Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Monday, January 20, 2003

Using a camera-equipped mobile in a locker room -- Comment()
Warning: use of camera-equipped mobile phones could be hazardous to your health: "That's the message going out from at least one chain of health clubs in Hong Kong, where a new generation of cell phones that can take and transmit video and still photos is raising concerns over a new crop of privacy-related issues. Physical, which operates nine gyms in the former British colony, recently posted signs in its Hong Kong facilities forbidding the use of mobile phones in locker rooms."

Updated CV -- Comment()
After lapsing for half a year, I updated my CV (in Adobe Acrobat PDF format). I noticed that I had quite a few new publications to add to the CV. Now the length of the CV is five pages.

I started to keep track of my publications about three years ago. Thus, the CV doesn't list all 300+ publications of mine (in fact I don't have a complete listing), and is focused on the more recent publications. Even then I had to leave out quite a few articles to keep the CV in reasonable length.

-- Comment()
Getting to Top of an Internet Search: "Just as it is often difficult for people to find what they are looking for on the Internet, it is frequently a challenge for the people themselves to be found when they want to be." [Google Technology News]

-- Comment()
The secret life of Professor Lessig: "One nice thing about Google Groups is that you can use it to search for recent posts by people who interest you. For example, Professor Lessig has posted 10 things to Usenet." [Aaron Swartz: The Weblog]

Fifteen years ago: Forestry of the Future -- Comment()
Fifteen years ago, in 1987, I was in the army doing my service. However, early in 1987 I noticed an announcement for an international writing competition 'Forestry of the Future'. I started writing short pieces of text on evenings, when there was some free time after the military exercises. I polished the resulting text on a weekend leave at home, and sent it in.

I didn't expect much of the text, because it was done in bits and pieces, and my writing skills did not get much practise in the army. However, it turned out that I was the national winner of the competition. I even got a one-day leave from the army to attend the award ceremony. It turned out that the other price-winners were studying forestry, and my background was quite different (physics and mathematics). In any case, I got the price, which was a little bit of money and a paid trip to meet the other winners at the UN building in Geneva, Switzerland.

I have good memories of the trip to Geneva, even though time has managed to erode a lot of the details. I remember us poor students in an exclusive watch shop in Geneva, looking at watches with starting prices around 1000 dollars. We were the only customers at the shop, sitting on armchairs with only a couple of watches on display at a time. The service was excellent, even when we finally said that we didn't quite find what we were looking for.