Recently in Geek Category

Went to a Swedish Glögg party. It is red wine, vodka, cinnamon sticks, clove and sugar. There are almonds and raisins fit in. Here is a recipe from ling.su.se"

BBC took me back to the days of Tom Clancy and Hunt for the Red October and Red Storm Rising. The TU-95 Bears were the early warning and ocean hunters of that day. Big slow turboprops with incredible range. Apparently, the Russians visited Guam with just such a plane.

The article makes them sound like dangerous bombers, but Wikipedia is right, they are really surveillance aircraft and ahardly a threat. Some great stories of keeping them at bay, because where you see a Bear, Backfires are sure to follow to quote from Red Storm Rising and their really gigantic AS-4 Kitchen antiship missiles (called Raduga Kh-22 by the Soviets back then). They used a high speed rocket motor given them a speed of Mach 2 in cruise and 250 mile range and in terminal mode, could dive at Mach 4 and caried a 2,000 pound bomb load, enough to really wreck a carriers day. The idea was to keep the Bears at bay and then for the F-14 Tomcat to use its Phoenix missiles to take them out before they got within a 200 mile range.

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In my previous life, the League Tables that showed who had done the most transactions in investment banking was so important. Its interesting to see how the names haven't changed that much. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan continue to be very big in underwriting globally. Thomson Financial seems to keep this and other records.

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Hey there are so many cool dates coming for buying gadgets:

* June 5. Yesterday the new MacBook Pro's were available. They have the 15" in Seattle Apple stores, but not the new 17" yet. The website was quoting delivering next week for both 15" and 17"
* June 9. Blackberry Curve on AT&T launches. A very cool device
* June 11. The new iMacs are available. Completely new industrial design.
* June 29. iPhones are available.

So break open those piggy banks.

Think Secret - With iPhone launch date out, other details emerge

A trio of iPhone television commercials Sunday night delivered the news many have been waiting for: June 29. That's the day that customers will be able to take home an Apple iPhone. Apple does plan to include two years of free phone support with iPhone purchases, however, and an AppleCare for iPhone
plan is in the works that would cover the hardware for a period of two
years as well, similar to the AppleCare for iPod plan.

Our buddies in Toronto have a great site. Check out Pinny's World

Our buddies Helen and John have a resolution, they aren't shopping for anything for a year. The Anti-Shopping Year. Good luck to them!

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OK, this probably should go into a work blog, but this is the one I have open. We are looking at a company where FASB FIN 46 makes a difference. It is about the consolidation of interest from special purpose vehicles. Its designed to prevent the Enron-like off-balance sheet financing which killed it. Here is:

• FASB Fin 46R. The actual PDF of Revision 5 of FIN 46
• Wikipedia. The Wikipedia explanation for dummies
• Equipment Leasing. Jeff Taylor goes over what this means for equipment leases
• Vinod Kothari. His interpretation.the high levels
• CFO Magazine. A good piece on it at

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I'll translate them in a little bit, but here are some good Chinese reference sites:

太平洋电脑网 PConline.com.cn->IT世界 由此精彩. This is a really great site for geek information on everything from computers to cell phones to printers and camera.s

上海美食 - 大众点评网. This is a review site for restaurants and everything else in China. User input is what drives this. Pretty accurate. Uses a Zagat like index for restaurants.

Danieli's_大众点评网. This is supposed to be the best Italian restaurant in Shanghai. Very expensive though, but good.

上海餐厅排行(口味评分)_大众点评网. This is the list of the top rated restaurants by food quality。

福乐居_大众点评网. My buddy at Weirdmeat.com says Rendezvous is the best Malaysian/Singaporean restaurant in Shanghai. It is actually just terrific, their curry noodle thing is delicious, the curry lamb is really good as well. It is really hard to find though as the Gateway is confusing. It is on the first floor and it is across from Element Fresh in a little area inside the building, there is no signage at all, so good luck.

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No one has written the perfect application yet for learning Chinese IMHO. It should have both Chinese, Pinyin and English and you should be able to highlight anything and see the translations. The closest seems to be:

1. DictCN. This is a Firefox plug in that really works well for English to Chinese, but seems buggy trying to do Chinese to English. It does have pinyin which is great and it comes up as a tooltip in Firefox, but it isn't super reliable. Seems to take a while to load properly
2. CEDict. This is the actual open source dictionary folks use. MDBG seems to be the best source for the latest cedict.u8 file that applications need.
3. Dimsum. This is a Java tool that does the same tjhing on your desktop.
4. "DLTool" Seems almost perfect, it translates whatever is on the clipboard and is a Windows application. It is buggy though both in displaying characters and it seems to spin sometimes when there is too much stuff on the clipboard.

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Sorry not to have posted for a while. I gummed up Performancing the blog tool I use in Firefox. And there is no way to logon to ask questions. For those of you using that Firefox add-on, to really reset Performancing, you have to go to c:\documents and settings\rich\Application Data\Mozilla\...\profiles\ and look for the performancing* files and delete them and this resets performancing.