting as Dell releases their E (does this sound familiar) machine later this month and Lenovo releases their IdeaPad S10 in October. Both of these are blatant "me-too's" in a market segment that is full to overflowing. But what these two machines have which is missing in the current wave of netbooks (with the obvious exception of the Mini-Note) is the clout of a well-known company. And certainly the Dell E is very easy on the eyes, even if it's taken a step backwards as far as specs go in a netbook. The netbook market, while still in its infancy, is certainly growing up and the victors will be emerging shortly. Until then, it'll certainly be a fun and fascinating time to be on the sidelines.

Five Words

2008-08-02T14:26:00.000Z

I had a workmate who was going in for his annual review. As part of his preparation for this, he was tasked by his line manager to ask people to give him a list of five words that would describe him at work. Here was the list I came up with for him:

Informational
Dedicated
Innovative
Organised
Tenacious

He was really pleased with this list, until he discovered my sixth, hidden word. Oops.

In Memoriam

2008-07-26T08:45:00.007Z

If you could give one last talk to people knowing that it would be your last, what would you say? Randy Pausch, a lecturer at Carnegie Mellon University, had this opportunity. He was 47 and was dying of pancreatic cancer.

Here is his last lecture in its entirety (76 minutes). It is a moving talk on the importance of achieving dreams and helping others to achieve their dreams. He doesn't talk about his illness or his reflections on facing death, although he does admit to having a deathbed conversion experience (he bought a Mac computer).

Yesterday, he succumbed to his illness and died. May he rest in peace.

A Steaming Cup of Coffee

2008-07-20T14:38:00.001Z

A couple days ago, a man walks into a coffee shop and orders a triple espresso on ice. The barista (the equivalent of a wine's sommelier, but for coffee) politely informs the customer that they don't sell espresso on ice. The guy was somewhat taken aback by this. And then he decides to get clever about it. He orders a triple espresso and a glass of ice. The barista sells him the requested items. And then the guy, in front of the barista, is about to pour the triple espresso over the ice, when the barista says, "Hey man. What you’re about to do… that’s really, really Not Okay." But the guy proceeds to do it anyway.

Later, he blogs about it, further stating that the only way he'd return to the coffee shop is to burn it down. The owner of the coffee shop, responds to the blogger on their website threatening to punch him in his reproductive organ. The Washington Post gets wind of the story and writes about it, thus causing it to spread like wildfire. All this because of a little cup of coffee. Can we all say together, "perspective". But I guess if I have to weigh in on this matter, I would have to say that I'm on the side of the coffee shop.

Prince Caspian

2008-07-17T21:07:00.002Z

It was the late days of the 1980's when a guy by the name of George Lucas tried to buy the film rights to 'The Hobbit' in order to make a film of it. Being unable to do so, he instead made the film 'Willow', which was remarkably similar in storyline to the Hobbit. At the time, it was hailed by the Little People of America as a breakthrough for using the most amount of people who are differently-sized vertically. This film also put the actor Warwick Davis on the map.

Prince Caspian is the second film based off of the Chronicles of Narnia by Clive Staples Lewis. The storyline revolves around the four Pevensie children as they try to help Prince Caspian reclaim the throne that is rightfully his. The storyline strays quite far in certain places from the book, even adding in a whole other battle scene. This film no longer needs to establish the whole idea of Narnia or to introduce the characters, as that was all done in the first film. Because of this, it was unfettered and was able to focus more on action and storyline, which it does very ably. However, this comes at the price of characterisation, and the people in the film seem strangely two-dimensional still.

In the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Weta Workshop was still cutting its teeth on special effects and costumes and creatures. In this film, one can see how much they've advanced since then, with the effects being much less uneven than in the aforementioned trilogy. However, we at FilmQuest still have issues with talking animals, and this still proves to be a sticking point for this film. There is just no good way to have animals talk in a believable manner.

At any rate, the film is still good and definitely enjoyable to watch, especially so since it has Warwick Davis in a very against-typecast role as the dwarf Nikabrik. We give this film a very solid 7 out of 10 stars.

Things Getting Ugly

2008-07-15T20:52:00.000Z

It's been a busy week in the world of TechWatch. First we bid adieu to a blogger, who at the age of 108, was the world's oldest. Second, Apple's iPhone 3G sold 1 million units in it's first weekend, a feat which took its predecessor 74 days to achieve. And in another blow to physical media, Netflix has announced that they will stream videos over the XBox 360.

But the real news is what's been happening with Yahoo and Microsoft. Wow, is this one getting ugly. Microsoft and Icahn made another attempt to buy Yahoo's search engine, only to be quickly rebuffed. Instead, Yahoo said they'd be willing to sell the company outright for $33 per share, the same exact figure that Microsoft had offered ten weeks ago and had been rejected as seriously undervaluing the company.

So what's changed in the past ten weeks? Well, the upcoming shareholder's meeting in just over two weeks for one, which sees the current board of directors as well as Jerry Yang in serious jeopardy of losing their jobs for botching the Microsoft negotiations months ago. We have said before that we seriously doubted that there'd be an independent Yahoo when 2008 is over, and we still stand by that.

The End of an Era

2008-07-13T20:44:00.001Z

I've had the same computer for the past 10 years (having shipped it over from the States when I moved here). I've often been very proud of that fact. Of course, everything inside of it has been updated almost on a yearly basis. In fact, the only things that were still from the original computer were the case and the floppy drive (even the power supply had been changed twice).

However, due to a number of reasons, not least of which was a workmate who chastised me and told me to loosen the purse strings a little, I've decided to capitulate and buy a new case. So after a decade of the same beige box that had become an old and familiar friend, I now have a new black and silver case with blue led's flashing from the front of it.

While it is nice to have front USB ports and a computer that doesn't look like it's bound for a museum, I sort of miss my old case. I guess I'm sort of sentimentally stupid that way.

The One to Watch

2008-07-08T21:21:00.006Z

The new iPhone 3G is being released this Friday, thus causing the websites who are carrying the iPhone to be swamped, most notably O2 and Carphone Warehouse. Apparently, demand is 10 times higher than the original iPhone and it is already sold out. We can certainly see why people would drool over this one. As we mentioned a couple months ago, it'll have GPS navigation, 3G access and of course a user interface that is second to none.

However, for those who are more tech savvy, as opposed to the great unwashed Apple supporters, our money is on the C905 by SonyEricsson. This one isn't due until early fourth quarter of this year, but it'll be well worth wait. So what makes this one so great? Well, it's a CyberShot camera, with 8.1 megapixels and a xenon flash (as opposed to the camera on the iPhone, which is seriously lacking). This camera will carry Sony's face-recognition software for taking great candids of people. It also has a GPS receiver (a SirfStar III chip), so not only can you get directions to your destination, but they've also managed to tie it to your camera so your photos can be geotagged. How cool is that? Also, it'll be SonyEricsson's first CyberShot mobile phone that will have WiFi built in, and we're betting that it won't take down WiFi routers like the iPhone did. This will be the one to watch, as it'll soon set a new standard in mobile phones being the centre of convergence of electronic gadgets.

Race to Witch Mountain

2008-07-03T21:04:00.004Z

When 'Escape to Witch Mountain' came out in 1975, it captured children's imaginations across the country. It was a simple, unassuming story of a brother and sister by the names of Tony and Tia (played by Ike Eisenmann and Kim Richards respectively) who are searching for their past. But these children aren't ordinary children. They have powers of telepathy and telekinesis, and thus become the objects of pursuit by an evil millionaire. It was a good, wholesome film, which you'd expect being it was made by Disney.

Three years later, Disney released a sequel, entitled 'Return from Witch Mountain'. This was more action oriented, but the storyline wasn't nearly as engaging nor as rewarding. Then in 1982, Disney released direct to TV a third film, entitled 'Beyond Witch Mountain'. This was aired only once in its first two decades of existence and was never released on home video. These days, it makes a very rare appearance on the Disney Channel. As such, it is extremely difficult to find anywhere. After many long years of searching, however, the staff at FilmQuest have finally managed to track down a copy of it and it's now on order and should reach our offices soon. Stay tuned for a full review of it shortly. It is notable for having both Tracey Gold and Kirk Cameron in it, both of whom would go on three years later to star together in the TV series 'Growing Pains'.

In March 2009, a remake of the original film is slated to be released. This will be called 'Race to Witch Mountain' and will star Alexander Ludwig and AnnaSophia Robb (from 'Bridge to Terebithia') as the siblings, Tony and Tia. It will also have the child actors from the original film in cameo roles as a police officer and a waitress. It should prove to be an interesting film as it's going to have an X-Files/Roswell feel to it. Remember, you read about it here first!

Boys Will Be Boys

2008-07-01T19:29:00.001Z

Well it's been a slow week in the world of technology. Yes, we bid farewell to both Bill Gates and Windows XP, eBay got a $61 million fine in a French court and a 16-year-old student used his blog and facebook to assemble the world's largest peace sign. But nothing too exciting. So we thought for this week's TechWatch, the staff would delve into the archives and give you a little history lesson.

In the summer of 1973, Alexander Sawchuk, an assistant professor at the USC Signal and Image Processing Institute (SIPI), and some colleagues were looking for an image to scan for a colleague's conference paper. They got bored of the regular stock photos and wanted something glossy and had a face in it. Almost as if on cue, in walks a guy with a recent Playboy magazine. They immediately took the centerfold, tore the top third of it off and wrapped it around the scanning drum.

This image soon became the most widely used image to test new compression and dithering algorithms. It is actually a very good image to use for such tests because there's a mixture between blurry and sharpness, it has a wide colour palette and it doesn't hurt that there's a beautiful woman in it.

Of course, all this goes to show that boys will be boys and even 25 years ago they managed to find a way to put porn into their computers. Below is the image that has appeared countless times in image textbooks over the past quarter century.

Compliments

2008-06-29T23:35:00.003Z

I guess I'm never going to get the whole idea of giving good compliments. Twice this past week I've failed miserably at giving them, and to the same person at that.

I was walking past a workmate's desk and noticed that she had a very old scientific calculator. I was impressed that it was so old and that she was still using it. I commented on the age of her calculator and she took it the wrong way, saying things like, "Whoever told you that saying that something is old is a compliment?" and "Why would I want to replace a calculator that is still working?" I really genuinely was trying to say a nice thing about the calculator but failed to do so, as only I can.

Later in the week, she was showing me pictures of a trip that she had taken to Europe last year. There was a picture that she was in. So I tried to compliment her by saying, "Wow, you look so much younger in that picture than you do now!" I figured if being old wasn't a compliment then surely saying that she was young looking must certainly be a good thing. But apparently I worded this one wrong as well. Oh well, live and learn.

Once in a Lifetime

2008-06-26T17:51:00.006Z

This week's film brings us to the heady days of the late 1980's with a made-for-TV film. But it's not just any film. It stars Christina Applegate (from 'Married with Children'), Tracey Gold (from 'Growing Pains') and Alyssa Milano (from 'Who's the Boss?'). They were the three reigning teen queens at the time. On top of this, you also had Alan Thicke and Kelsey Grammer. And don't look now, but is that a pre-Friends' Matthew Perry? A cast like this only comes along once in a lifetime and what a cast it was.

Dance 'til Dawn first aired in 1988 at a time when sitcoms ruled the airwaves and the cast in this film were the crème de la crème of the sitcom world. The plot is pretty basic. Hoover High School is having it's prom night. That's the whole plotline. Seriously. It's filled with so many clichès, you could pretty much take a ticksheet and mark them off as you come across them. There's the snobbish girl who gets her comeuppance, the nerdy boy who gets the popular girl, the bookworm wallflower who gets the popular guy, etc. The whole film plays out like an extended sitcom show, sans the laugh track. And that's a good thing.

But what makes this film so fun is that it doesn't take itself seriously at all. It makes no apologies for being what it is, and that is just to have a good time. This film won't change your life nor will it cause you to have any grand epiphanies, but then it's not trying to do that. It is just mindless entertainment, which it's very good at being. So we at FilmQuest are giving this film a rating of 6 out of 10, which is extremely high for this kind of film. And did we mention that spectacular cast?

The End of Communism

2008-06-24T21:06:00.003Z

Back in the late 1980's, a company called Aldus redefined desktop publishing (dtp) with their software package 'Pagemaker'. This was at a time when some companies had their entire business model built on designing and developing fonts. It was also a time when a little software company had been trying to release a new graphical interface for the burgeoning PC market. The first two versions of which had failed miserably.

The software company in question was Microsoft and the failed software was Windows. But during the development of their third incarnation of this new graphical interface, one of the people in Microsoft approached the head of the company, Bill Gates, and suggested that they include 11 fonts for free with Windows 3 in order to make the user experience more pleasant. Bill Gates immediately turned to the guy and said, "What are you, a communist?" This was one of Bill Gates' key phrases and every important person at Microsoft had at one time or another been accused of being a communist by him whenever they suggested something that is counter intuitive to the capitalistic business model.

Of course, Microsoft did give away free fonts with Windows 3 and jt became an instant success. This in turn led to the collapse of the entire font market almost overnight. And the rest as they say is history. Bill Gates has arguably changed the world in so many ways through the software developed at Microsoft. Next Monday, the 30th of June, will be his last day as an employee of the company that he helped cofound with his pal, Paul Allen. His guiding presence and business acumen will no doubt be sorely missed at Microsoft. And so this week's TechWatch bids a fond farewell to one of the most instrumental personalities in the computer world. We in the TechWatch offices consider it an honour and a privilege to have been witnesses to a personality the likes of which we'll probably never see again in our lifetimes.

A Large Moon

2008-06-21T19:55:00.001Z

Last Wednesday, for those of you who were fortunate enough to see the moonrise in the evening, you saw an exceptionally big moon. This is due to two factors. The first is that the moon is very close to the horizon (which you would expect with a moonrise) and the second is that it's a full moon (though technically you can never have a full moon, because then the moon would be in the shadow of the earth and therefore it would be in eclipse).

The moon doesn't change in size. If you think about it, you'll know this to be true. So why does the moon appear to be larger when it's near the horizon than when it is in the sky? Well, there are a couple of theories proposed. One of the previously widest accepted theories was that it is an example of the Müller-Lyer illusion, being closely related to the angular size illusion. However, in 1986, an exciting new theory, known as oculomotor micropsia, came onto the scene. Currently this is the theory that seems to make the most sense.

You can read more about it here.

Musa

2008-06-19T20:16:00.003Z

In the late 14th century, when the Yuan Dynasty was fading and was quickly being replaced by the rising Ming Dynasty, there were plenty of intrigues afoot. There was a small envoy sent from Korea to present a gift of horses to Hongwu, the Ming emporer. No one knows what happened to the envoy as it was never seen or heard from again.

Enter Musa, a warrior. He is a slave who is set free when his owner (a member of the Korean peace delegation) dies. He helps the envoy battle through a fierce and inhospitable land as they struggle to make it back to their homeland. On the way they find Bu Yong, a princess of the Ming Dynasty, who was being held captive. They decide to try to curry favour with Hongwu by returning her back to the palace.

Musa (aka 'The Warrior') is a stunning piece of Korean cinema. It is beautiful and cinematic. The storyline is captivating, even if the characters are difficult to connect with in any real emotional way. The one thing that I found truly disappointing about this film is the complete under-utilisation of Ziyi Zhang (who starred in 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' and 'House of Flying Daggers'). It is also very violent and bloody, so it's not for those who have squeamish stomachs. Nevertheless, I would still recommend watching this film if you ever get the chance.

Firefox 3

2008-06-17T19:41:00.003Z

Back in the early days of 2004, I started using Firefox 0.6. Even in it's earliest incarnation, I had fallen in love with it. I have used it as my primary browser for the past four years and have found that it does everything I need it to do. Or course, back before it had hit the release milestone of 1.0, it wasn't recognised by most online banks as a secure browser, so I still had to rely on Internet Explorer for those times when I needed to transfer funds into my off-shore accounts.

Today marks the release of Firefox 3. Over this weekend I had upgraded my operating system from Windows Vista 32 bit to Windows Vista 64 bit. Knowing full well that Firefox 3 was being released today, I held off on installing an older version of Firefox. Subsequently, I had to use Internet Explorer for the past couple of days, which wasn't a pleasant experience.

Anyway, the folks over at Mozilla want you to download a copy of Firefox 3 before 18:00 tomorrow evening. They are trying to set a record for most downloads of a software in a 24-hour period. This should be fairly easy for them to achieve, if for no other reason than because no record currently exists. Of course, because of this, it did take me almost half an hour to get through to their website, but it was worth it.

Laminin

2008-06-14T20:50:00.000Z

I often get annoyed when Christians try to over-spiritualise things and see God's work in places by using a mallet to force things into their world view. One of the more recent offenders of this is Louis Giglio. He speaks about laminin, which is a small protein that binds the organs together. Laminin is a cell adhesion molecule that pretty much holds the body together. A scientific drawing of laminin is as follows:

Does the shape look familiar? That's what Giglio thought as well. And he drew the obvious analogies with Christ being the glue that holds our body together, even quoting Colossians 1. The problem is that in real life, laminin doesn't actually look like the scientific diagram, as is witnessed by the following:

While I do believe that God has made our bodies down to the minutest detail, I have problems with respected preachers building whole sermons out of suspect items. I mean there are already so many things about the human body that attest to the glory of God, that we don't need to rely on things such as laminin to force God into the human body. After all, He's already there without us having to do this.

D.A.R.Y.L

2008-06-12T20:28:00.004Z

In 1983, John Badham released a film that changed everyone's perceptions of computers. It starred a young Matthew Broderick who managed to hack his way into NORAD's computers and almost started a global thermal nuclear war, which would have eliminated all life on this world as we know it. The film I'm speaking about is of course 'War Games'.

Two years later in an attempt to capitalise on the paranoia that was created by this seminal film, Simon Wincer released the film 'D.A.R.Y.L.' Where 'War Games' was primarily focused on the dangers of entrusting the whole of the national strategic defence system to a single computer system, 'D.A.R.Y.L.' was more about the human element of computers. Barret Oliver stars as Daryl, a young boy who has no memory of his past but who is gifted with intelligence beyond genius. The film centres around his attempts at trying to adapt to a normal family household.

While 'D.A.R.Y.L.' is rather less ambitious in scope than 'War Games', in a number of ways it was the more prescient of the two films. It has a warm storyline that has a number of good moments. While the writing is a bit uneven at times and some of the humour is forced, it is still an enjoyable romp through 1980's paranoia. If you get a chance to see this film, by all means do it, if for nothing else, but to see one of the first references in film to the 'Turing Test'.

Flying Down Main Street

2008-06-10T19:08:00.004Z

There is an apocryphal tale about the time that Deep Blue (a huge super-computer built by IBM) first beat Garry Kasparov (the world's foremost chess champion) back on the 10th of February 1996. This was a historic and momentous event in that it was the first time that a machine had ever beaten the best chess player in the world. What was neglected to be mentioned at the time was that Deep Blue was specifically designed to play against Garry Kasparov's style. Where the apocryphal tale comes in is that after the match, it was reportedly asked of Deep Blue what he's going to do now that he's beaten Kasparov. The reply by Deep Blue was, "I'm going to go to www.disneyland.com."

This brings us to today's TechWatch topic: Google Earth. It has recently been announced that Google and Disney have teamed up to bring a 3D version of all four of Disneyworld's theme parks in Orlando, Florida to Google Earth. Now you can see this magnificent structure in all the glory that a virtual world can provide. It can also help you plan your next vacation there. This is truly what the world (at least the one represented by Google Earth) has been waiting for. Read more about this here.

Yama

2008-06-08T10:46:00.002Z

The Chinese have a belief that if you die, your body must be given a proper burial before the angel of death comes to claim your soul. This angel of death is known as 'Yama'. If Yama comes for you before a proper burial happens, then you will go to naraka, the Buddhist version of hell. This concept of hell differs from the western world in a couple of fundamental ways. The most significant being that if a soul goes to hell, then it is not for all eternity, but for a set-length of time (however, this is usually a very long period of time).

The Buddhist Yama (which is the predominant version in China) is actually a derivative of the Hinduist Yama. While they are similar, they are not the same.

I find the concept of Yama to be interesting in that all five of the major world religions believe in the 'Angel of Death' in one form or another. Why do you think that is?

Crystal Skulls

2008-06-04T19:32:00.001Z

Back when I was just barely a teenager, I had read about a crystal skull that was supposedly cursed. This particular one was known as the Mitchell-Hedges skull. Though there was much controversy surrounding the exact origin of the finding of it, there were two things that everyone can agree upon. The first is that it is carved against the natural axis of the quartz. Even today, using the most sophisticated devices, attempting to carve crystal against its axis will result in it shattering. The second is that no mechanical tools were used in carving it which resulted in a smoothness of the polishing that is so great that it cannot be duplicated using modern methods. They figure that the skull would have taken some 300 years of man hours to carve and polish, which would effectively have made it impossible to create. Quite simply put, the skull should not exist.

And this is the backdrop for the latest Indiana Jones film. The first three films (okay, really only the first and third ones) were known for simply being about having a good time and a good source of entertainment. Also, while they were a bit far-fetched and stretched your ability to suspend disbelief, there was some line that they didn't cross. This is not the case for this latest film. I found that this one didn't seem to care about that line at all and that there were some hearkenings back to the earlier Steven Spielberg film, A.I. This is not a good thing. The film at the beginning was entertaining, if a little slow at times (but this could have been due to Harrison Ford being 20 years older and not being able to run quite as fast). But the last half of it really ruined it for me. I can't honestly recommend this film unless you're just looking for escapism and have no expectations for it whatsoever.

Kindle

2008-06-02T20:02:00.001Z

Back in the late 1990's, there were a number of companies that were betting that the next 'killer' gadget was going to be an eBook reader. Franklin was one of the first off the block with their eBookman. It was basically a cut-down PDA (which is really saying something given the fact that back in those days PDA's were severely underwhelming to begin with). What marked this apart from all other PDA's was that this one had a special proprietary (read DRM-plagued) eBook reader. What it didn't have was any marketing support. This caused any effort at getting momentum behind it nigh on impossible. Add to this the fact that there was also a glitch that caused it to lose everything in memory every time the batteries needed to be replaced (which was literally every couple of hours) and it's no wonder that it was such a spectacular flop.

Since those rather inauspicious early days, things haven't really changed much. A proliferation of proprietary formats practically guaranteed that no one reader would be able to succeed. Is it any wonder that even now a decade later when tech companies come back to the idea of an eBook reader, that customers would yawn if only they could wake up long enough to do so.

But now Amazon thinks it can finally do the eBook reader idea properly. Last November they had released the Kindle, which was received to mostly favourable reviews. However, I suspect it's not doing as well as Amazon has hoped due to the fact that they won't release any sales numbers about the Kindle itself or about any of the eBooks available for it. But it is slowly garnering more and more support. Case in point: Simon and Shuster just released another 5000 titles for the Kindle, bringing the total number of avaible eBooks to 125,000. If you combine this with Amazon's knack for tapping into consumer zeitgeist, the Kindle might just be the spark required to set the world of eBooks ablaze.

Amazement

2008-05-31T22:15:00.004Z

Sometimes I am amazed by just how good other people's hearts are. It constantly inspires me. Being the recipient of such kindness recently makes me very grateful that there are still people who truly desire to make this world a better place. It inspires me to try to be a better person myself. While I fall far short of other people's kindness, I do try.

We Need The Children

2008-05-28T20:30:00.003Z

Not many people know this of me, but the first famous person that I had a proper 'crush' on was Alyssa Milano, back when she was in the TV show "Who's the Boss?" This was the mid-80's and she was huge as a teen star. In the late 80's and early 90's, she released some music CD's, but only in Japan. After years of searching for them, I've finally managed to snag all five of them off of eBay. They are all really cheesy pop songs, but I like them. My favourite song from those albums is 'We Need the Children'. It's a rather humanistic, secular song, but it is really beautiful. Here are the lyrics:

The time has come
When we all have to take a stand
We can make it together
By placing our hands in each others hands

In your darkest hour
In your time of need

* Oh we need the children
To teach the world
To carry on
We need the children
To live in peace
Til fear is gone

** We're the hope of all people
We shine the light
We need the children

We live in a world
Where the love has been thrown away
We can help one another
By living each day for a better day

In our brightest hour
In our time of hope

* Repeat

** Repeat

Together we can build a place
Of love and peace and happiness
We can save the human race
We'll shine through darkness

* Repeat

You can listen to it here.

Web Browsers

2008-05-26T22:13:00.004Z

A lot of emphasis has been on the humble web browser. Some are saying that the days of the web browser are numbered. But with Internet Explorer 8 currently in beta and Firefox 3 at the Release Candidate 1 stage, innovations are still abounding in the ubiquitous browser. Take for example the way that Firefox 3 now uses a database to organise bookmarks and instead of having to manually sort them into folders, all you need to do is do a search and then save that search. Future bookmarks that meet the criteria for that search will then automatically appear.

I was strongly opposed to the tactics that Apple's Safari did recently to triple their market share (going from .08% to .24%). How is a full web browser considered to be an update to iTunes? And yet that's exactly how Apple distributed Safari in March, as an update to iTunes. Shame on you Mr Jobs for trying to pull a fast one.

Long gone are the days of 1993 when Mosaic was the killer app of the Internet. Gone also are the latter days when there was a little company called Netscape who owned 95% of the browser market through a web browser that you actually had to pay for. Now it's a dog-eat-dog world and everyone and their brother is trying to get into the picture. What will the world of the browser look like in 10 year's time? I don't know, but hazarding a guess, I'd say we're in for one heckuva ride.

Another Munro Trip

2008-05-24T07:13:00.004Z

This morning I'm leaving to go up to Inverness for a 3-day weekend. We're planning on doing some camping and more Munro bagging. We have some pretty good hills lined up. As they are a ways away from where we are tenting at, we're also taking our bikes so we can get to them without too much more effort.

We had been up to Inverness just four weeks ago and had managed to do six Munros that weekend. The total for my Munros bagged in the past 2 1/2 years will be up to 48 after this weekend. In Loch Ossian, in one month's time, we will manage to do four Munros, which will then bring my total over the 50 mark, which for me is a rather significant number.

I wish everyone a happy and safe weekend. And remember, if you choose to drink, drink in moderation and never drive while under the influence. This safety message has been brought to you by the Wise Alcohol Safety Teachings Education Department.

A Man of Mettle

2008-05-20T19:14:00.002Z

When I first heard that they were planning to make a large screen version of the comic book 'Iron Man', I must admit I had serious misgivings. Now I could understand 'Spiderman', 'Fantastic Four' and 'X-Men'. A lot of people have heard about these comics and know some of the storylines to them. But Iron Man? He was never very popular and he had a really poor supporting cast of flunkies and supervillains.

Having seen the film, however, I can honestly say that it far exceeded my expectations. Robert Downey, Jr. does such an inspired job of playing a character who has everything going for him, but who still has some very human flaws. I was wondering if he was channelling some of his own life for this performance. Gwyneth Paltrow, who is always easy on the eyes, however, isn't given much to do with her character, which is unfortunate. There were times when you could feel her trying to rise above the script, but ultimately she's not really given the opportunity to do so.

It should have been expected that, for Iron Man's first super-powered nemesis, they chose Iron Monger. While the final action sequence is one for the video game generation, it's still engaging nonetheless. But what really makes this film is the very real person of Tony Stark (the protagonist) with whom you can empathise. You can tell that he is truly a man who has a heart and who is a man of mettle.

Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web

2008-05-18T21:32:00.005Z

So what is Jerry Yang thinking these days? He managed to get his way by fending off Microsoft's attempt to buy out the company that he helped to cofound with David Filo in 1994. Back then, when Yahoo was known as 'Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web', I doubt Yang would have ever thought that what started out as a university thesis operating out of a trailer in Stanford, California would have ballooned into the headache it's now become.

You have to give Yahoo's board credit though. They managed to stave off the 800-pound gorilla, which is no mean feat to do. Apparently they didn't feel that Steve Ballmer would be a good Yin for their Yang, even if Microsoft was offering $44.6 billion to do so. However, just when they thought they were out of the woods, not only are they getting slapped with a class-action lawsuit from shareholders, but they're also being threatened with losing their positions if Carl Icahn has anything to say about it.

So with Yang now embroiled in a many sided fight to save not only his job, his savings and his reputation, it's little wonder that he's now in talks with Microsoft again, but on a much smaller scale. How will things eventually pan out? I'm not sure. I doubt that we'll have an independent Yahoo in 2009 and I'm quite certain that Yang is going to have a really rough rest of the year, even if he somehow manages to hold onto his job. But whatever happens, it's now certain that this has all just turned into one big yabrouhaha where everyone will be a loser except for Google.

Bad Day at the Office

2008-05-16T23:57:00.002Z

Sometimes technology is a good thing. It can help make people more efficient and eliminates some mind-numbing tedious tasks. But when technology fails, it can lead to a bad day at the office, as is evidenced by this video. Seriously, you have to see it to believe it.

A 3G iPhone

2008-05-14T18:04:00.004Z

With stocks of the iPhone now sold out in both the US and the UK, can it be long before Steve Jobs finally announces an upgrade to the phone that has arguably redefined what a smartphone should be? Most industry analysts are expecting him to announce something on the 9th of June at the Worldwide Developers Conference, where he's the keynote speaker. Could it be that we'll finally be seeing a 3G iPhone?

When the iPhone first came out on the 29th of June last year, many people criticised it for not being 3G capable. But despite this, the iPhone debuted in second place with over a quarter (27%) of the US market share, easily outpacing all of the smartphones based on Symbian, Linux and Palm OS combined, and in the process, knocking all of the phones based on Windows Mobile into third place. In fact, it was second only to Blackberry.

This has caused Blackberry to wake up and smell the toast burning, as is evidenced by their new Blackberry Bold phone, which was announced only yesterday and due for release this summer. Sporting a qwerty keyboard, a full web browser and a screen that has twice the real estate of their previous smartphone, it appears that Blackberry is ready to take the iPhone on as a serious competitor. But is it too little, too late? Only time will be able to answer that one.

Isabel

2008-05-12T21:29:00.004Z

I am amazed by Isabel, which has helped to save countless lives and is a prime example of what a super cruncher can do in order to benefit humanity.

Let me give some back story here. In 1999, a London stockbroker by the name of Jason Maude brought his 3-year-old daughter, Isabel, to the hospital because she had a high fever and other symptoms. She was promptly diagnosed with chicken pox and sent home. Three days later her organs started shutting down, at which point they properly diagnosed her as having a rare flesh-eating disease and managed to save her life, though without leaving permanent scars on her body.

Out of this near tragic story, Jason quit his job and partnered with Joseph Britto, the doctor who saved Isabel's life. Together they created a huge medical database to help physicians the world over diagnose diseases. He named this database after his daughter, Isabel. It catalogues over 11,000 diseases and cross references them with medical journals, drugs, symptoms, and a host of other related links.

Isabel then takes all this information and processes it. It's like number crunching, but on steroids, i.e. super crunching. Isabel is just one example of how super crunchers are changing the world. Everything from predicting the price of wine to picking the next home run hitter in baseball, super crunchers are taking the guesswork out of previously unquantifiable expertise. For more information on super crunching, I would highly recommend the book 'Super Crunchers' by Ian Ayres. It is a fascinating read and you won't look at the world the same again. I guarantee it.

Commitment

2008-04-17T20:01:00.003Z

I've been wanting to blog about this topic all week now, but have only now been able to get the time to do so properly. In Switzerland, I was skiing with this guy named John for the first week. He is a much better skier than I am. Because of that, he pushed me (gently) to the edge of my boundaries and expanded them. By the end of the week I was doing black runs (the hardest ones) like there was no tomorrow.

Often when we got to a very steep bit of the slope, I would stop and look at it. My heart would skip a beat and I'd tell myself that I couldn't make it. And then John gave me some very good advice. He told me, "You have to just make a commitment in your mind to go for it and then commit to the mountain. There's nothing you can do but commit." It worked. Whenever I was facing a really steep run, my mantra became, "There's nothing to do but commit." And then I'd take a deep breath and go for it. It worked so well that this has now become my new mantra for life in general for whenever I'm facing some really challenging times or huge tasks.

Back in Glasgow

2008-04-13T20:00:00.002Z

Just returned to Glasgow about an hour ago. Am exhausted. It's been a long two weeks, but good. Will blog more later.

Ever Since The World Began

2008-03-27T20:26:00.005Z

Lately there has been so much happening in my life to blog about, but I have been unable to write about it. And now I'm off to Switzerland for two weeks of skiing and will be unable to blog until I come back. Until that time, I leave you with this song.

I’ll never know what brought me here,
As if somebody led my hand,
It seems I hardly had to steer,
My course was planned.
And destiny it guides us all,
And by it’s hand we rise and fall,
But only for a moment,
Time enough to catch our breath again.

Refrain
And we’re just another piece of the puzzle,
Just another part of the plan,
How one life touches the other
Is so hard to understand --
Still we walk this road together,
We try and go as far as we can,
And we have waited for this moment in time,
Ever since the world began.

Taking in the times gone by,
We wonder how it all began,
We’ll never know and still we
Try to understand,
And even though the seasons change,
The reasons shall remain the same,
It’s love that keeps us holding on
'Til we can see the sun again.

(Refrain)

And I stand alone, a man of stone,
Against the driving rain--
And the night -- it’s got your number,
And the wind -- it cries your name --
And we search for clues, win or lose,
In this we’re all the same --
The hope still burns eternal,
We’re the keeper of the flame--

(Refrain)

We Are The World

2008-03-21T16:50:00.004Z

Well, I'm off out of town this weekend to do some more hillwalking. I wish everyone a happy easter as you all choose your own ways in remembering the resurrection of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.

I also leave you with this video found on YouTube. It's the 1985 song, 'We Are The World', except done by Japanese impersonators. And I must say that they do an excellent job of it.

Pi Day

2008-03-17T22:00:00.004Z

I wanted to blog about this last Friday, but due to not being near a computer or indeed even mobile reception for the whole of the weekend, I was unable to do so.

Friday was probably my favourite day of the year. Not only was it White Day (a Korean version of Valentine's Day where the men give women gifts) and Albert Einstein's birthday, but it was also Pi Day, due to the American way of writing dates (3/14). For those who don't know, an approximation of pi is 3.141592. I once knew pi to the 100th decimal point, but these days I can only manage it to 50.

I've mentioned before that the Bible makes reference to pi in 1 Kings 7:23:

He made the Sea of cast metal, circular in shape, measuring ten cubits from rim to rim and five cubits high. It took a circumference of thirty cubits to measure around it.

Thirty divided by ten gives a value of 3. This was an amazingly poor approximation of pi considering both the Egyptians (3.16) and the Babylonians (3.125) had much better values of pi at the time. However, it is interesting to note that the word circumference happens to be spelled with an extra letter in the original Hebrew. Since in Hebrew all letters are also numbers, if we take the ratio of the value for the word as it is written (111) to the normal spelled word (106) we get the number 1.047169811... If you multiply this number by 3 you get 3.141509434, which is a remarkably close approximation of pi. Coincidence? I think not.

Milestones in Life

2008-03-16T21:52:00.002Z

Conversation I had this weekend with a guy I've never met before:

Me: So where are you from?
Guy: Wimbledon.
Me: Don't they have some small tennis game or something there every year?
Guy: Yes, and it's very inconvenient to us locals.
Me: Have you ever been to one of the tournaments there?
Guy: No, but my wife got some tickets for a match for this year.
Me: Oh, that's exciting.
Guy: Well, we can't use them. Our oldest daughter is graduating from university that day.
Me: Surely, Wimbledon should take priority. I mean your daughter will have other milestones in her life that you can celebrate. But how often can you get tickets to Wimbledon?
Guy: Well, I did miss our son's university graduation already. And our daughter will be getting married soon which I'll obviously have to be going to. So maybe. I'll have to talk it over with the wife though.
Me: You do know that I am only joking.
Guy: Oh.

Rewarding Good Work

2008-03-11T21:16:00.004Z

I've been asked to be part of this small task team to plan the goals and direction of the company for the next two years. Today we were presenting our recommendations to the senior leadership team. During my part of the presentation, our head of HR commented, "I see that you haven't mentioned yet how you were going to reward people for doing a good job." I looked him in the eyes and immediately replied to him, "A job well done should be its own reward." I said it in such a tone that said to him that, as head of HR, he should know this already. He looks at me back and I can see him trying to formulate his response to my comment. The whole room is in stunned silence wondering what will happen next.

And then after just enough time to let him formulate his response but not enough time to actually let him give voice to it, I cracked a smile. At which point the whole room started laughing and the head of HR said to me, "You nearly had me there." Someday, my sense of humour is going to get me into trouble at work, but thankfully today wasn't that day.

Factoring Large Numbers

2008-03-09T15:27:00.003Z

I've been intermittently for the past fifteen years working on a way of factoring large numbers. Before the days of the Internet, I had 'discovered' that any odd number (N) plus the square of a second number (r) will always add up to the square of a third number (P). Once you know what r and P are, then the two factors of N are (P-r) and (P+r). So let's say you have the number 77. Since 77+4=81, r is 2 and P is 9. This means that the two factors are 9-2 and 9+2 (or 7 and 11). Since this was rather intuitive, I was almost certain that I couldn't have been the first to discover this. Once the Internet happened, I was proven correct. I learned that it was first discovered by Fermat in the 17th century and the method is now known as the 'congruence of squares'. Since then, no real advance has happened. In fact, all modern methods of factoring large numbers is a variation of this technique.

The problem is trying to determine what r and P are. Here, there has been very little advancement. We knew that of r and P, one had to be odd and the other had to be even, but we didn't know which was which. Until now. I've discovered a method that immediately determines if r is odd or even. I've also discovered a number of other properties, which reduces the amount of possible factors by a tenth. In fact if I can refine my techniques a little more, I could be able to factor very large numbers (let's say thousands of digits long) in a matter of minutes. This would break all modern methods of encryption, since they're all based on the fact that it's incredibly difficult to factor really large numbers. And if that happens, then the need to move to quantum encryption becomes ever more important.

Navigating Callander

2008-03-08T21:31:00.002Z

This weekend the hillwalkers decided to host a course in navigation in order to get more people trained in how to successfully lead hillwalks. Now any idiot can lead a hillwalk, but only a skilled person can lead a group up a hill that they were actually intending to climb and then to lead the people back down again alive.

The course started last night with a meal and some theory. There were a dozen people there. We covered such things as how to read a map and how to use a compass. This included how to get a bearing and how to triangulate your position by using known landmarks. By the end of the evening, a lot of people were excited about being able to put these newfound talents to the test.

So this morning, eight of us headed up to the Callander area to try some navigating. We split into two groups of four and practiced trying to find various spots on the map. Even though it was cold and windy and raining and hailing, it was a most enjoyable day. And people, even if they aren't fully competent yet in navigating, are certainly much more skilled than what they had been.

Priorities in Life

2008-03-04T22:44:00.002Z

I think sometimes people forget what's truly important in life. They end up doing what's called "majoring on the minors". This is just another way of saying "making mountains out of molehills". I try to retain a sense of perspective when it comes to life, not always an easy thing to do.

One thing that always comes back to me is this sermon I had heard on the radio about ten years ago. It was on how to relate to others. He said that people are more important than possessions. I have been a strong proponent of this view ever since then. I try to live my life by this. Afterall, possessions can be replaced, but friendships cannot. I would absolutely be horrified if I've ever found out that I've caused a rift in a friendship due to a dispute over a material item.

At the end of the day, you can't take it with you. I feel that as long as God has blessed me with the ability to have possessions, I am to be generous with those, within reason of course.

Ansel Adams

2008-03-02T21:32:00.005Z

I spent this weekend in Edinburgh visiting my friend there. We had a great time together, and we had managed to pack it full of things to do. We started off by climbing to the top of Calton Hill and looking at the view of Edinburgh from there. Next we climbed all 289 steps of the Scott Monument (located in the heart of the city) and got to see the view from there as well. The Scott Monument is a fantastic piece of gothic architecture and it was really exciting to be able to go to the top and look out onto the city.

Our final activity was to go and see an exhibition of Ansel Adam's photographs. This was only in Edinburgh for a short time and I was thankful that I was able to go see it. I have been a fan of his work ever since I first got into photography 15 years ago. One thing that I really noticed was the way he framed his pictures in such a way where he was still able to bring out the subject of his photos using such a large f-stop (small aperture size). I know I wouldn't have the confidence to do that, but that's probably why he was considered a genius and I'm not at all known in the art world.

Throw in a nice roast lamb dinner and a pancake breakfast, and we had all the makings of a fantastic weekend.

Sadie Hawkins

2008-02-28T22:53:00.002Z

In the States, there is the tradition of having a "Sadie Hawkins" dance, where the girls ask the boys to go with them. This was started in a comic strip called "Li'l Abner" back in 1937. I never cared much for these dances as I never was asked to one of them. In fact, I never cared much for dances in general in high school because whenever I asked someone to go with me to one, she would say no.

Tomorrow is 'leap day', the 29th of February. And in the UK there's a tradition where the girl asks the guy out. This brings back memories from high school. But thankfully I have grown since then and I am now not expecting any girl to pursue me. But I've been too busy anyway lately to pay heed to things like this. In fact, at this point in my life, I think a girlfriend would only slow me down. I don't really mean that, but there is some truth to that statement.

A Sad Day

2008-02-27T23:03:00.003Z

Well, today my friend who has been helping me learn the Chinese characters is leaving Glasgow. She's moving back to China to get married. So alas, I will have to go it alone now into the vast uncharted wilderness of the Chinese written language. It is easy to get lost and confused there and accidentally write the wrong character, because there are so many that sound alike.

With Chinese, it's as much as knowing what the word means as it is about the pronounciation in order to determine which character to use. For example, if we take the word 'mu dan', we know that this is comprised of two Chinese characters. But there are dozens of characters for each part of the word. In order to get the correct characters, we need to know the components that make up the word. And on top of this, 'mu dan' itself has a meaning (which is 'peony', the ancient national flower of China). So you can see how one could easily get confused when learning this language if you don't have someone helping you.

Social Commentary - Gift Wrap

2008-02-24T20:56:00.005Z

Let me start off by stating categorically for the record that I think gift wrap is a scam. It's yet another way for the gift card makers to get more money out of us. Think about it. Shouldn't a gift be a surprise to begin with? Why do you need to unwrap it in order to have that much more enjoyment out of it? And if people really need to conceal what the gift is, why wouldn't newspaper suffice to wrap it in?

But instead, we're conditioned by society to believe that we must wrap gifts in gift wrap. And to top it off, in the States it is unthinkable to re-use the gift wrap. At least British people have the common sense to re-use gift wrap. It might not look as pristine the second or third time around, but then if you've ever seen how I've wrapped gifts, appearances really aren't that much of a consideration for me when wrapping gifts.

So I urge people to take action. Instead of buying more gift wrap just to have it go to our landfills, be more creative when wrapping your gifts. I've found that smaller items such as watches fit nicely inside of socks, books fit nicely inside boxer shorts (you should clean them first) and world globes will fit inside of bras (depending upon how well endowed you are). This way, in our own little way, we no longer have to be slaves to societal expectations.

I Am Golden

2008-02-21T22:27:00.005Z

I've stated in a previous post that in the year 2000 I had to go to a courthouse in South Korea to get a copy of my birth certificate. It wasn't until that time that I was able to first see my Korean name written in its original Chinese characters. I had been with a Korean at the time who knew a little Chinese and he told me that 'Kee Jung' meant 'correct foundation'.

For the past three years I've had a friendship with this Chinese girl in Glasgow. Recently we were talking about Chinese names and I showed her what mine was. She then informed me what my full name meant. 'Kim' means 'golden', 'Kee' means 'foundation' and 'Jung' means 'righteous'. Prior to this, I didn't realise that my family name even had a meaning. So my full name means 'A righteous foundation that is golden.' She said I had a very good name. She then told me what the Chinese pronounciation of these characters are and showed me how to type the Chinese characters into a computer. So below is the first time that I've seen a non-handwritten version of the Chinese characters of my name (along with the Korean characters for good measure).

My Secret Love

2008-02-20T21:22:00.004Z

For the past three years I secretly have been obsessed with this one girl. She's been consuming a lot of my thought life, especially as of late. Whenever I can, I try to picture in my mind the colour of her hair, the way she smiles and what clothing she wears. I think about her personality and how she interacts with others, what motivates her, who she's friends with and what her sense of humour is like. In short, I've been spending a lot of time just really being able to know her inside and out.

Her name is Arianna Morgan and she's 14 years old. She's also the main character in this series of books that I've been trying to develop, albeit ever so slowly. Her best friend is Jason Singer and she has a younger sister named Alicia. Together they go in search of the ancient artefacts. I can't say much more beyond this without giving away too much of the plotline. Will these books ever see the light of day? I'm not sure, but at least it's been fun doing the research for them. And I've certainly learned a lot from Arianna over these past three years.

Hi Def DVD Watch

2008-02-16T16:23:00.006Z

As an avid viewer of films, I have been watching the intense battle over the next gen of DVD's. I announced recently that 2008 would be the year that Blu-Ray beat out HD-DVD. This came on the heels of Warner's announcement to abandon the HD-DVD format. In this past week alone, we've seen three huge American retailers abandon the HD-DVD format: Best Buy, Netflix and Wal-Mart.

And now next week, it will be officially announced which company will be next up to abandon the HD-DVD format: Toshiba. For those who don't know, Toshiba is the company behind the HD-DVD format. So by them giving up on the format that they developed, it's pretty much them conceding defeat to Blu-Ray, which means this stupid format war will finally be over (much sooner than anyone could have guessed) and consumers can finally get on with the business of upgrading their DVD libraries to Blu-Ray. With this in mind, sometime in the next couple months, I'm going to upgrade my projector to one that can process Hi Def pictures.

Appreciating Flowers

2008-02-15T23:45:00.001Z

This morning I received this text message: Mr A thx for the flowers sent yesterday - am very flattered and surprised! Alison x

I was very pleased that Alison liked her Valentine's Day flowers. Though I was wondering why she waited until this morning to show her appreciation for them. Maybe she needed time to digest the full impact of them, as they did come out of the blue for her. There was no way that she could have been expecting to receive them, hence her surprise. I do wonder what her next steps will be in this potentially budding romance and am obviously hoping for things to work out.

Although I am quite certain that Alison wasn't as surprised to receive her flowers as I was to receive her text message, considering I didn't send anyone any flowers yesterday. After a couple of text messages back and forth, I quickly found out that she sent the text message to the wrong person. In fact, I'm quite certain that I don't even know who this Alison is. I do wish her all the best with her new suitor though.

Valentine's Day

2008-02-14T19:42:00.003Z

Well today is Valentine's Day. As I've mentioned in the past, in Korea this is the day that girls give chocolates to the guys they like. Being not in Korea and having no girls that like me, I once again received no chocolate this year.

In the US and UK, it is usually customary for the guy to give the girl roses or something like that. So today, I was asked by my Friday lunch partner if there was any girl that I was going to send roses to this year. I told her that I was warned not to send this girl flowers. She looked at me funny. To which I followed up, "Well, there's this whole restraining order and stuff. It's a long story." Once again, thankfully she knew me well enough to know that I wasn't being serious about it.

So alas, it's another Valentine's Day on my own where I didn't get anyone anything. At least I can still make jokes about it though.

RAG

2008-02-12T22:37:00.001Z

When I moved into my new department at work, I was given three differently coloured (colored) balls: Red, Amber and Green. Since I like to juggle, I was quite excited about this. But then I was told that these balls weren't to be used for juggling. Instead, they were to indicate our status of interruptibility. If we have a Green ball showing, then anyone can interrupt us, Amber means only if it's really important and Red means only interrupt if it's a life and death situation.

Since I always operate an open desk policy, meaning if I'm at my desk anyone can come to me and speak to me regarding a request or question, I'm always showing Green. But then I thought that this was boring and decided to be more 'creative' in my use of the balls. Therefore it's not surprising that when I first changed my status to Red when I was away for a meeting, this confused people. But I thought that my reasoning would have been obvious behind this. If I'm not at my desk, people can't interrupt me, hence why the Red ball. But apparently other people aren't as laterally-minded as myself. Oh well.

Hare Hill & Blackcraig Hill

2008-02-10T21:35:00.000Z

This weekend I went away to do a hillwalking expedition with the guy who first got me into hillwalking 2 1/2 years ago. We did two hills, Hare Hill and Blackcraig Hill. Both of these hills are decent hillwalks in their own rights. Since we both love hillwalking, we had no choice but to do both of them in a single day. This meant ten hours of walking with minimal breaks and about 16 miles of distance travelled. It was a long day (finishing about an hour and half after sunset) and we were both exhausted at the end of it.

The weather was dry, but very windy and we often got stuck in the mist. But when we did get views, they were gorgeous and it was impressive being able to see a windfarm so close up. Because we were walking in the mist when we arrived under the windmills, they would just suddenly appear out of nowhere. We were but ants standing next to them. All in all, it was a very good day indeed of hillwalking. I can't wait until my next hillwalking adventure!

Back to Switzerland

2008-02-07T18:24:00.002Z

Well, I just got off the phone with Oak Hall. We've just confirmed when they will be needing to use me again. So it looks like I'm going to have to spend the first two weeks of April in Switzerland doing more Alpine skiing. Oh well. I suppose there are worse things that you could be spending your time doing. And as far as ministries to be involved with, I can think of worse ways to be serving God. Although, I guess there's a whole question around if you're serving God, are any ways better than others?

I am actually quite excited about it. It's hard to believe that I'll be skiing in Switzerland again in just over seven weeks! I hope that things will go as smoothly as they did over Christmas. I had an easy group to lead then, and I pray that I'll be able to handle things as they arise this time around. This time , I'm actually doing two trips back to back, so there's twice as much opportunity to serve God. If you're of the praying type, early prayers now for these trips couldn't go amiss.

Having A Significant Other

2008-02-05T22:16:00.000Z

My company has asked me and my teammates to go on one of those inspirational conferences. It's a two-day seminar and it costs £600 ($1150) per person. Now my company will not only pay the cost for me to attend, but also for my partner as well. There was also a choice of three different set of dates that we could attend.

So I had emailed my manager when I'd like to go. After reading my email, my boss looks up from his computer and asks me if I was taking anyone with me. I replied to him, "No, it's just me as I have no significant other. Thank you very much for bringing that up and reminding me of that fact." Because it's an open-plan office we have, about a half dozen other people heard my reply. Thankfully, they all know me well enough to know I wasn't being serious and they all started laughing.

Pentlands

2008-02-02T23:36:00.001Z

Well today's hillwalk was altered slightly due to the heavy snowfall we were receiving. So instead of doing Hadrian's Wall, which is on the Scottish/English border, we went and did the Pentlands near Edinburgh.

While the weather was rather wild, it was still an enjoyable hillwalk. We had 10 people going on it, with a couple of people joining us for the first time. The wind was just so strong today, that a number of times I just leaned into the wind and let it hold me up. What a surreal feeling that is. It's a good thing we had the wind behind us as we were on the summits.

All in all, it was a good day of hillwalking. Next weekend I'm off on another hillwalking adventure, this time in an area that I've never been to before. I'm quite looking forward to it.

Blackle

2008-01-30T22:34:00.000Z

With all the emphasis on being environmentally friendly, there are things you can do every day that will help reduce your carbon footprint. One of the easiest things you can do is stop using Google as your search engine and start using Blackle, which will give you the same exact search results as Google will.

The idea behind Blackle is that because white is a combination of all the lights, it takes more energy to produce a white computer screen than it does a black one. So by using a black background instead of a white one, you are actually saving a very small amount of energy by using Blackle instead of Google. And while it might be a negligible amount of energy saved for you in one search session, the cumulative effect can be quite enormous. It's an idea anyway and I applaud the developers of Blackle for thinking outside the box.

Rethinking the Blog

2008-01-28T21:52:00.001Z

I had every intention of stopping this blog until a meeting I had this evening. I think my decision to stop my blog cold turkey was a bit rash. Truth be told, I really enjoy blogging. I'm not sure why.

So I'm going to start this blog up again tentatively, but with a couple of caveats. One, I'm not going to blog nearly as often, maybe a couple times a week. And two, I'll rarely mention anything about my personal life except if it involves a hillwalk or a travel adventure. It'll probably be more of a showcase blog, with whatever happens to tickle my fancy at the time of writing.

So here's a fantastic website that I stumbled across the other day. Have you encountered a stray dog or cat on the street and thought to yourself that it's a shame that something couldn't be done about it? Well, here's an answer to solve the problem of strays. This website will buy any stray animals you come across so they can then resell them to the medical community to be used as test animals. What a great idea and it really will help benefit all of mankind by expediting drug trials and helping us to get better shampoos quicker.

The End

2008-01-20T21:44:00.000Z

After almost 3 years of blogging, it is now time to end. Thanks to everyone who has supported me over the years in this endeavour.

My Mobile Phone

2008-01-18T18:35:00.000Z

I remember living in Korea about 6 years ago now amazed at how mobile phones (called hand phones in Korea) had saturated almost every single demographic. They were literally everywhere and everyone had one, including myself. People had to have mobiles if they ever wanted to meet up with one another in public places, due to the nature of traffic over there. You never knew how long it would take to arrive from point a to point b. My mobile was capable of doing text messaging in both Korean and English. This was fantastic because texting was still a relatively new feature of mobiles back then. And I couldn't believe how small my mobile was. In fact, it is still to this day one of the smallest mobiles I've ever owned.

But moving to the UK, I've found that mobiles have become quite a nuisance, especially when using them to talk to other people. I rarely use my mobile to talk to people, and instead just text people. But even at that, I rarely text people, although I do have some friends who are determined to try to get me to increase my texting volumes significantly. But we'll see how successful they are at that!

Social Commentary - Avid Book Readers

2008-01-17T17:29:00.000Z

Have you ever noticed that when people state that they like to read books, they often describe themselves as 'avid book readers'. There really is no other adjective these people use to describe their book reading. People don't say, "I'm an ardent book reader" or "I'm an athirst book reader" or even "I'm an avaricious book reader". No, it has to be avid.

But really, how enthusiastically can a person read books? I know some books might be gripping or page turners, but a lot of them can be dull and boring. Can these people honestly say that they avidly read books about how to more effectively cross shred their bank statements in order to make confetti to celebrate the release of their friend from prison who committed identity theft?

Have book readers ever noticed that reading books is a rather sedentary pastime by nature? How enthusiastically can you sit and hold a book for hours on end? I mean it's no more energetic than watching television. And yet I've never heard anyone describe themselves as 'an avid television watcher'. Why is this?

Social Commentary - Shoes

2008-01-16T22:01:00.000Z

I've been taking an informal poll this past week of all the girls in my office. I've heard that women like it when men compliment them on their shoes. So I wanted to find out if this was true and the only way I could think to do this was to actually ask girls if this was indeed the case.

Here are the results of my very scientifically chosen sample of women. In general, women do like to be complimented on their shoes, but only if they are special shoes or new shoes. If they are old trainers (tennis shoes) then indeed women would find it weird that they were getting complimented on them.

Now I'm already planning my next research poll. I aim to find out why women like to be complimented on their shoes. To me it's just footwear, and yet some women have such an obsession about them. Imelda Marcos. Need I say more? I guess for myself, I've never been too bothered about my shoes and they are simply a means to an end. Maybe I'm missing something though.

A Major Life Decision - Part 2

2008-01-15T18:06:00.000Z

In November of 1999, Disney finally saw fit to release their animated features on DVD. And so my promise so rashly made in 1997 that the first film I'd buy on DVD would be 'The Little Mermaid' was finally obtainable. It was at this point that I decided to stop buying VHS and buy only DVD's. But I didn't have a DVD player and I wouldn't have one until the summer of 2001, when I moved back to the States briefly, at which point I had a collection of over 50 DVD's, which I could finally watch.

And now I'm at the point where once again I am going to have to make a decision to stop buying DVD's and start buying the next generation of DVD's. I've been holding out until the whole Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD battle is over. With Warner Bros' recent announcement, it looks like Blu-Ray is going to win, even if it sounds like some shady dealings went on with Sony. The fact that Germany and the porn industry are also now exclusively supporting Blu-Ray, means 2008 might be the death knell for HD-DVD and when that happens, I'll start purchasing Blu-Ray. But hold on, what is this? VMD Day is only a week away! Can there seriously be a third contender for the Hi-Def DVD? And even more surprisingly, it looks like major studios are supporting the VMD format. Hmmm...

A Major Life Decision - Part 1

2008-01-14T20:55:00.000Z

I am close to reaching a major decision in my life. This is one that has been brewing for a couple years now and each day that I delay in making this decision, it becomes harder for me to avoid making unless I want to experience great loss. This decision echoes that of a similar life decision I made shortly before I moved to Korea in 2000.

Let me give some background information. The year is 1999. I was young and arrogant. I knew what God wanted me to do in life. I also knew that I wasn't doing it. I was a youth pastor at a Korean church and a member of a young adult's group at a Chinese church. I had a good paying job, but one that wasn't really rewarding. Two years prior to this, I had made a vow to myself, one that was getting increasingly harder to keep. But did I have the determination and the integrity to hold fast to my word? I was beginning to waiver a bit. I needed something desperately to happen, but it was something well out of my control.

And then in November of 1999, that something happened and it changed my life forever. I made my decision then, but I wouldn't be able to fully reap the benefits of it until the summer of 2001. What could this have been? Find out in tomorrow's entry.

Locked Out

2008-01-13T23:22:00.000Z

I am generally an organised person and like to have things planned ahead of time. In 2007 I managed to take this to an extreme and had my entire diary booked months in advance, which meant I had no room for any spontaneity whatsoever.

This year I've decided to try not to plan things too far in advance unless necessary. I've been able to do a lot more things at the last minute and it's a nice thing to be able to have some spontaneity in my diary. Just last week I managed to do coffees with two very lovely ladies and this week I'll be able to do a coffee with yet another lovely lady. These are things that would have been impossible for me to do last year unless they were booked into my diary well in advance.

Because I'm generally organised, it is with some frustration that yesterday I managed to yet again lock myself out of my flat. I did this at 8am and I managed to not have my mobile on me. My neighbours (a couple of very lovely ladies) have my spare set of keys to my flat. But it would have been unthinkable to knock on someone's door at 8am on a Saturday morning. So I walked a couple miles to the nearest supermarket and did some grocery shopping, making it back at 10am, where thankfully I was able to get my spare set of keys and get back into my flat. Ugh, not a good way to start the weekend!

I Don't Exist

2008-01-10T22:49:00.000Z

I can't tell you how frustrated I am that I don't exist. I keep calling people up to let them know that I do exist, but they keep denying it. What more can I possibly do?

Let me explain. I've been with my current electricity provider for about 2 1/2 years. I was even doing the whole online account thing with them. Then about a year ago, my online account thing with them stopped working for me. I phoned them up and asked about it. They told me that my customer number is no longer showing active. So they made it active again.

I continued to get bills from them, showing my payments and their estimated meter readings. But whenever I would try to give them my actual meter readings either online or over the telephone, they would never be recorded. Every time that I've actually spoken to someone at the power company, they kept telling me that I don't exist as a customer, which is why they never record my actual meter readings.

In the interim, they've been happily providing me with my electricity and taking my direct debits. But because their estimated readings are under my actual readings, I'm now showing that I've overpaid them by about £200 in just over 9 months. Hmmm...

Jack Handey

2008-01-08T19:46:00.000Z

I tend to make outrageous statements with a deadpan face to see if people believe me. I was recently at a Starbucks and asked the lady behind the counter if the "Honey and nut hot chocolate" contained any traces of nuts. She looked at me and said, "Yes." I replied, "Oh right. I'm allergic to nuts. In that case could I get the hazelnut hot chocolate instead." She just looked at me puzzled. To which my friend came to my rescue and playing along kindly 'informed' the saleslady that the hazelnut is actually a seed and not a nut. I then backed this 'fact' up by saying, "Much like how the peanut is not a nut but a bean." I only hope that the saleslady doesn't go on 'informing' other customers that the hazelnut isn't a nut but a seed.

And so going out in public with me is often a dangerous thing for people to do because one will never know what I'll say. A strong influence on my humour is a guy named Jack Handey. He often would make very surreal or absurd statements in a serious tone. I have many favourites amongst his sayings, but as an example, I leave you with this one: "Somebody told me it was frightening how much topsoil we are losing each year, but I told that story around the campfire and nobody got scared." Here's a collection of some of his other sayings.

A New Job

2008-01-07T21:28:00.000Z

This is my first full week in my new job. In my last job, I was a trainer, instructing people how to use the company's computer systems. My new job will entail me going around to various departments and trying to make them more efficient. The way I'll be doing this is by using a combination of both the lean method and six sigma. I will most likely be developing solutions to automate a number of their manual processes, which will entail a lot of database development and programming.

This is a post that was developed specifically with me in mind. In fact, this is now the second post in a row that has been developed with me in mind. I am looking forward to the new opportunity and the increased level of challenges. And I'm most especially looking forward to the team lunches with my new department! Already, 2008 is starting off for me with a fresh start in my professional career and fresh opportunities in my social life as well. More about these latter things later.

The West Island Way

2008-01-05T22:02:00.000Z

There's a famous trail in Scotland called the West Highland Way. It's about 90 miles long and ends at Ben Nevis, the largest Munro. On the island of Bute, they have a much smaller trail that they call (tongue-firmly-in-cheek) the West Island Way.

Just over a year ago we did the 14 miles on the south part of this trail. Today we did the 10 miles to the north. It was a cold and windy and very rainy (sometimes sleety) day. There were six of us that went and all of us got soaked to the bone (except me, I stayed rather nice and dry due to having some very good boots and waterproofs). But much fun was had by all and we're all thankful that we've now done the island of Bute properly.

The first time I had been on Bute was for a half marathon race about 16 months ago. Speaking of runs, I tried to enter the Paris marathon this year, but was too late to get in. So now I've put my name in for the Edinburgh marathon. Let's hope they pull my name out of their hat so I can run it!

CLAN

2008-01-04T23:52:00.000Z

In Switzerland, as I was handing over control of the chalet to the next team, one of the incoming guests looked at me and said, "I've seen you at CLAN before!" I had a complete look of shock on my face. There are thousands of people from all across Scotland who attend this annual Christian event. How could this one complete stranger remember me from at least a year and a half ago, which was when I was last there.

I racked my brain furiously. All of a sudden, dawning appeared on my face and I remembered her. In 2006, I had volunteered to help out with CLAN Kidz and her son was in the age group I was working with. As I was often on door duty checking kids in and out of the area, I got to know the parents quite well. In fact, it got to the point where I just had to see a parent's face and I could go look for their child. Well, apparently the parents remembered my face as well, even though this was from such a long time ago. Who knew that someone I had met in St. Andrews would later be greeting me in Switzerland! It just goes to show you, you never know when you're going to meet people again.

By the way, here's a picture of me skiing in Switzerland, just to prove that I was indeed skiing!

Chance Encounters

2008-01-03T15:47:00.000Z

One of the best things someone told me is to always throw yourself into the moment and to get to know those around you because you'll never know when you'll meet them again. I have done this particularly with my Oak Hall trips. And in fact, on the Switzerland trip, as I was handing off to the next trip, I happened across a family that were on one of my Spain trips last August. It was a really pleasant surprise to see them again.

We got chatting and they offered me so much encouragement about my involvement with Oak Hall. Apparently after the Spain trip, they decided that their church back home wasn't giving them the solid teachings that they needed so they decided to move churches to one that would give them more sustenance. Their spiritual lives really came alive in that new church and they are now a part of a house group and their children are actively involved in the youth ministries. In fact their entire way of life has been transformed. And they said that it was all due to their eyes being opened to the full potential of God during the Spain trip. It is so humbling to be reminded that this is what serving God is all about.

Wicked

2008-01-02T16:07:00.000Z

I had the opportunity to go see the musical 'Wicked' in the West End when I was down in London last weekend. As the only other two West End productions I've seen were 'Les Miserables' and 'The Phantom of the Opera', the expectations were rather high for this musical.

For those of you who don't know what this musical is about, it's about the life and times of the Wicked Witch of the West from 'The Wizard of Oz'. It's based off of the book by Gregory Maguire and tells the backstory of how the young witch grew up, but it mostly focuses around her college days.

When I heard that Stephen Schwartz had done the music, I did have a few reservations about it. He has a tendency to play things safe and not really break out into the truly adventurous or creative, as was witnessed by his work on the Disney films 'Pocahontas' and 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame'. However, his style worked amazingly well for this musical, although there were times when you felt that if he had been a bit more daring, the music could have made that jump from really great to legendary, but alas it never did.

The storyline itself was inventive and very cleverly crafted to give some 'much-needed' insight to the characters that we already knew and loved(?) from the Wizard of Oz. The performances were astounding, especially by the artist playing the wicked witch. And the music was entertaining. I felt that it was £45 that was well spent and I would highly recommend going to go see it. If 'Les Mis' and 'Phantom' are at the top of the musical pecking order, 'Wicked' wouldn't be far behind them.

New Year's Resolution

2008-01-01T03:43:00.000Z

I just came back from spending a very lovely time at a friend's house ringing in the New Year. In fact, this year probably will make it up there on my list of all time favourite New Years. We were sharing what our resolutions for this coming year will be and I was just drawing a blank. Over the past couple of weeks, I had been trying hard to think about what I could do for a resolution this year, but nothing seemed to click with me. I had a really good resolution last year, and although I often failed at it, it is something that I'm going to keep working on for the rest of my life.

And then it hit me. I tend to play things safe at times, but this year I thought I'd make it my resolution to be more daring, take on more challenges and in short move out of my comfort zone a lot. I'm not sure what this will entail, but I do know that there are a couple of opportunities that are coming my way that will definitely kick me out of my comfort zone and that I will need to grasp with both hands. I'll no doubt be blogging about these adventures in the near future. I wish you and your loved ones a safe and happy New Year.

Home From Skiing

2007-12-30T22:28:00.001Z

The trip to Switzerland went well. There were some surprises, most of which were pleasant ones, although there were a couple that weren't so pleasant. The first surprise was that I found out I was to be both the leader and speaker of this trip. Having never led an Oak Hall trip before, this was a bit daunting at first, but I quickly got to grips with it and things went rather smoothly. Of course, it certainly helped that I had a really easy group to have and the team I was leading was fantastic.

The second surprise was I wasn't prepared for how hard skiing would be on my thighs. My first day on the slopes was a bit painful and it took me a while to find my ski legs, but after that, I did manage to get the hang of it and by the end of the trip I was skiing down the red slopes (intermediate level) with no problems. I reckon that given another week out there, I would have worked my way up to the black slopes (advanced level), but who knows.

Anyway, I just got back home now and am exhausted. I'll post some more about Switzerland tomorrow, although I do have a busy couple of days ahead of me. I hope everyone had a very happy (merry) Christmas!

Switzerland Bound

2007-12-17T23:59:00.000Z

Well tomorrow I'm off to the airport straight after work. I won't be returning to Glasgow until the 30th. I'm quite excited about this opportunity to not only get my skiing legs back, but to also be able to serve God in this manner.

If you are of the praying type, please pray that God's word would be shared through me in such a way that would bring glory to Him and Him alone. May the people have receptive hearts and may those who are away from their family and friends during this holiday season find comfort in Jesus and His enduring word.

May you all have a Happy Christmas and I'll see you in the New Year.

A Quick Entry

2007-12-14T21:15:00.000Z

I just managed to get back from Cardiff in Wales okay. It's a nice city and it looks like there was lots to do. I didn't actually manage to get out and do anything though, but it was interesting seeing the inside of the prison system though.

Anyway, my house guest hasn't shown up yet, so I thought I'd take a quick couple minutes to catch up on my emails and post a blog entry. This weekend is fairly busy for me with both a sermon to deliver and being a reader in my church's Christmas Carol service. I am also finishing up the final arrangements for going to Switzerland next week, although I won't be able to pick up the Swiss francs that I ordered until Monday. Hope you all have a great weekend!

Secret Santa

2007-12-12T17:39:00.000Z

My department at work has three dozen people in it, of which only a dozen are female. Now I haven't really been an active part of my department for the past couple months. So I was sort of surprised when they asked me if I wanted to participate in their Secret Santa gift exchange. But I thought to myself, "Why not?" and I told them that they could count me in.

A couple days ago, the organiser of the Secret Santa had a little conversation with me. She asked me if I still wanted to be a part of it. I told her that I did and then I questioned why she was wondering if I would like to pull out of it. She then told me that they only managed to get thirteen people in the department to participate in it: the dozen females and myself. This meant that every single female in the department said 'yes' and every single guy (with the exception of me) said 'no'. I have some really pants (lousy) guy workmates. To them, all I have to say is, 'Bah, humbug.'

Tomorrow I'm off to Wales until late Friday night, and then upon my return I will have a house guest for the weekend. This means that I most likely won't be able to blog again until Sunday evening.

Friendships

2007-12-11T23:58:00.000Z

I've recently spoken to most of my friends in the States. These are some of my oldest and dearest friends. Among them, the newest friendship was just over ten years old while the oldest I've had for more than two dozen years.

As I mentioned in the distant past, I have friendships that represent certain periods in my life, and these people span all of those significant periods. While speaking to them, I realised just how much these people mean to me and how much I really do miss them. They've seen me through some incredibly difficult times and they have shared my mountain top experiences with me as well.

I consider myself truly blessed to have such a high calibre of people who are willing to be my friends. If only I could see them more often, I would find myself on top of the world. But such is life, that we can't always get what we want. So instead, I'll settle for what I can get.

The Golden Compass

2007-12-10T22:48:00.000Z

After anxiously waiting for this film for the past five years since the production was first announced, and having been an avid fan of the trilogy by Philip Pullman, I finally got to watch the film tonight. I had some reservations when I heard Chris Weitz (best known for 'American Pie') was to helm the project, and these proved to be not altogether unfounded.

Being the author had very little desire to have anything to do with the film (instead opting to take the money and run), a lot of the names were mispronounced, but only those who would have studied Greek and a couple of other languages would have noticed this. As with any film, there were some character condensations, which seemed to have worked well here.

Dakota Blue Richards does a very commendable job in the key role of 11-year old Lyra Belaqua and Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman capture their parts almost perfectly. Ian McKellen (Gandalf in the 'Lord of the Rings'), however, forgets that he's not in a West End production and overacts as the voice of the armoured bear, Iorek Byrnison. This film was bound to have loads of CGI, which I worried about. The daemons turned out much better than I thought they would, but the talking bears were always going to be a trouble point, and so they were.

Weitz was for the most part faithful, if not always to the storyline, at least to the intent of the story. The one major flaw that I think he had, however, was in being adamant about it being a 2-hour film. This forced him to reduce scenes to their bare minimum. And while those who have read the book will understand them, those who haven't will have found some of the dialogue a bit stilted and out of context. And he totally skipped over the prophecy of the 'great betrayal' and the origin of the word 'dust', which I thought were key elements in the book.

I enjoyed the film, even though it had delusions of becoming another 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy, complete with historical narrative at the beginning. I do think though that I would have enjoyed the film a lot more if some of the people sitting near me would have stopped laughing through the whole of the film, especially whenever the name 'Bolvanger' was said.

Christmas Music

2007-12-09T23:19:00.001Z

I must say that I absolutely love Christmas music. I love the cheesy lyrics. I love the fact that most of them are sung in major keys. I love the feeling of warmth and joy that you get when singing them.

I in fact love almost everything about Christmas in general. I think this time of year is just so good. People are in better spirits and the goodwill shown to fellow people is just phenomenal.

I also must say that this year, I've been rather organised. I've already done all my Christmas shopping online and all the gifts have now been delivered and are just waiting for me to wrap them. How great is that?

When Friendships Fail

2007-12-06T22:16:00.000Z

There are some things that you cannot tell your friends, no matter how close they are. I've just encountered such a time.

I've received some news recently that has hit me harder than I thought it would. I knew it was coming, I just didn't know when. And now that it has come to pass, I'm sitting alone, desperate to discuss it with someone, but unable to do so.

Ah well, such are the intricacies of life. There's nothing left to do but to buckle up and get on with the busyness of living. It's what I do best, I suppose.

Homelessness

2007-12-05T22:21:00.000Z

I've lived a fairly full life so far. I have no regrets about the decisions that I've made, and that is something that I know a lot of people can't say. I feel like God has been blessing me hugely lately and that I'm right where He wants me to be. Life really couldn't be going much better for me, with the single exception of wanting to start a family sometime soon.

And so it is that as we go into the holiday season once more, I find the discrepancy between those that have and those that don't is ever more glaring. Just recently, I was walking down the street and passed a beggar. My heart broke for him as I realised that it could have just as easily have been me on the streets, had things turned out differently for me.

So many things have gone to shape my life to make it what it is today, most of which I don't really realise the full impact of. I urge you to pause for a moment now and look at those around you and take stock of how fully blessed you really are. And then I urge you to not stop there, but to go out and do something to help those who are in need.

Visiting Wales

2007-12-04T19:35:00.000Z

Work has been mental busy for me lately. I can't remember how many new projects I've taken on in the past month alone. I'm rarely at my own desk these days, and it's gotten to the point where if my boss does see me, he asks me why I'm in the department and not somewhere else. And it's not just my own projects that I've been working on, but I've also been lending support to others on their projects. During our presentations today to the senior management team, half of the people doing presentations mentioned the work that I've done for them. It felt nice to be finally recognised for the work that I've been doing.

On top of all this, I just found out today that I'm supposed to be undertaking yet another major project. This one will take me to Wales next week, which is an interesting place for me to go since we don't have an airport there. But since I've yet to make it to Wales, I'm excited about being able to see a new country. All in all, I've really been enjoying the diversity of my work lately and the unique contributions that I bring to the company.

Just Friends or Something More?

2007-12-03T22:29:00.000Z

Something huge happened to me this weekend. Ever since the Springtime of 2004, there is something that I've wanted to do, but I never seemed to be able to progress any closer to my goal, no matter what I did. It was really quite frustrating at times.

And then this past September, I took a huge step forward towards this goal, which I blogged about, but only in cursory terms. And so it was for the past 10 weeks that I've been devoting a lot of my efforts and attention towards getting what I've wanted to do for so long.

A couple of times though these past few months, I didn't think it would actually come to fruition. But then about a month ago, I had made plans that would more or less bring things to a head this weekend.

So on Saturday night, I was quite nervous as I was so close to reaching my goal. And then it happened, and I felt such a sense of achievement. After years of patiently waiting, I finally managed to watch all 10 seasons of Friends on DVD in a continuous run. Whew!

Online Persona

2007-11-29T22:22:00.001Z

I was having a conversation with a friend the other day about who I am in my blog. I hope people realise that for the most part this is not the real me. It's more of a caricature or parody of who I am in real life.

For the most part, I am just a normal person. Yeah, I have my quirks, but then who doesn't. I don't know why my online personality is different from my in-real-life personality. I think it's because I used to be a lot more honest about myself in the very early days of my blog, but that only got me into trouble. So these days, my blog is a lot less personal and a lot more about the extremes in my life.

So for all those who are still reading my blog after two and a half years, I've appreciated that you've stuck with me. Who knows what the future of this blog will hold, but I'm sure it'll not be the same as it is now.

Beauty

2007-11-28T22:13:00.000Z

One thing that I really appreciate is beauty. I especially appreciate it when it is found in a woman. And I don't mean just the surface beauty, but the inner beauty as well. Of the few women that I've become close friends with over the years, they've all had one thing in common and that is an overwhelming sense of beauty in one way or another.

And the even fewer women that I've been interested in dating over the years are in a league all of their own when it comes to being beautiful. Words simply cannot express how beautiful I found these women to be. And the funny thing is, even after I've moved on from pursuing a woman, I still find that person to be so full of beauty. And of the women that I'm still good friends with, it warms me inside whenever I see them because of the beauty that emanates from them. But for various reasons I can't tell them this, although I'd like to because I think it would brighten their days a little.

So to all men out there who are in a relationship, go and tell that someone special how beautiful you think they are. Because you know what, it's all too easy to take it for granted and not fully appreciate exactly what you have, until it's too late.

Public Speaking

2007-11-27T19:44:00.000Z

I was speaking to a person the other day. Here's how the conversation went:

Him: I could never do public speaking. It's just too scary.
Me: I have no problems with it.
Him: Don't you get nervous with all those people looking at you?
Me: No. I've found a way to overcome that.
Him: Is it the old 'picture the audience in their underwear' trick?
Me: No, I just keep my eyes closed the entire time I am speaking. That way I don't see them.
Him: You do? But what about making eye contact with the audience? Isn't that supposed to be important?
Me: Not really. I tell them that they can close their eyes also and to just imagine me as a disembodied voice on the radio.

It's at this point that he pauses to consider what I'm saying to him. Finally he says, "I don't know you well enough to tell if you're kidding or not. But your face is so deadpan."