The following youtube shows the will of the cape buffalos to save their young and risking their lives against the all mighty lions, though won over the crocodile but lost the battle.
I learned about this video from our tour guide, Leslie, at the Safari West.
Yesterday, I had an unfortunate incidence of a disk crash on my Windows XP Pro. The symptom was very weird. Normally a disk crash is preceded by some disk errors and system sluggishness. In my case, the system just froze and refused to reboot afterward. Later I found out that Windows XP just couldn’t find the kernel, probably some bad sectors on the disk where the system files reside or the systems files were corrupted for some reasons. Upon reboot, I noticed that some times the disks didn’t get recognized. I tried to repair the drive using the Windows CD. It didn’t help. Something hideous was going on in my Sun Ultra 20 system and I didn’t know exactly what.
Fortunately, I had a couple of disk back ups (backed up by g4u), which I had backed up verbatim (sector by sector) in August of last year. And II am glad I had two – more on that later.
Well, the question is how I can get all my data for the last 9 months. A couple of ways to retrieve my data files. 1) Restore my files using my regular back up on Mozy server, or 2) Trying to copy the files from the bad disk (perhaps still readable in some areas of the disk). I first tried the Mozy method, but the data transfer took a long time, and I still didn’t get all the files I was looking for. I didn’t know that you need to submit a request to have the Mozy prepare the data files for restore. Also, I think the Mozy client may be outdated. I downloaded a new one. Meanwhile, while trying to restore the files, I damaged one of my verbatim backup disk. I didn’t know why, for some reason, the disk refused to boot Windows, similar to the original disk. Now I began to suspect something is wrong with the SATA port bridge chip (normally called the South Bridge) or I happened to have two consecutive bad disks. That’s very unusual. I decided to switch the boot disk to connect to SATA port 3 instead of SATA port 1. My suspicion was that SATA port 1 may be bad; I tried to avoid using this port.
To make the long story short. Here are the lessons learned:
1. Back up the entire system boot disk once a month. (This effort normally takes 2 hrs or so @ ~40MB/s if I use the the internal SATA ports. It could be days if I had to use USB ports.) Don’t be lazy. My task would have been an easy one if I had done this once a month. Now I need to figure out how to install/uninstall all of the software I installed for the last 9 months.
2. Don’t assume hard drive is the only thing that can go bad. The SATA port or some other chips on the board may. Protecting/backing up the data is a discipline that’s worth the time and efforts. Create a log and use calendar reminder to keep track of and remind yourself of this task.
3. Keep the majority of the data online or on-server with professional backup so the amount of the data doesn’t get too overwhelming, especially with the huge audio/video data size lately.
I found this website great for producing all kinds of grid paper including Children’s alphabet writing paper and engineers’ grid paper. You can even program the spacing and line width of the grid. Just download the pdf file and print as many copy as you want. Highly recommended.
Confronting the reality of new business model is the essence of this book.
A business model consists of 3 components:
1. External Realities: 1) Financial history of your industry, 2) Overall business environment, 3) Customer Base, 4) Root-cause analysis.
2. Financial Targets: 1) Operating margins, 2) Cash flow, 3) Capital Intensity, 4) Revenue Growth, 5) Return on investment.
3. Internal Activities: 1) Strategy, 2) Operations, 3) People, 4) Organization.
Harmonizing the three components by repeatedly reviewing them as you add new information, and analyzing the subsequent changes in relationships among them.
The author uses 3 technology companies as examples: EMC, Sun and Cisco. Of course, you can probably predict what the bad apple is among the 3. Sun, of course. The author cited Scott McNealy’s slow response to the structural change of the business model.
The authors also credited Nardelli for doing a banged up job at Home Depot in remaking Home Depot’s business model due to the rapidly dwindling cash position. He was able to centralizing purchasing to cut costs, improve the management quality, install the information systems needed to manage inventory more efficiently. Of course, this book came out before Nardelli was removed from Home Depot as the CEO. The stock price of Home Depot did not go up that much during his tenure but he seems to have kept up Home Depot’s competitive position against Lowe’s.
In looking around corners chapter, they go over the tools for staying ahead. Some ideas are interesting:
– Look for the customer chain: all the way to the end users.
– Converse with people from different parts of the business, at a trade show, or at lunch with a supplier.
– GE’s strategy sessions – look for external changes and issues that seem relevant for the future then discuss the strategy.
How to condition your culture for reality:
– Pick a initiative to mobilize the organization and lead an initiative by learning the guts of the initiative yourself and then invest your time and energy in the initiative.
– Pick the right people to implement the initiative.
– Be courageous.
– Changes in rewards can add muscle.
What stands out from this book is how easy it is to tell people to confront reality and respond to them. Sometimes, the consequence is so dire that one may need to go through the normal grief process just to achieve the transformation. Having worked at Sun during the last 13 years, I saw how Sun went through the transformation of the roller coaster ride. The elephant was in the living room, everyone saw it but nobody wanted to do anything about it because it takes courage from the top to make the change. Sun is changing the business model to embrace the open source strategy. Whether this change will save Sun or not, it remains to be seen.
This is a children story I created while taking a shower for my daughter; she just lost one of her front tooth last month while eating watermelon, thus the story. I dedicate this story on this International Children’s day – April 4th.
Once upon a time, there was a little girl who likes to eat watermelon.
One day, she bites into a juicy and crunchy slice of red watermelon and out comes a white seed.
She wonders why there is a white seed among all the black watermelon seeds she spits out.
She shows her mother the white seed and asks her mom to plant the white watermelon seen in the backyard.
The girl waters the seed every day. She can’t wait to see the watermelon.
Many days pass. Still no watermelon.
She waits and waits ….
One day, she goes to the yard and finds a giant tree full of sparkling “white seeds.”
And she sees many tooth fairies flying around the tree and placing and hanging the “white seeds” on the tree.
“Thanks to you,” one of tooth fairy says to her, “we now have a place to decorate a beautiful tree with all the teeth we collected from under the pillows of the all of the children of the world.”
The girl smiles with one missing front tooth.
Einstein, well known for Theory of Relativity, has a rather adventurous life. The following stand out for me:
– Not particular good at math but eventually warmed up to math because he needed to solve his physics problems. Very pragmatic.
– It helps to have a good sounding board like Michele Besso, his best friend, and his Olympiad group that allow all the great minds to debate and challenge one another. This may have contributed a great deal to his accomplishment.
– His relationship with his first wife, a fellow physics classmate, was all about his passion for the same subject. It’s like have a soul mate. She might have contributed to it by being his sounding board. He eventually divorced his first wife and gave all his Nobel prize winning to her and their two Children. His second child came down with mental illness. And his eventually married his cousin, who was more of his opposite, protector and business manager and left him pretty alone. Strange that a mature relationship tend to be a symbiosis-type.
– A general rebellious attitude toward establishment, Newtonian theory, prompted him to question and came up with the Theory of Relativity. Sometimes, it takes a rebel to make the paradigm shift.
– His appreciation for simplicity was out of his own belief that God would not make nature too complicated for man kind. This allowed him to put two and two together, combining EM wave theory with Newtonian Law. The example about the man in the train and the synchronicity of time and space is very brilliant. Of course, it helps to work in a patent office next to train station with a clock tower. It’s amazing how our environment plays a huge role in how we perceive the world.
– Of course, his rigid idea about how a grand unified theory should be able to explain the entire universe include quantum mechanics also pushed him to doubt the quantum mechanics as being incomplete and forced him to purse the unified theory until his death. Sometimes a certain way of thinking – like a business model – can help you to reach fame and can sink you at the end because you’re not able to adapt to a new model.
– Einstein, being born into Germany at its most turbulent time, has a great international perspective about the good and evil of mankind. His fear for the use of mass-destruction weapons prompted him to advocate mutual arm reduction among the superpower nations. His famous letter to Franklin Roosevelt resulted in the creation of the Manhattan project, the Atomic Bomb. Though he was wrong that German scientists were pursuing the same bomb, the end result is that it ended the world war in Asia and brought about the nuclear era.
– Einstein enjoyed his celebrity statute and yet lived a very simple life. He used his fame to advance his course including the establishment of Israel, after seeing first hand how his people was treated by Germen. And yet he was prophetic in his urge to live peacefully with Arabs or suffer the dire consequence.
Overall, I enjoyed listening to this abridged audio book. It’s fascinating to see how he arrived at all the theories – the bending of light due to gravity, general theory of relativity, and etc. It’s also comforting to see a great man so down to earth with all the same problems we have – relationship with spouses, children, colleagues, and the academia world. Too bad, he didn’t live long enough to see the how quantum mechanic has transformed the world as we know today w.r.t. to the internet and computer. It would be great if he can come up with the grand unified theory. But we’ll need to wait for the next Einstein…
I learned a few tips on plumbing. My intention is not to install a new plumbing for a kitchen or bathroom (I would hire a pro for that), but to learn a few advanced tips. The following is what I picked up from the book that’s full of pictures and is fairly easy to understand.
1. Use of de-burring tool to de-burr the cut plastic pipes.
2. Use of dielectric union (with screw-on transition fitting, nut, plastic washer, and sweated brass female end) to transition copper pipe to galvanized pipe.
3. Use shimming when a pipe run through the wood stud but allow for expansion.
4. Design-in an access panel for the shutoff of the tub faucets.
5. For gas line to the water heater, a drip leg should be added to collect condensation and dirt.
6. If a water filter is inserted into the supply, make sure to add a jumper wire with clamps to ground the pipe.
7. Use of pipe strap to strap drain pipes.
8. Use of metal cover over the stud where the pipe runs through to ensure nails cannot be drilled into the pipe.
9. Venting for the drain pipe is a tricky business. The code may require sloping of the vent lines.
10. Special reverse-U shape drain needed for installing a sink in a kitchen island.
