After coming back from Seoul, New York seemed even dinkier than the last time I returned from a trip. As I was boarding the plane at Incheon, I picked up a copy of the Wall Street Journal (Asian edition). I had enough time to read almost all of it, as KAL arrived into Narita early, but Continental was six hours late. It might as well have been called “The GM Journal”, since about two thirds of the stories were about GM and Chrysler, and how the US government is trying to save them from doom due to chronic mis-management and exorbitant legacy costs.  

My wife, who has a far more sensitive nose than me, jokes that the first thing you smell upon disembarking the plane is cigarette smoke in Greece, and garlic in Korea. Read the rest of this entry »

That’s what you get when you use colorful tags like “life bits” and “pointless“, especially if you use them together:  Google thinks your website is highly relevant to the query “life is pointless”.

I’m now experimenting with a separate tumblelog to post most random thoughts but, in the meantime, here you go Google: one more post about “pointless life (bits)”!

Some visions do not really translate into plans.  Becoming rich, established or happy, for example.  It’s like saying “I want to be a superhero!” How do you go about that?

Nope.  Not much of a plan.

The cafeteria served “Jamaican jerk chicken”—again. Horrible. Not only did they kidnap, slaughter, quarter and cook it, they’re also calling it names. Did the chicken really deserve this? Maybe I should become vegetarian.

The reason for this site is pretty simple: it is one way to actively establish an identity in the “global village” (aka. Internet), which is something I have avoided doing for too long. Speaking of identity, this blog supports OpenID which, despite some weaknesses, is emerging as a long-needed standard. Page footers have links to my identity on other sites; when I find a satisfactory OpenID provider, perhaps those will go away.

Why, in the age of cloud computing, would I bother to set up relational databases, CGI binaries, and so on? I could just say “for the heck of it”, and it would be true. I like to see how things work first-hand; for example, I am (still) the kind of guy that actually prefers to run his own Hadoop instance on a handful of machines, rather than use e.g., EC2! Beyond that, I’m not sure I have a really solid answer.

But enough for a “hello world” post! Welcome, and I hope to see a few people around for things to follow.