Bjorno.licio.us

David Cameron has been appointed the new party leader of the stagnating Tories in Britain. The Tories has decided to vote for vigor and youth, shedding the staid image that probably caused them to languish on the opposition benches for the past 3 elections, kicked in the a** by a rejuvenated Labor party under the increasingly weak reign and fast-expiring political mandate of a certain Tony Blair.

Will youth work again (as they did when they voted a youthful Blair into office last century?) in convincing the British electorate to vote Conservative in the next election? The battle begins in tomorrow’s verbal sparring match between Blair and Cameron at the weekly Prime Minister’s Questions. Lets stay tuned..

2 great articles, here, and here,from TIME magazine today, on the founding father of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, re-aligned my nationalistic understanding. In one hour, two articles written by 2 American journalists made me patriotic in no way that decades of living in Singapore and undergoing years of a “national education” syllabus designed by Singapore, could have done.

I was born in Singapore, a third-generation Singaporean descendant of Chinese grandparents, who had emigrated from southern China in the 1940s to escape their strife-laden lives back in their ancestral homes, and made Singapore their new home. I was educated in English-speaking Singaporean schools (albeit aligned with British education systems), taught with Singaporean-adapted syllabuses that aimed to imbue me with the most relevant knowledge of science, math and humanities but infused with traditional Asian values updated with modern Western ideologies. In my belief through my adolescent years, I had rejected Asian values, gradually strengthening and coalescing my personal belief systems around a core of Western beliefs and values. I aspired to break free of my Singaporean roots, a country that had given me a peek into Western society from within the cloistered confines of Asia. Singapore, with strong economic ties to US and Europe throughout its economic rise, had been a highly metropolitan city that could be considered where East-meets-West in a highly symbiotic fashion.

Today, I read 2 articles that rattle my belief systems and may have begun a new introspective re-examination of my ideological foundations. Lee Kuan Yew, founder of modern Singapore, had in an article written by 2 American journalists, successfully crystallized the nuances of geopolitics and history, the ironies of the conflicting cultural, political and social systems of Eastern & Western schools of thought that existed in my cognitive database. Not only does he explain and articulate his thoughts better, but he also integrated it with contextual, time-based realities that had affected many of his decisions at many dilemmatic junctures of his life, that coincided with the growth of modern Singapore.

This integration of thought systems with irrefutable realities has brought forth a highly pragmatic, logical and sentiment-free vision of my world. I would not say that this integration has caused a seismic shift in my understanding of the world, but it certainly marks a new milestone in what I thought i believed and learnt to re-analyze it with a more critical eye.

Too much thoughts in my brain, just thought i wanted to capture the immediate reactions of my brain to this new information. It feels like that scene from the Matrix in some sense, that another version of reality did exist. Will blog more on this later after i have had more time to think through.

From The Connectivity Phase to the Participation Phase, read here.

Doesn’t he look like Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian premier and owner of AC Milan FC?
Meet the man responsible for the turnaround job at Motorola from Prince of the Drab to King of Cool in the mobile phone business. He is the 2005 CEO of the year, awarded by Marketwatch.com and is credited for the sleekness and innovation that has pervaded the Motorola design culture and churned out the wildly popular Razr. Read the article here. On why the Razr is the rave of town and making other wannabes eat its dust, read this.

Garages are near-mythical representations of the innovation and technology in Silicon Valley. A great many startups have emerged from these oft-ignored spaces ina typical house and spawned new industries, multi-million dollar companies that have coem to define and revolutionize the way human beings lived, are living and will live in the centuries to come. Here’s an article referencing how the garage-originated startup, by the innocuous moniker of HP, was used by David Packard and Bill Hewlett in 1939. This garage, located at 367 Addison Ave, Palo Alto, CA, is now almost a shrine for HP employees to pay homage to on of the many shrines around Silicon Valley today.

More examples of garage-inspired great Silicon Valley enterprises include Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak’s darling — Apple Inc –> currently basking in the universal infatuation inspired by their iconic iPods. Of course, we cannot forget Google’s late infancy stage (as they were born first in another mythical birthplace of startups- the college dorm) in Susan Wojcicki’s garage too, further adding another aura of mystique.

Singapore’s ruling the zeitgeist of the day. We are everywhere on the major newswires on the internet. Singapore’s hanging of heroin smuggler Nguyen has caused the small island-nation to be cast as a draconian nation with strict laws. Here’s some screenshots from CNN and Google News as of this hour (1430hrs PST) reporting on this piece of news as their major headline of the hour on Planet Earth. Scroll down to the bottom of this post to see the screen shots.

My opinion:

GET REAL, AUSTRALIA. The REAL issue here is drug smuggling, an universally condemned crime that pollutes our global society down to its roots, NOT how a young man’s life is about to be terminated by a momentous act of folly. Nguyen screwed up big time, period. If he went undetected, 400 grams of heroin will endanger 26,000 doses/ lives, Who then will answer to the families, relatives and friends of these 26,000 ++++ pple who suffer?

Heroin is a hardcore drug. The message should be narcotic containment and prevention, not capital punishment. Yes, i admit Singapore is strict, but principles have to stand firm. There’s too many pansies out there sitting in goverments across the world who do not send out strong messages enough to drug traffickers. Let Singapore take the brunt of that but show the world a message to future generations why drug trafficking is so serious one developed nation’s government believes that punishment by death is justifiable.

Here’s a piece of news about Google opening a brick-and-mortar “store-front” in Heathrow Airport. The project is called Google Space.

Free internet is available at this airport lounge/ hangout, mostlikely going to be useful for the millions that get stranded there. According to the report above, Brits spend nine hours a year “waiting at airports, looking for things to do,” Sounds like the perfect audience to pitch almost any product to for any advertiser around the world. Google Space’s objective is to enhance international expansion of Google-related services to the physical world, the mainstream laggards that are not diving with blind abandon to the virtual wonders of our magical Internet realm. Hence, 10 laptops with focuses on different Google services, such as Maps, Picasa, etc.. aim to speed up the world’s adoption of Google into their daily lifestyles.

I managed to find a picture of the lounge. The design’s not very space-age as my mind-eye imagined it to be.

This next picture below is better though, nice customer service provided by nice blondes. More my cup o’ tea, if you ask me eh.

I didn;t go to Heathrow, and these pictures are courtesy of this site.

I just read this article about a new initiative happenning within the halls of the original search supremo- Yahoo! They have a new guy on board - Bradley Horowitz, an entrepreneur with pedigree from MIT Media Lab. Tasked as the new technology director, his job is to restore the pizazz of Yahoo in web search and he has suggested to do that viA “SOCIAL SEARCH”, where search results, in my opinion, is not by the bots and algos of GoogleSoft (Google and Microsoft), but by disrupting the whole search experience throught the collective effort of the whole Internet user community. Hmmm, not a very revolutionary concept philosophically, but it may be technically. Hey, i am not a tech guy, but i would like to see how this search concept will differ from the way “BackRub”/ Google sorts out results.