sunday

I don’t buy all the hype Vista is making. I did when it first came out way back in…June (?) last year, but as Vista unraveled more, it became apparent that it ripped off a lot of Mac OS X’s GUIs and would be overpriced. I’ll give Microsoft a couple of months (maybe a year?) to work out its kinks before I grab a copy for myself, but in the meantime, here are Maximum PC’s top ten reasons why you don’t need Vista today:

1. Vista requires a fairly powerful machine
2. Application incompatibilities
3. Vista is crazy expensive
4. No hardware audio
5. Vista doesn’t work with a lot of bleeding-edge hardware
6. Vista doesn’t work well with some games
7. Vista includes consumer-unfriendly DRM
8. Poor driver support
9. Vista is kind of annoying (think frequency of permission prompts)
10. You can wait

With the latest news of Apple’s iPhone, it’s kind of surprising I haven’t blogged anything about it yet. Not gonna lie, but I WANT ONE. It’s one of those, “I want it, I need it, I have to have it” sort of thing. But move aside iPhone! You’ve just been ousted by Miuccia Prada. Prada teamed with LG to remake the KE850 so that it’s a completely touch-screen phone, that says Prada on it. It’ll be in five European countries this spring, and hopefully in the US later this year.

For more pictures, see Gizmodo.

I went shopping at Ruehl today in my scheme to replace all my too-big jeans for smaller jeans…and after I checked out while I was leaving, the lady—no, the girl—at the register stopped me. She asked me if I lived in the area and if I was in school because she said I could work there part-time or something. Then she gave me the whole pitch about how it’s really great to meet people in your age and you can get discounts if you work there. Of course I was like, “what discounts??” She said 30% and sometimes 50% off. While I am tempted to get the discounts, I think I’m too prissy to work in retail.

Well, as you all can tell, I finally started my program…real work (not “work”). I’m sitting at the National Reconnaissance Office (yes Kiefer, I can say that) not doing much because I just started this past week. I do not have any kind of normal internet access, and as you can imagine am currently going through internet withdrawals. It’s kinda like detoxing from heroine or something. Anyways, so no more free time to blog about nothing, even though I’ll get random ideas to blog, I can’t, because I don’t have the internet.

The other morning I drove to work, and it was light out! I used to go to work at 6AM and it would be completely dark and dismal. At least I get a little light now, and it’s not as depressing.

I could insert some comments about the idiot drivers I encounter on my way to work, but I think we’ve all heard enough for now.

Some upcoming changes I’d like to do for the blog. Put in a gallery for my photos, yes coding it myself. I’ve tried using templates and stuff but it’s not anything I really want, so I’m probably just going to have to create one myself. I’d also like to have a static front page with random stuff on there and the main post.

But currently on the to-do list is to exchange all my too-big jeans for right-size jeans. All my Abercrombie jeans that I bought in college are now too big for me because I went back to my regular size/weight. Oh and just as a random side note, I know it’s not my birthday yet, but if anyone’s feeling generous, I’ve been wanting the Alicia Keys Unplugged songbook for a while now, but haven’t gotten around to buying it :).

I wanted to go out, specifically k street lounge, except we kinda showed up at 10pm before doors opened and we didn’t put ourselves on the guest list—girls $10 cover and guys $20. So the boys (Chris and Phil) decided to hit up a bar and get a little buzzed before returning to the club. Seeing as it was FREEZING and McCormick’s was a lot farther than Phil thought, we ran into Fast Eddie’s, which Phil also thought was a sports bar. It was a strip club. When we got inside, Phil gave me this awkward look and I told him I had no problem and at least it was warm inside. So while the boys drank their beers and very expensive Long Island’s, I night-capped on my “Dessert of the Day,” which when I asked our 40-something waitress what it was, I was afraid she was going to say poon-tang or something. To my relief, and delight, it was chocolate cake.

I was the only girl in the strip club, aside from the strippers, and when we got up to leave, I made a quick trip to the bathroom. I’m pretty sure the other men were wondering why I was fully-clothed. Unfortunately, the strippers weren’t very good (none of them worked the pole) and there was only one hot stripper, that I could see from where we were sitting at least, because I didn’t have my glasses and am near-sighted. Boo.

We returned to k street lounge and Chris and I got our groove on the so-called dance floor. The DJ was pretty good, playing all the good hip-hop songs that you WOULD dance to, but Phil grabbed us and told us he found an old marine friend he met back in Cali. So the four of us all headed out to Ultra Bar, where Phil’s friend knew the owner, which meant no cover, access to VIP area and free drinks.

It was a pretty good night, seeing as we went to a strip club, then the lady at k street was so flustered by the benjamin Chris gave her that she gave us the wrong change (we ended paying for two people instead of three), and we waltzed right into Ultra Bar. The only thing we did pay for was the cab ride home.

Another Slashdot news that I found interesting. Being an electrical engineer myself who actually partially went through with the MSEE process, I think professors should definitely be gearing their teaching towards educating thinkers.

Some people have commented otherwise, because what they learned in grad school doesn’t apply to what they did in the real world. In that case, they got the wrong job, or shouldn’t have gone to grad school at all. But definitely, “Just because it is now fashionable to call people who are not engineers OR tradespeople by the name engineer is no reason to try to dumb it all down.”

So I came across this snippet on Slashdot how they’re going to give parents the power to monitor what they’re kids are doing through some software installation on the computer. People are saying that this could drive the MySpace user away to go to the “next cool thing” in social networking (teenagers are fickle, right?). I found one commenter who said: “My GOD, it’s DOOMSDAY. Myspace users will begin to leave myspace and begin to infect the rest of the internet. KILL ME NOW!” LOL, so true, so true.

But is it really? After all my bitching and ranting about MySpace and it’s inadequacy to live up to HTML standards, I’ve come to realize that it’s not the people who use MySpace, it’s the actual web-based tool called MySpace. Imagine if the people on MySpace have Facebook accounts, and I’m sure most do, does it affect Facebook? No, because Facebook (and Orkut, etc) don’t put the power of “space” design into the users. Hence you get one clean, unified interface for all to view.

For me, MySpace is just an annoying and unsophisticated tool. It’s just unfortunate for the responsible people who use MySpace that there’s a bad name for the social network, thanks to all the junior and high school kiddies hooking up with 35-year-old men (among other things I’ve mentioned in previous posts). Although I really don’t mind the fact that they’ve managed to contain all the annoying teeny-boppers in one place on the internet.

Most of my Rose peers can attest to not being an ultimate geek who wants to work in a cube for the rest of their lives. In fact, most have planned to attend business school at some point in their lives to get that management edge for their career. But as Business Week presents, is the MBA overrated? For a long time I thought it was the key into getting your butt into the upper echelon, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that you don’t need an MBA to be a top exec. In fact, according to research, very few executives have MBAs, “a surprising number considering the hundreds of thousands of B-school alumni with enough experience to qualify them for top jobs.”

The bottom line is “if you are good enough to get in, you obviously have enough talent and abilities to do well, regardless,” says Jeffrey Pfeffer, professor of organizational behavior at Stanford and longtime critic of business schools. The road to executive success that leads through business school is, when it comes right down to it, the road less traveled.

Getting mad is all the rage and, according to the latest research, can also be good for you. Eve Conant lets loose.

I found this interesting because I’m part of the sexes that like to keep my angers within and just stew until the storm passes. Maybe I should be more outward with my anger? Especially the second to last paragraph, I can wholly relate the whole “garbage dumping” incident.

From Vogue December 2006 issue, in Beauty Health & Fitness. Editor Abigail Walch.

Read the rest of this entry »

Well, we’re back. Came back Friday night. It was really fun, really relaxing, blah blah blah, tropical vacation, you get the idea. Pictures say it all.

In case you’re wondering, we were at the Rockhouse Hotel in Negril, Jamaica.