connecting the dots II

As I prepare for my Student Exchange Programme, I look at all the money that I have spent so far, and will be spending, and I wonder whether I should have applied for SEP to the USA in the first place. I still remembered during my Freshman Orientation Week, this girl presented her SEP trip to France, and when she mentioned she spent $10k-$15k in total, I turned to my friend and told him, "Siao, I will never be able to spend this kind of money."

Fast forward to today.

To clarify, every single cent that I have spent so far came from my own pockets, painstakingly saved up over many years, and I think I have just about enough for the entire Program. However, to prepare for contingencies, I will be asking my mother for some money to act as a buffer, which I will try not to spend as much as possible and return her the full amount when I return. Nevertheless I still feel bad having to ask her for money; all the hidden costs have caught me off guard.

A little part of me wishes I can reverse all this, while a bigger part of me wishes a lump sum of money will fall from the sky into my hands. But most importantly, I wish that when the future [and poorer] me looks back at the present me, future me will be able to 'connect the dots' and thank present me for having done the right thing.

I have made many difficult decisions to come this far, so I sincerely hope everything turns out well. Someone deceive encourage me please? =)

connecting the dots

I first heard of this phrase back in 2007 [?] when I watched Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address. He used this to remind us to trust our guts and feelings and do what we think we should do, and that one day these 'dots' will somehow connect.

Back in the early 2000s, Microsoft took the world by surprise [ok maybe just me] when it announced that it was going after the video game console market by announcing the Xbox. Around that time, Sony had just released the Playstation 2, and Sega's Dreamcast was barely able to stay alive. I was still a little kid then, and I remembered wondering why Microsoft wanted to making a game console when its main business was Windows, Office, and well, productivity software. While Microsoft was already a game publisher then, nobody was really associating Microsoft with fun.

Fast forward to today. Not only has Microsoft managed to establish a stronghold in this highly competitive market, Xbox's successor, the Xbox 360, has also managed to hold its own against the Sony Playstation 3. But the most impressive feature, I feel, that came out of Microsoft's gamble in the market will probably be Xbox Live, its multiplayer gaming and content delivery platform, and this is the answer to my query on how the Xbox fits into Microsoft's main business.

Xbox Live started off simply as a online service to connect Xbox players around the world to play together, and since then it has branched out to include Windows and Windows Phone platforms as well. Its role has also been expanded to allow users to do more than just play games; users can now buy and download games, download additional content, update their systems, and interact with each other through other Microsoft services like Live Messenger.

Thanks to Facebook and Apple, games are now no longer an exclusivity of introverts or geeks. Anyone with a Facebook account or a smartphone can play games now, and more people are now playing games as they try get themselves rid of negative connotations like violence. Its a very important market not to be treated lightly.

Microsoft is in a very interesting position. Unlike Apple and Google, where they developed cloud ecosystems after they have released their operating systems and devices to distribute their apps and games, Microsoft has strong services to begin with, like Xbox Live. At this stage, the dots have connected for Microsoft. I'm pretty sure when the engineers first started writing Xbox Live code back in the 2000s, they would not have thought that it will be an important component of Windows Phone devices today, and soon, Windows 8. If they have never developed any game console, they will be in a worse position today. They have plenty of catching up to do, but one must be in the wrong mind to dismiss them.

Tablets are hot these days, but besides Apple's iPad and, to a lesser extent, Samsung's Galaxy Tab, no other tablet manufacturer has been able to come close, sales-wise, popularity-wise. That is, until Amazon's Kindle Fire came along. The question is, why?

The answer is simple: Content.

The iPad has a big advantage over Android tablet manufacturers, which is the availability of apps. Android tablet manufacturers, on the other hand, have no control over the number of apps available on the Android Market. This makes manufacturers difficult to differentiate themselves from each other based on hardware alone. Add on to the fact that there are so little apps available for Android tablets currently, consumers see no point in getting one.

Amazon, just like Microsoft, is well positioned. Instead of making a tablet and waiting for the Android market to populate itself with tablet apps, Amazon, being an online retailer, has huge amounts of books, songs and apps available for purchase, and consumers now find it worthwhile to get a Kindle Fire so they can have access to the Amazon stores.

Like Microsoft, I am sure when Amazon started its business as an online bookstore, they would never have thought that one day they will find themselves in a hardware tablet market. Similarly, the Amazon Web Services do not seem to have any relation with selling stuff online at first glance, but now their Kindle Fire comes with the Silk Browser where powerful backend AWS servers process and render webpages first before sending them to users.

Things are definitely looking very good for Amazon, and my humble prediction sees them join the ranks of Apple, Facebook and Google in changing our lives forever.

December randoms

The semester is over!

CS3216 had been a great module. I met many brilliant classmates, although that only served to remind me just how little I really know. Throughout the module, I got my hands dirty with web programming, and did stuff that I have never done before. In fact I think CS3216 is making me reconsider my previously rather narrow ambition of landing a job in the gaming industry, now that I have seen for myself just how much the Web can offer.

Now I am taking a little break as I prepare for my Student Exchange Programme. Among the things to do this week include a visa interview on the 6th, confirming my flight details, transferring money to my friend who kindly helped me pay my accommodation fees through credit card, and reading up on North Carolina and South Korea hehe.

As mentioned in my previous entry, I've got a new phone!



The Sony Ericsson Xperia Neo V is my second Android phone; the first was a Samsung Galaxy Spica. It was a nice phone, but its dated hardware and limited memory made it painful to use, hence I was prepared to fork out a little money for better performance.

I was not looking at Sony Ericsson initially; my brother's Xperia X10 mini was too heavily customised by SE for my liking. I was deciding between LG Optimus Black and Motorola Defy+, both costing $98, when the Xperia Neo V caught my eye. At $0, it offers the same performance as the LG and the Motorola: 1Ghz Scorpion CPU and Adreno GPU on a Snapdragon chipset, and 512MB RAM. The only thing the Neo V falls short is the 320MB of internal storage it offers for installing apps, but I can live with that.

Of course, the one factor that made me decide to take the Neo V is SE's software support. While LG is still struggling to upgrade their models to Gingerbread, the Neo V already comes with Gingerbread out of the box, and an upgrade to Ice Cream Sandwich is already promised. Then just a few days after I got this, SE rolled out a software update, which I came to know later, made SE phones one of the first to support WebGL. Awesome.

Usually, I am not a fan of manufacturer-specific bloatware, but I really like SE's Facebook inside Xperia functionality. I have always frown upon the lack of Facebook Events integration with Google Calendar, which in turn synchronizes with my phone calendar [or maybe I'm just not looking hard enough]. Now this little SE app pulls all my Facebook events and friends' birthdays and displays them in the Calendar [you can see my BBQ event in the screenshot], and leaves my Google Calendar alone. Neat.

I have always been using Samsung phones; the only other time I used a SE phone it completely let me down. So far the Neo V has been great, so let's hope it lasts!

In other news, I have returned my iPad to school. The iPad has been fun to use; I found myself reading alot more than before. But in the end, I guess its not exactly a necessity, and I can live without one, especially now that I have a new phone that can satisfy my reading needs [as I repeat, the Galaxy Spica was painfully slow to use].

That said, I'm not ruling out getting an Amazon Kindle Fire when I go to the US. Hehe.