Arbalest online

I finally bought my first mac last week. It’s a macbook pro with a 2.4 Ghz Core 2 Duo(was actually thinking of waiting for an Intel i7 based MBP) and a 9600GM(256 Mb) video card.  I like the macbook pro over the macbook but the price difference was keeping me from buying it initially. Damn those aluminum macbook. If those aluminum macbook did not exists it would have been an easy decision.

What made me buy the MBP? My girlfriend was actually trying to bargain a good deal on the Macbook Pro and the sales lady gave us one. Rules of bargaining. If you bargain and they gave it at the price you wanted, you must buy. Besides, this is my first time to splurge for myself. I pushed uncle Scrooge this time around(but now he is haunting me).

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I did have some trouble setting this thing up. I replaced the hard drive and I don’t have a torx 6 screwdriver. I had to borrow from my cousin.  I bought my mac on a Saturday and was able to install the hard drive on Tuesday. Talk about wasted time.

The biggest problem I had was transferring my files. My external hdd is formatted in ext3(linux file system) and OS X cannot mount it. Doing it(mounting an ext drive)  in windows is much easier. 

*Update: I used the original hard drive and formatted it to fat32(using GParted). OS X can’t still mount it. I used OS X’s Disc Utility to format it. It worked. OS X is a pain sometimes…

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One of the few reasons that I don’t want to buy an MBP is that I will buy accessories for it. Spending does not stop from buying the laptop alone.  I already bought a bigger hard drive(WD 500Gb) for it, Monde Palm Guard and Monde Clear Case. My girlfriend(thanks bebe!) even bought me a Zephyr cooler(also by Monde). 

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Arbalest is the arm slave(mech) of Sagara Sousuke in Full Metal Panic.

Outliers

Pop quiz hotshot.  What does pro-hockey player have in common? The answer will surprise you. Most of them are born on the first quarter of the year.  This obviously has nothing to do with astrological signs. This is due to the cut-off date for age-class hockey which is January 1.  Kids who are born on the first quarter are naturally bigger and has more experience playing hockey. And when the time comes when the coach chooses an all-star team, the older players, being bigger and more experienced, has a greater chance of being chosen. With better coaching and all that extra practice,  those players has more chance to make it into the big league.  This example shows that talent does not necessarily translate into success. The environment you are born with(in this case the cut-off date) has a large impact whether you will succeed or not.

This is the thesis of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. People does not necessarily rise from nothing. The environment, parentage and patronage has a very profound effect on whether we succeed or not. It not just talent. You just need to be good enough.

Take for example math. Why are Asians more talented in Math? In Outliers, the main reason he said is because of Asians tend to work harder. They tend to work on math questions longer. And math is one of those things where hard work really matters. If there is a Math Olympics that will be held, you can tell which country would win even without asking a single math question. You can tell if you can measure how hard they are willing to work.  The next question is why Asians tend to work harder. It is because Asians work in rice paddies. Working in a rice field is ten to twenty times more labor-intensive than working on an equivalent-size corn or wheat field.  Hard work is embedded into Asian culture, and that culture is inherited by Asians of today.

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Another interesting thing that is mentioned in Outliers is that in order to become an expert in a field you need ten thousand hours or about ten years(reminded me of Peter Norvig’s Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years).  He mentioned Bill Gates and Bill Joy(creator of vi) as examples.  They have accumulated ten thousand hours of programming. And those ten hours of programming was because they are (very )lucky enough to have access to computers at those times.

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outlier(copied verbatim from the book)

1. something that is situated away from or classed differently from a main or related body
2. a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample