Kenny's Cafe Corner

From a 9-Year Old's Mind
Yesterday I was helping out a 9-year-old with her essay. It was entitled, 'What Would You Do If You Are A Millionaire' and I was brainstorming some ideas on what to put in her writing so here's how it went...

Me: Imagine you're rich, how would you spend your money?
Lil' girl: I dunno...

Me: What would you buy?
Lil' girl: Cheese!

Me: The first thing you do when you're rich is to buy some cheese?!
Lil' girl: A lot of cheese!! I love cheese!

Me: Okay....so what sort of cheese? Surely not Kraft Cheddar? Something expensive...like blue cheese or something...
Lil' girl: A wanna buy salmon cheese!

Me: They have THAT?! .oO(eeuwW!) Salmon cheese?!
Lil' girl: Yes, Australian salmon cheese! I love cheese!

Me: Let's not talk about your love of cheese for the moment...what else would you do with your money? Give to the poor perhaps?
Lil' girl: Yes...buy food, drinks, and give money to poor people...

Me: How would you do that?
Lil' girl: I'll give to the orphanage...

Me: So you have a point, which is giving to the orphanage...Now you need to elaborate on that point...Give some examples...What kind of food would you give? Milo?
Lil' girl: That's not food, it's a drink lah!

Me: Yes, it is, and you may also mention giving rice...
Lil' girl: And CHEESE!!
Me: .oO(d'oh!) Okay, and cheese...
Lil' girls: *SALMON* cheese...
Me: sigh...okay let me write that down for you...

Me: Now what else do you want to buy? How about for your family?
Lil' girl: I buy chair, tables, tv...

Me: Good...to decorate your house...anything else?
Lil' girl(looking around the house): Erm...lights...

Me: With crystals...a chandelier? The most expensive!
Lil' girl: Why most expnsive?

Me: Because you could afford it silly...You're rich remember? You mentioned chair, what type of furniture? Italian perhaps?

Lil' girl: Cheese chair!
Me: ...

Lil' girl: And cheese sofa!
Me: Okay, see that? (Pointing at painting)
Lil' girl: Yes and a cheese photo!

Me: No! I meant, would you want to buy a painting? It's worth a lot...a painting of horses perhaps?

Lil' girl: With cheese!
Me(hangs my head): Yes...with cheese.

Lil' girl: I...love...cheese!

And so it goes, with me finally hammering out four points for her to complete her essay with.

'If I Had a Million Dollars'-- song by The Barenaked Ladies

Fabulous Adventures In Coding : How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb?
A fascinating (for a code monkey that is!) blog entry on what happens when Microsoft implements a 'simple little feature', in their products.
Even more fascinating is the little debate that follows ...of course it's the old Micro$oft vs. Open Source argument again, but go read it anyway.

Part 1 - Essays on Popeye - Lessons in Christianity
Weird but feel-good reading...

Build your own paper rocket!
Bored out of your mind? Make your own office desktop toy!

CBC Arts: Star Trek's Scotty dies
A moment of silence for the greatest fictional engineer ever...
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.
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He's one of the reasons why I've wanted to be an engineer. Death's been on my mind lately...
A colleague lost her boyfriend to an auto-accident and now this...

I even fear for the health of a loved one...So any of you haven't said all you want to said to someone you love...do it ...now, or at least as soon as you can.

Google Moon - Lunar Landing Sites
You've seen Google Maps, now visit the moon.

Optimus keyboard
Damn cool keyboard. Each key is actually a mini display so you can display whatever symbol you want. I especially like the Quake 3 mapped keys.

Wired News: Free Beer for Geeks
Heard of the Free Software Foundation? Now we bring you Free Beer whoohoo! Go open source beer go! WHOOHOOEEE!

*burp!*

Bruce Schneier - winter 2005
An interview with the security expert for the reading pleasure of IT professionals everywhere!

Guardian Unlimited Books Special Reports Short and sweet-- fiction by Dave Eggers

Here's a link to a Dave Eggers article on why he writes short short stories. Half-way through his book 'Short Short Stories' I thought I'd Google his name up. (Check out some of the short short stories on that page too.)

It's one of those RM9.90 Penguin mini-books. In fact I've bought four more in the series since I've enjoyed Nick Hornby's 'Otherwise Pandemonium' so much. Looks like these two authors are linked. Nick Hornby wrote the screenplay for Eggers' memoir 'A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius'. Too bad the movie has yet been produced!

Dave Eggers is also the co-editor of Timothy McSweeney, an online journal for a publishing house. Good reads to be found there...

I like these stories. They're written with style and wit. Now that I might be too busy to read full-fledged novels, these are perfect for satisfying the literary soul in me. In many ways, short short stories are blog entries!

Ananova - Astrologer sues Nasa
LOL! Which is more important? NASA's research into comets or a lone astrologer's data accuracy? 'Accuracy' you say? LOL!

Martians as Metaphor
An in-depth discussion of the ideas behind Spielberg's War of the Worlds.

:: rogerebert.com :: answerman
A discussion of the viability of the three-legged mechanical monstrosities in War of the Worlds.

The Six Patron Saints of Graphic Design
Patron Saints for graphic designers. Cute...very cute indeed.

Wide Island
A fellow blogger retells a Japanese folk tale. Its similarities with a local Malaysian tale of 'Ikan Duyong' is intriguing.

In ikan duyong, a fisherman caught a mermaid whom he married and had three sons. The third son has eyes the color of the ocean and the story ended with the other two brothers leaving him in the sea after a fishing mishap. Of course this third son turned out to be a merman and soon found himself a fetching mermaid girlfriend...
nice!

inner.geek � Blog Archive � HOWTO: Save nearly any multimedia file in your web browser to your hard drive
Let's assume you're well informed enough to use Firefox as your default web browser...

Then let's say you really like one of those blinkin' Flash animations on a recent website visit and you want to save it down for repeated viewing later. Instead of slogging through Firefox's cache for an extra large file to copy out and rename, here's an easier way to do it.

Enjoy!

A Place So Foreign and Eight More
Short stories ready for the download by Cory Doctorow. These are stories from his A Place So Foreign anthology made available based on the Creative Commons license.

Thank goodness science fiction isn't dead! Thank God for accessible science fiction by people like Mr. Doctorow here.

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town
Download this full book and share it! Cory Doctorow writes good science fiction, judging by his last book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

Haven't read this latest work yet but the last book was William Gibson inspired and in many regards, better than Gibson even though he was the pioneer in cyberpunk fiction. Reading the reviews however, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town sounds like something for the Neal Stephenson fan...

So watcha waiting for? Download this goody now, it's protected by the Creative Commons license and Malaysia isn't in the High income group according to the World Bank list...:)

NASA - Deep Impact
Perfect hit! Way to go NASA!

The Star Online eCentral - Malaysia Entertainment
Here's a review of Spielberg's "War of the Worlds", which I saw last night with some of my buddies.

[SPOILER ALERT! Do not read on if you haven't seen the movie yet!]


I like the movie, though admittedly it is not one of Spielberg's best works.
There are some issues in the review that I would like to comment on so it'll be helpful if you read it first before coming back here.

First, the reviewer questioned how the aliens, (Martians in the H.G. Wells novel, but the movie merely implied the red planet as the origin...never explained them explicitly), managed to hide their war machines underground without humans discovering them.
A good point, however it could be countered that if a slightly superior race wanted to hide something from us, they could easily succeed in doing so. Regardless, this whole hiding huge hardware without us detecting them plot device is rather weak. In Mr. Wells' defense, his original story described cylinders launched from Mars, which made a whole lot more sense!

Second, as with all these alien invasion stories, the reviewer asked why didn't the aliens do proper research about Earth's biological hazards before they attack? Once again, this is a failure on the part of the movie's screenwriters...HG Wells is a smart man and if you read his book you'll get a sense that the Martians attacked because they're desperate and out of time..they did not plan this 'million of years ago' as the movie stipulates, thanks to the stupid introduction of 'hiding machines underground' concept.

Furthermore, when you're out of time and you need a new planet to survive, it would be logical to assume you'll just try to exterminate these 'bugs/maggots' crawling all over your new 'house' without bothering to waste time on diplomacy and the 'we-can-co-exist-peacefully' way.

You see, these aliens did not come from some far off star system. They came from just 'next-door', a short hop away (in galactic terms) on the next planet. Therefore, it would be reasonable to assume that they share almost the same evolutionary timeline as we do.

The aliens have only a slight technological advantage over humans and that is enough to destroy us. Mr. Wells wrote "War of the Worlds" at the turn of the last century when European countries with only better weapons of war managed to invade and conquer countries all over the world.
Look at the British Empire's invasion and subsequent hegemony of Malaya...During the course of my studies in local history I've always found it fascinating that these 'alien invaders' never established a strong fort or base of operations on the mainland of Malaya, choosing instead to headquarter in the Strait States of Penang, Malacca and Singapore. These are either islands or coastal states...why not concentrate on building a fort around Ipoh where they plunder the area for tin ore?

I think the reason why the alien invaders never got far inland is because that's where the diseases are. Their immune system was not ready for the onslaught of germs, fungi and virii that causes cholera, syphillis, malaria, dengue etc. But shouldn't they be prepared with their advance science? After all, Louis Pasteur was European!
No, they weren't prepared because no matter how good your science and technology is, it's still no match for mother nature's awesome forces. Vaccines and antibiotics are useless against germs and virii that mutate to gain resistance.

No, the movie, being as faithful to the novel without appearing anachronistic, isn't about reasonable or even 'smart' aliens...It's about a desperate race deciding to invade a planet infested with life-forms it considers inferior.
Sounds like the Bush Administration's war-mongering doesn't it?

I've always loved the way the novel resolved the war. How to stop an invasion force if all your science and machines couldn't stop them? Easy, tell a story in which Mother Nature kills them off. Because even if aliens could come up with advanced technology, they will STILL be subject to natural forces....

At least it's way less-stupid than uploading a computer virus into their mothership!