Listen environmentalist and animal right activities. Factory farming is more environmental friendly for milk cows. It uses less water, releases less green house gas and produces more milk.
Yearly Archives: 2010
Google Warns of China Exit Over Hacking
Bravo to Google. They really live up to their corporate motto: “Don’t do evil”. They have the guts say no to the Chinese government. No one know where history will lead, but Google may very well trigger the fall of the communist party.
Rain making
Vancouver has a gloomy winter. We have almost non-stop rain fall from October till April. To make us more depressing, the unusual sunshine often come during the weekday when everyone is trapped inside the office. I have an idea that will make Vancouver winter more bearable. We can use rain making to shift sunshine from weekdays to weekends. The technology is rain making already available. In fact, China has been using rain making technique to control rain fall for decades. One of the best example of human triumph over the environment is how China control rain falls during the Beijing Olympics last year.
The principle of rain making is fairly simple. Spray silver iodide or dry ice into the atmosphere and water module will attract to the particles and form rain clouds. We can create rain clouds during the weekday to give us a sunny weekend. Silver iodide can spray from a plane or shoot up to sky using rockets. The Vancouver city government should consider rain making as a public service. We can save money by outsourcing the work to high school science project. Imagine if each high school student build a rain making rocket, there will be enough rocket to give us sunshine every weekend.
Rain making has no environment concerns, since rain eventually will falls without human innervation. The total amount of rain fall does not change over a long period of time, we are just making it rain at a more convenient time. The first step is to control rain falls, the next step is to find ways to control temperatures. If we can make rains fall on Friday at 4-5C on Friday in Vancouver, then Saturday would be the perfect ski day with sunshine and soft powder snow in Whistler.
My PMP exam study plan
My company starting to put more emphasis in project management. They try to avoid having the employees to work insane overtime, having forever slipping the project schedule and most important of all, minimize the risk of the project. They even start a new project management career leader in addition to the normal technical and management career leader. Project Management Professional (PMP) is the credential for project managers, it’s very common in construction, utilities and software industries. It is relatively new to semi-conductor industry and it is slowly getting acceptance. It would be an asset for me to have the PMP credential.
The PMP exam has 200 MC question and it is 4 hours long. There are expensive preparation course out there to help you pass the exam. In my opinion those prep course are a waste of money, unless they are paid by my company. I am expert of writing open exams. I have aced in TOEFL, SAT, GRE, GMAT, P.Eng exam The PMP exam is not that difficult compare to other open exams. Probably about the same level as the P.Eng practice exams on legal and ethics. The official PMP textbook is really boring and the content very confusing. Reading it is a waste of time because you won’t remember a thing. There are lots of prep books out there. I am using the one written by Andy Crowe, but I think any the prep books can get the job done. Studying the prep books won’t teach you much about project management, but it can help you pass the exam.
I applied the PMP exam last year and I have been procrastinating to schedule my exam date. My application is about to expire, so I finally schedule my exam on the last available date. It gives me only one month to prepare for my exam. There are 10 knowledge area in PMP exam. I have to study 3 chapters per week. It took me 2-3 hours to study one chapter. The work load is not too bad, I only have to study a few hours every other day. The prep book comes with a mock exam and a 1 week trial for an online exam database. I will save the mock exam and the exam database access until the last week. I think my study schedule is pretty good. I don’t want to span my study over a long period of time, since I may forget what I learned a few months ago. A one month study plan is just about right.
Verifiable
Verifiable is an online visualization tool. You can upload statistic or data and use the flash web client to plot charts interactively. Its function is similar to plotting charts in Excel, but it’s free and it has a pretty sleek user interface.
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