This Week in Review

The big news of course was iPhone. Steve Jobs, the purveyor of cool finally answered the perennial prayers of its fanboys and gave them and the world iPhone. Cisco, without missing a beat, say iSue, claiming trademark infringement of the name iPhone.

For $250 million for 5 years or $1 million a week, David Beckham is moving to LA. Does America care about soccer? It never did and probably never will.

More iPhone

If you are not yet sick and tired of the iPhone already, you may want to get yours right here right now. You don't need to wait till June or sign any 2-year contract with Cingular. Sid, don't say I don't do anything for you.

permalink from Boing Boing.

The Future has Arrived.

After months of speculation, Apple's Steve Jobs finally unveiled the much anticipated cellphone that is known as the iPhone. It's not the Christ's second coming, but I guess it comes close.

It's not like we don't have cellphone now, it's just that people dig Apple's sleek design.

Other than the iPhone, there aren't that many new developments except for the new Apple tv which I am not too crazy about. I rather see some hardware improvements and price reduction on the MacBook and MacBook Pro lines even though it's very unlikely given the momentum that Apple is enjoying.

See iPhone yourself.

Anybody digging Vista and Zune ....

UPDATE: Cisco is suing Apple claiming the ownership of the name iPhone. I thought Apple would have used a different name for its cellphone but apparently Jobs is so hung up on the i everything branding. Personally, I think podPhone, MacPhone work too.

Apple Store Offline

A cell phone sans buttons introduced by Apple's Steve Jobs. JPGs from macRumors.com

When other ecommerce stores go offline, it means offline or some screwed up. But when Apple goes offline, it means only one thing - new products.

Apple store is taken offline so be prepared for some new updates there. Jobs is now doing his presentation. If he's not going to demo a "podPhone," the stock is going to nose dive I think. Entering the cell market is perhaps the next right thing for Apple to do but they are going to uncharted territory. There are talks that Apple may even operate the phone network so as to have end to end control of everything. Or it's going to be exclusively on Cingular for its debut.

OKAY, according to MacRumors.com, Wifi n is officially supported for its streaming video device. Speed if not love is definitely in the air now....

3 revolutionary products:
Widescreen iPod. Good I didn't buy any old iPod. this is the one...
Mobile Phone. So the rumors are just valid.
Internet Communicator. What the hell that is. I guess it's like a Tablet or such.
I take it back, it's actually one device doing the above three things. So this is drastically different from iPod's philosophy: do one thing and do one thing really well.

Apple's shares shot up minutes after Jobs introduced the "phone."...

Guys, get ready for a lot of touching and fingering ... that is if you can afford to spend $499 or $599 for a 4GB or 8GB model with a 2-year contract with Cingular.

Blogger is pretty down now

Blogger is stalling. For some reason my blog is still up and running. Not that it matters.

podPhone is imminent

Let's see if today is the day for the introduction of the much anticipated podPhone from Apple. 2oo7 is going to be another exciting year for the technology inclined, just think Vista and Leopard. The whole IT industry probably is going to benefit from these two significant OS's rollout.

NYC stinks

NYC stinks and it's confirmed and reported.


UPDATE:
NYC is blaming NJ for the source of the stench. Yes, that explains it, it's all New Jersey's fault.

Further reading here:-
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-NYC-Gas-Odor.html

While Dems are taking control of the House ...

Asians are crowding America's top colleges.

Stanford 24%
Harvard 18%
Princeton 13%
MIT 27%
Cal Tech 33%
Johns Hopkins 22%
Columbia 13%

Sources: College Board, fall 2005 via Little Asia On the Hill by Timothy Egan published on the Education Life section of the Sunday New York Times on January 7, 2007. JPG from The New York Times.

Take for example, Berkeley. Asians compile 12% of the California population but 37% in Berkeley's undergraduate program. So you can see Berkeley is the "Asian Heaven." So if you are Chinese and want to experience diversity on campus, don't even try. The reality is people generally respect and celebrate differences but they don't necessarily mix socially. There are debates whether the system should bring back affirmative action in campus as to mere meritocracy as it is now to diversify the campus experience...By the way, Asians aren't considered minority for affirmative action, so Asians are pretty much on their own without the benefit of any federal guilt trip let's level the playing field program.

iWoz: Book Report Part II

Let me see where I left off first. I didn't write much at all.

iWoz is Steve Woziniak's autobiography to set the record straight, or essentially telling people what an asshole Steve Jobs was . There were several events as mentioned in the book that leads me to conclude that Jobs could be an asshole.

On p.109

"In the meantime, trembling with fear, Steve passed the Blue Box to me. He didn't have a jacket on, but I did. I slid it into my pocket."

The Blue Box was one of Woz's brilliant hacks to make free (read illegal) phone calls. Jobs passed the Blue Box to Woz thinking that the police approaching them knew they were making illegal phone calls. So Jobs shit his pants and just wanted Woz to have the Blue Box when the police came.

On p. 147-148

"... Steve paid me half the seven hundred bucks he said they paid him for it.... Later I found out he got paid a bit more for it - like a few thousand dollars - than he said at the time."

So Jobs was a greedy liar, even to his friend and partner. Woz on the book says "I was hurt. But I didn't make a big deal about it or anything." Yeah, right. Many years later, like now, he still remembers and writes about it so the whole world knows Jobs was a liar and cheated him more than a thousand dollars. This was about the video game Breakout the two Steve's did for Atari, then Jobs employer. They did it in four days and ended up with mononucleosis.

On p. 195

"Steve Jobs made what I thought was the most ridiculous statement. He said, 'You might just want to buy this product for a few hundred thousand dollars. I was almost embarrassed....Steve added, 'A few hundred thousand dollars, plus you have to give us jobs working on this project."

Woz was talking a meeting they had with Commodore's bigwigs when they tried to raise money for their Apple II personal computer. So Jobs was not only greedy but ridiculously so.

It just gets better, on p. 269

"From what I heard, he threw it against a wall and put in a box and said, "Send it to him." As if Apple owned it. The Frog guy told me that Steve told him they couldn't do any work for us because Apple 'owned' Frog."

Woz quit his work at Apple (but still an employee and draws a salary up to this day) and started his own company CL 9, to make, gasp, universal remote. He was trying to get Apple's design firm, Frog Design, to do the prototype but Jobs wouldn't have any of it. So Jobs was a greedy asshole. (As an aside, Woz emphasizes more than once that the Wall Street Journal reportage was wrong on saying that he wasn't happy at Apple and was disgruntled. Woz says his reason to leave Apple was to start his company making universal remote. I wouldn't believe it let alone The Wall Street Journal.)

So you see it's not too farfetched that Apple has this option backdating scandal, because like Woz mentioned Jobs could be very not honest and greedy. Jobs name was cleared of any wrong doing by some internal committee, though the whole thing is still under SEC investigation as far as I know.

Also, Woz likes to point out that it was he and only he who single handedly designed Apple II, not he and Jobs. They didn't found Apple in Jobs garage as the legend would have it. It was HP, Woz beloved company that was started in the garage. Woz worked in his room in his apartment while Jobs worked in his room in his parents' house. Apple II, the one designed by him rocks while Apple III really sucks ass. Woz blames the constant crashing of Apple's OS 7 on Internet Explorer, at the same time without citing any evidence, at least in my mind.

In conclusion, Woz gives some words of wisdom to todays engineers, screw the committee and team work. Work alone. He promises it is worth it.

The book is easy to read, even I can finish it in a few days. I think any parent, engineer, entrepreneur can benefit from reading it.

Breaking: NYC high 72 F

I can almost hear the iceberg cracking and melting away in Antarctica for good.

Macworld, Jan 8-12. The podPhone introduction is imminent. More crap from Apple. Just sit tight and see what Steve Jobs has to offer.

iWoz: Book Report Part I

I was no good at writing book report. Actually that should come across as pretty obvious.

I checked out iWoz a few days ago. The book isn't like Shakespeare or something and perhaps just because of that it's very readable to me. iWoz is an autobiography of Steve Wozniak, the other Steve that founded Apple.

... to be contined.

Asia Birth Rate is going up in 9 months

According to a research scientist in Flushing, New York, whose identity shall remain anonymous, the birth rate in Hong Kong is likely to perk up due to Internet outage caused by a 6.7 or 7.1 magnitude earthquake happened outside Taiwan on Christmas Eve 2006.

Instead of surfing porn and having sex with PC or Mac or blogging in the virtual world, people in Hong Kong re-discover hardcore sex and like Justin Timberlake says "bring sexy back" in the bedroom or even better on the kitchen floor.

Sex is healthy and good in general, however local health officials express concerns on the already stressed out prenatal care system ....

Reporting live from cubicle farm from yours truly...

News Digest

Or otherwise known as The New York Times Rip-off.

January 2, Wall Street will be closed in honor of the death of a former President, hint, not Saddam. It's Gerald R. Ford (1913- 2006). The Masters of the Universe in Wall Street kind of get another day off. The launch of the new Wall Street Journal on Jan 2 is inadvertently affected and inconvenienced and hence made fun of by the New York Times.

Microsoft gave out Ferrari to Bloggers. Wait, it's the $2,200 Acer Ferrari laptops not the bank breaking muscle car. Bloggers, apparently have lower or no journalistic standards than real journalists. The laptops are intended for tech bloggers to review Vista that came loaded with the laptops. FOM, or Friends of Microsoft (yes, they even have a acronym for that) sure have benefits.

2006 was the deadliest year for journalists and media workers. 155 deaths were reported by the International Federation of Journalists. As for bloggers, anyone can be a blogger...and the number of bloggers killed in front of their keyboards is ... zero I think. And the number of self important and delusional bloggers who think they are building a rocket ship or something that are changing the world is countless, The Time's ass-kissing Person of the Year issue certainly fans this delusional thinking.

The 60s is the new 40s. Stallone's final (don't bet on it) Rocky movie is swinging in the Christmas and New Year box office. Not surprisingly, the Indiana Jones money making franchise is making a come back (did it ever go away?). The fourth chapter of the Indiana Jones will be released around May 2008. I hope it's not about Jones fighting ED and AD (as in erectile dysfunction and Alzheimer's disease). The last Indiana movie was the 1989 Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. I was immensely delighted by the Raiders of the Lost Ark, I even have a LD for that movie.

The most popular Wikipedia Citations are
10 RSS file format
9 Snakes on a Plane
8 Wiki
7 Meme
6 Ajax
5 Mark Foley scandal
4 World War II
3 Blog
2 Steve Irwin
1 Web 2.0

Sources: The New York Times, Monday January 1, 2007 paper edition

Year in Review

My sucky, shitty, baddy 2006 is going to come has come to its inevitable demise in a few hours time. I am glad it's all over.

At least 2007 can give me some false hopes for some time. My new year resolution is to stay alive.

Happy New Year.

Now get back to work.

UPDATE:

Now the New Year has come, the party is over, the reality begins to sink in. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, it's just another freaking year except you are getting older, stupider and uglier.

Year in Review

Life always comes to a bad end, let's just try enjoy the journey...

If you cannot get online, get on9. Severed undersea cables can't stop you from getting on9.

If you have existential issues as to why you blog, worry no more. Sina has come to the rescue. It is going to release a compilation of posts in a dead tree publication called Why Weblog? or Why We Blog? or whatever. It may just be the answer to your question "Why the hell do I blog?" If you have real or imaginary existential issues, I suggest you to read Sartre and Camus.

Saddam Hussein was hanged while Bush was in bed asleep. See life always come to a bad end.

Dow rose more than 16% for the year and topped 12000. Finance is the industry to be in.

Movie Review, again.

OKAY, this is a movie review, albeit a poorly written and untimely one.

Yesterday, we used the magic card that's called Queens library card to check out a few movies. So far I watched two, and hence you know how boring my life can be. Both movies star some old men, namely Steve Martin and Harrison Ford, as in Shop Girl and Firewall.

Firewall is supposed to be a thriller, but I really don't find it thrilling except maybe the part Ford uses a juice blender to kill one of the guys. I think Ford killed all the bad guys. The movie simply lacks intelligence that one would expect from a movie starring Ford and more so playing a computer security expert in a bank.

Shop Girl, based on the same name novel written by Steve Martin, is about a clinically depressed young woman working at Saks in Beverly Hills. No doubt, Shop Girl is Martin's wet dream. And may I add most men's. It's a nice little story and the performance of the three characters are good. For a moment I thought I was seeing the Matrix as Mirabelle's apartment is always so green. Shop Girl is the kind of movie that I won't borrow but end up enjoying it.

I borrowed Firewall and my wife picked Shop Girl, apparently she knows me better than I know myself, sometimes.

DS Action

DSC_7125
Originally uploaded by rnj97.

Here is Mr. Harry, practicing his little muscles. Holding the stylus, making the minis move. He should be playing Super Mario vs. Donky Kong. The game probably isn't the greatest but I guess it's okay. Honestly, what do I know about games?

Mountaineers

DSC_7276
Originally uploaded by rnj97.

Alex with the rest of the mountaineers.

Waiting in Line

DSC_7305
Originally uploaded by rnj97.

C Lift

DSC_7297
Originally uploaded by rnj97.