SighGone, Hø!

My New Workplace: Chroma

noreply@blogger.com (ADMarshall) — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 11:10:00 +0000

Year of the Yin Metal Cat (Tân Mão) 2011

noreply@blogger.com (ADMarshall) — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 02:25:00 +0000

Goodbye Việt Nam?
Wikipedia says Tết (Vietnamese Lunar New Year) is the time to set animals and plants free.

Does that include my family and me?

YeeHo! Why Keep on Keepin On? GangstaGrass

noreply@blogger.com (ADMarshall) — Sun, 11 May 2008 12:36:00 +0000

How Gangstagrass looked, once, before Firefox locked up
Ubuntu 7.04 and the web site went 503

So fine. Not everyday you stumble on a CD with every song just tooooo sizzlin sweet.

Gangstagrass. She's a perfect mash of hillbilly twang'n'beat happyin-up some of the finest homes and hos voices today. One hear gives ya visions of great grinning gangstas stompin with a gaggle o' them danged slangin' good ol' boys. Hold onto yer guts if you're ganja-enhanced. Guffaws galore.

And, if the mashup's producer Rench doesn't do a Gangstagrass vidi for Obama, there just ain't no justice in the world.

At time of writing, the band's website was 503'd (Service temporarily unavailable), apparently overloaded by just Boing Boing's mini-review and the news just hit Digg, so get a Bittorrent client and go to Pirate Bay for the whole 22-song album, as free mp3s, plus cover art and songs-artists list.

Look, call for more Gangstagrass. This is the best future yet.

Only in America, Only on Fox: WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) Obama-Clinton Smackdown Proposed

noreply@blogger.com (ADMarshall) — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 08:05:00 +0000

YA (Yet again), herein at least, both "America" and "the Americas" are considered North, South and Central. How's that for dogma?

But it's indeed a bit too difficult to imagine this being breaking news on any major news network other than Fox:

WWE Invites Obama, Clinton to One-on-One Smackdown

by FOXNews.com

Saturday, April 12, 2008

Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama — Get in the ring.

That's the challenge from WWE, which has issued an open invitation to the deadlocked Democrats to settle their differences "the American way — in a wrestling match."

Seriously.

World Wrestling Entertainment aired the video invitation Tuesday, calling for a bona fide smackdown on Monday night RAW April 21.

"What we're trying to do is provide both Senator Clinton and Senator Obama an opportunity to speak to more than 8 million viewers of our program … which is the night before the Pennsylvania primary," WWE spokesman Gary Davis told FOXNews.com.

Original Report Link

A video of the WWE invitation to Clinton and Obama is supposed to be here, but wasn't when this Ho tried to watch it.

As the Fox report also noted that, "What exactly the world of professional wrestling expects Clinton and Obama to do in that ring is unclear", it seems apropos to offer up this depiction from editorial cartoonists Cox & Forkum -- nice name -- circa, AD.2007.Jul.26.EDT:

Knock Down, Drag Out

Urm... a mea culpa may be in order, too: This post is in part a dig at our gonzo mate over at Saigon's WWE (Wild, Wild East). DEC oi, it might take a while to nudge the smackdown crowd out Google's top spots on that acronym. ;)

Hugh just saved me from trialling twitter...

noreply@blogger.com (ADMarshall) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 23:32:00 +0000

[eMail to WWE auteur]

I was skeptical about even trialling twitter before. My thinking: it would just be yet another addictively time-wasting nerdy Net fad. But between the oppressive buzz twitter's still getting and seeing a box for it in the sidebar on WWE, i was actually verging on giving twitter a taste.

Then, a link to the following popped up among the 400+ RSS-feed entries in my Google Reader account this morning. Please do thank Hugh for saving me from getting duped into yet another Net-fad obsession. I haven't read his post yet. The following did indeed "say it all" for me.

April 10 2008

The Decline And Fall of Western Civilization Part III: The Twitter Years

Erick Schonfeld

57 comments »

Are you feeling Twitter overload, or just sick of hearing about it? Blogger/Cartoonist/Ad Man Hugh McLeod feels the same way. He illustrated a post titled Why I Deleted My Twitter Account with the following cartoon:

Kind of says it all.

noreply@blogger.com (ADMarshall) — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 11:08:00 +0000

WWEeeee?!? Wild Wild East in Saigon? Talk about touching a nerve... Listen up, folks!

DEC (David Everitt-Carlson) is doing "Dailies" here in sunny SighGone. Dare i blurt a hallelujah?!? Another gonzo journo fan(atic) -- albeit one eloquent and an adland and online vidi artiste, too -- has hit the ground running in our oh-so-edutainment-deprived adoptive Ho'town.

It does indeed look to be so, fellow hoz. DEC gives good EXPLICIT mention to HST, Hisself.

I'll not dally more in feeble tries to tell WEE Dailies' tale. In his own words:

The "Wild Wild East" is a memoir of my ten years marketing in Asia“ you'll find a link in the sidebar. But somewhere along the line you're going to ask, "Hey, what happens in the end?" And of course, that is a trade secret, but to help you all along, here's a daily blog of basically what I'm doing now. You can have all the fun you want filling in the blanks between "then" and "now". ©2008 David.E.Carlson@gmail.com

Email up front! Yo... Good bio brevity, too:

About DEC

David Everitt-Carlson,
HCMC, Vietnam,Independent writer and
Brand Provocateur living in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
-- that's Saigon for the old schoolers.

And -- personal peeve -- he even had the balls to go with a black background, ie, far, far fewer pixels turned on, and burning your eyeballs out ;)).

I still prefer Saigon, or SighGone. Guess that makes me old-schooler. Dang... So dying b4 i old. The memories WWE revive make fogey-status indubitable now. Dang, dang, dang...

Done.

To torch a few cobwebs for any of the other oldies about, who might've actually forgotten watching this way2cool TV show way back when -- and, frighteningly, maybe even before the star of Wild Wild West, the feature-lenth flick, Will Smith (huzzah), was but a twinkle in his old man's eye:

From the Internet Move Database (IMDb)

F/U: Stroke of insight

noreply@blogger.com (ADMarshall) — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 10:03:00 +0000

[From yet another eMail cc'd to blog] Following up (F/U ) on our fine conversation of late, [here's the link to the mind-blowing TED presentation i was telling you about]:

20080325124440: TED: Stroke of insight

Jill Bolte Taylor:
Neuroanatomist

Brain researcher Jill Bolte Taylor studied
her own stroke as it happened -- and has
become a powerful voice for brain recovery.

Do note the slick VideoEgg streamer, too.

Chord Struck 01: Another Depressing Screed on Global Warming

noreply@blogger.com (ADMarshall) — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 04:18:00 +0000

This post struck a chord: "Another Depressing Screed on Global Warming". It's by an young but already renowned US guy, Nick Brown, someone, who like some 80 percent of Vietnam, is under 45.

Brown's "screed" pretty well sums up the progressive certainty i've been feeling and pondering about at least the evidence, if not the appropriate response, to the "climate crisis", after following the global warming, climate change headlines -- and even reading several of the articles, too -- since i first watched Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" last June.

To the point of how this might interest an editor at "The Organ[?!?] of the Party Committee, The Communist Party of Viet Nam, Ho Chi Minh City", Sai Gon Gai Phong, well, some 80 percent of Vietnamese are among the generation(s) Brown refers to when he writes:

... frightening. When they explain that, if current trends continue, fifty years from now the next generation - by which they mean me - could easily have a sea level that is one meter higher than the present one, it's depressing.
-- Huffington Post, "December 7, 2007 | 06:17 PM (EST)"

Brown was lamenting the potential disastrous prospects of a "1m SLR" (Sea Level Rise of one meter). But cast that against the following conclusions drawn regarding Vietnam, and, in particular, Ho Chi Minh City (ex/or SaiGon) extracted from a report found at the Social Science Research Network via Googling "vietnam one-meter sea-level rise" (3,290 hits). From "The Impact of Sea Level Rise on Developing Countries: A Comparative Analysis", by analysts of the World Bank's Development Research Group, independent Canadian consultants and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development and funded by the Canadian Trust Fund (TF030569) sponsored by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). (The URL for this paper was incorrectly hyperlinked in " Risk of sea-level rise: High stakes for developing countries", posted "01/04/2007", at the site of the Marine Protected Area Network in Vietnam (ficen.org.vn).) From the original World Bank report:

As shown in Figure..., Vietnam is the most seriously impacted by SLR: Up to 16% of its area would be impacted by a 5m SLR, making it second only to The Bahamas among countries analyzed for this paper. Most of this impact is in the Mekong and Red River Deltas. Note in Figure... that most of Vietnam's land area southwest of Ho Chi Minh City would be severely impacted by SLR.

Large percentages of Vietnam's population and economic activity are located in these two river deltas. As shown in Figures..., 10.8% of Vietnam's population would be impacted by a 1m SLR. This is the largest percentage of impacted population among all 84 countries ( A.R. of Egypt follows with 10.56%). Vietnam's impacted population would reach 35% with a 5m SLR. The impacts of SLR on Vietnam's GDP (Figure...) and urban extent (Figure...) closely follow the impact on its population.

Eleven percent of an impending 90mn population, almost 10 million people! With a 1m SLR, they'd likely be pressured at a snail's pace to move to higher ground over those 50-odd years, but in a nation already packed to the brim with people, a nation already normally hot, wet or dry, and getting hotter and wetter or drier already.

How would the nation's most practical and capable people respond?

Eighty percent of Vietnam is in the countryside and vastly more poor than the cities' rising young consumer classes. "Brother and Sister Rice", as established urbanites call them, have little chance to fully appreciate the global perspective explicit in global warming. Most of their information comes to them via limited media that's completely one-party-state controlled. And they're way too busy focusing on just keeping their fields fertile, harvesting them and getting a price they can survive better upon.

And 80 percent of Vietnam is under 45, and just getting its first glimpse of a just the decent standard of living they or their parents have already worked too hard to attain.

Thomas Tobin, the president and chief executive of HSBC (Hong Kong Shanghai Bank) Vietnam, recently summed up their prospects, as quoted in " Foreign banks encounter cultural barrier in Vietnam", by Ben Stocking, The Associated Press, at the site of the International Herald Tribune (IHT), Friday, December 14, 2007:

"Stand on the streets of Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City and watch the millions of motorbikes drive past," he [Tobin] said. "Everyone has a mobile phone. Everyone is really well dressed. Every day, you see more and more people able to participate in consumerism."

How many and which of those nouveau riche, young Vietnamese consumers' dreams will they defer, or even pass up, just as they seem within their grasp? Why should they abstain from the unbridled consumerism they see in foreign films and TV news when they soon find out that most of those who can have any significant, if small, impact on reversing the climate crises are not even in their own nation, and worse, a depressingly small percentage of those overseas elite yet have any interest in doing anything significant about the impacts of climate change even in their own domains.

Who can spell "lower, warmer coastal nations' rich-brain drain (LWCNRBD)"?

-- ADM, on the hyperevolution.

From the Huffington Post, a leading US voice of relatively objective, informed dissent:

Nicholas Brown| BIO | I'M A FAN OF THIS BLOGGER

Another Depressing Screed on Global Warming

Posted December 7, 2007 | 06:17 PM (EST)

Read More: Carbon Emissions, Carbon Footprint, Climate Change, Global Warming, India Pollution, Manhattan Sinking, Polar Bears, Pollution In China, Reducing Carbon Emissions, Rising Sea Level, Breaking Politics News

"It's not sinking!" uncle John is angry. Or grumpy. Or both. He has spent far too much of his life screaming logic at disinterested boobs to tolerate misphrasing. "The water is rising."

The 'it' in question is New York, specifically Manhattan.

"True, but isn't that really a matter of relativity?" I ask. "I mean, if we measure altitude in feet above sea level, then if sea level rises we're technically sinking."

"It's not sinking!" John says. Our Thanksgiving table is filled with relatively agreeable people who agree heartily on the catastrophe of carbon emissions, so in order to stir up a really good fight - an important part of any Thanksgiving - it's important to be stubborn over small details.

John's wife, Susan, interjects "Seattle is rising. The rock bed underneath it is moving the city slowly upward. Venice is sinking. Those have nothing to do with the water level."

These are people who have become so deeply embroiled in a cause that shrugging it off as yet another of the world's moral train wrecks is not an option. To them, global warming is apartheid or imperialism or slavery; anyone who can shrug and a buy an SUV is a collaborator and a villain. They are moral and dedicated people. And, like most moral and dedicated people, they make dreadful cocktail companions.

"True," I say "but look: the kilogram is defined by a block of platinum in Paris, right? So if somebody knocks that block and chips off a few molecules, everything suddenly weighs more. It's the same with sea level."

It's important to keep up these stupid arguments because otherwise John or Susan or both will talk about global warming in earnest.

The problem is that they are too distinguished. John is a scientist emeritus at Wood's Hole Oceanographic Institute and Susan has her own PhD and for ten years was the president of Ecological Engineering, a wastewater management firm. Their titles carry weight, so when they say Manhattan is sinking - or, I suppose, global water levels are rising thus putting Manhattan underwater in a way that, really, has pretty much the same effect as sinking - it's frightening. As if their knowledge didn't scare me enough, they use metric units, which are terrifyingly scientific.

As the only person in the entire world who has not seen An Inconvenient Truth, I can generally avoid confronting the all-but-inevitable implications of global warming if I set my mind to it. Does this winter seem different from the winters fifteen years ago? Sure, but maybe I'm misremembering.

My aunt and uncle know the numbers. When they explain that water levels are rising about 1mm a year but that rate is accelerating, it's mildly frightening. When they explain that, if current trends continue, fifty years from now the next generation - by which they mean me - could easily have a sea level that is one meter higher than the present one, it's depressing. And when they explain that Manhattan would have to spend gobs of money on levies and water pumps or else be partially submerged, I entertain thoughts of doomsday. I like Manhattan. I live there. I would like it to remain an above-water attraction.

If science is the religion of the secular left, then global warming is our Armageddon. And like any young Baptist who believes in the rapture but isn't sure he'll pass muster, I come out of global warming sermons feeling hollow and jumpy.

John is standing now. He rose to refill his wine glass, but he is irritated so standing will do him just fine. "The kilogram's not the same. Water levels change constantly and we don't redefine the heights of mountains. And it's a dumb way to look at it. The water is rising." His tone has a note of finality to it, and he waits for me to challenge him.

Earlier in the night, John noted that his farm is a good 22 feet above sea level (in a rare scientific lapse, he didn't use meters) and thus will mostly avoid the coming flood. Honestly, this seemed smug.

My generation, our generation for those of you twenty-somethings out there, is going to be the first, by most indications, to really feel the worst effects of climate change. We will have memories of polar bears as creatures that lived in the arctic while our children will understand them as yet another in a long list of extinct species. We could easily see large parts of the Greenland ice shelf collapse into the ocean in our lifetimes. And, again, parts of Manhattan - not to mention Florida, Louisiana and Hawaii - will probably be underwater by the time I am in my seventies.

Pessimism is an unpopular sentiment in American politics, even when it seems pretty close to realism. So we won't hear much in this next election about the preposterously large global effort it would take to mitigate, much less reverse, our current climate trends. For the first time in history, China is emitting more carbon dioxide than the United States and India is closing in on us. The candidates will probably talk a fair amount about the US taking leadership in the battle against global warming. They will probably not talk about the fact that to seriously dampen carbon emissions, we will have to convince 2.6 billion people in China and India to develop a transportation system that doesn't rely on automobiles and a fuel system that doesn't rely on petroleum, and that's assuming we can begin to steer our own people in the same direction.

It's not, of course, that catastrophe is inevitable. There is a chance that climate change will occur more slowly. There's a chance that human technology will limit or even eliminate its effects. It's just that there are a lot of very smart people who know a lot about climate change who think we are making the world irreversibly hotter.

John is waiting for me to respond to his point in our tiny argument, and I do: "look, I'm just saying all motion is relative - that's a basic principle of physics - so both sinking cities or rising water levels are correct." It's a dumb point in a dumb argument. At the end of the day, whether the water is rising or we are sinking, we will all still be in deep - and might I add hot - water.

--
AD (Andi) Marshall
Zone: ICT (IndoChina Time, GMT/UTC+7)
Post: HoChiMinh City (ex/or SaiGon), VietNam
Quote: "Love all, trust a few. Do wrong to none..."
Source: Shakespeare, 1623, "All's Well That Ends Well"
Get it at Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2246

Microsoft updates Windows without users' consent

noreply@blogger.com (ADMarshall) — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 13:40:00 +0000

Note: The full report includes instructions about which files are secretly updated and how to check them. -- ADM

From Windows Secrets Newsletter • Issue 122 • 2007-09-13
By Scott Dunn, Associate Editor

Microsoft has begun patching files on Windows XP and Vista without users' knowledge, even when the users have turned off auto-updates.

Many companies require testing of patches before they are widely installed, and businesses in this situation are objecting to the stealth patching.

Files changed with no notice to users

In recent days, Windows Update (WU) started altering files on users' systems without displaying any dialog box to request permission. The only files that have been reportedly altered to date are nine small executables on XP and nine on Vista that are used by WU itself. Microsoft is patching these files silently, even if auto-updates have been disabled on a particular PC.

Full report: http://windowssecrets.com/comp/070913

Scott Dunn is associate editor of the Windows Secrets Newsletter. He is also a contributing editor of PC World Magazine, where he has written a monthly column since 1992, and co-author of 101 Windows Tips & Tricks (Peachpit) with Jesse Berst and Charles Bermant.

Vietnam Signs $1Bln Telecoms Deal

noreply@blogger.com (ADMarshall) — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 05:43:00 +0000

The Moscow Times Online, Thu.13.Sep.2007

Vietnam Signs $1Bln Telecoms Deal

By Anna Smolchenko, Staff Writer

	Mikhail Metzel / AP Putin speaking with Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung at his Novo-Ogaryovo residence late Tuesday.

Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung on Wednesday blessed the signing of a raft of business deals with Russian firms and called on Russians to return to the country.

VimpelCom, Russia's second-largest mobile operator, said Wednesday that it had agreed to form a joint venture in Vietnam and invest $1 billion to develop the country's mobile network. An official at United Company RusAl said it could soon clinch a lucrative deal to develop bauxite deposits in the country.

Full Story

Biuti: Firefox Redshift v2 theme on Ubuntu

noreply@blogger.com (ADMarshall) — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 17:27:00 +0000

It's a s'shots day today it seems.

In the environmentally zeitgeist of Blackle, the new Redshift v2 theme for Firefox rocks. Even with FF overloaded with add-ons, an add-on it doesn't display lusciously has yet to be found.

Ubuntu w/ xvnkb s'shot

noreply@blogger.com (ADMarshall) — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 08:59:00 +0000

Despite unprecedented lobbying and PR, Microsoft's OOXML loses ISO approval vote

noreply@blogger.com (ADMarshall) — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 05:47:00 +0000

[This post will just have to be improved very soon. More links have to be added, and maybe a few images, too. But Sir Francis beckons now for brews and grub at 219 No Tran Long, yet again. :D Please pardon the inevitable typos and awkwardness.]

According to GesmerUpdegrove LLP's ConsortiumInfo Standards Blog, Microsoft's OOXML just lost the vote for acceptance by International Standards Organization (ISO) as an international standard, leaving the OASIS/OpenOffice ODF standard as the world's sole globally-approved office-document standard.

The near-term implication, assuming no reversal of the vote, seems to be that digital office documents will now enjoy a single, open standard under which any company, anywhere competitively build information-systems applications.

The ODF standard could thus provide a common global standard for working with office documents just as HTML has long so successfully provided the same for pages in the Internet's World Wide Web. (See comments by Canonical, Ubuntu Linux' Mark Shuttleworth in a Vietnam video-conference transcript about the same, near here.)

Of this hardly insignificant event, Andrew Updegrove wrote on the Standard Blog, PDT.05:31.Tue.04.Sep.2007.AD, 'The actual numbers for the final tally are now what you could rightly call "encouraging." All 41 P members voted, with the following breakdown: 17 yes, 15 no, and 9 abstain. Or, as the ISO press release more neutrally described the result':

Approval requires at least 2/3 (i.e. 66.66 %) of the votes cast by national bodies participating in ISO/IEC JTC 1 to be positive; and no more than 1/4 (i.e. 25 %) of the total number of national body votes cast negative. Neither of these criteria were achieved, with 53 % of votes cast by national bodies participating in ISO/IEC JTC 1 being positive and 26 % of national votes cast being negative.

As Updegrove notes in the outset of his post, the New York Times conspicuously just ran an piece by Kevin J O'brien headlined, "Microsoft Favored to Win Open Document Vote ", 04.Sep.2007, New York (03.Sep, Berlin) -- which now erases most of the doubts i at least had about the NYT's neocon establishment slant since i read a recent interview with Seymour Hersh following Bush Jr's recent self-serving comparison of the USA's invasion of Iraq to its regrettable invasion of Vietnam.

Another highly informative, if potentially biased piece on the MS OOXML ISO approval bid can be found at the Boycott Novell blog, " Has Microsoft 'Bought' the Vote for OOXML in Vietnam?", 27.Aug.2007. The post's question-veiled proposition is supported by a lot of apparently credible links and what looks at first glance to be a fairly well-rounded argument.

In fact, it was via a post at the Boycott Novell blog, "It's Final and Official: ODF is the Only ISO Standard", 04.Sep.2007, that Updegrove's post was first found.

noreply@blogger.com (ADMarshall) — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 07:03:00 +0000

Update: Georgie Bush Jr, Google & News: Vietnam +/-Iraq...

Re Georgie Bush Jr, Google & News: Vietnam +/-Iraq +/-War -- Yet Again, 2007.Aug.24
Update, AD.2007.Aug.26.Sun.13h09.ICT:

The Google web and news hit numbers of the post referred to above were just updated. The revised results follow.

The most obvious results were, first, far from what were expected. Firing from the hip with a shotgun caught less interesting changes than hoped for. (It's been a couple days of too many expectations being trashed, yet again.) Over only two days hits were down significantly for all searches except for those limited to "vietnam" or its main cities plus "iraq" and "war" with or without "bush". Before, all were expected to rise.

But only the last three searches showed significant increases in hits, most significantly for news about "vietnam iraq war bush".

Web: 204,000,000 for vietnam | saigon | hcmc | hanoi | hochiminh (down 10 million hits from 214 million at 2007.Aug.24.Fri.14h00, two days earlier.)
Web: 149,000,000 for vietnam | saigon | hcmc | hanoi | hochiminh -iraq -war (down 5 million)
Web: 29,100,000 for iraq-war (from 30.3 million, down 1.2 million)
News: 23,552 for iraq-war (from 24,060, down 508)
News: 25,190 for vietnam | saigon | hcmc | hanoi | hochiminh
(from 26,219, down 1,029)
News: 12,622 for vietnam | saigon | hcmc | hanoi | hochiminh -iraq -war (from 13,500, down 878)
News: 6,450 for vietnam | saigon | hcmc | hanoi | hochiminh iraq war (from 6,111, up 339)
News: 6,416 for vietnam iraq war (from 6034, up 382)
News: 3,934 for vietnam iraq war bush (from 3,427, up 507)

It seems all that can be readily said is that George Jr got the attention he sought from the Vietnam-Iraq analogy, deservedly or not, to his own chagrin or not.

Several other interpretations of the results come to mind already. But, hey, what's the point?

One valued spin-off from this whole deluded exercise was finding this unnerving, eye-opening of survey of military literature and philosophy in light of Bush's Vietnam-Iraq analogy:

Robert D. Kaplan's "Rereading Vietnam", TheAtlantic.com, 2007.Aug.24

That alone was worth it. It's a read that smacks the more liberal among us up the side of the head. At least, it shook a lot more of the reactionary old cobweb's out of this author's head -- making a whole list of revisions to a lot of earlier posts all start to seem wise.

Then again, it's got to be better (or less time-consuming at least) to live, learn and let some pasts be.

.14h33.ICT

noreply@blogger.com (ADMarshall) — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 16:01:00 +0000

Glacier Break-off-Splash Surfing

When the global going gets hot, real surfers go north, way north.

Via Mother Jones, Blue Marble Blog, "Glacier Surfing".

noreply@blogger.com (ADMarshall) — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 13:08:00 +0000

The Wilder, Weirder of Harper's Weekly Review, 2007.Aug.21

Permalink for this Weekly Review issue (includes links to references and pop-up info boxes)

Epinephrine or "adrenaline": Two OHs and a HO, near Hanoi (HN).
[Source: Wikipedia]
Scientists analyzing the urine of the lonely found higher levels of epinephrine, a "fight or flight" chemical that contributes to physiological decay over time; a study suggested that women with breast implants were three times more likely to commit suicide than those without; and the Army's suicide rate was at an all-time high, leading the Army to hold a poster contest. A Massachusetts man pleaded guilty to intentionally eating glass in over a dozen restaurants to collect insurance compensation. An earthquake along the southern coast of Peru killed 510 people. German physicists claimed to have broken the speed of light, and Scottish physicists reversed the Casimir force to make objects levitate. David Beckham scored on a free kick during his first game for the LA Galaxy, and astronomers observed a dying star named Mira shedding a dazzling, comet-like tail. A study found that mothers who ate junk food while pregnant predisposed their children to obesity. After widespread flooding, 53,000 Bangladeshis contracted diarrhea, an Australian woman was crushed to death by her sexually aroused pet camel, and a couple in China named their baby "@."

General Weekly Review link
Copyright 2007 Harper's Magazine Foundation

noreply@blogger.com (ADMarshall) — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 04:42:00 +0000

Georgie Bush Jr, Google & News: Vietnam +/-Iraq +/-War -- Yet Again.

[Updated 2007.Aug.26.Sun.13h09.ICT - "Find" that timestamp below.]

This has to be one of Georgie Junior's biggest PR screw-ups to date. Keep the troops in Iraq to avoid another "Vietnam", he told the world. The world Press has pounced on this one like a pack of starving dogs. (See Google search stats below.) If Bush Jr's Admin' weren't on their way out, you'd almost think some in their clique must be clinically mad.

US president George Bush during a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars
National Convention in Kansas City, Missouri. Photograph: Jim Young/Reuters
From Guardian Unlimited, 22.Aug.2007,
"Bush gambles with Vietnam reference over Iraq"

Skimming the hundreds of titles listed yesterday from some thirty news feeds via Google Reader, it started to seem almost grossly negligent to continue ignoring Bush Jr's breach of his own Admin's PR taboo on comparing the USA's Iraq war to it's Vietnam debacle just three, four decades earlier.

US personnel & friendlies escaping from Embassy rooftop, Saigon, April 1975, from
TimesOnline UK, 23.Aug.2007, "Bush invokes Vietnam to justify Iraq commitment"

Some four years ago, searching Google for "Vietnam" became increasingly tedious as more and more comparisons between the USA's Iraq and Vietnam wars started marching in step with preparations for the Iraq invasion and Bush Jr's denials of any relationship between the two misguided and ultimately regrettable conflicts.

Eventually, it wasn't worth searching for "Vietnam" unless "Iraq" was excluded, along with the old exclusion for "war" that had always been needed. A year or two later, the Iraq exclusion could be dropped as the US Admin's PR strategists succeeded in pushing such invidious comparisons out of the memory and interests both the USA's media and public.

But, yesterday, those same old comparisons came rushing back online, this time promoted by the very Admin' that had worked so hard to suppress any such comparisons, just a few years earlier.

Take a look at the Google stats from roughly 2007.Aug.24.Fri.14h00.ICT -- and note, we screwed up something in an earlier version of this post <sigh/> and have since revised the time above and numbers below. The specific period has to be mentioned because the numbers below were rapidly rising with each page refresh ("|" means "OR"; "-word" means exclude "word"; "word1-word2" means find the exact phrase "word1 word2"):

Take your own snapshot now. Clicking on the link for each page-count above takes you to the latest Google search results -- providing new numbers, not the ones above. Note: To keep the numbers comparable, the underlying URLs turn "Safe-search" off (only for these searches) and they only use "Google home", google.com, not, for example, google.com.vn or other.

We might do an update or two ourselves, later on. For now, a couple pieces from "America's Oldest Journal Covering the Newspaper Industry", Editor & Publisher, might be worth a read:

Apocalypse ... Now? Press Explores Bush's Iraq/Vietnam Link, Greg Mitchell, Editor, August 22, 2007 10:55 AM ET
LBJ's 1965 Vietnam Speech Echoed By Bush Today, Greg Mitchell, Editor, August 22, 2007 ET

Update, AD.2007.Aug.26.Sun.13h09.ICT:

The Google web and news hit numbers above were just updated. The revised results follow.

The most obvious results were, first, that firing from the hip with a shotgun caught less interesting changes than hoped for and, second, that over only two days hits were down significantly for all searches except for those limited to "vietnam" or its main cities plus "iraq" and "war" with or without "bush".

Only the last three searches showed significant increases in hits, most significant for news about "vietnam iraq war bush".

Web: 204,000,000 for vietnam | saigon | hcmc | hanoi | hochiminh (down 10 million hits from 214 million at 2007.Aug.24.Fri.14h00, two days earlier.)
Web: 149,000,000 for vietnam | saigon | hcmc | hanoi | hochiminh -iraq -war (down 5 million)
Web: 29,100,000 for iraq-war (from 30.3 million, down 1.2 million)
News: 23,552 for iraq-war (from 24,060, down 508)
News: 25,190 for vietnam | saigon | hcmc | hanoi | hochiminh
(from 26,219, down 1,029)
News: 12,622 for vietnam | saigon | hcmc | hanoi | hochiminh -iraq -war (from 13,500, down 878)
News: 6,450 for vietnam | saigon | hcmc | hanoi | hochiminh iraq war (from 6,111, up 339)
News: 6,416 for vietnam iraq war (from 6034, up 382)
News: 3,934 for vietnam iraq war bush (from 3,427, up 507)

It seems all that can be readily said is that George Jr got the attention he sought from the Vietnam-Iraq analogy, deservedly or not, to his own chagrin or not.

One valued spin-off from this whole deluded exercise was finding this unnerving, eye-opening discussion that includes a few illuminating comments on the current situation in Iraq, post Bush-Vietnam-Iraq analogy:

Robert D. Kaplan's "Rereading Vietnam", TheAtlantic.com, 2007.Aug.24

.13h56.ICT

noreply@blogger.com (ADMarshall) — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 00:08:00 +0000

Saigon Country Tour, v.SCT-AD.2007.Aug.11-12.ICT

Outside the city once again, for yet another refreshing break from smog, swarms and sleaze -- as much fun as the latter three Ss can be... Select pix.

(Click on images for enlargements you can save to disk.)

Not Something You See Everyday Anywhere Near Saigon (Outside of KFC) - Cleanliness and Symmetry in Condiments Shelved, at Phung's Phnom Penh Noodle Shop

We'll try provide address & more pix later. Good noodles!

Ferrying Cross the Muddy Saigon on the Way to Phuc Thai
Something Spacey In Some Industrial Park
Lunch with Luu and the Girls: Linh
Lunch...: Hong
Mushies Spotted on a Morning Walk
Luu Squints into the Wind Twixt Hos Coc & Tram:

Guess

A HaLong Embrace-Café Proprietress at Parent's Roadside Cafe Near Ba Ria, So She Said

noreply@blogger.com (ADMarshall) — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 23:29:00 +0000

Watch the World Breathe -- as we smoke it, some might say

Click image to view full-size screenshot.
But, note, it's just a still of a video page

David Bleja (aka StillWater), a student of Multimedia Design at Monash University, Australia, has created a Flash video presentation displaying the ongoing evolution via an interactive, multimedia map of the world estimating of each nation's worldwide carbon dioxide emission levels, birthrates and death rates using on base data from the USA's CIA and United Nations, all in purported "real-time", as it happens.

Going to BreathingEarth.Net and clicking to enter loads up an interactive, multimedia map and starts a counter recording global births, deaths and carbon dioxide emissions. Clicking on a country lists its base data as population and the numbers of minutes in which a person dies another is born and a kilotonne of carbon dioxide is emitted in that nation. (Unfortunately, because of StillWater's coding, the map only works in Internet Explorer and browsers that spoof IE, not Firefox.)

In about a minute thirty-four of one run, Stillwater's map guessed 120 folks bit the big one worldwide while 325 new lives lined up for the Show by PT Barnum, and another 49,000 tonnes of CO2 were spewed as support and exhaust of over 6.5 billion homo sapiens worldwide (see screenshot above).

The UN's World Population Prospects system forecasts over 9.1 billion people worldwide by 2050, adding some 2.5 billion people over 45 years. The entire cumulative world population built up to 1950 over 10,000 years was just over 2.5 billion.

As of the time of this post, Wikipedia describes World Population trends like this (click to enlarge):
And this (in millions):

Region	1750	1800	1850	1900	1950	1999	2050	2150
World	791	978	1,262	1,650	2,521	5,978	8,909	9,746

[Click arrows to view Wikipedia page]

(Ed. - Buy real estate, inland, maybe high ground.)

Vietnam's contribution to populating and polluting the Place, according to BreathingEarth (screenshot above) is summarized as over 84 million folks pumping out a measly 1000 tonnes of CO2 every 7.9 minutes, compared to the leaders, the G7 and BRIC blocks. But it does so while adding a new homo sapiens every 22 seconds for each one lost at one per minute -- ie, net growth of some 17 Viet homo sapiens every 10 minutes, almost 908,000 over the 525,600 minutes this year, edging a million per annum.

StillWater's recent works, including BreathingEarth, are listed at the StillWater Microcosm site.

Thanh Nien: Air authorities fight police over sword-wielding cop

noreply@blogger.com (ADMarshall) — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 15:25:00 +0000

[Follow-up] This yarn was originally sited in a post to the VNBiz mailing list where it was used as an example of how laws must be braced by ethics in both the judicial and enforcement arms of a nation's legal system.

Today, a mere two days later, the online English edition of Vietnam's Thanh Nien newspaper reports, "Central Vietnam's airport authorities have asked police to review their decision to press no criminal charges".

We'll let Thanh Nhien fill the gaps via rather long excerpts from their report, " Air authorities fight police over sword-wielding cop scandal". Sounds like quite a circus act:

Security guards at Da Nang airport arrested Do Hoai Phuong Minh, a policeman on vacation, on August 11, accusing him of attempting to attack them with a sword after being told he could not park in a no-parking zone.

When told to park in a designated area, Minh allegedly went ballistic and insulted the guards before chasing them with a large blade. Guards found another sword in his car after he was apprehended.

[Ed: Thanh Nhien foots the story with, "Reported by Thanh Nien staff – Translated by The Vinh". The Vinh must be among the Vietnam media's elite translators. After over a decade of reading English versions of the Vietnamese press, its hard to believe there's a translator in there familiar with the expression, "to go ballistic". - ADM]

The incident stirred widespread public outrage as many demanded that Minh be charged with preventing officials from executing duty and illegally possessing and using a primitive weapon, crimes which carry jail terms of up to two and three years, respectively.

The Hai Chau district police, however, decided last Thursday that Minh's violations were "disturbing public order" and "trading and transporting a primitive weapon", and fined him VND5 million (US$38) and confiscated his swords instead.

On the same day, the Central Airport Authority, which manages the Da Nang airport, sent a letter to Da Nang police leaders in protest of the decision.

...

Fact gaps

The police said Minh had not attempted to attack the guard with his sword.

Minh was just "rearranging the luggage in his car trunk," the police report said. He then "took a 1-meter long sword [from the trunk] and unsheathed it" before being brought down by three security guards.

The report did not mention why he unsheathed the sword. However, it did say that Minh had had a quarrel over his illegal parking with the guards before the incident.

It quoted him as saying that if the guards dared to take off their uniform, "I'd beat you dead." His fried Truc [Ed: wait.. what?!], whom Minh had picked up, also said that, "I'll call someone and you'll all be sacked."

Pham Phu My, Vice Director of the airport's security center told Thanh Nien he stuck to the security guards' report. "We told the truth and the truth only," he stressed.

Gun story

Minh, a traffic policeman from the southern Binh Duong province, told the police he had bought the two swords, which looked like those of Japanese samurais, as "souvenirs" several days earlier.

His father, Do Van Cong, who is the Communist Party secretary of a Binh Duong district, told the media after the scandal that "if [Minh's violations are] worth jail term, he must be jailed."

After the Da Nang police report, the Binh Duong police department suspended Minh for three months. It also promised to reopen a probe into a 2000 incident in which Minh fired a gun at a karaoke parlor employee for allegedly refusing to "go out" with him. Investigators found four bullets at the scene. Minh, however, claimed the gun "went off accidentally."

He was internally disciplined by police but was charged with no crime.

Minh's arrest this time also brought notoriety to a deputy head of Danang's Hai Chau district police, senior lieutenant-colonel Vo Tuong. Tuong defended Minh in an interview with Thanh Nien, refusing to refer to Minh's weapons as "swords", saying that they "did not carry labels."

Full Report

Bloor: Could Linux become the dominant OS? Gradually, Yes, Via Googlesque, BIC DIYs

noreply@blogger.com (ADMarshall) — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 14:16:00 +0000

Hurwitz & Associates' Robin Bloor, founder and president of Bloor Research, foresees a virtually inevitable dominance of both PC and server markets worldwide by GNU/Linux, led by Google's DIY (Do-It-Yourself) servers and a block called the BIC -- if not by the whole BRIC ( BRIC: Brazil, Russia, India, China). See BeLow.

Could Vietnam make it VBRIC? It will likely need a lot more help from government and threats from Microsoft if either its user or developers, local or foreign, are to be weaned off MS piracy addiction.

The Register
Could Linux become the dominant OS? - Gradual triumph

By Robin Bloor, Hurwitz & Associates → More by this author

Published Friday 17th August 2007 09:15 GMT

Excerpts

[Of the] ... "constructed servers" [DIYs, not included in most server market surveys]: very large and they nearly all run Linux. How large? Well Google, for example, builds all its own servers and is estimated to be the fourth largest builder of servers in the world - after HP, IBM, and Sun. It's not the only ISP that does this, but its activity is so great that it distorts the market stats.

Linux probably doesn't trail Windows by much and it will almost certainly dominate in time. The determining factor is the emerging economies where Linux is growing at a much faster rate.

Linux has two very important advantages for developing economies such as China, India, and Brazil:

It can be used to establish a local software industry with local skills.
The cost of adopting it is lower by far than any alternative.

If you examine the enthusiasm for Linux in these rising economies you quickly see that it is government led, with governments mandating Linux for their own IT needs. Bear in mind that in most countries government accounts for 10 per cent of the IT budget and the drive to Linux becomes clear.

Full Report

Mo' & MoRe: [Vnbiz] Intel Vietnam refuses to pay bribes

noreply@blogger.com (ADMarshall) — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 06:23:00 +0000

[Earlier published at MoRe: [Vnbiz] Intel Vietnam refuses to pay bribes . The following is revised. The former will soon be deleted.]

Thank you, sincerely, Anh Hoanh, for making that byte a whole lot less ambiguous.

Of the significance of the purportedly unique international reach of the US Foreign Corruption Practices Act of 1977 (FCPA), with all due respect, please let's remember that a tree grows and spreads out from its roots, that the US roots, at home, do not stack up all that well these days against those of its peers, or others, and please, please, please can we keep the Yankee-doodle-dandying in either perspective or check? ;)

The USA is still a great nation with even greater individuals and communities -- who today are often hanging on the skins of their teeth. But, today, the USA is far from the world's accepted ethical leader in few places other than the US Bible Belt and in the Media in or from the USofA.

For the convenience of all chis, anhs, et als here, here again are two previously mentioned, apparently quite authoritative takes on that perspective above of the USA's level of corruption versus its international peers, graphically, for those who can receive as much:

2007-08-15

From http://govap-sighgone.blogspot.com/2007/08/twenty-nations-ranked-by-corruption.html

Twenty Nations Ranked by "Corruption Control"

Click on the chart to enlarge it.

This chart is based on data from the World Bank's "Governance Matters" pages, http://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi2007/

2007-08-15

From http://sighgone-ho.blogspot.com/2007/08/transparency-internationals-corruption_15.html

Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index - Top 23, USA Highlighted

Click on the image for an enlargement.

Source: http://www.transparency.org/content/download/10825/92857/version/1/file/CPI_2006_presskit_eng.pdf

As an aside, on your question of the relevance of Iraq and oil, it's just another US invasion-cum-war directly resulting from the corruption of the last two Bush Admin's. I can only extend the [subconscious?] waffle in the rationale of your response as such: "... it is not about oil, or at leadt not about oil only,...", or, maybe, at least not primarily about controlling oil wealth [which is what i wrote], or maybe not all of it, eh?

[Said and sent with the goodwill of open debate between free and friendly folks worldwide. Please pardon a few friendly pokes here and there. ;) - ed]

Cheers,
Andi

On 8/15/07, Tran Dinh Hoanh < tdhoanh@xxx.yyy> wrote:

[ Vietnam Business Forum ]

Dear brother Andi,

The US Foreign Corrup-tion Practices Act of 1977 (FCPA) prohibits U.S. companies, their subsidiaries, as well as their officers, directors, employees, and agents from bribing "foreign officials" (and also requires U.S. companies that issue debt or equity to maintain internal accounting controls and to keep books and records that accurately reflect all transactions). It means that even if the payment is considered legal in a foreign country under the law or normal practice of that country (such as the customary "boi duong" or "gifts" in Vietnam), it is still illegal under the US law if it violates the FCPA and the American violator will be prosecuted in the US court, even if the payment is done in a foreign country.

As far as I know, only the US reaches its citizens that far. Other countries will let its citizens do whatever is considered legal practice in a foreign country.

I don't understand why we have to talk about Iraq. I oppose that war because it is stupid. But it is not about oil, or at leadt not about oil only. (/11 attack on the US is real, and if Bush over-reacted in Iraq, that would be easy to understand. :Let's stay with what we can prove by facts.

I am not saying that American companies are not corrupt, Some of them do, and I did talk about the Banana Republic often in this forum. However, many US companies will not engage in corruption practices overseas because US companies have many ethical lawyers like me.

Have a great day!

Hoanh

noreply@blogger.com (ADMarshall) — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 02:35:00 +0000

One Hø's Response to "[vnbiz] Intel Vietnam refuses to pay bribes"

Dear Anh Hoanh,

Could you please expand a bit on your statement, "The US is the ONLY country in the world that has the anti-corruption practices act", to explain whether or not this means the US is (a) the only country with anti-corruption laws, (b) the only country with effective anti-corruption laws, (c) the only country with one set of laws specifically called the "Anti-Corruption Practices Act" or (d) some other meaning? The wording and grammatical mechanics of that statement seem to invite misinterpretation in the USA's favour.

I initially wondered about this because i remembered that while living in Hong Kong over 1990-1994 that territory had already instituted a very rigorous set of anti-corruption laws complemented by an enforcement infrastructure that was world-renowned for its effectiveness. And, according to Google searches on the American Bar Association, US anti-corruption laws seem to date from 2000.AD, though i didn't have time to confirm that conclusively.

Next, i was reminded of the curious naming of the Operation Iraqi Freedom which avoided the then most prevalent keyword of the Bush Admin's pro-war propaganda, "liberation". It would be just too revealing to call the US invasion of the sovereign state of Iraq, "Operation Iraqi Liberation" (OIL). No?

Just joking. But around the rest of world not dominated by the Fox network and other pro-US-Bush-Admin media i think it's been pretty obvious from the beginning of the US invasion of Iraq that that war has always been primarily about controlling oil supplies and resultant wealth (and pollution).

Often less obvious have been self-serving links between the Bush Admin', Big Oil and the Bush family's ties to the Saudi regime, Dick Cheney's Halliburton, which was virtually granted a monopoly on repairing the damage the Bush Admin' has been causing in Iraq, along with arms dealers like Carlyle (with its long, well-documented Bush-family ties to the Saudi bin Laden family). (Cf http://www.google.com/search?q=bush+family+arms-dealers+oil-companies, in particular "'Frauds-R-Us' - The Bush Family Saga", which has entries about both Halliburton and Carlyle. Otherwise, if you're not a rabid neocon , just watch or read Micheal Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11".)

Now, if that's not yet another example of the USA's long history of highly sophisticated INSTITUTIONALIZED corruption, i don't know what is.

Like the leadership debate, there seems to be yet another glaring gap between principles and practice when we discuss anti-corruption efforts.

But how do we measure and rank institutionalized corruption? Because most accepted international corruption indices (now also "indexes") are based on legal definitions of corruption most will have difficulty measuring corruption based on legal loopholes or institutionally accepted practices that allow corruption to leak in legally.

Still, just to get an idea of how the US ranks on corruption, internationally -- without counting the institutionalized corruption inherent in political campaign contributions, media patronage, etc -- see for example the "2006 Corruption Perception Index" of Transparency International [pdf] wherein the US ranks 22nd, after Chile.

Also, i did stretch my free time a bit to use the US-dominated World Bank's Governance data to construct a chart of 20 arbitrarily selected nations' "Corruption Control" rankings, including the USA and Vietnam. I'd suggest it's significantly revealing of the USA's position. I posted it here.

Here it is, again (click on it to enlarge it):

Source: the World Bank's "Governance Matters" pages.

I'd also submit that the VNExpress report (BeLow) on Intel's anti-corruption role primarily highlights most news media's foci (now also "focuses") on news involving what the TV ad-industry calls "Jiggles & Jolts", ie representations of sex, money, violence, etc, to attract and hold viewers attention. Jiggles & Jolts sell the news just like they sell TV game shows. Just as your own anti-corruption efforts went unreported, Anh Hoanh, i'm sure hundreds of other laudable efforts before Intel's have just not been judged "news-worthy".

Last but not least, i'd suggest we should not forget the pervasive impact bribes still have in the editorial choices of Vietnam Inc's PR Department, ie, the nation's entire state-owned news media.

Just yet another couple of dong's worth -- for whatever that's worth (max VND16,198/USD according to Vietcombank, but VND16,200/USD at a Go Vap jewelry shop, yesterday).

With regards,
AD

On 8/15/07, Tran Dinh Hoanh <tdhoanh@xxx.com> wrote:

[ Vietnam Business Forum ]

Dear CACC,

According to this VNExpress article, Intel Product Viet Nam has signed with the management of the Advanced Industrial Zone of HCMC a memorandum on business ethics, rules of conduct and "saying 'no' to corruption." This is the first momorandum of this type in Vietnam. The US General Consul in HCMC also signed this momorandum.

And I am very a happy that this is a US-based company. The US is the ONLY country in the world that has the anti-corruption practices act that prohibits its citizens to engage in corruption practices overseas.

When I was in Vietnam, I was solicited into many multi-million-dollar deals with under-the-table payments required. I refused all of them (which made some of my solicitors very upset and kept me poor).

But I told them, "I am an American lawyer. My job is to teach my clients to keep the law. And the US law is very clear: 'No payment under the table, no kickback, no bribe.' Sorry, no deal."

I hope that US companies will happily follow Intel to lift up the American ethics torch overseas. And I am very happy to see that the US government is involved in this ethical effort.

Have a great day!
Hoanh

__________

http://vnexpress.net/Vietnam/Kinh-doanh/2007/08/3B9F9342/

--
Tran Dinh Hoanh, Esq., LLB, JD

Washington DC
--
AD (Andi) Marshall
eMail: admarshal [at] gmail [dot] com
Zone: ICT (IndoChina Time, GMT/UTC+7)
Web: http://admarshall.googlepages.com/
Post: HoChiMinh City (ex/or SaiGon), VietNam
Quote: "Love all, trust a few. Do wrong to none..."
Source: Shakespeare, 1623, "All's Well That Ends Well"
Get it at Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2246

BizWk: Facebook Goes Grey; Lenova, Linux, Olympics; India Outsourcing Decline?

noreply@blogger.com (ADMarshall) — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 16:38:00 +0000

From the Business Week Online, http://www.businessweek.com/, Newsletter:

Fogeys Flock to Facebook
Professionals pushing 40 and older are joining the college
crowd on the social hub. Can CEO Zuckerberg's team give them
reason to stick around?
http://newsletters.businessweek.com/c.asp?669008&9f6384f84fa982dd&8

A Torch Lights the Way for Lenovo
By going after a look that sought to meld the Olympics with
Chinese culture, the computer maker is winning by design
http://newsletters.businessweek.com/c.asp?669008&9f6384f84fa982dd&6

Related Lenovo news:

Lenovo moves to the country
Offers low-cost PCs for China's rural market
http://go.theregister.com/news/http://www.theregister.co.uk /2007/08/03/lenovo_targets_rural_market/

LENOVO TO SHIP LINUX ON SELECT NOTEBOOKS
"Following in the footsteps of Dell, Lenovo said Monday that it plans to give both
consumers and businesses the option to have Linux installed as the default operating
system over Windows on select models..."
http://www.betanews.com/article/Lenovo_to_Ship_Linux_on_Select_Notebooks/1186410839

Is the Party Over for Indian Outsourcers?
Infosys, TCS, and Wipro still rake in profits, but they face
challenges ranging from a stronger rupee to the likes of IBM
and Accenture romping on their home turf
http://newsletters.businessweek.com/c.asp?669008&9f6384f84fa982dd&4

noreply@blogger.com (ADMarshall) — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 08:38:00 +0000

First Surreal Contact with the X, Post-Partum - Plus Pussy Pix

It'd been almost three months since i'd signed off on divorce at the Saigon kangaroo court. If i remember correctly, the X and i had a mutually frustrating SMS exchange a few days after that, something about a bullshit friendship proposal of hers, pure shiat she obviously had no intention of living up to.

Then she texted me again ten days ago, again professing to still be pining for the oldest, dumbest and laziest of the three boys here, my toms, Chin, Bob and Rajer. Chin's the oldest.

Raj is the youngest, wittiest, lithest and most easily adorable. Raj can dance, fly and swat all in one move. He's thin and light, but nimble, charmingly guileless and a consummate opportunist, a true Viet tom.

Bob's the cutest little tank of a bobcat. At home, Bob whimpers pitifully and simpers for massages. Outside, he rips into any cat in the hood who pushes too far, no matter how big they are. Most mornings he comes back in tatters. Each time he does it's a joyful wonder just to hear him yowl and know he's not dead yet.

A few pix from those sent to the X:

Classic Raj and Chin.

SighGone, Hø!

My New Workplace: Chroma

Year of the Yin Metal Cat (Tân Mão) 2011

YeeHo! Why Keep on Keepin On? GangstaGrass

Only in America, Only on Fox: WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) Obama-Clinton Smackdown Proposed

Hugh just saved me from trialling twitter...

Erick Schonfeld

F/U: Stroke of insight

Jill Bolte Taylor:Neuroanatomist

Chord Struck 01: Another Depressing Screed on Global Warming

Microsoft updates Windows without users' consent

Vietnam Signs $1Bln Telecoms Deal

Biuti: Firefox Redshift v2 theme on Ubuntu

Ubuntu w/ xvnkb s'shot

Despite unprecedented lobbying and PR, Microsoft's OOXML loses ISO approval vote

Thanh Nien: Air authorities fight police over sword-wielding cop

Bloor: Could Linux become the dominant OS? Gradually, Yes, Via Googlesque, BIC DIYs

Mo' & MoRe: [Vnbiz] Intel Vietnam refuses to pay bribes

2007-08-15

2007-08-15

From http://sighgone-ho.blogspot.com/2007/08/transparency-internationals-corruption_15.html

BizWk: Facebook Goes Grey; Lenova, Linux, Olympics; India Outsourcing Decline?

Jill Bolte Taylor:
Neuroanatomist