Two Things: Excellent Typography, About Introverts

This is my sixth post today. I'm on a roll, eh? Two completely unrelated articles this time, for which I apologize. It's just that I don't want to write two separate posts for them when, really, I just want to write three lines for each.

First, do you want to see stunning examples of typography on the web? Look no further than I Love Typography's '15 Excellent Examples of Web Typography'. I mean, like, wow.

Second, Brian Kim wrote a really good article earlier this week called 'Top 5 Things Every Extrovert Should Know About Introverts'. Being generally introverted myself, I really appreciate the fact that he's written this and think that it's something everyone (extrovert and introvert likewise) should read.

The Latest on My Tablet PC Obsession

If you've been reading this blog for a while now (that would be just you, Nadia!), then you'll know that I am rather obsessed with convertible tablet PCs. That is, I really, really, really want one. Why? Because convertible tablet PCs are everything that I want in a laptop computer at this point in time. That is, a keyboard that I can type on, a touch screen that I can write on, and a small and light form factor that I can easily carry around. The latest ones are also fast, powerful, and full-featured (ports, accessories, etc.). The only things missing in them -- a large display and a configuration suitable for gaming -- are better left to desktops anyway. I figured, therefore, that it was time for another tablet PC update. Why? Because Fujitsu and HP both recently released their latest tablet PC offerings: the T2010 and the 2710p respectively. And from all the reviews about them on the web, they're both excellent machines.

So here's my hypothetical issue (it's rather pathetic to have one, I know, but hey, if I can't fantasize about all this here, then where can I fantasize?). If I had the money to buy a tablet PC right now (let's say I won the lottery or something...God: hint, hint), which one would I get? I'm down to the following four choices:

  1. Lenovo ThinkPad X61t

  2. Fujitsu LifeBook T4220

  3. Fujitsu LifeBook T2010

  4. HP Compaq 2710p


And they're all really good. The problem is that, while they're all really good, they're all extra-specially good in different ways.

The Powerhouses

The Fujitsu T4220, for example, is the only one that has an on-board optical drive. It's also (by far) the most powerful of the bunch. However, it's also the most expensive. The Lenovo X61t, meanwhile, has the best keyboard (though the others are really good too), the longest battery life, the fastest hard drive, a really good processor, and the best extras. However, it has the the dimmest screen, no on-board optial drive, and, for the time being at least, is going through production problems. These two are also the heaviest of the bunch (though both are less than 2kg each).

The Lightweights

Meanwhile, both the Fujitsu T2010 and HP 2710p are incredibly light (about 1.5kg each), have excellent screens, good battery life, and aren't all that expensive. However, neither has an on-board optical drive (which means you have have to buy, and then carry one, with you separately) and both have low-power (i.e. slightly less powerful) processors. The 2710p also has the slowest hard drive. On the other hand, it's the only one with a wide screen. It's also the cheapest of the lost, and, apparently, has the best "tablet PC experience" of the lot as well.

Confused? Hong Kong Phooey made a really nice comparison table that shows each tablet's strengths and weaknesses graphically. That might help. The discussion below that posting is quite good too.

More Data, Mr. Spock!

Want to know craploads more? Check out the following video reviews on GottaBeMobile.com:

Or the following text reviews listed on Tablet PC Review (except for the last two that haven't been added to the listing there yet):

Analysis, Mr. Data?

So what does this all mean? Which would I finally choose? Well, when you compare the four, the first (and most obvious) grouping splits the bunch into features and raw, number-crunching performance (X61t & T4220) versus display quality and overall tablet PC experience (T2010 & 2710p). I generally prefer performance over everything else since I want to be able to edit audio & video and run processor- & RAM-intensive programs like Dreamweaver and Paint Shop Pro on my laptop. This would be true even if I did end up buying a desktop on which I could play high-end computer games etc. And, really, I don't mind the extra half-kilo of weight. That eliminates the two lightweights and narrows my choice down to the two powerhouses: the X61t and the T4220.

Next, if push came to shove, I'd probably pick the Fujitsu over the Lenovo. Why? Because, even though the Fujitsu is the most expensive of the lot, it does have the most features. If I get the SXGA screen (i.e. the higher resolution one) and up the hard drive to 7,200RPM (i.e. the fastest one; if possible), for example, I undo most of the Lenovo's advantages. I won't get the Lenovo's excellent battery life in the standard configuration, yes, but I will get the most versatility thanks to the Fujitsu's modular bay drive that can hold an extra battery, the optical drive, or, to reduce weight, nothing. And I like versatility.

Oh, and I get a few bonuses with it too: the control key is the bottom-left-most key on the keyboard (a big plus in my book), there's a touch pad instead of a track point stick, and the docking bay includes an HDMI port (which makes for better viewing on large, external monitors). Fujitsu is also supposed to have the best service and support.

So there. I've decided then. I am hypothetically going to get the Fujitsu LifeBook T4220P (the P is the more powerful of the two models) as my next laptop. Now I just need the money for it. Which basically means that I won't be able to actually get this till next year (assuming, of course, that I have a job by then). Oh, and Dell will have have come out with its tablet PC by then too. That should really shake the industry up and, as a result, I will get to make one more posting about my little obsession here. Yippee! :) Till next time...

Muslim Punk Rock?! Awesome!

Rolling Stone ran an interesting article a few days ago called Allah, Amps and Anarchy. It's about the first-even Muslim punk-rock tour in America and it makes a really interesting read. Here's a snippet:
There are more than a million Muslims living in the U.S., and the youngest generation is still struggling to find its place in America. "Shit changed for all of us Muslim people after 9/11," says Khan. "The best way for me to deal with it was music." The Kominas are one of the more established groups, having toured and released records. Their songs mix punk speed and attitude with Middle Eastern sounds. Their lyrics, often confrontational, are also deeply personal. In "Par Desi," Usmani, who spent part of his childhood in Pakistan, describes getting beaten up by punk skinheads in America: "In Lahore it's raining water/In Boston it rains boots."

Djembe, Geek T-Shirts

Other than this awesome djembe from Toca Percission (pronounced jem-bay, by the way) that Nadia got me for my birthday:

Djembe_small


She got me a few t-shirts too. I selected these three from ThinkGeek:

Pi By Numbers



There's no place like 127.0.0.1



No Comment



We also really wanted this one, but it was out of stock:

Come to the Dark Side



And now, thanks to Download Squad, I really want this one as well:

Balki Bartokomous T-Shirt



(*sigh*) Some day.

Tech Stuff: Screen Savers, TinyURL, UC Berkeley, Careers

A lot of people have written about a lot of good/fun tech stuff over the last few weeks. Here are some of the things I found interesting:

The excellent Smashing Magazine did a good roundup of the best screen savers available online. And, in case you missed it, they recently did a good roundup of desktop wallpapers (my favourite wallpaper site for the last few years has been Vlad Studio, by the way) and, some time ago, an extensive roundup of over 40 books for professional design and development. Pretty awesome.

Scott Rosenberg wrote about the Terror of TinyURL. I'm someone who rarely, if ever, clicks on a URL that he can't see in the browser's status bar so I know where he's coming from. And while I do understand the need for TinyURL, it does scare me.

CNET reports that UC Berkeley has now started posting entire course lectures online on YouTube (at http://youtube.com/ucberkeley). And while the are the first to do so, they certainly won't be the last. This should be fun.

Finally, Marc Andreessen has been giving lots of excellent advice about career planning on his blog. He's written three installment (plus introduction) so far, and though he comes from a high-tech, Silicon Valley background, it makes a really great read for everyone:

Enjoy :)

Life in Lahore

In a comment to my post about monsoons in South Asia, Aman pointed me to Umer Farooq's two-part article on Lahore that also talks about what happens when it rains there (and does a much better job that I ever could). You can find that on the Read It Live website: Lahore, Lahore - Part II. If you've ever lived in Lahore for a decent amount of time (or simply know people from Lahore), this ought to strike a chord. Or at least resonate a bit.

Multiple, Complex Storylines = Good

One of the really cool [1] things about television shows these days is the complexity and sheer number of storylines that they're squeezing into them. What's even cooler is that we're able to follow each of those threads, for the most part, reasonably easily. Though recaps and other assists help us keep things straight. Of course, this is not to say that the A/B storyline concept is dead [2]. That is indeed alive and well, and will continue to be the dominant narrative form on television for the foreseeable future.

If that jargon has thrown any of you, here's a quick recap. A storyline is a narrative thread "experienced by different but specific characters or sets of characters that together form a plot element or subplot in the work of fiction" [Source: Wikipedia]. Basically, a storyline is a plot (if there's only one storyline) or a sub-plot (if there are more). You can also call them story threads.

Single-Plot Stories

Older television shows (and even movies) usually had just one storyline that ran, for the most part, linearly. There was usually only one major plot (e.g. Spock, Kirk, and McCoy get stranded in the 1930s after stepping through the portal called The Guardian of Forever) and, occasionally, a few minor sub-plots (e.g. Kirk, surprisingly, finds the time to fall in love with Keeler). And we were usually shown these in chronological order unless, of course, there were flashbacks.

This is generally (not always!) what makes older stuff a little harder (i.e. a little boring) to watch. Though an episode like Star Trek: The Original Series' The City on the Edge of Forever is far from boring!

Multiple-Plot Stories

Then came the concept of the A/B storyline [3]. In this, two (or more) story threads (i.e. narrative plots) are developed simultaneously. The A-storyline is the main plot of the episode. For example, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Once More With Feeling, the A-storyline is the one in which the team investigates the spontaneous singing and bursting-into-flames phenomenon and tackles Sweet, the demon who has been summoned to Sunnydale and has caused all this mayhem.

The B-storyline, meanwhile, is a sub-plot that usually does things like character development, moving forward a developing story arc (i.e. a plot spread over a number of episodes), or supporting the main plot in some way or the other. In Once More With Feeling there are two main B-storylines. One is Tara finding out that Willow is abusing her Wiccan powers (and using them on Tara) and the second is Giles realizing that it is time for him to leave Buffy on her own (and for him to go back to England). The former doesn't figure much into this particular episode but the latter almost gets Buffy killed. You could say there are two more B-storylines going on: the first addressing the Buffy-Spike relationship and the second exploring the Anya-Xander relationship in more depth. Those are a little less important though, so you could even call them C-storylines!

Generally, though, shows produced after the turn of the century have lots of little subplots and storylines being developed in them all at the same time. That is, there aren't just two storylines, the A and the B, there are a few. Despite that fact, the phrase "A/B storyline" still generally works.

By the way, I chose Once More With Feeling to explain storylines specifically because each B-storyline literally gets its own song in that episode!

Craploads-of-Plots Stories

What's happening in television shows these days, though, is that there are many more storylines that just a handful. Lost is probably the first series to explicitly explore numerous storylines, character development arcs, and overall story arcs. This fact was initially daunting but, once you got used to it, all the storylines fit together and made sense. It was a little difficult, though, to start watching the series mid-season since you weren't quite sure what was going on. Also, Lost uses flashbacks to explain a lot of what is happening with its characters.

Heroes, which just started its second season in the US a few days ago, is the second major series to tackle this many storylines. In this they use both recaps and captions (that give you characters' names and locations) to help you figure out what's going on. That is particularly important for this series since, basically, it is narrated like a comic book.

The best thing about all this, then, is the fact that television shows are starting to become more compelling (narrative-wise, that is, since you have to have good writers on the show to be able to pull off that many simultaneous storylines and still make sense!); more in-depth with their stories (though, understandably they're a little slower with story development); and more prone to cult-like followings (since laypeople will find it hard to join mid-way...and once you're hooked, you're hooked). All of this, in my opinion at least, is a good thing.

Multiple, complex storylines = good.

Footnotes

[1] I have to stop using the words "cool", "awesome", "great", and "really".

[2] Or is it "A-B storyline"...I don't know.

[3] In television shows, that is. Plots and sub-plots have always existed in books.

Newly Discovered News Feeds

I've already written on this blog that I love Google Reader so you know that I'm into news feeds (lots of them!). What is really cool on the Internet these days, though, is the number and variety of sites and services that are starting to offer them.

There are, of course, the obvious ones:

That is, sites that feature dynamic, regularly updated content.

And then there are the less obvious ones. Much to my delight, the two that I've recently discovered are:

  • Facebook, which gives you an RSS feed of your friends' user statuses (so you can find out what they're up to without having to log in and you don't miss anyone's status update)
  • Flickr, which gives you a feed that contains the latest pictures uploaded by a particular user

Both are really useful and I'm glad they're there. Thanks, people!

Now if only sites like Ain't it Cool News, Airliners.net, and McSweeney's would start offering news feeds too. Some day.

I Miss the Monsoon

Since yesterday, Victoria (the province that Melbourne is in) has been buffeted by strong winds -- sometimes reaching gale force in localized areas. There hasn't been much damage, though the Bureau of Meteorology has issued a severe weather warning for "Localised Damaging Winds".

I walked home through that weather last night and, when I was about four streets away, it started raining. The rain itself wasn't hard but the wind was whipping it around quite a bit. Though I've been through heavier rains and thunderstorms in Melbourne, this was the first time I really felt the power of the elements -- which is a feeling that I really love. Of course, as Richard Adams says in his book 'Watership Down', the only reason we can say that is because we know we can protect ourselves from those very elements. If we couldn't, we probably wouldn't love, say, winter all that much (which, by the way, is my favourite season).

Anyway, as I hurried down the street while being pelted by rain, I realized just how much I miss the South Asian monsoons. I've been in Australia for the last two monsoon seasons -- which, in Pakistan, runs from end June to September -- and there's nothing quite like that on this continent. And though the weather here is sometimes more extreme, I do miss those rains (the thunder, those heavy showers) very much. It's not just the rains, though. It's the sights, the sounds, the smells, and ultimately, what the coming of the monsoon means for that part of the world. The monsoon heralds the coming of a new season, a new beginning, a new lease of life for that land...something that washes away the previous year and brings in the next. [I'm not going to try to be poetic about this. Many others have done a much better job that I can ever do!]

I think it was the smell of fresh rain on the ground that triggered my memories. That and the fact that I wasn't getting drenched like I would have been, had this been a monsoon rain. I wonder when I'll get to experience that next. Probably not next year. The year after that, maybe? Only if I'm lucky. Oh well.

Thinking Like a Dog, English Writing Evolves

Two more snippets from the Internet. (It's just one of those days where interesting things are happening elsewhere.)

Dog owners will appreciate and understand Khoi Vinh's logic flowchart for dogs. It revolves around eating and napping and reminds me a lot of Missy and Rufus, our two Labradors back home:

Missy and Rufus

Though they're much bigger now -- both age-wise and size-wise -- than they are in that photograph. Oh, and the comments to Vinh's post are great too so make sure you read those.

Meanwhile, Reuters is reporting that, thanks to the Internet Age (or Information Age, whatever), the Oxford English Dictionary has dropped the hyphen from about 16,000 words in the latest edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.

Bumble-bee is now bumblebee, ice-cream is ice cream and pot-belly is pot belly.

They did this after reviewing "2 billion words, consisting of full sentences that appeared in newspapers, books, Web sites and blogs from 2000 onwards". Ah, the joys of witnessing the evolution of a living language.

Band From TV

Since I have finally started posting about music, here's something else you might want to check out: Band From TV.

This is a bunch of successful TV stars -- like Hugh Laurie from 'House' (on keyboards) and Greg Grunberg from 'Heroes' (on drums) -- who are also amateur musicians. They play mostly cover songs at live venues (though they have an album coming out later this year) and they do it all for charity. They're quite good too.

Bruce Springsteen & Marion Call

I haven't been online much these last few days (and probably won't be till the weekend either) so I'm just popping in to post two interesting things.

First, Bruce Springsteen's new album 'Magic' is going on sale soon (2nd October in the US). In the lead up to that, his first single, 'Radio Nowhere', is available for download for free by Sony BMG. It's quite an awesome song and you can get it from this site: http://www.radionowheredownload.com.

Second, thanks to a posting by The Bad Astronomer, I too am being enchanted by the music of Marian Call. Her music is really good and it's funny just how much I relate to the lyrics of 'I'm Not Sexy'. If you get a chance, take a listen.

Blog Tools: Reading & Writing

If you read blogs -- especially if you read a lot of blogs -- and regularly browse the Internet to keep up with what's going on in the world, check out Google Reader, Google's web-based news feed reader/aggregator. It's fresh out of beta and really is quite fantastic.

Other than providing you with the obvious benefits of an aggregator:

Aggregators reduce the time and effort needed to regularly check websites for updates, creating a unique information space or "personal newspaper". [Source: Wikipedia]

it is free, fast, efficient, and very well designed. You can check your feeds online (which is really cool) but can take them offline as well (up to 2,000 posts).

It also has a few extra features thrown in. For example, you can bookmark your posts (by 'starring' them) though that's not all that special. What is special is that you can share your favourite posts online as well. You do that simply by clicking on the 'share' icon that appears at the bottom of each post. Doing that adds that particular post to your personal, automatically generated open-to-the-public Google Reader page (which, by the way, even has it's own RSS feed). Quite fantastic.

For The Blogger

Meanwhile, if you are a blogger yourself -- and you use Windows -- check out Windows Live Writer (WLW), Microsoft's new (still in beta) blog authoring tool. It may make your life a lot easier.

Much like an e-mail client, WLW lets you write blog posts offline in a full-featured rich text editor (which is generally better than what your blogging software has online). You can then publish your postings to your blog with the click of a button. That in itself is really cool: You can be blogging even when you're not connected to the Internet and you can save your drafts locally as well.

What makes WLW fantastic though is that, when you add your blog account to it (it supports all popular blogging tools and services), it downloads your design template and tags. It then loads those into its editor so, when you compose a post, it actually looks like you're typing into your blog! For example, this is what I see as I type this post in WLW:

Screenshot - Windows Live Writer

That actually looks like I'm typing into the blog itself. Compare that to the WordPress view that I would otherwise have gotten:

Screenshot - WordPress

That makes quite a difference, doesn't it?

Another cool thing is that you can save your drafts online (to your blog) so you're not tied to that particular computer when composing a post. Again, quite fantastic. 

The Bigger Scheme of Things

In the bigger scheme of things, it's great that both Google and Microsoft are taking on board the fact that people like doing things both online and offline. And that this is not true for just e-mailing (for which I use Thunderbird offline and Yahoo! online, by the way) but for other things like blogging and composing (and collaborating on) documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Most cool.

Want to Know More?

These days, lots of software development teams that are working on online products and services maintain blogs. The Reader and Live Writer teams are no exceptions:

By the way, the big three -- Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft -- have lots of other product/service blogs as well. You can find them all online but here are three each to get your started:

Enjoy :)

Connolly in Potter, Fry on the Web

Monsters & Critics is reporting that comedian Billy Connolly will be playing Zenophilious Lovegood (Luna Lovegood's father) in the upcoming Harry Potter movie 'Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince'! That's brilliant because Connolly is an exceptionally funny actor who has just the right amount of wackiness to play this particular role.

It's cool how, despite the fact that they're playing mostly bit parts, this franchise has gotten a whole bunch of seriously talented actors and actresses [1] to act in this series of movies. All of them are perfect for their roles [2], of course, though one wishes one could see more of them. Oh well.

Fry on the Web

Speaking of fantastic comedians (which is how we started), Stephen Fry now has a blog. His first (and, so far, only) entry is about the iPhone. Apparently, he's a huge PDA fan ("I have never seen a SmartPhone I haven't bought"). Who'd've thunk? Anyway, it makes a great read and, hopefully, he'll be an active blogger. Now wouldn't that be awesome.

Footnotes

Yes, I have footnotes in a blog posting. Want to make something of it?

[1] Or, if you want to be more politically correct (Hollywood style), just "actors".

[2] Like Alan Rickman as Serverus Snape, Kenneth Branagh as Gilderloy Lockhart, Maggie Smith as Minerva McGonagall, Emma Thompson as Sybill Trelawney, Helena Bonham Carter as Bellatrix Lestrange, Gary Oldman as Sirius Black, and Ralph Fiennes as Lord Voldemort.

Analyzing The Ongoing Communications Revolution

The last two or three generations have all gone through some form of communications revolution or the other. From the introduction of the telephone, to the early days of the "wireless", the widespread availability of low-cost printing, the ubiquity of broadcast media, all the way to the modern day proliferation of mobile phones, computers, and the Internet. And those are only a few of the technologies that have continued to further empower, enable, and connect people around the world. There are many more.

What is important and relevant to us these days (and to this posting, of course) is the communications revolution that we're going through right now. And, as with every communications revolution, it's not just about the technology, it's about what people are doing with that technology. That is, for example, while it Internet itself is really quite remarkable, what's even more remarkable is what people are doing with it, what they're using it for, and the content they're creating on it.

Recently, Wil Wheaton wrote a good article about all this in his weekly 'Geek in Review' on the Suicide Girls website. He writes:
Communication empowers people, and an empowered people are very, very scary to the powerful upper class who hope that we’ll just go away, right after we buy a lot of crap from them that we don’t need. And holy shit are they scared right now. The revolution may not be televised, but it’s being blogged, YouTubed, MySpaced, Facebooked, Dugg and Netscaped.

The follow-up discussion about that article on his blog is good too.

Phil Plait from the Bad Astronomy Blog then carried the discussion forward by talking about the problems we face when going through revolutions:
Old media (especially movies and radio) are dying, but their death throes are damaging new media too. Wil makes this point about DRM, the RIAA, and other hurtful acronymicious things. They are scared of teh ‘tubes, so they try to make them knuckle under. It’s not working well.

And there's much more discussion about all this on the comments to his posting as well.

My own take on all this mimics what Wil and Phil are saying, of course, but I just wanted to add something that Isaac Asimov wrote in one of his essays (I don't remember which one). He said that it's cool to be living in an age in which you can actually follow the evolutions and revolutions in technology that take place in your own lifetime. Before this, things happened over a number of generations. Nowadays, Moore's Law holds.

And the awesome thing is that, the people who are able to follow these evolutions and revolutions (i.e. those who learn from the past, live in the present, and create the future -- like Phil and Wil), what do they do? They blog, they make websites, they write articles on those websites, they record and freely distribute audio and video netcasts...basically, they use all of these revolutionary technologies to, well, further the revolution. And it's not the technology revolution they're furthering, it's the social one. The one that talks about equity, fairness, honesty, peace, justice, kindness, and so on and so forth. And that, really, is what it's all about.

AFR Ranks Australian B-Schools...Hmmm

The Australian Financial Review's (AFR) BOSS magazine's latest issue has a special report on business schools (b-schools) in Australia. Apparently, they publish one every year. This is the first time, however, that they've broken away from lumping Australia's b-schools into four broad categories and have ranked them individually instead.

Now rankings -- especially b-school rankings -- are a contentious thing, both at the personal and professional level. That's because every publication does them differently (by using a slightly different ranking algorithm) and thus comes up with different rankings (sometimes drastically different ones). On the one hand, that makes rankings in general a lot less relevant to, say, b-school applicants. Especially when one school is ranked highly in one ranking and not so highly in another. How do you interpret that?

On the other hand, two good things come out of everyone coming up with different rankings. First, some schools score highly in all rankings. That generally means that they're good regardless of how you look at them (i.e. how you slice the numbers). Second, it tells you that rankings aren't all that useful after all. Actually, it tells you that there isn't one best way to rank schools and, ultimately, it makes you wonder about how useful it is to quantify all this stuff anyway.

Of course, if you're a real b-school candidate, wanting to quantify everything probably comes naturally to you. Numbers are powerful. They can be placed in balance sheets and used in NPV calcuations. You can talk about them, throw them around, and make charts and trends out of them. They're also shorter than works. And so you look at, not only the rankings, but also the methodology used to get those rankings. Basically, rankings do matter, regardless of their relevance to your actual, often highly personal opinion on the "quality" of a particular business school.

Incidentally, this often helps you decide which of the major financial publications (Financial Times, BusinessWeek, etc.) suit your style or thinking, analyzing, and writing. That ends up being quite useful in the long run.

Anyway, coming to the point of this article: Six of the "top" b-schools in Australia (AGSM, MBS, Monash GSB, MGSM, U Queensland, and UWA GSM) didn't like the way BOSS was putting the rankings together. They (under the auspices of the Australian Business Deans Council) then drafted a white paper that presented their collective opinion on how b-schools should be ranked. BOSS, however, stuck to its own rankings system and that's what it printed in its September issue.

So, if you're thinking of doing your MBA in Australia, my advice is to (a) check out all the various rankings and ranking methodologies, (b) read the ABDC white paper, and (c) make your own criteria by which you should judge the schools you want to apply to. Just keep in mind, though, that rankings are rarely (if ever) everything.

Seven Wonders of the IT World

I have a lot of small bits of information to share today. I guess I'll do it in bits and pieces (i.e. in separate blog postings). Here's the second tech-related one of the day.

CIO Magazine recently published an article on the Seven Wonders of the IT World and it makes and interesting read. A couple of the wonders are more "what a cool place for a computer to be" type wonders: the computer closest to the north pole and the computer farthest from the Earth. Three have to do with raw processing power: one of Google's data centers, the largest grid computing project, and the world's fastest supercomputer. One has to do with smallness: the smallest computer to run Windows Vista. And one has to do with computing: the paradigm change brought about the Linux kernel. They're all truly wonders (or, at least, CIO's definition of what makes a "wonder") and, like I said earlier, the article is good to read.

Have you noticed, though, that more and more we like readings things that have are neatly listed, categorized, and ranked -- basically, things that we can digest quickly and easily...like, er, chicken nuggets. Oh well.

Technology in Education

Universities these days are really getting into the high-tech thing aren't they? Here are two examples. First, from my undergraduate university in Pakistan:
Mobilink, [Pakistan's largest cell phone carrier], recently announced its collaboration with the country’s top-most business school, the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) to provide exclusive BlackBerry® communications solutions to its campus life. [Read the Pakistan Times article]

And the second from one of Australia's top universities:
Macquarie is the first university in Australia to provide students with customised Google e-mail accounts with Gmail for staff set to follow. [Read the Computer World article]

2007 Hugo Award Winners

The winners of the 2007 Hugo Awards were announced on the 1st of September (yes, I'm a little late in posting this), with Vernor Vinge's 'Rainbows End' winning Best Novel. I'm dying to read that book but, unfortunately, don't have the time. Not that I mind, really. I'm currently reading Neil McAleer's authorized biography of Arthur C. Clarke for the 'Leadership and Change' course that I'm taking this term. After that, I'll probably read my second- that third-choice biographies for the same course: Brian Herbert's 'Dreamer of Dune: The Biography of Frank Herbert' and David Alexander's 'Star Trek Creator: The Authorized Biography of Gene Roddenberry' :)  Of course, I have tonnes of course material (for my other four courses) to read as well. Such is life.

By the way, this is the third Hugo that Vinge has won. He won it in 1992 for 'A Fire Upon the Deep' (a tie with Connie Willis's 'Doomsday Book') and again in 2000 for 'A Deepness in the Sky'. Seriously, if there are two people in the world I would do almost anything to meet, they are Arthur C. Clarke and Vernor Vinge. Rounding up my top three people-I'd-love-to-meet, by the way, would be U2's lead singer Bono. Actually, there is no "rounding up my top three". There are only three people on that list!

Of course, had I been alive a little earlier, the list would have included Frank Herbert, Roald Dahl, and Isaac Asimov. Oh well.