Author: p6admin

Randomly waking up to see Egypt explode

Al Jazeera English and pulled out the iPad.  I then looked up and saw the Vice President of Egypt start to make an announcement. “Hosni Mubarak has waived the office of presidency….” WTF?  Is this live?  I grabbed my glasses to look for the LIVE ticker and then the next scene was pandemonium.  I had to turn down the TV volume.  Mumbarak was gone, and Al Jazeera, to their credit, then showed nothing but screaming crowds for what seemed like 5 minutes. I booted up Twitter and it hadn’t hit yet.  I started blasting some messages and within about a minute I was getting replies and other updates from the breaking news services.  It was kind of funny to still get my assortment of tech related messages coming through oblivious to the world changing outside, but eventually Twitter caught up to the fast changing events happening on TV. Talk about a random moment to wake up.  A few minutes later and I would have been too late.  A few minutes earlier and I probably would have gotten bored and checked the movie channels. Here is how it played on Al Jazeera:

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My former professor is now Catholic University's President

My constitutional law professor at the University of Notre Dame, Professor John Garvey, was just inaugurated as the President of Catholic University in Washington, DC. Quite an honor for him, the first lay person to be president in several decades. He’s already ruffled some feathers with a pretty explicit discussion about free speech and words (which mirror a rather similar, shock inducing session we had when studying the First Amendment back in law school).  He was said to be in consideration for the deanship of the law school at Notre Dame, but rumored to be taken down by some of the more liberal members who felt he was too conservative.  Now some religious conservatives are mad at him for being too liberal.  Go figure. Will have to look him up should I get back to DC anytime soon.  Looks like he’ll be busy rebuilding the campus according to the press reports (Catholic is kind of spread out and needing of a quad, trees, and other campusy things). Congrats Professor (President) Garvey.]]>

Wild week for Silicon Valley's top leaders

Monday we had Steve Jobs announcing another medical leave of absence (get well soon). Thursday we had Eric Schmidt of Google announcing a change in focus as he steps down from the day-to-day. Also on Thursday we had HP announcing the resignation of four directors and the appointment of Ebay’s Meg Whitman to the board. Quite a shakeup for one week.  One wonders if this Friday will bring anything else. I also still wonder about the future of the Valley.  Many of the older school leaders in Silicon Valley remember when there was still Silicon being used in the Bay Area.  Now it seems SV stands for “Social Valley” with all sorts of startups surrounding the social networking sphere.  There was quite a bit of tech involved, whereas much of the new ‘social revolution’ really smacks me of just a ‘publishing’ revolution that is occurring on top of the technology of built last decade.  Some (European papers) are even rubbing their hands with glee that perhaps the luster has worn off in Silicon Valley.  Not quite yet I think, but who knows what will come in the next decade.]]>

Downloading FIFA 11 for the iPad

FIFA ’11 onto the iPad. FIFA ’96 was a hidden joy I discovered back in law school and now the fact I can start playing again is pretty exciting (I gave up the Playstation when the kids were born). Take a look at the trailer. Note that they don’t even both showing Spurs on the trailer. That would make people not buy the game if they knew they were going to lose everytime. ]]>