Grammy and jazz

I was trying to check out the nominations in the jazz category of Grammy 2014 using Google. Well, one of the links I got is a British newspaper article moaning the lack of European Jazz artists being nominated. Ironically, the article didn't mention any European jazz artists who the journalist think deserving of nomination. And the photo chosen for the article is American pianist Fred Hersch, who the journalist totally agree deserving nomination, which is totally irrelevant to the point he is trying to make! Oh well, good journalism is scarce on the other side of the Atlantic as well. The only relevant article I found so far has to do with the jazz vocalist category. I guess I will have to write another one after the results are announced.

Palm and Qualcomm

It was April 2010 last time I wrote about Palm, the handheld computing pioneer. HP acquired Palm back then. Too bad it was not a success as I hope it would be. HP did release a tablet called TouchPad based on the webOS developed at Palm but it was a flop and was discontinued 49 days after it was announced in 2011. HP opensourced webOS and transferred its team to LG. The latest move by HP was selling off Palm's patents to Qualcomm. Qualcomm is certainly capable of making good use of the patents to create new products. On the other hand, they might just use them for legal purpose only. :(

Unfamiliar territory

I suppose one of the least understood country (especially to the west) would be North Korea. NBA great (and the notorious) Dennis Rodman has organized a few trips and playing games over there, which generated a ton of publicity, not all of them positive to say the least. However, I've just read an interesting article about a scientist who were with Rodman there (translating for him). There are few things I wanna mention from the article: he found that North Korean people were genuinely friendly to him, in spite of the propaganda against Western people (especially American)  Trips like the one made by Rodman would make North Korean understand the outsiders more (and vice versa) And the understanding could only be a good thing. Regarding his own activities there (researching genetics and teaching science,) he found the students were really interested in the scientific methods and ideas he taught and appreciated his efforts. It's good to put politics aside.

The "epic" Windows 8.1 upgrade

If you bought a PC that was released more than a few months ago, it's likely to have Windows 8 instead of 8.1 installed. And since the 8.1 upgrade is free (for most version of Win 8), it would be a good idea to get it. But how? Well, the update is supposed to be available at the "(App) Store" (i.e., the one on the "Start" screen) However, it is only available when your Win 8 has the KB2871389 patch/update installed already. And this patch is supposed to be automatically "discovered" by Win 8's Windows Update. In my case, it was indeed suggested to be applied but that did not happen. And for some reason the PC won't download any update even if I requested it to. So I ended up going to Microsoft directly to download the update installer and ran it. For a long time it was "copying packages to the windows update cache" and I was worried it hang but fortunately it completed eventually. Upon restart it actually pulled 60+ other updates, which took about an hour to complete. Once it was done, the 8.1 update is finally available in the Store and I chose to install it. However, downloading was stuck at 0% after 15 min. I googled again and found another KB article by Microsoft. I ran the "troubleshooter" which seems to fix something and not fixed something. Oh well, it doesn't hurt to try installing the 8.1 update again! And it did slowly made progress downloading. The whole update is ~3-4Gb and of course I didn't wait for it to finish before heading to bed. I guess it took 2-3 hr to download. When I got up, I finally see the "Agreement" screen. Next, it asked me to confirm the hotmail address I provided when setting up the PC the first time. How? It's tied to another e-mail addr which I have to check on my other PC. Man, these days people are expected to have multiple e-mail accounts and multiple internet devices. Anyway, it's finally done! And I am one happy 8.1 user.

Next project: install a SSD. Found this post from someone who did it.

HIMYM is officially over the hill

I was a big fan of the show "How I met your mother." I have always found Cobie Smulders ("Robin") very attractive but I gotta admit my passion for it has waned some what and stopped watching every episodes religiously after the first few seasons. It's because I found sometimes the writers just tried too hard to be funny and "beat the horse to death" so to speak. However, the show went from "sometimes boring" to bad taste when the 1/13 episode was aired. This episode continued one of the show's more boring theme: the slap bet. One of the character went on a journey during which he met 3 Kung-Fu master-like characters who taught him the art of slapping. The problematic part is that the Kung-Fu master wore costumes that were stereotypes of Asians (e.g., the Fu Manchu moustache, the yellowface) These might have been acceptable a few decades ago but it's generally regarded as racist these days and caused an uproar in social media. The creators came out to apologize afterwards but the damage has been done. It's probably not gonna stop me from watching the show completely 'coz it's the last season anyway but it just dropped out of my list of all-time favorite sitcom.