Ever met a guy who’s trying to be too mature, too soon, too fast? You know – the 8th grader who carries around a smartphone and a PDA, brings his laptop to class for note-taking, and regularly tries to give stock recommendations to his uncaring friends acquintances over break?
It’s funny/creepy when a kid grows too mentally big to fit his own prepubescent shoes, but it’s kind of scary when a country decides to take that route and grow itself much bigger and more grandiose than it was 20 years ago. I’m talking specifically about the country and city of Dubai, one of the fastest growing places in the world. A country in the middle east that decided it couldn’t rely on its punitive oil reserves, the government started to go po-mo back in the early ninties and has been continuously building ever since, creating a booming tourist industry.
I recently tried updating my computer’s hardware (the keyword being “tried”) by replacing the graphics card – the part that affects game and graphics performance the most on modern systems and will make running Windows Vista bearable. With the amount of games I play, I figured this was a good visual investment (although it’s a terrible monetary one, graphics cards depreciate even faster than other computer parts).
As it turned out, the card I picked (the nVidia 7900GT) was a dud; people have been complaining about failures for a few weeks now, and chalk it up to my lack of extensive research that I went ahead and bought a card known to have issues anyway. I will say that it looked real nice for the week I had it.
But what I wanted to jot down wasn’t how nVidia won’t admit to problems with their cards, it’s how good some company’s customer service can be. I had made the purchase from Newegg (I had never had to return something from them before), and from my previous experience with the online retailer buy.com, I was expecting some hard work and argumentation on my part to get an acceptable return.
I recently had to reinstall Mozilla Firefox on my machine (the upgrade from 1.0.x to 1.5.x left behind a few lingering issues), and, like any other highly customizable piece of software, it takes a lot more time for me to tweak the settings to get the look-and-feel right than it is to actually install the program.
One of the best parts of Firefox is the ability to add user-created functionality via Extensions. The idea is that Firefox itself is a (relatively) bare web browser, and you can customize the set of extra stuff to enhance the browsing experience. Supposedly, as they’re continuing development, they’ll integrate some of the more common and popular extensions into the main program.
I’ve been continuously making small updates to my site since I got back from my east coast conference. Believe it or not, I actually keep a list of enhancements and bug fixes myself and others have found and spend time implementing those items; the last two weeks, I revamped my journal search interface and added navigational arrows to journal entry pages as well as fixed up a few display bugs. If you have suggestions or find anything wrong, lemme know via comments, thanks.
Lately I’ve been trying to get myself more energetic and less…well, sleepy, at work and at home as well. I don’t get that many hours of sleep on weekdays (and as it turns out, I’m usually more tired than not the next day regardless of how many hours I get), and staring at thousands of lines of written code for hours on end doesn’t make things better.
I was gone all last week to an engineering conference held by Factset – hence that ride in Central Park – and came back more appreciative of our trademarked sunny Californian weather and (relatively speaking) friendly highways. The time away from home was pretty good (it was almost like a company-expensed vacation), but the actual business purpose of attending technical discussions and presentations turned out to be, well, not as good.
Engineers get a bad rap for lacking in social and interpersonal skills, which, I’m sad to say, was evident from some of the presentations I had to sit through. I don’t blame them too much, though; I had to stand up there myself and gave a talk on Windows Vista, and it’s tough to keep a crowd of 150, 200 people focused on your talk when you have to compete with wireless internet and engineers’ tendency to zone out 10 in the morning.
You start speeding up, you lose concentration, you forget your lines and your slides, your well-rehearsed jokes and one-liners are forgotten and delivered in the flatest of monotones – that’s what standing up there is like, especially if it’s your first time and imagining the engineers in front of you sans clothing makes you physically sick. Sadly, bad presentations and lectures are the norm at software conferences, so completely messing up only puts you in majority of those who chose to speak on stage.
So, um, bye?
Graduation ceremonies are a fickle thing; you spend a good hour or two sitting through something you are completely uninterested in for around ten seconds of redemption that is “the walk”. It’s a show meant to be for parents, to show that their financial support and patience the last 4+ years actually amounted to some level of accomplishment, and what better way to cap the end of a hard-earned, intense, four-year run through an undergraduate degree than a long and superficial show?I had the honor of attending Sui’s graduation from the MCB major at Berkeley this last Friday, and – forgive me for being so condescending here – it was essentially what I described above, having to trade a few hours of boredom and discomfort for the few seconds when it really mattered: when Sui was striding across the stage in her black robe and square hat looking very much like the girl who took everything Berkeley threw at her and made slimy biological goo out of it. It was a proud moment for me, her, her parents and family, as well as her friends that drove over from UC Davis; so closes an early chapter of her life with another one following right along.
