vision for a company

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/16-12/ff_ozzie?currentPage=all

intriguing read. It makes me wonder, in VMware, we do have someone doing this kinda stuff, right? We need a vision, a concrete one.

Another thought. Is MS just a good place to foster good managers? Thus far, I have really like Maritz's stuff, he too comes from MS. Cerrtainly Ray Ozzie doens't come from MS, but he works there now.

The interesting thing to watch might be will MS be as good as today when the Maritz and Ray Ozzie generation of managers retire?

better get back to forming a more concrete strategy for the product I manage............

jump starting the freakin' car

hats off to German sports car maker.........................

You have made jumping a car soooo freaking complicated, and the relevant portion in the manual so disjointed.  Un-Deutsch und unglaublich.

 

We accidentaly left the GPS plugged in. You would think the car would shutdown the aux power when its not running.  Anyway, we were left with a great car that won't start.

We were able to borrow a jumpstart kit from a mechanic but were unable to start the car.  Since it's a mid-engine car, I figured I can't reach the battery leads and the instruction in the manual was what I needed to do to jump start the car.  Remove the fuse box cover, pull out the leads that had the plus sign on it, hook up the red end of the jumper cable to it, then the black end to the car body.  Woowoo, I got lights in the car.

But the car won't start.

We returned the jumpstart thingy, thinking that it just didn't have enough juice for our car.  The mechanic looked baffled.  We borrowed some jumper cables and waited for a friend to get off work.

Did the same routine, and of course, it didn't work either.  Now I am reading the damn manual again, and sure enough, at the bottom of the page in fine print, it said something like: "this won't start your car.  You can now open the front cover of the car (where the motor of a front engine car would be).  It doesn't tell you which page you should read now.  Flipping through the 300 page manual, I found that 10 pages later, you find a picture of a battery and jumper cables hooked up to it.  It doesn't tell you where the damn thing is, it just shows you that you can hook up jumper cables to it.  Damn it!  Well, I guess 2+2 equals 4 and I started searching for something that resembles what the picture had shown.   

After pull out every conceivable cover, faceplate under the hood, I found the battery!  Hooked the jumper cables to the battery and eureka!  

Doing all this while I am sick with a fever really didn't help.............................

Happy Thanksgiving

As expected, we will not be celebrating Thanks Giving with a Turkey this year. Instead, we are heading out to Barcelona for the long weekend.
Pretty tired now from working the whole day. Had lunch with Manu. For those from the Ecole, he moved out to Chicago 1.5 years ago.

Suddenly, I am thinking of a friend from the east coast. I hope you are having Thanksgiving with your mom and things are getting better. I know how it feels. These feelings tend to sting a little during the holidays.

St. Laurent

Today, we enjoyed a bottle of St. Laurent from Austria: Hoepler - Erwein 2005

It's a bit light compared to the Malbec, tempranillo, Chianti, or french wines we normally like, but has yet enough flavor, and is slightly sweet to match with the mild venison Entrecote we had.

I think it's a wonderful match, but also offers such an Austrian flavor that makes me think there is probably enough emotional factor in it for YiChun and me - she lived in Vienna for so long and I when I was so young.

what a week

Lufthansa pushed the flight back yet again...... I am sitting in Munich after a long haul flight from SFO.

looks like some changes are coming down the pipe. Hopefully the situation will improve at work. It will be a hard couple of months, but hopefully all for the better. It's amazing how one person's actions could impact so many people's lives.

Much learning on the job and life. Makes things interesting, doesn't it?

are we becoming dumber?

The Perils of Public Chic. - an op ed from WSJ provided plenty of food for thought for Mark and me.

This reminds me. The American people deserve more credit than I give them. I didn't think America was ready for a black president. I can't believe I would say this, Bush actually accelerate the giant leap forward by screwing stuff up so badly.

Like the Chinese proverb: Mr. Tsai's loss of a great horse is not an indication of loss of fortune.

The 80/20 rule in marriage

From the movie: "Why did I get married?"

In most cases in marriage, you are only going to get 80% of what you need. So here comes this woman offering the 20%, because you ain't gettin' it, you think you are getting 80%. Only when you go with her, and you end up with 20.

back in America

For two weeks of meetings and VMworld.

Oh do I miss it.

Was watching the show Rachael Ray has. Never seen it before since it came on after I moved to Switzerland. (Looks like her voice is more horse, she put on some weight, and she just looks plain tired. Slow down, girl!)

Jerry Springfield was on that day. On the question of what kind of food they provide in the backroom for guests, Springfield said:
"We have ...... and mesh potatoes because most of our guests don't have teeth."

So very cute :)

Russia has invaded Georgia!

My dear Americans, For those of us living abroad, sometimes these kind of posts just don't help persuading how great America is, no matter how hard we try to convince people near us.

before naming your child

ah, one of the often talked about topic. You want our child to have a special name and yet not be ridiculed. With so many bad examples, one should just google a name before you name your child. I had a friend in college of Greek descend, his name was Clito. It's ok, just a Greek name, but did you ever think that you are giving birth to your son in an English speaking part of the world and chances are he is going to have a pretty rough time in school?

Stumbling upon Lev Tylor's divorce news and that she has a child. She named her son Milo?

YiChun said maybe we should consider calling our child Caotina Yiu.

when voters lie

Excellent article on wall street journal on political surveys and voters:

what would you do?

Friends came to visit from Ireland this weekend. Younger of the two sons was a student of YiChun's. The older son is autistic. It's really touching to see how much effort both parents put into raising the son. Not only are the parents, the younger son also takes responsibility in watching over his older brother at times.

Last night, I asked myself what I would do if I had a child like that. I admire what the parents have done. I ask myself if I have the same level of dedication, and I am not at all sure. How could you ever be sure at your child's birth, besides the ten fingers and ten toes, that everything is "normal"? It must have been a gut wrenching thing to find out that your child is different.

Which leads to another question. Some of us strive to be different. "Think different" - Apple's commercials always say. But when it come to physical and mental characteristics, we all wish to be "normal"? Why the disparity?

There are just so many unknowns in life. I guess we all expect the unexpected.

Wedding pics

These are the most hi quality ones since Love who is a professional took them.........

Check back often. I am sure there are more to come.

Sia

why does everyone keeps asking.....

"Are you nervous?"

No, I am not really. I think I was tense a couple days ago because of work. I am cool about Friday though. Everything is pretty much done except the party favors that were supposed to have arrived from Germany today. But that's ok. YiChun are now picking out music for the party. Gettin' married is actually kinda fun. :)

gettin married

ah, the Swiss government just informed us two days ago that we have to get married on May 30th. So we are having the civil ceremony, and a dinner party for the friends nearby.

A little surprised? So are we.

Check out the web page.

Urgh.... OS X 10.5.2 & Juniper SSL VPN

IT had some issues with the SSL gateway. I think they must have upgraded to solve the problem. As a result, when I connected up this morning, it forced me to install a new client and that is where all the problems started. First the software wouldn't install. Then throwing the Network Connect software away didn't help. When I did finally get it to install, I got stuck where it was executing the installation script.

I tried everything on this post and some of the stuff was helpful. This is what worked for me.
Delete the Network Connect app.
Do the links suggested by the last poster.

$ cd /usr/lib
$ sudo cp libcrypto.0.9.dylib libcrypto.0.9.dylib.ppc
$ sudo cp libssl.0.9.dylib libssl.0.9.dylib.ppc
$ sudo ln -sf libcrypto.0.9.7.dylib libcrypto.0.9.dylib
$ sudo ln -sf libssl.0.9.7.dylib libssl.0.9.dylib

Then delete the files:

$ cd /Library/Frameworks
$ sudo rm -R net.juniper.*
$ sudo rm -rf /usr/local/juniper

Then do what sudogeek said here:
The installation for Juniper's Network Connect differs on different OS X versions. I have successfully installed and used Network Connect 5.5 on Mac O X 10.3.x, 10.4.x, and 10.5.1.

Mac OS X 10.3.x, <10.4.9:>

Mac OS X >10.4.10, 10.5.x: This alternative method works for all Mac OS X versions but seems to be necessary only for the newer ones. You need to log in to your Mac as an administrative user and open the NetInfo Manager (10.3.x or 10.4.x) or "Directory Utility" (10.5) application in "Utilities." Under "Edit" click on "Enable root user." Then go the "System Preferences" and change the login options to Name and Password. Log out then log in as root. Now use Safari to open the web site which loads the VPN client. Click Start for Network Connect and the software will be downloaded and installed. Now, log out of the root account, go back to your regular administrative user account and log in. Again open the "NetInfo Manager" or "Directory Utility" application and under disable root user. Then go the "System Preferences" and change the login options to whatever you want.

Don't replace this bit with the sudo safari stuff from your regular user. It should work in theory, but when I tried it, safari still asked me to provide the password.

Even though I am a UNIX guy and don't believe in reboots, I did a reboot just to make sure the links and all the changes I made are in correctly.

When the box came back up, I logged in as root, the installation went fine. Although I tried logging into the SSLVPN, it failed. I logged out and logged back in as the regular user, and was able to get into the SSLVPN without issues. Weird.

Good luck.

HP Laserjet 4 m plus on OS X

what a pain....... If you don't know how it works.

It wasn't available in the drop down for OS X. The new OS X 10.5 drivers from HP doesn't have it either.

On windows, duplex works, and everything is cool.

The printer kept printing everything twice and ignore all duplex setting when printing from the Mac. So here is what it all came down to. To get the Laserjet4m plus working, you have to use the generic postscript driver, and go into the postscript setting on the printer to turn duplex on. In addition, set copies to 1. My printer came in German, so it's "Examplare". That kept throwing me off because I thought the drivers were not working. Urgh......