Sports highlights: Champions League semi, Stanley Cup playoff, NASCAR

Who would have guessed it is Bayern vs Inter in the final 3 months ago? Most of our friends didn't even give Inter a chance 3 weeks ago! In order not to jinx the team I root for (like I did so many times on this blog before,) I am not going to mention which team it is.

I haven't watched much of Stanley Cup playoff so far. So glad that our local team, the Sharks, at least made it to the 2nd round, unlike last year. They won the President's Trophy (best regular season record) but lost in the first round so unexpectedly. Well, this year another President's Trophy winner got eliminated in the first round. I am not a fan of the Canadiens but it was exciting to see them beating the high-powered Washington Capitals. (In fact, 3 out of the last 5 President's Trophy winner were ousted in the first round! I guess no one wants to win it in the near future >:)

Last but no least, what an exciting finish for the NASCAR Sprint Cup race at Talladega last Sunday. As expected, there were a few big wrecks. And Kevin Harvick barely beats Jamie McMurray at the finish line, literally, at the 3rd green-white-checker restart. It is race like this that gets me addicted to NASCAR. For every boring race, you get something like this. Not a bad deal!

Tech of the day: HP bought Palm

In the storied history of Palm, one of the mobile computing pioneer, another new chapter has been written today: it was acquired by HP. As a gadget lover/user, Palm always has a special place in my heart. In the past I have owned 3 PDAs that run Palm OS (though only 1 was made by Palm. The other 2 were Visor made by HandSpring and the Watch PDA made by Fossil) Although many companies faded away quickly in the tech industry, it is still sad to see Palm going from having a really dominant product like Palm III, Palm V to having also-runs like Palm Pre (which probably has some good technologies but no one really cares) Almost everyone uses a Palm PDA 12 years ago. Now I do not know anyone that uses Palm Pre. The newest Palm I have seen my friends used was a Palm Centro! And Palm hasn't really have any game changing product since Treo 600, which was THE first successful smart phone with PDA and phone functionality integrated properly.

On the other hand, it seems fitting that Palm went to HP, who has made quite a few legendary mobile computing devices themselves, like the HP-71B, a handheld computer that runs BASIC and HP-200LX, a handheld that runs MS-DOS Even though HP seems to have lots its edge in building such devices, evident in the fact that they dropped their own Jornanda-line of Windows CE/Pocket PC in favor of the iPAQs from their acquisition of Compaq.

Will Palm ever be able to come up with another game changing/domainant device? Let's keep our finger crossed.