The last lecture of late Dr. Randy Pausch about childhood dreams

I just learned about this last lecture of late Dr. Randy Pausch by chance, read through his amazing presentation slides and video on Youtube, and would like to share with you about his great talk delivered on 18 September 2007 in a lecture hall of Carnegie Mellon University.

Randy Pausch was a computer science professor and alumnus of Carnegie Mellon University. He got pancreatic cancer which took away his life at the age of 47 on 25 July 2008, 10 months after he delivered this last lecture.

The talk has been uploaded into the Internet and viewed by millions of people. A best-selling book titled "The Last Lecture" based on the lecture has also been published and translated in thirty over languages.

To date, his Last Lecture titled "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams" is still giving great impacts to people around the world.
 
His talk was about his childhood dreams, how he overcome the barriers to realise his dreams (or at least getting close to it). He also talked about enabling the dreams of others, and some lessons learned.



He mentioned several times that "the brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people. Brick walls let us show our dedication."
 
Some of his important advice:

• Be good at something: it makes you valuable
• Work hard … “what’s your secret?”
• Find the best in everybody; no matter how you have to wait for them to show it
• Be prepared: “luck” is where preparation meets opportunity
  

He ended the talk by saying,"It’s not about how to achieve your dreams. It’s about how to lead your life. If you lead your life the right way, the karma will take care of itself. The dreams will come to you."
 
Click here to download the presentation slide of The Last Lecture by Dr. Randy Pausch.

Click here to download the transcript of The Last Lecture by Dr. Randy Pausch.

My ACM card wallet with money clip

Do you realize that nowadays we have to carry so many cards with us -- ATM cards, credit cards, member cards, petrol cards, discount cards, Touch 'n Go card, medical card, ... you name it.

I have been wondering is there a stylish and nice looking card wallet for me to keep my cards in my pocket, without cramping them into my money wallet, and I've found the patented ACM card wallet with money clip from the internet.

This Auto Card Manager (ACM) card wallet has a special compartment that can store up to 6 cards in a well organized manner. There is another model which can store up to 12 cards, but could be too bulky to carry in pant's pocket.

The cards can easily be slotted into the wallet. There is spacing between each of the cards, a feature said to be able to prevent card demagnetization, scratching and premature magnetic strip failure.

This is how it looks like with all the cards slotted in completely. Once slotted in, the cards are held firmly in the wallet and will not slide out by themselves. The cards are easily retrievable by pushing the button corresponding to their slot.

There is a money clip at the back of the ACM card wallet, which can be used to clip bank notes, receipts, name cards, etc.

And the money clip is easily detachable.

This ACM card wallet comes with 18 interchangeable button icons pads and a leather pouch. Its casing is made of metal meterial, which is pretty durable. Despite that, it only weighs about 90g with 6 cards installed.

Global Broadband Quality Study 2009 by Saïd Business School (of Oxford University) & University of Oviedo

Sponsored by Cisco and conducted by a team of MBA students from the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford and also the University of Oviedo’s Department of Applied Economics, the 2nd annual global study on the quality of broadband connections has just been released on 30 September 2009.

The 1st groundbreaking Broadband Quality Study was published in September 2008 to highlight each country’s ability to benefit from next-generation web applications and services.

It was found that broadband quality is linked to a nation’s advancement as a knowledge economy and countries with broadband on their national agenda had the highest broadband quality. This year’s report covers an additional 24 countries to 66 and includes new analysis on broadband quality in more than 240 cities.

The study was based on approximately 24 million records sourced from actual broadband speed tests from Speedtest.net (Ookla) for the target 66 countries during May 2008 and May to July 2009.

The research team concluded that broadband experience is mainly affected by broadband speeds in both directions, latency, network over-subscription, and packet loss. These parameters were grouped into 3 major categories: download and upload throughput, and latency.

The Broadband Quality Score (BQS) for each country was determined using a formula that weighted each category according to the quality requirements of a set of popular applications now and in the future as follow:

It is found that:

Overall average broadband quality increased across the globe, with global average download throughput increased by 49% to 4.75 Mbps, while global average upload throughput increased by 69% to 1.3 Mbps. The global average latency has decreased by 21% to 170 ms.

South Korea tops the 2009 Broadband Leadership table. Driven by continuous efforts by the government to strengthen the country’s position as one of the world’s ICT leaders, and combined with higher broadband penetration, South Korea rises above Japan (in the 2nd place now) in the global Broadband Leadership rankings.

The  Global Top 10 Broadband Leaders are:

• 1. South Korea
• 2. Japan
• 3. Hong Kong
• 4. Sweden
• 5. Switzerland
• 6. Netherlands
• 7. Singapore
• 8. Luxembourg
• 9. Denmark
• 10. Norway

Malaysia ranked 48 and China ranked 49 in this broadband leadership matrix. The United States ranked 15.

Click here to download the report of Global Broadband Quality Study 2009 sponsored by Cisco.