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April 24 Kryptonite discovered!Superman beware! Kryptonite has been discovered in a mine in Serbia!
The BBC are reporting the discovery of an unusual mineral in a mine in Serbia. Subsequent chemical analysis has shown that it is comprised of "sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide", which turns out to be the same scientific name described in the Superman story, where it was written on a case of rock containing kryptonite, stolen by Lex Luther from a museum in the Superman Returns movie.
Well there you have it. Kryptonite exists! Now if only there was a real life Superman to try it...
This ends today's completely useless news report. Thanks for reading. April 22 Where will the next Bill Gates come from?
From Asia.
According to a study done in the US on the topic "where will the next big success and where the next Bill Gates come from", 60% of Americans believe the next big success will come from Asia. And guess what, Bill thinks so too, according to an article in China's People's Daily Online newspaper.
OK, so he was speaking in Hainan, China at the time, and he wants to make his audience feel good. But there's probably a bit more to it than that. Include me in the 60% of people in the US who agree. Limbo: here today, gone tomorrow?I was raised as a Catholic, baptised, holy communion, confirmation, attending boys-only school run by the Christian Brothers. Since age 12, I've been somewhere between an atheist and an agnostic. I like to use the term "speculative atheist". I remember that I did not believe in what I was being taught at age 12 because I made a conscious decision to go through with my confirmation ceremony only because I was going to get money from all my relatives. Going through with it also avoided consternation and embarrassment on the part of my parents. I like to think of it as a win-win :-)
Today I read about a report from the Vatican which urges that Limbo be abolished. It used to be that people who died unbaptised went to hell, including babies who hadn't survived birth. That was back in the 5th century. Later on (I think around 15th century) they softened it up by introducing this concept called Limbo, basically a holding cell halfway between heaven and hell. Limbo was the first circle of hell in Danté's Inferno. Now it seems even Limbo is too "cruel" for a church that wants to appear more touch-feely with its congregation, so they want to remove it altogether and let unbaptised babies into heaven.
This fits nicely with other "rules" which have changed within my 38 years on the planet - eating meat on Fridays, going to Church on Saturdays if you can't make it on Sundays... and now Limbo.
To me, a religion loses all credibility when they decide to change or bend the rules - any rule. Religion is absolute. You can't just change it because times have changed and people are less willing to go along with it, so your congregation is dwindling and nobody listens to the priest anymore. If they were really sincere, they would stick to their guns. Eat a t-bone steak on Friday, go to Hell. Miss Mass on Sunday morning, go to Hell. Didn't get baptised through no fault of your own? Screw you says God, you're going to Hell to burn for all eternity.
Either the Vatican/Catholics knew what they were doing in the first place (and they should, since the religion is supposed to be following God's wishes on how he should be worshiped), or it pretty much proves they were just making it all up from the beginning (duh!). So one day it's a sin, the other it's not. A baby born today is supposed to go to Limbo. If this council within the Vatican convinces the Pope to change that, then Limbo just ceases to exist and will never have existed. How does that show the infallibility of the Pope, that he is God's representative on Earth? It doesn't. It only shows that they don't know what they are talking about and they make it up as they go along.
I think this only gets to me because I grew up in Ireland, a 98% Catholic country, and I could see the BS was spread a mile thick even before I hit my teenage rebellious years.
At least Islamic/Muslim people have the balls to stick to the rules. Their attitude seems to be: Here's what it says in the book, follow it to the letter, I don't care how many centuries ago it was written. Don't like it? Screw you. Now THAT's a religion. I don't know what Catholicism is anymore... April 19 Lesson learnedNever stay up until 2:30am playing H3 internal beta the night before an exam... I'm so excited/addicted to the H3 internal beta that I'm currently participating in prior to the public beta starting on May 16th (previously blogged about below), that I completely forgot that I had my Japanese 3rd quarter final exam this morning at 9am. Needless to say, I did no studying/reviewing whatsoever, and to make matters worse, I was 10 minutes late thanks to all of the road works going on, so I didn't even have 5 minutes before the exam to quickly scan the vocabulary list. I don't think I have ever experienced a more miserable exam. If there was ever a day when I needed a caffeine boost in the morning, today was it. My comatose brain simply refused to work. Oh well... I guess it just confirms what others have always believed: 私はばかです。 April 17 US: an unruly teenager?You know how teenagers get - always thinking they know better than their elders, refusing to be a cooperative and friendly member of the family, pouting and sulking when they don't get their way every time? Well, the US of A was founded in 1788, just 219 years ago. Considering the far greater age of many countries, it seems to me that the US has now entered its teenage years, and this is leading the country down its current path, throwing its weight around and refusing to listen to the wisdom of its elders (China, France, UK, Japan, etc). I wonder if the US is actually the youngest member of the UN Security Council? (I haven't had time to check this).
When France refused to support the US in getting UN agreement to allow them to invade Iraq, people in the US were wildly anti-French for a while. How quickly a teenager forgets even in his short lifetime. The US's greatest ally these days is the UK, but of course as we all know, the US was founded in 1788, essentially after the War of Indepenence, in which the French had helped the "US" to defeat the British. The French gave the Statue of Liberty as a gift at the founding of the new nation. Indeed, South Park even reminded us recently by pointing out that the Muslims haven't been the enemy for very long. Your enemies can be your friends, and vice-versa, within a very short space of time indeed...
(transcript courtesy of SPScriptorium)
Anyway, it seems to me like the US has lost touch with the tenets it was founded upon. Hopefully, if it survives its teenage years without too many scars, it could mature into a nice young man.
What brought me to this subject, in a very roundabout way, was an article on BoingBoing about the world's oldest company, a temple-building company in Japan founded in 578AD, that went out of business in 2005 after ONE THOUSAND, FOUR HUNDRED and TWENTY EIGHT YEARS! SUICA & NEXThis information is certainly useful for me and my colleagues, so I thought I would share it with a wider audience (if anyone is reading, that is...) For anyone who may be traveling to Tokyo in the future, please note there is now a new train ticket type which will be extremely useful (and cheaper!) when travelling to and around Tokyo. The offer combines a one-way ticket from Narita to Tokyo, plus a Suica stored-value/pre-paid card with ¥1500 worth of train travel around Tokyo. It is only available for purchase at Narita, and is only available to non-Japanese citizens. Previously, the Narita Express ticket (NEX) cost ¥3110 for a one-way trip from the airport to Tokyo. The Suica & NEX package for ¥3500 lets you save ¥1610. It consists of: 1) a one way trip from Narita Airport to Tokyo (or Yokohama) by Narita Express, and The Suica card can be used on almost all trains around Tokyo, you can recharge it by adding additional money when the balance gets low, and you can keep it essentially forever and use it again the next time you are in Japan (the money on the card doesn’t expire for 10 years). Having such a card is far more efficient than having to get a ticket for every train journey during your stay. The Suica & NEX package can be purchased at Narita Airport only by travelers who hold a non-Japanese passport. More on Suica & NEX and how to use it Background info:
April 11 35 days until Halo 3 Public Beta
May 16th at 12am PDT until June 7th, for those lucky enough to have a coveted space in the beta. I think I might have to use up some vacation time...
My gamertag is 'arsewipe'. See you on XBL, prepare to be pwned.
Here's a link to the article on Bungie.net.
They've also posted a great video with actual gameplay from H3 and interviews with Bungie crew. I really enjoyed watching it! Here's a link to the 110Mb WMV version (640 x 360).
April 09 China Mobile users outnumber the entire US populationChina Mobile just announced that the number of people who subscribe to their mobile service is more than the entire living population of the USA. Their subscriber base grew to 301 million.
Other interesting facts:
Xbox Keypad & Messenger IntegrationFile this one under S-W-E-E-T!
I work for Microsoft but I often find out about product developments just like any regular customer - via blogs. I regularly (daily or several times daily) read the following blogs:
Tonight I found Engadget, CrunchGear and Neowin all reporting that there will be an Xbox Live dashboard update - reportedly scheduled for May 7th - which will include the ability to instant-message with your Windows Live Messenger buddies, among other things. You can read more about what's coming at the link above. However, as you might expect, IM-ing your buddies isn't all that great using the Xbox 360 controller. All that "hunt and peck" effort is not conducive to chatting, or merely leaving messages. You can, of course, just plug any USB-based PC keyboard into your 360 and type away, but let's face it - who wants to have a big keyboard hooked up to your 360 all the time. The solution is this rather nifty-looking QWERTY keypad which attaches to your controller. Like you, I've only seen the pictures going around the internet today, but it looks pretty sweet to me, and I can't wait to get one!
cool, huh? KDDI: coming to AmericaKDDI, the second largest mobile carrier in Japan (after NTT DoCoMo) is going to set up an MVNO on Sprint's network here in the US. This is pretty cool news, if it means that we might be able to use some phones that were designed for use on KDDI's network in Japan. It's not yet clear what their service will offer compared to existing US carriers, but everyone knows that USA is lagging behind Asia and Europe in the mobile world, so I'm certainly hopeful that this will bring something new to the US market.
April 05 Alpha Beta?Yahoo! has a new beta search engine, called Alpha, running in Australia as a trial market.
Talk about confusing! Maybe I should start a product called Beta and then release an alpha version of it.
Happy EasterSaint Peter = Peter Rabbit?
Tonight's South Park episode finally sheds light on an ancient Christian mystery - what do the Easter traditions of painting eggs and the Easter Bunny have to do with the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ? Watch and learn, children ;-)
By the way, Bill Donohoe, president of the American Catholic League, is a central figure in this episode. He's had something to day about South Park before, and Trey and Matt have their revenge here, with Bill overthrowing the Pope and sentencing Jesus to death. Fun Fun Fun! April 03 New stuffI had mixed luck with my new toys today. As I mentioned earlier, I was picking up my new replacement Xbox 360 and also getting a new laptop today. Not a bad treat to make returning to work bearable after a week of sick leave.
The 360 is working well, I played some GoW and DOA4 to break it in. It seems to run quieter than my old one too - at least with no DVD spinning. With a game disc in there, it's hellishly loud. But for the rest of the time it's nice and quiet. I might be more inclined to use it as an extender for my Vista MCE machine in the study.
The laptop, on the other hand, didn't fare so well. I saw the Vista BSOD ("blue screen of death") for the first time today.
The laptop is a Toshiba Portege M400 Tablet. On the inside it's reasonably decent, with a Core 2 Duo processor, 2Gb RAM and so on, but on the outside it looks like an ancient machine. It looks soooo uncool that it's not even funny. After seeing it and realizing I was going to be stuck with it for the next 3 years before I am again allowed to upgrade, I got pretty depressed. I started looking into buying my own laptop for work use. The new R400 from Toshiba looks way cooler, but I wasn't allowed to get that. Maybe I'll start using my MacBook with a Boot-Camped Vista... that should turn a head or two around the office ;-)
Anyway, as I was saying, I got the dreaded BSOD the first time I turned on the machine. It was going through its iniital setup of the OS, so the crash could not have come at a worse time. It left me dead in the water, and without a recovery disk (thanks again, Tosh!). I couldn't restart the OS install, so in the end I called Helpdesk and asked them to wipe it and just put a brand new image on there. Hopefully that will do the trick. April 01 10 YearsI joined Microsoft 10 years ago today.
That's more than a quarter of my life. Scary thought.
Yes, April 1st, 1997, was my hire date. I replaced my orange contract-staff badge with a blue one, and joined the ranks of the Internet Products & Tools Division. I still have a coffee mug somewhere with the IPTD logo on it. Somebody (Andreas, I'm talking about you) obviously forgot to tell me they were just kidding about hiring me, so I stayed.
The Internet had rekindled my interest in computers (I cut my teeth on a Commodore VIC 20 back in the early 1980s, you may have similar memories of using cassette tapes as non-volatile memory, and laboriously typing 200-line programs from computer enthusiast magazines only to find out you had a typo somewhere and no debugger). I still remember my first online experience. My friend Mike had a CompuServe account and logged on and showed me around, using DOS software as I recall. OK, so CompuServe was a "walled garden" online community, like AOL, not the true internet, but I was fascinated. My passion and interest in the internet space has never faltered since that moment. I bought a 14.4kbps modem, got my own CompuServe account, borrowed a Mac Classic from Mike (the one with the 9-inch black and white screen), and taught myself HTML. The rest, as they say, is history.
The World Wide Web had really emerged around 1994. At the time, Microsoft was still cranking out Windows 95. Bill refocused the company on the internet starting in 1996, so that when I joined Microsoft on a 6-month contract with the grand title of "webmaster", we were hell-bent on catching up with Netscape in the web browser space, and the internet was on fire. Yahoo was the king of the web portals, but there were many competitors - Lycos, Excite, Alta Vista, and so on. Microsoft had nothing in this space at the time - it's MSN service was still a walled-garden community much like CompuServe and AOL. It wasn't until mid-1998 that we had a www.msn.com portal site that anyone on the internet could access.
Mike has influenced my life in more ways than one. He was the one who introduced me to the internet and generously gave me a spare computer to allow my interest to build, and eventually it was he who first suggested I should go work at Microsoft. Take away either of those two milestones and my life would be on a completely different path today. What kind of path, and whether it would be better or worse than this one, is impossible to say - after 10 years working for the Evil Empire, I really can't imagine doing anything else or being anywhere else - but it feels like this has been a good path for me, so cheers, Mike, old boy.
There's an old tradition that a person should bring M&Ms to work on their anniversary, in an amount that equals the number of years that they have worked at the company - in other words, 10 lbs of M&Ms for my 10-year anniversary - but not that many people follow it anymore. There are just way too many people that have been in the company 10 years or more. Even with 70,000 employees, you'd never run out of M&Ms to eat.
"10 years at Microsoft, what a great achievement, you must be proud!" Well, in a way, I am. But it's hard to think of it as much of an achievement at all. I think of myself as just one of 70,000, and one of the "younger" people in my team of 60 or so people - we have one 20-year guy, and many with more than 10 years under their belts. Besides, I'm not sure how a period of time can be an achievement. It's really what you do that's important. Did I spend the 10 years contributing meaningful things? Did I make an impact that improved things for our customers?
I prefer to take the quiet and humble approach. But I'll say this. I'm not ready to retire yet. Because when I do retire, I want to be able to answer those questions with conviction. 10 years under my belt, sure, but we're still just on Web 2.0. The Internet is still young, and there's a lot of cool shit going on, and I want to be a part of it. |
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