Hmmm. Why didn’t somebody do it sooner?

All aboard for the Harry Potter rollercoaster - Yahoo! News

J.K Rowling, who became the world’s first billion dollar author on the back of
Harry Potter’s success, has given the go-ahead for the creation of a Florida theme park dedicated to the schoolboy wizard.

Hmmm.  How personal  and versatile can your cell phone get - you use it to vote for the American Idol, and you also use it to tell policy makers what you think.   Yes, it can be the next protest or popularity tool.

1M text messages protest China plant - Yahoo! News

A Chinese city has halted construction of a chemical plant after residents sent more than 1 million mobile phone text messages protesting possible pollution dangers, news reports said Thursday.

Six ways to write more comprehensible code

As a developer, time is your most valuable resource. These six tips on how to write maintainable code are guaranteed to save you time and frustration: one minute spent writing comments can save you an hour of anguish.

This application I know will be very revolutionary …

Slashdot | Computers Outperform Humans at Recognizing Faces

“According to the recent Face Recognition Grand Challenge, The match up of face-recognition algorithms showed that machine recognition of human individuals has improved tenfold since 2002 and a hundredfold since 1995. ‘Among other advantages, 3-D facial recognition identifies individuals by exploiting distinctive features of a human face’s surface–for instance, the curves of the eye sockets, nose, and chin, which are where tissue and bone are most apparent and which don’t change over time.

ComputerWorld enumerates what skills are not cool anymore.

The top 10 dead (or dying) computer skills

we’ve compiled a list of skills and technologies that, while not dead, can perhaps be said to be in the process of dying.

Last month, i brought my family to visit the East Coast of the US, and we visited New York, Philadelphia, and Washington DC.  What were the memorable sites, many friends ask.  Some of those worthwhile remembering is:

a.) National Air and Space Museum ( Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center), near the Washington Dulles International Airport.  This is the add-on facility to the Air and Space Museum on the National Mall which opened on December 2003.

Memorable planes seen are the Concorde, Enterprise Space Shuttle, F-14 TomCat, F4 Phantom, Sr-71 Blackbird, various space modules, as well as the Enola Gay, the Bomber that dropped the Atomic bomb during WWII.

b.) Mt. Vernon - George Washington’s House.  Most noteworthy is how sparse the house was compared to the houses of the Kings/rulers in Japan, China, France, England and other countries.

Maybe US is great because their leaders did not see the need to be opulent, and who see service to the nation as their starting ground instead of the other way around.  I hope that does not change.  Showing off is considered American, but it is also encouraging that most of the US richests are also leading the way in philanthropy.

c.) Lancaster County or the Amish Pennsylvania Dutch country.  This is the homeplace of the Amish Pennsylvanians, noteworthy because they still ride horse buggies, and disdain new technologies.  It is always refreshing to see people whose center is devotion to family and community, and who believe that a strong work ethic is the ticket to fulfillment.

I know there were a lot of sites I missed.  Any noteworthy ones?

I got an excellent comment from Salve,from my post Internal Locus of Control and Responsibility.

He asks an excellent question, ” How do you know an applicant is good based on his bio-data, and a 30 minute interview that the person can not only perform, but can execute well under pressure?”

The answer is you can’t, and no matter how good you are, you cannot know a person that well at so short a time.  Heck, I misread even people I dealt with for years.

That is the reason why businesses have to tailor their HR to make sure you get to know the applicant as well as possibly can before the hire decision, and continue to work on feedback and evaluation so you can get to know even better as he worked inside the company.  Moreover, for positions of responsibility, it helps to promote from within - people you are already familiar with, and know how to dealt with, and at least people whom you at least know how they react in adverse or stressful circumstances.

As they say, though this would be the last quote I would say works all the time, ” better the sob you know, than the angel you don’t know.”

This is a revealing report on subprime mortgages. In a way, when the industry is growing fast, and everybody is aggressively focusing on getting their share of the pie, shortcuts inevitably happens, and repercussions occur.  A good reminder for us who manage businesses.

Neighborhood swayed by ‘liar’s loans’ - Yahoo! News

People who might have had trouble borrowing found it much easier to get a loan. Lenders devised new types of loans and eased standards to bring buyers into the market.

As a result, homeownership reached record levels.
But as interest rates rise and the market cools, it becomes clear many people were put into punishing loans they couldn’t afford.

That is particularly evident in the enormous growth of what the industry politely calls “stated income” loans — also known as “liar’s loans.”

Stated loans — whose borrowers list income and assets without having to prove anything — were meant for solidly self-employed buyers. Then they “morphed into a huge monster,” says Connie Wilson of Interthinx, a maker of mortgage fraud detection software. “Now we have stated income programs for everyone.”

The persons who are most likely to be entrepreneurs, or even those that will be handling important positions in corporations are more likely to be people who exhibit internal locus of control.  This means a person has to be believing that personal effort is the primary determinant of your outcome.  Do you know people who act as if everytime something is wrong, it is always somebody’s fault?

It is hard to teach responsibility, and that is one of the headaches in growing a company — finding good people who will actually be willing to be responsible.  It is really ironic that many people would come to me, and say that they cause the success of x, and yet when x fails, they are not at fault.  How can you make something successful, and yet you were not the one who make it fail?

Anyhow, there may be hope. Lately we have some people who we were reluctant to place into positions of responsibilities, especially if they have a track record of not being decisive, or who have not exhibited high discipline.  However, we do see that some people delivers when placed in the hot seat.

Maybe for some, they never had the opportunity to be assertive or to show what they can do when unleashed.  I guess one way to make people more responsible is really to risk putting them in positions of responsibilities.  Some will deliver, and some will come up to the test when their backs are pushed to the wall!  Some will even surprised you - and maybe themselves.

I was just with my family, and my son unintentionally toppled his drink, and it spilled to his pants.  The attendant promptly helped him wiped the table clean, and offered to refill his drink for free.

I remembered the last two times that happened, we did not get any offer of refill.  And it gave good feelings for that eatery.  Sometimes, making the customer happy and the meal memorable may just cost so little.