Miscellaneous and Useless Information
James Lin’s infrequently updated blog
It’s amazing how fast this year’s primary season is going, thanks to the compressed primary schedule. Two weeks ago Senators Clinton and Obama were essentially tied. A little over one week ago, Willie Brown, former San Francisco mayor, former speaker of the California State Assembly, and all-around political guru, said that since Obama was favored …
Continue reading “What do you mean, Super Tuesday was only two weeks ago?”
This year, I watched the Super Bowl at a party where almost everyone was for the New York Giants. I wasn’t strongly for either team. On the one hand, when I lived in Connecticut, I rooted for the Giants. But this year, I was leaning towards the New England Patriots, because I wanted to see …
Last month, Danyel blogged about Microsoft Research’s moving into a new building, Building 99, and linked to several newspaper articles about Microsoft’s expansion in general. I’m somewhat familiar with the Microsoft campus, having interned there in 1995 and visited a few times since, so I was curious to find out even more. On Microsoft’s web …
Continue reading “Microsoft’s Building 7: now you see it, now you don’t”
Last week was the most action packed I’ve had in a while. Between Monday and Saturday, I only spent Wednesday night at home: Monday: to the Computer History Museum for a panel on the 25th anniversary of the Commodore 64, my first computer Tuesday: ice skating with friends at the Sharks ice skating rink near …
For you Billy Joel fans, Here Comes Another Bubble. Earlier this year, Conan O’Brien was in San Francisco for a week. Watch his visit to Intel (part 1, part 2) and you’ll be impressed with what he gets away with. And I bet Sam Wo Restaurant in Chinatown is getting a bump in business after …
Remember this slogan? “If you paid full price, you didn’t buy it at Crown Books.” Another company bought the naming rights to Crown after it went bankrupt in 2001, and the chain has opened a store in Cupertino. This incarnation of Crown Books buys remainders and overstock at big discounts and passes the savings onto …
Continue reading “Cupertino gets a new bookstore… Crown Books?”
I was recently helping out Ron with his Ph.D. defense talk, and sent him slides from my talk as a reference. He said, “By the way, your last slide is amazing. best defense slide ever.” My last slide was titled, “What has happened since I entered grad school.” So are some of the notable products …
One more amusing anecdote from Morris Chang. The initial funding for TSMC came mostly from the Taiwanese government (48%) and Philips. There were also a few key individual investors who put their own money into the company. But TSMC was proposing to be a silicon foundry, a brand new business model. How did the company …
I just got back from a Computer History Museum event: a conversation with Morris Chang (張忠謀), founder of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, better known as TSMC, and Jen-Hsun Huang (黃仁勳), co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, the last independent graphics chip company. Morris Chang is a pioneer in the computer industry: TSMC was the first dedicated …
Looks like my prayers (and those of many others) have been answered: Apple will release a software development kit for the iPhone and iPod touch in February, enabling developers to write their own native apps for those devices. I’ll be curious to see how the third-party iPhone/iPod app market will develop; I bet it will …