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Tuesday, Mar 18, 2008 - 02:02 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

Heavy Monday

"After seventy minutes of a talk, half will be dozing off and the other half having fantasies."

- Guest speaker for Beyond the hype of Facebook: Sustainable Applications and Approaches for Monetization, paraphrased

A sad thing about guai guai attending lectures is that often not that much is learnt from it, for the outlay of time. Yes, it's true that almost always some knowledge is gained, but unfortunately a few minutes of wisdom often entails a couple of hours of waiting for that nugget. But that's college.

Today's Geography lab presented a few differing views on global warming, always a good starting point when approaching any subject. Hot on the heels of Al Gore earning a Nobel, Bush has a go at environmental issues - ok, not exactly him, but...



The ex-chief scientist of Amazon.com came down for the previously mentioned talk on Facebook, and one of the examples he raised in a quite engaging session was of a "paradigm shift" by sched.org - instead of having a separate registration page, users can directly enter a new username and password, and if that username had not already been taken, it would be created with the given password. I thought I had encountered that, though, and later recalled that that was too the case in the old version of Dragon Court. Objectively considering the convenience of such direct account creation, it does have the con of not being able to capture any additional user info (e.g. name, address, email, etc); Still, it has its applications and is good when used in those cases when such info is not needed, I suppose.

He did bring some web technologies that I hadn't been following to my consciousness, such as illumio, which trawls your hard disk drive to ascertain your areas of interest (hmm, Google Desktop Search?). Heard of yelp? Neither me. Too many spiffy new services to catch up with.

Ending with the most ticklish bit of comic strip banter I've read in some time (from The Order of the Stick #539):

*Belkar Bitterleaf, halfling ranger with a level of barbarian and all around tiny badass, stabs a harmless trader gnome*

Haley Starshine, human rogue and nominal party leader: WHAT DID YOU DO???

Belkar: What? You said it yourself, this is war! There's now one less gnome for the Resistance to fight, right?

Haley: The Resistance isn't at war with the gnome!!!

Belkar: Well of course not, not anymore. He's dead.

Belkar: Don't get so worked up. He was a pointless NPC (non-player character). He was just there to provide color to the scene. He probably didn't even have a name.

Haley: He TOLD us his name!

Belkar: Did he? I wasn't listening.

Belkar: Look, I can't be the only one who appreciates the symmetry of the situation. He had a donkey, and we needed a donkey to pull the cart. Now we have a donkey, and he doesn't need anything anymore. Everybody wins!

Quite compelling argumentative logic at second glance...



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