Hear Ye! Since 1998.

Archived Posts for April 2002

Please note: The posts on this page are at least 3 years old. Links may be broken, information may be out of date, and the views expressed in the posts may no longer be held.
10
Apr 02
Wed

OMG, They Killed Kenny!

You bastards!

Long Bets

Long Bets have intriguing wagers on a variety of long-term, conversation stimulating topics. Since the winnings from bets go to charity, they should perhaps offer an option to form betting syndicates. Not everyone has a spare US$1000 to place, but 10 people contributing US$100 each would allow more people to participate. It’s an interesting site, and once the discussion forums come online, I’m sure opinions about the bets will be flying eveywhere. {src: AJH}

7
Apr 02
Sun

SMS Foils Kidnap

Reuters article. One wonders why she just didn’t dial 112 instead. I guess talking aloud would’ve alerted her kidnappers.

Queen of the Damned

Should’ve picked Black Knight instead.

Aquarium

Dave bought an aquarium yesterday. It looks like we’re going to be keeping a couple of yabbies in our apartment. It’s sitting on the kitchen bench. I remember back in school, our tutor kept a yabbie in her lab. Every house period, everyone would find some way to traumatise the poor thing when she wasn’t looking (it’s amazing what tools you can find in a science lab). Eventually it died due to shock or so we were told. We were convinced it was all those bananas she kept feeding it. Have you seen the mess and stink a banana makes when it slowly disintegrates in water?

3
Apr 02
Wed

Recruitment

Well April is underway and so too is the recruiting silly season. Strat consulting firms are the first to recruit, and I finally sent in all those forms in the last few weeks. That is, M/B/B, Booz, and a couple boutiques. Naturally, you can’t expect a position in those firms unless you are in the freak category, so the other industries I’m applying for include IT Consultancies, namely the consulting arms of the Big 5, IT departments of i-banking firms (they pay well, apparently), and IT firms. PwC Consulting is holding an information night for BITs tonight. It will be interesting to see how they pitch themselves. Their intake for consulting this year is around 25, which is only slightly less than the probable total intake across all the strat consulting firms I applied to. Next week we have a BIT recruitment night, where our course sponsors and us get together for an evening to sell ourselves to each other.

The first company to kick off interviewing is McK on the 10th. No one I know has heard anything from any of the firms as yet. Not sure if this is a good or bad thing.

Old Browsers

Deja Vu, “the web as we remember it”. The site contains a chronology of web browsers, together with a java applet that emulates browsers from the early 90s. Ah… memories of Mosaic.

2
Apr 02
Tue

The Royal Tenenbaums

So we’re standing at Hoyts City looking up at the session time board. “Uh, I’ve seen most of everything here. And I’m not seeing that one. And I refuse to see that movie. Which leaves… um, I haven’t heard of any of what’s left.” Which basically left us with The Royal Tenenbaums. My friend was like, “What’s a Tenenbaum?” “I think it’s a surname…” “This better not be crap.”

The movie has a fairly big name cast, but it’s not exactly mainstream. It’s a quirky movie, a refreshing change from the stuff I’ve been watching lately. Probably only funny to those with a certain sense of humour. In a nutshell, it’s about a separated grandfather with the unlikely name of Royal (Gene Hackman), who fakes stomach cancer in order to win back his family. Heheh, I liked it.

Google

Uses a PigeonRank system :)

Hard Drives

IBM’s new 120GXP line of hard drives come with a daily power-on rating. This has caused some confusion about drives that everyone assumed could be used 24/7 but are actually rated for about 11 hours of usage a day. Which is downright poor. IBM then pulled this rating off their datasheet after people pestered them about it. Read more. IBM is not impressing me with their screwing around. Especially since the hard drive is the one component in your computer you don’t want to see break down.

1
Apr 02
Mon

New War3 Race

The Pandaren. The announcement was made on April 1. We are suspicious.

Not Another Teen Movie

Not too bad. Some funny bits, nothing particularly brilliant about it though. Better than Scary Movie 2. How long until we see the next spoof-of-a-spoof-of-a-spoof “Not Another Not Another Teen Movie” though?

Ice Age

Cute and clever. Not as good as Shrek or Monsters Inc, but not a waste of money either.

Easter

I hope the break for you was enjoyable. Four day long weekend did me a heap of good.

Skills are Built By the Degree

An interesting article:

The higher the tertiary entry scores needed for a course, the better the abilities of first-year students in such skills as critical thinking, problem solving and communication. The same is true of students as they finish their courses, only more so.

It turns out that the medicos enter and emerge uni with the best problem solving skills (not surprising given that the entry UAI for medicine was an intimidating 99.75 last year and they exit the course after 6 years in uni, with 3 degrees). Combined law is perhaps the next largest bunch (99.30-99.40 entry), but law grads are edged out by their science/eng counterparts (~90 entry). I would think this is due more to the content of the course – engineering is pretty tough and the hours are long. Law from what I hear can be pretty cruisy (I think first year engineers have almost double the hours of everyone else) so it’s probably because they are the top 0.7% of the population that they are naturally intelligent, than the content of the course. It also explains why strat consultancies love doctors and engineers (especially chemical engineers, who for some reason seem to be in every consulting firm).



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