I guess the outage at the Danger division of Microsoft has given us a new term for when things go wrong in the cloud. Would you be willing to let your data and applications live in the cloud and be Sidekicked?
Danger Hiptop – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia#Data service outage 2009.
Caught this while I was loading up on my weekend dose of BOFH on TheRegister.
While deleting email that was from grad school, I chanced upon a mail titled Living Life in Chunklets. I never actually read the full article but was pleasantly surprised to find the archive online:
If every moment, even outside of work, is spent striving toward some officious end–reading a quick article in a trade journal, exercising to keep heart disease at bay, maintaining a network of potentially useful acquaintances with quick personal emails–then something has to fall away. And some people think it’s the fragile things that go first: contemplative time, time to just be and not do, time to let the mind drift and spin.
http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/01.06.00/cover/humantech-0001.html
I might not have searched and found this amazon review page if I was not working late and found a bugzilla quip that piqued my interest. But, this was the most reading fun I have had in a while:
Chinese guy singing Hindi Song:
Jai Ho in Spanish:
I am too old but makes me want to learn the guitar:
Is it cool to be on twitter?
I end up reading about facebook and Twitter more than I need to for social or work reasons. However, it will surprising to know that is more for intellectual curiosity for the underlying technologies and the infrastructure and scalability issues than for the social networking.
I was once bitten by the Ruby on Rails bug and developed a couple of public apps and a few internal applications using the framework. I ended up liking the Ruby language while I was doing it. I am a fan of Rapid Application Development tools (especially for web sites with database driven backeds) that still feel like basic programming. Java with its sea of technologies and packages never appealed to me. I remember reading an early Ruby slide that said if the language and compiler are not fast enough just wait for hardware to get faster. (Music to hardware designers ears).
So I was doing a lot of rubbernecking when twitter was having problems. I am still waiting to try out Scala after I saw the raging debates on the internet about languages and speed that I had not seen since the C, Java and Perl days and read about Twitter and Scala.
Reading about all the news with the oil futures spike, peak oil theories and inflation makes me wonder if good old two hands will become more important in the future for a country.
Whenever I compare India (where I was born) and USA (where I live), I find that anything that requires human touch is a lot more expensive in the US than in India. The opposite is true for highly automated machines. Household help/caregiving, massages, drivers for hire, etc. are all less expensive to hire in India. Hiring people for cheap is usually the most common differentiator when people compare the quality of living in India with USA.
I even remember a speech at my college by the Human Resources Development minister (who is the ex-officio head of the IITs) highlighting this point. He was berating the computer science students for working on Robotics when we should be focusing on trying to better utilize India’s best resource – the abundance of human resource.
If automation (automobiles, manufacturing, et. al.) gets more expensive then in a hundred years we might be back to using human power to power everything! Not back to the dark ages, but to cycling and hammer and tongs…
Once in a while I get the urge to do something with the few savings that we have sitting in the savings and retirement accounts. Something aggressive, creative or opportunistic. I always go back to sanity by reading a few bookmarks.
Here is an article in the San Francisco magazine that is the sanity check. I have that article saved locally so I would not have to worry about it disappearing from the web. The folks at Aperio Group who are mentioned in the article now have a website which is called Transparent Investing. They have a basic investing guide which is simple enough for do-it-yourself investing and detailed enough to appease the engineering minds (for example, it accounts for the fact that people have taxable accounts and retirement accounts).
I was reminded of these because of an anectode from Warren Buffett:
One shareholder asked a question along the lines of ‘how should I study investing in order to build wealth in my spare time?’
Buffett replied that, for most people, the bulk of their income is going to come from earning power in their chosen profession. Therefore, from the standpoint of building wealth, free time is better spent sharpening one’s professional skills rather than studying investing.
If you like your profession, and you enjoy doing what you do (like I enjoy what I do for a living), then read the articles and stop worrying about investing.
Imagine Eli Manning and the NY Giants missing the points on their last drive. Many (if not all) news bulletins would have carried the photo of Randy Moss hauling in the pass from Tom Brady while Corey Webster was spread eagled even before the Ball was anywhere near Moss. It would have been painted as Tom Brady’s clinical effort and Randy Moss’ redemption for a poor post-season. However, more interestingly, Corey Webster would be forever the guy who was on his ass behind while NE scored. Instead Corey Webster is the guy who deflected the Hail Mary pass in the last 10 seconds and who (ahem!) inexplicably fell down on the previous drive.
Note: I am only a USC and OSU fan and not even a 49ers or Raiders fan.
