The Grammy award 2010 makes every love country music. :P Anyway… I m not that into country or R&B…

The important thing is… Greenday’s got the Rock Album of the Year. Ha… actually… don’t think award is that important to them… (I actually think Grammy award is getting more and more meaningless. You can tell from who’s got nominated and awarded)

21 Guns

Better America!

The iPad hype has completely blown away my attention to Obama’s State of the Union Address. Not sure if Steve Jobs has sent the tech savvy president a demo unit to White House. :D

Anyways… finally got time to watch his address in youtube. With the recent victory of Republican in the Kennedy seat, you can expect try every possible means to regain people’s confidence in his leadership.

I quite like his speech. You can feel his tremendous passion to his country within each arguments against opposition parties.

He told his own party “To Democrats, I would remind you that we still have the largest majority in decades, and the people expect us to solve problems, not run for the hills. “. To Republicans, he said, “Just saying no to everything may be good short-term politics, but it’s not leadership. We were sent here to serve our citizens, not our ambitions.” (BTW, I think Hong Kong has the same problem as well)

He also dismissed Republican’s complaints to economic and government budget saying “From some on the right, I expect we’ll hear a different argument -– that if we just make fewer investments in our people, extend tax cuts including those for the wealthier Americans, eliminate more regulations, maintain the status quo on health care, our deficits will go away. The problem is that’s what we did for eight years.”

I wish politicians in Hong Kong have this ability as well! The ability to pin point problems and solutions, to dismiss accuses and show leadership, to lead the road ahead and give us hope….

I do suggest you to check out the speech. (transcript here if you prefer reading it instead :P)

First run of the year… haha… it’s just so-so… a little under 26 min. Think I have to train my average pace to sth between 5 min to 4 min 30 sec per minute. Lots of work ahead!!

The Times to Charge for Frequent Access to Its Web Site – the newspaper giant announced on Wed that they will charge user for access to the times content on the web.

I have no complain to their act. I am willing to pay for quality content. I used to read SCMP. But, as you may know, the editorial quality is really… so-so when compare with NYTimes. SCMP started charging some years ago. As that happen, I naturally ditched them.

The challenge should rather be devising a proper price scheme than arguing whether they should charge or not… We pay for music, apps and movies in iTunes Store. It makes total sense that newspaper, as one of the content publishers, wanna assert a paid model to the subscribers.

My concern is… the paid subscription should be focused on offering more features (or contents) to readers instead of just setting up a system which locks up access to content. Maybe all subscribers get access to the Timers Reader or some features about the reader community.

Hope they’ll come up with sth creative :)

Spent my whole day cleaning up home…

I came across a bunch of CD albums. haha… can’t hide my geek root. I do have a few CD albums for keeping CDs and DVDs I burnt throughout the years. haha… a pretty old school and 宅男 behaviour.

But, it’s 2010… I decided to dump all disks and keep stuff in my 1TB FW800 drive. Among all the useless disks, I found a few backup CDs. I don’t really remember what’s in there but I do know that the stuff there are important as history of me. I loaded the disk into my Macbook Pro. Within seconds, most of my early traces with PCs and Macs are recovered.

I found some Pure Math notes. That’s when I studied Form 6 and 7.

Though I have virtually forgotten all those stuff :P , it brings back the memory of the last decade… The secondary school years where life is simple and free. It’s always about studying and performing well in exam. :)

I also found my lab report in collage. I still recall cramming in late night making up fake experiment data trying to finish up the report. :P

My random walk through the backup also brings me to something remarkable – my first web site!!

Haha… it was up in from 1999 to, roughly, 2002. It was hosted in the server space provided by HKU to its students. (not sure if students nowadays still get web hosting service from computer center…) The current site should be the 3rd generation which first made public in 2005.

It’s so much fun thumbing through my first site. :) Pictures of the old days… the very typical Geocities-like design. It’s so much fun to witness the advancement of web technologies and be one of the practitioners.

Some much have changed in the past decade… One interesting thing is… Pages works with my 10-year-old Word doc file and Safari works with my equally old web site. I am lucky that I don’t have files in “word star” format :P

One side note… do u recall how Apple’s web site looks like 10 years ago?