Miscellaneous and Useless Information
James Lin’s infrequently updated blog
From the Cupertino Courier: Higher prices make it harder to buy a home in Cupertino A concern frequently expressed by some city council members and planning commissioners is that Cupertino homes are become so expensive many families cannot afford to move here…. “In the first six months of the year, it was a seller’s market. …
Continue reading “News flash: Cupertino housing is expensive”
24-23! Holy moly, I didn’t give Stanford a chance. As a Cal fan, I think the competition for this year’s Big Game just got a lot more interesting. And Cal’s prospects for the Rose Bowl also opened up even more.
At its Max developer conference, Adobe gave a sneak preview of a new tool code-named Thermo that allows designers to create the front end to Flash-based rich Internet applications without writing code. For example, you can import a layered Photoshop image and convert parts of the image to real UI controls. You can also create …
IBM made a big splash a couple of weeks ago when it released a new productivity suite based on the Productivity Tools in Lotus Notes 8. I joked with my colleagues that it should be called “SmartSuite for Notes.” But I never dreamed Lotus would reach back even farther and dub the them Lotus Symphony. …
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services introduced a new citizenship test, which takes effect in a year. To pass, you are asked ten questions randomly picked from a list of 100, and you must answer 6 correctly. USCIS has posted the questions (PDF). Some organization should do a survey to see what percentage of Americans would pass the test. …
Continue reading “Could you pass the U.S. citizenship test?”
My colleague Jeff clued me in to a singer-songwriter, Jonathan Coulton. His gentle voice and smooth delivery belie lyrics that are often twisted and bizarre. Good stuff. He has a good introduction to his music on his web site. I recommend “Code Monkey,” especially if you’re in the software industry. His music video, “Flickr,” shows the …
This past weekend kept me quite busy. On Saturday I met a college friend for lunch and then went to a potluck dinner with my high school friends. On Sunday I met up with another college friend to go the dragon boat festival, where a friend I’ve known since elementary school was racing. Afterwards I …
I was truly saddened when I read in the San Francisco Chronicle that Phil Frank died yesterday. Phil Frank drew the only local comic strip in the country, Farley, which was published in the Chronicle. Indeed he captured the spirit of the Bay Area through his cast of distinctive and wacky characters, and because it …
Michael Wallis, author of The Lincoln Highway: Coast to Coast from Times Square to the Golden Gate, was featured on the Colbert Report! That’s more than a million people who now know what the Lincoln Highway is.
What a study in contrast. Yesterday, Palm announced that it is canceling its widely panned Foleo, a smartphone accessory that is essentially a stripped down laptop, before it was even released. While the idea is not necessarily bad, Palm needs to focus on its core products, the aging Treo smartphone line and the Palm OS, …