No publicity is bad publicity

Some like to diss bloggers as "attention grabbers" that have nothing better to say. As a blogger myself, I usually dispute that claim but I gotta admit some bloggers went over the board.

For example, one blogger claimed that he has "been using Macs for a while ... wondering if they're all that special" and he might switch back from Mac to PC. Well, everyone is entitled to their opinions. In fact, I wrote my fair share of criticism of Mac. However, this guy kept bashing the apps because he doesn't use them! Check out his nonsense:
"I really dislike iPhoto. I much prefer the Windows thumbnails."
What's he smoking? iPhoto is a photo management software (it's not perfect but I must say it does a pretty good job.) Windows thumbnails? That's a file preview mode! He's comparing apples to oranges.
"You know, .Mac is interesting, but way too expensive."
Apple's .Mac is a service not unlike the paid version of Yahoo's e-mail and photo storage service. I don't see how .Mac being expensive a reason why Mac is inferior to Windows.
"I'm not a musician, GarageBand to me isn't particularly compelling."
OK. That's as ignorant as saying "I'm not a painter, Mona Lisa to me isn't particularly compelling" as the reason for Louvre not being special.

Anyway, I gotta give him some credits for having the guts to diss Mac. I'm pretty sure he'll be expecting "hate mails" from some unhappy Apple fanboys. To be honest, some of his points are valid: low-end Macs are slow. Text Anti-aliasing do seem fuzzy on my Mac and better on Windows.

Another blogger wrote that phones should be replacing general purpose PC as the main device for computing needs. Well, that's pretty much stating the obvious. I mean, that's the ideal but not gonna happen in the near future! And the biggest disadvantage is giving too much control to your phone company, which has the tendency to charge you for anything you like to do with your phone.

I left out links to their blogs on purpose since I don't wanna give them extra traffic. In the meantime, I'll try my best to come up with more articles with high shock value.

RIP Montana Mazurkiewicz

Most think sport is about machoism most of the time, but it has a touching side too:

Notre Dame Fighting Irish's head football coach Charlie Weis visited big Irish fan, 10-yr old Montana, before he died of brain tumor last Friday. Weis granted him a wish: calling the first play for Irish's next game (vs. Washington last Sat)

Irish's first play was at their 1 yard line. What did Montana call? "Pass right!" That's a dangerous play at that situation but Irish went with it and got good 13 yards out of it.

Good karma working at its best? I think so.

And it's good publicity for Notre Dame, which hasn't had a lot for the past few years when it hasn't won as much as it used to.

You gotta earn your right before you trash talk

Terrell Owens, all-star wide receiver of Philadelphia Eagles, might indeed be a "bad apple" to his team at times (e.g. his feud against his coach, the management and his QB) but it's not something Derek Smith, a linebacker of 49er, who a lot of football fans have never heard of, has the right to say.

That's his comment before the Eagle-49er game, in which his defensive team has given up 143 yards and 2 touchdowns to Owens.

What did Derek Smith say after the game? Well, he still didn't want Owens on his team. Yeah right, like he wanna be on your team!

Man, some people might enjoy publicity like this, but it just sounded stupid to me.

Money can't always buy victory

I'm not talking about sports (where money could buy victory) This is about how a student fought against the almighty Microsoft's army of lawyers who sued him for selling 2 unopened boxes of M$'s software on eBay.

The result? He counter-sued and M$ settled.

Sometimes our legal system doesn't seem that broken.

Update your resume

Have you been wondering why the diaster in New Orleans caused by Hurricane Katrina was handled so poorly? Maybe this explains: Discrepancies reported in Brown [chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency] resume.

Assistant to Manager, assistant manager, what's the difference anyway? (That reminds me of an episode of "The Office")

And at the highest level of academics, teachers always learn from their students. So you might say a student is also a professor!

Let me see: I have been working as assistants to CEO, directors, architects...... I should sign up for a Harvard distant learning class ASAP so that I could put Harvard Professor on my resume!

Wait a second! I wasn't on President Bush's campaign team before. (New resume now in trashcan)

Do you Yahoo? No thanks.

Yahoo is accused by a media watchdog of becoming a "police informant" for the Chinese government that led to the jailing of a journalist for "divulging state secrets."

Yahoo's practice is widely criticized by members of the media. While they acknowledge the need to comply with local law, most question whether such action is ethical. After all, the "state secret" here is an internal Communist Party message that warned journalists of the dangers of social unrest resulting from the return of dissidents on the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, in June 2004. Isn't that kinda obvious?
See "Yahoo business ethics sorely lacking" (Infoworld)
and "Web of complicity" (Telegraph UK) Don't forget this is a company that was willing to buy the notorious spyware writer 3721 in order to "compete in the China market." I still remember how bad I felt when my computer was hijacked by 3721.

Surprisingly, there are quite a few netters (on popular website slashdot.org) defending Yahoo, saying it's nothing wrong with taking care of shareholder's interests.

I don't know about them. To be honest, I'm a heavy user of Yahoo's services: My Yahoo, email, fantasy sports...... Now I'll think twice before using any of them. I've already switched my homepage to My Netscape, even though it's inferior in terms of features. And this will be my last season playing fantasy sports on Yahoo. ESPN: here I come!

It takes less time than a commercial break (almost)

... To assemble a Dell! That's what I've just learned from this article: "...PC assembly time down to less than four minutes..."

Incredible!

Even more amazing is that 30 seconds were wasted every time they put those annoying Intel and Microsoft stickers on the computer!

Maybe we could save $100 off the price if they don't have to do that :P

The market of MP3 player is just as bad as the NL West

... where every team commits one blunder after another!

First, Rio is gone due to lack of QC and marketing. (They made it official last week.)

Second, Apple settled the lawsuit over its poor battery.

Now Creative is shipping worm with its player!

Is it that hard to make a decent player? I wonder.

Good bye UGL

UGL = Undergraduate Library, at University of Texas, my alma mater. This is one of the places in Austin where lots of my fond memories are associated with. (Yes, I met pretty gals there >:)

The university is moving the books out and converting it to a student center this Fall. It will be a place for students to hang out and study.

Well, actually that's what we used to do over there anyway (minus the study part :P) The books were useful to kill time when waiting for the "target" to leave.

I've never knew why it's called undergraduate library 'coz most libraries let undergrad in but I just found out that's not the case in the 50s. Interesting!

Microsoft makes baseball exciting

Aren't they? Here is their patent.

Well, kidding aside, it's not that bad. I guess MLB.com is actually using it now. I'm a subscriber of MLB.TV which streams video of complete or highlights of baseball games. Before I learned of this patent, I thought they must have hired a bunch of low-paid kids to cut (i.e. edit) these video. And I have been wondering how boring that job must be :P Looks like it's more automated than I thought.

Good bye Rio (the MP3 player pioneer)

See "Death bells ring for Rio as they are cut up and sold to SigmaTel"

It's sad 'coz I still believe among all competitors of Apple iPod, Rio Karma has the best features, design and UI, in fact, even better than iPod. This is based on my experience of owning one for 2 weeks (returned for battery life issue)

So, once again it proves that it takes more a good feature set to win in the consumer electronics business. You'd need marketing, marketing, marketing (yes, it's so important that I have to repeat it again and again), quality control and customer service as well. This is reinforced by my recent good (surprise!) experience with getting my iPod fixed (the headphone jack has bad connectivity) at an Apple store (BTW, there was no service dept at Apple store. Apple named it "Genius Bar." The name is a bit too arrogant and exaggerated but that's Steve's call, not mine. The service rep was actually a very helpful gentleman. He looked at my iPod and found that the remote control was the culprit. He simply swapped it with a new one.)

If fixing my Rio was this easy, I would have kept it and won't even consider iPod! Apple opening all these retail stores over the country turned out wasn't such a bad move.

RIP Jean Charles de Menezes

Mr. de Menezes was shot and killed by London police as a bombing suspect last week but London police later on admitted he was innocent.

You probably recall his killing made front page news. However, the fact that he was innocent didn't. It wasn't even appear as headline on http://news.yahoo.com/ !

This is very sad 'coz not only his life was lost for nothing but also his innocence was complete ignored.

Forget about justice but where is the conscience of the media now?

Hawk attacked Dove

So you think this is an analogy of what happens in politics today.

Well, symbolism turned reality. it actually happened in Hong Kong yesterday!

The result? Both dead. (Cause of death: bone fracture. Suspected both collided into a building during the chase.)

Politicians out there should learn something from this.

Good advice? Bad advice?

Dunno how accurate this is but according to Apple Daily (a Chinese newspaper from Hong Kong, no link) Professor Paul Chu, president of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, appeared in a young student IT challenge award ceremony as guest of honor. He said he's happy to see that today's kids are so fluent in computer skills and they will have a bright future working in the IT industry.

Well, I'm not sure if he really meant what he said. Following the current offshoring trend, when these kids are old enough to work, IT jobs would have been offshored from China to other countries with even cheaper labors! This reminds me of Bill Gates encouraging young people in US to study computer science. (See my take in a previous comment) They either need a reality check or stop BS-ing!

(BTW, the winner is a 6th grader. She made her own e-card using Flash and built website that educate people about giant panda as an endangered specie. Good for her!)

Finally, American government is playing catch up

... on totalitarian policies.

If you've listened to any communist propaganda, you probably are familiar with their claim of a superior society. Eventually all other countries will follow their practice. Well, it looks like they're not all wrong:
U.S. House of representatives has approved constitutional amendment to outlaw American flag burning.

This immediately reminds me of two pro-democracy activists, Ng Kwok-hung and Lau San-ching, being fined for burning the Chinese national flag 2 years ago in China-ruled Hong Kong.

Maybe someday our first amendment will be amended to a point that criticism of the government like this will be deemed unpatriotic and thus criminal. So I'd better say it before it's too late.

MLB.TV Full Screen on Mac

...... previously not possible but I've found this solution (Credit to poster ess@Macforumz)

"You can trick Safari into playing the game in full screen using Windows Media Player.

To to this, you need to remove the Windows Media Player Plug-In from the internet plugins folder (it's located in HD-Library-Internet PlugIns-Windows Media Plugin).

After you do this, Safari will ask you if you want to us the WMP application (rather than the web based plugin for WMP) when watching a MLB.TV stream."

Then you could tell Windows Media Player to play it full screen. Problem solved!

OK. I should remove one strike against Mac.

Fight Censorship

Here is a follow-up to the article below: Adopt a Chinese Blog is a program to help Chinese bloggers by hosting their blog oversea to avoid being banned.

Well, those bloggers may still run into trouble back home as all traffic is being monitored over there.

I hope someday such program will become unnecessary.

Madeline's first swimming lesson

 

Video here

You should give credit to M$

... for criticizing themselves! See Microsoft bans 'democracy' for China web users on MSN Money. The company claimed that law required them to do so but the article pointed out no such law exists!

Well, in a country where journalist long time loyal to the ruling party could be detained for "spying", it doesn't matter what law exists.

Why should this be on the news anyway? It's capitalism at work, my friend! Apparently companies couldn't be wrong when they do things in the interest of their shareholders, no matter how immoral those are.

To Chinese bloggers: let's learn something smart from spammers: d3mocracy would do the trick.

Go SBUX Go!

What could be a better place to have the presense of this great company than the great palace?


Yes, it's the (not-so) Forbidden city in Beijing.