the exciting media and us

since I have been sick, I decided to spend this sunday morning reading something interesting and spend my time quietly. So I am reading the DIscovery magazine while listening to Ashkenazy play Bach's Well Tempered Klavier. An article triggered me to go over to discoverymagazine.com's blog section. I read down the blog trying to find what I was looking for when I stumbled on a link to Jon Stewart's take on the whole climate gate thing. Polarizing statements from idiotic republican senators aside, Stewart, as usual, is hugely entertaining and it reminded me of two of my pretty smart friends who watch the Daily Show, well.... daily.

I then went back to Bach and the Discovery magazine. Wow, it struck me how "blend" Bach is compared to Jon Stewart. I was shocked at that reaction. No wonder so few of us listen to classical music any more, or read a magazine like Discovery or the Economist.

We want to be entertained, our senses stimulated. Bach is great art, Stewart is amazingly entertaining and definitely packs in many more punches in 5 minutes than Bach can. Short punchy entertainment is what we need now, instant success, quick rise to fame. Short articles on the web, blogs, even better, twitter, drives us toward ever shorter attention span. Where are we headed?

If time is x, attention span = y where y = 1/x as x -> infinity. Maybe this formula isn't even correct since our attention span probably shortened a lot quicker in the last century than any century before it.

In an attempt to lengthen my attention span, am heading back to the Discovery magazine and Bach now......

Perlman is like the Samantha in Sex in the city?

this morning, I woke up and put a Mozart CD in and started listening. Requiem soon became way too serious for Sunday morning. I know it would take me closer to God, but it's just not feeling like one of those Sunday mornings.

So I turned to a newly acquired Oistrakh playing various violin sonatas (disc 52 of this series).

A discussion with YiChun over skype ensued. Oistrakh's Back sonata really is cold, and less emotional than we both liked. I didn't really see the point of Reger's piece, and even less so for Ysaye. The Wieniawski was just ok and was played by with David & Igor. Kinda special since this is when Igor was still young.

Then came the Prokofiev sonata for 2 violins. Man, talk about cold. It was cold. Shortly after the music started, I had the picture of a worn out artist, pacing an empty street in the middle of winter. Cold, and just beaten by the world. When allegro started, he was telling the story of the love of his life - how his girl friend broke his heart. A 2 second smile quickly faded as he recounted the time they had spent together when he realizes that he is without a home, without success, without money, and worst of all, without his love.

I just couldn't take these three russians (David, Igor Oistrakh, and Prokofiev) drowning me more on this Sunday morning - it's cold, cloudy with no sun as is. I just had to switch to something a little more upbeat.

Mozart Requiuem too serious, Oistrakh playing Prokofiev too depressing, I turned to.........
Perlman's Greatest hits. Yeah, I know. It starts with Carmen Fantasy. Wow, I don't even want to imagine what it would sound like of Oistrakh was playing that. (Let's just leave the debate of Perlman's music for another day)

I said to YiChun: "Compared to Oistrakh, Perlman is like the Samantha in Sex in the city."

Arrau & Francois

Been listening to the collection of Arrau's last recordings (in Switzerland). Dad told me if I liked his Debussy's girl with flexen hair, I should listen to Francois.

I did and must admit that Francois plays Debussy with a very different style, a much more active one. The music is still absolutely amazing. They do have different take on the music. Not just with girl with flexen hair. I have to admit that I didn't quite recognize Francois playing Berceuse héroïque. It was just so different from Arrau. Arrau puts less "effort" into the music and yet leaves a more profound impression on me.

Interesting........

Kogan & Oistrakh playing Kachaturian is next. But I am going to wait for the weekend for that. it's just tooooo heavy for a week night.

apple mail & SMIME

Thawte announced a while back that they were cutting off the free personal cert and at least, they are replacing it with a free VeriSign class 1. I wonder if VRSN ever made that $500M acquisition worth their while. NetSol?

Anyway, I never tried to make Apple Mail send out smime mail b4 so I thought I would give it a try. I have to say, I am not really impressed how complex Apple has made it. I guess I have come to expect Apple to make things easy.

Getting the cert into keychain wasn't hard. But.....

1. Double Click on your cert and bring it up in keychain.
2. click on the little triangle next to "Trust" to expand it.
3. In "Secure Mail" select "always trust"
4. Restart Mail.

Now you should see the little check box to the right of the screen.

playing with iPhoto 09's face recognition

Interesting results.

It asks me to confirm 4 pictures of Maria B. In the 4, two of them are actually Maria, and two of them are Jorge. (I am not sure what that says about Jorge or vice versa)

It asks me to confirm 5 pictures of Janeth. OUt of the 5, two were Janeth, and two of Katya. I think the 5th was a bit blurry.

It also mistook my wife as Sandra F on one occasion.

TGIF!

This week wasn't too tough, but I found myself just feeling sooo couped up inside. I just couldn't wait to get off work. After I finished that presentation, I really felt like getting some fresh air, not the kind of "fresh air" in the bar. So I decided to so something I have never done in Switzerland (actually I don't really find myself doing it in the states, but I was driving a Honda).

I went driving around like a redneck, just for the sake of driving. And no, I didn't have a 6 pack next to me. And no, I did obay the speed limit (loosely).

Man how cool was that! Went over to Lutry, got on the highway and just let it rip. I was going 130 well before I was out of steam in 4th. It just feels soooo good. I love that car!

Now off to dinner for some tapas!

We went hiking

and winded up...
a big black cow chased us around..... because she didn't like me singing the pink panther theme.

We started filming this because she wanted a picture with the sweet looking cows. You can tell how much she loves cows - like best buddies.


Before the chase.



Of course, the cameraman had to ditch filming because of the chase.

Then after...


Then she commented on what happened.


Then we re-enacted what happened.

(we will try to subtitle this in english later)

upgrading to snow leopard

the directory service is still burning up a lot of CPU for no good reason.

The upgrade killed my openldap install so I had to install from scratch.

This meant compiling the berkely BD. LDFLAGS and CPPFLAGS are absolutely crucial to doing this on OSX. Google provided good help there.

Orchestrator is still loading up with JVM 1.6 instead of 1.5.0 even with the hack. Don't know what is going on there.

i love TV, I love the bar

been a tough few days.
After VMworld, I had to unwind n0 matter how tired I am. So I ended up at the irish bar next to the hotel.
Beer, wings.... boy, i didn't realize how much i miss it.
then back to the hotel. TV!!!!!!!
Swiss TV SUCKS dead goats!
American cable rocks......... Ｉmiss it.

eeepc update ui

first time I am running it. it just crashed on me. I think the updates are still running since the ps outputs suggest it's still alive.

There is no way my wife would know that if she is the one running the update.......

Also noticed that asus disabled the update button on firefox and only allows you (in the UI) to install newer versions of firefox through their update server. The problem is that they are WAY behind..... (FF still on 3.0.4 when it should be 3.0.13 or 3.5.2)

1st thoughts on the eeepc 1000

not sure if the hype of ssd is paying off. Maybe it's the processor and memory spec that is slowing the down.
The thing shipped with Xandros linux by default. Not bad, kinda cute. The keyboard is a bit clunky, and feels cheap, but I suppose what is what you would expect from asus.

Why do the xandros UI folks choose to model their UI after Windows? There are plenty of good examples out there. Ever heard of OS X?

Getting to a command prompt was a bit painful. ctrl+alt+t... wa then sudo konsole. I suppose it's the KDE console. Then there is no easy way to get it added to the desktop where all the apps are.

One more thing. The reason I hate touch pads...... you hit them by accident all the time. That is why I preferred the nipple on the thinkpads.

jetlegged but I need to get some sleep now......

(went to a decent japanese joint last night....... i guess i look the part. they say "hi" a lot:)

wise words.......

Nature commits no errors; right and wrong are human categories.

-PARDOT KYNES, Arrakis Lectures

Quote of the day

It was on my fifth birthday that Papa put his hand on my shoulder and said, 'Remember, my son, if you ever need a helping hand, you'll find one at the end of your arm.'
- Sam Levenson