I am Cow

This rather amusing email hails from a land far far away; thought it’d provoke some amusement. Continued after the fold.

STRESS TEST

I am not sure exactly how it works, but this is amazingly accurate.
Read the full description before looking at the picture.

The picture below has 2 identical dolphins in it. It was used in a case study on stress levels at St. Mary’s Hospital. Look at both dolphins jumping out of the water. The dolphins are identical. A closely monitored, scientific study revealed that, in spite of the fact that the dolphins are identical, a person under stress would find differences in the two dolphins. The more differences a person finds between the
dolphins, the more stress that person is experiencing.

Look at the photograph and if you find more than one or two differences you may want to take a vacation.

No need to reply. I’ll be on vacation.

Never take life seriously. Nobody gets out alive anyway.

maki

kaizen software manifesto. Kaizen is essentially the idea of making small, continuous improvements.

Someone writes to TODAY to say something about “no”.  Is it really too late to try and keep them at that stage?

U of Kentucky PHY231 about the kinetics of bungee jumping.

There’s been a huge controversy over the pay of Government employees. I was just sitting in the bus when someone complained about only officers on the superscales get any notable pay increase.
The Cornell Center for Hospitality Research has a nice study about pay.

Rackable is producing container ‘dataparks’ too. Partly water-cooled, 1200 1U servers * 2 sockets * 4-core Xeon = 9600 cores in 40′ x 8′. How does that stack up beside Project Blackbox?

1G

CDW has got Core Duo 2.0 Macbook Pros for sale at USD 1329. That’s about SGD 2025.

Man, the Macbook Core 2 Duo 2.0 is at SGD 2112.60, under Education Advantage.

Wink

Thankfully, my macbook’s getting the hard drive replaced under warranty – despite the gash across the screen, and this crack on the right wrist rest which even I’ve yet to identify the origins of. Apparently the old drive is unreadable – they can’t let me have it back anyway – so it’s essentially half a year’s worth of data gone in a poof. The cruel bit is that I was backing up non-crucial data a few hours before the crash.. so, believe me, start the backups.

In other news, I’ve just cleared my inbox and drafts folder. On the other hand, after spending time clearing my actions, my homework is stacking up. Tomorrow’s outing is not going to help.

Skype on Windows feels very different from the Mac version, as does the Linux port.

I was looking at my feedreader’s statistics just now, and it seems that Thursdays are my most productive days. I’m reaching about 1200 items a month now.

After spending some time charting directions, I think I’ll be changing gears soon. What I’m doing now is simply too boring. I’ve got to find more fulfilling (and fun, ha) roles to play. Depending on the weather, life’s either a manipulative game, or a play.

GEP Enrichment Camp 2007

Guys, if you’ve been affected by various issues concerning the web registration system, please get together and go see Ms Law tomorrow morning. Alternatively, see Mr Peter Tan or Mr Jason Chan.

Thanks.

Vaccinations

http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/guide-to-php-security-ch3.pdf
Look at p6, The LIKE Quandary. Looks like I’ve totally forgotten about the % and _ use in MySQL, at the very least.
Replace mysql_real_escape_string with mysqli_real_escape_string, where appropriate.

Here, the source which pointed me to that – Crosspoint forums.

Ripples on the pool

The March 2nd incident. I’ve lost a handful of friends, and not gained any.
One thing is, the precedent that things can be escalated out of appointed persons’ realm, even if the delegation has been cleanly delineated, has been created. So, what do you think will happen if someone disagrees about something in the future? Our predecessors have tried their very best to keep all [our] previous squabbles and quibbling out of public eye; it’s a wise choice.

Another thing I’ve observed, I’ve heard people doling out rumours that I didn’t inform certain persons about something. Things like being Information Officer, I’m supposed to keep everyone informed and all that – now, I’d like to remind you as a courtesy I tipped you the news more than 24 hours in advance. Why? Otherwise, this incident would have been much worse.. you would be protesting in front of the powers that be. And guess what? If that had happened, I’d have quit on the spot – not to shoulder blame – for the organisation is as good as deep frozen and thrown out with the garbage once this.. schism is noticed.

I think I’m quite dispensable, really – my skill range is really very narrow and shallow. It’s giving me a nice fuzzy feeling thinking about it =)

I just had dinner at Charcoal, the successor to Petals, a SHATEC group restaurant.. I’m giving it a 1/50. Lousy food, slow service, expensive and a bad yoghurt cake. Don’t go.

I think I’ll be doing ‘link dumps’ on a weekly basis.

Web design, I found some nice sites. The WordPress Codex (it’s Wikipedia with ultra-short URLs), Freshview and its two product sites (which are really good stuff), I Bought a Mac (the images are good examples of the Apple-esque style), microformats.org wiki (the logo). The perennial HYBRIDWORKS, again.

Oh, and for those Adium users who haven’t gotten the full animated MSN emoticon set, go! (invokes Adium)

lalit dot lab has a cool method to figure out whether you’ve got a particular font. Works for me on Safari.

The Five Essential Phone-Screen Questions. I’ve got a long way to go before I’m employable in this field, heh.

The Peter Principle kind of explains why things are going wrong. Reminds me of Dilbert.

Mike pointed me to this – a teacher at the Classen School of Advanced Studies (Oklahoma City Public Schools) has a nice syllabus for English A1/AP Language & Composition put up. Go take a look – it’s fascinating. A JC usually doesn’t have this kind of policies.

PagePacker is a Mac OS X program that produces PocketMods. Windows users, go use that other utility :p

Twinkle

Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.9.
BonEcho and Photoshop/Imageready CS2 haven’t crashed at all. How many more to 10.5?

iTunes 7.1.
I’ve yet to play with fullscreen coverflow, though I guess it’d be cool to see on a larger screen.
My iPod Shuffle is now recognised as blue. That goes for the desktop icon too.
It’s moved from recognising it as a 1G Shuffle, to a 2G Shuffle, to a 2G colour shuffle. Magic or evolution?

Google Apps for your Domain’s Gmail has changed yet again; it’s now mail.google.com/a/[domain] instead of mail.google.com/hosted/[domain]. That’s in line with their admin panel’s naming – google.com/a/[domain].

The Effort Effect.

Google Hosted Mail Notifier is a third-party app that replaces Google Notifier, which suddenly stopped working some time ago with Google Apps For Your Domain. It does what it has to do well; I use email reminders and notifications for Google Calendar so I’m not clamouring for another notifier for that. Donationware.

EDIT: I forgot to say, iTunes now calls an ‘update’ a ’sync’. Everywhere.
New: “iPod sync is complete.”
Old: “iPod update is complete.”

Ninety-Nine

A friend mentioned this passage to me today, I think it’s a nice way for me to end this roller-coaster term.

“Don’t fret or worry. Instead of worrying, pray. Let petitions and praises shape your worries into prayers, letting God know your concerns. Before you know it, a sense of God’s wholeness, everything coming together for good, will come and settle you down. It’s wonderful what happens when Christ displaces worry at the center of your life. Summing it all up, friends, I’d say you’ll do best by filling your minds and meditating on things true, noble, reputable, authentic, compelling, gracious – the best, not the worst; the beautiful, not the ugly; things to praise, not things to curse.

Thirty more bottles, sitting on the wall. One falls down and..

Recruitment

MacAskill has a good take on how they hire at SmugMug. I think they’re very good ideas.

With God’s grace, today, COMPSERV | CST at ACS (Independent) has won 10 iPod Shuffles (2nd Generation) and Samsung L700s. The Committee will be deliberating on the distribution for these prizes shortly. We’ll try to make everyone happy, but there will usually be needs and wants which can’t be satisfied.

Guess what, the NIC Awards Night was at the Ministry of Sound. I’m fourteen and three quarters, and I’ve been in there, legitly with stamped arm and all – no alcohol though =)