Pan Admun Republic of Western Blog

We just got a big dump of snow yesterday, hopefully that helps keep snow on the ground until end of the month.

I spent 20 minutes after work to clear the snow on the driveway, it's a small price to pay for so good snow.



With all the snow, I decided to go up the hill and joined by Hue, Yong, and Anne. The snow is with puffy, but quite bumpy. It's good for working on terrain adaption, but the snow is so sticky that I lost a lot of speed.

Google's has stired things up on the net recently with a new feature on its search toolbar called autolink.

Many think it's evil since it has the capability to add and modify the content that present to the users in the way of adding link to things like address, book ISBN and alike. This feature can be misused to direct user to sites Google wants you to go to. All sort of people likely not too happy about this, of course.

However, things are not as black and white.

I think indeed Google's has made a feature in its search toolbar that has a huge potential of being misused in so many ways. But I think Google has not cross the line right now. Whether they will (do evil) in the future remain to be seen. On the other hand, it set a bad precedenrt for other not-so-good people to follow. I'm sure some evil-doer out there will soon come up with similar feature. ie a adware that intrecept the content and rewrite it before your browser displays it....

In short, it can be a can of worms.

Techdirt:Which Direction Is The Slippery Slope With Google's Autolink?

What? Have you see a good looking kid before.

We have a lot of good snow this Monday night. There are patches of soft powder all over the place, makes it very fun to ride on. I call it "rider friendly". The weather warms up quite a bit compare during the day makes it even more enjoyable.

The session is focus on terrain adaption and ride on powder snow.

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The weather is somewhat cold (it was -28 on Friday night...), the good news is we've been getting snow on and off throughout the week. So, the snow condition is pretty good.

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That Pepsi Girl, hum...

Some think this is a flog, a fake blog by corperate marketing to harness the blog power to draw people to their ad campaign.

Whether this is a flog or not, the commerical indeed seems quite successful, credit to the cute girl (name Mandy, as reported), another case of sex sales.

On the other hand, I was watching Chinese cable TV the other night, there was a commerical from a Rogers wireless retailer. It has a cute Chinese girl too, but the effect is nowhere near the pepsi girl. Ok, the viewer community is much smaller, but it's about making an impact to the viewers.

This commerical feels so cheezy; A somewhat cute Chinese girl dancing hip-hop happily, and phone ring so she grabs it. The girl acts quite unnaturally, at least I think so. Then there was one close shot that showing her belly button (the sex-sale-punch), it just plain ugly.

US army is deploying robots to fight. The usual response from people are: a) oh, no. Terminator is coming b) yeah right, you rich boy trying fight your dirty war with toys again

This actually remind me of Fuchikoma , the 4 legs AI tank in Ghost in the Shell. It fights along its master to provide transportation, armor protection and fire support. It is kind of like these robots, especially the Talon. I could imagine having these robots deploy with troops and fight along with soldiers. It just like a Fuchikoma without a brain.

Also see here