Ramblings

Microsoft

Big systems are unwieldy, and they tend to use equally unwieldy things. A large cooperation would invariably employ Microsoft products. Most iconically Outlook, and now things like Sharepoint and other software. Lots of universities adopt Blackboard, and most of them don’t make use of 50% of its features. I suppose one of the benefit of these is that they come with support.

I bet Google uses Google app and gmail in place of Outlook. I think it would save a ton of money to convert to a Google system. I suppose there is still no replacement for microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint, but the linkage between those and Outlook is minimal at best.

Of course I would also like to suggest that Latex should be used for making formal reports but who can be bothered. I think Excel is the last straw. It is such a powerful tool that I don’t know how it can be replaced. While the MacOS equivalent can do just as well in day to day number keeping, Excel is just more useful for quick and dirty scientific work (before we move onto matplotlib and such).

Emails

I still remember a time where email accounts are a valuable commodity, as in, it cost money to get an account. Then Hotmail came out with 2mb of storage and it was like the BIG thing. 2mb is not quite enough for one of my emails with some attachments these days.

Oh and the Internet Service Providers charged internet usage by the hour.

Moving between cities without a car

The train is approaching Utrecht Central. My schedule for the day.

Get off at Amsterdam Central, train to Sloterdijk.
Get on computer and update everything.
Go to storage box and pack one or two boxes into the suitcase.
Drag that suitcase to Delft.

Attitudes

Rural Texas. What must it be like there? Canada by comparison is a rather homogeneous place. From the east to the west coast, the difference is subdue, the slight change in accent, variation in demographics (from a lot of immigrants to really a lot of immigrants), and in gastronomy (since it is Canada, the variation in food is related to the immigrants).

If I moved from Toronto to Vancouver, probably no one would notice. If I moved then to Nova Scotia, the folks there may be weirded out by my attitude towards lobsters (not edible), but otherwise I am normal, common place Canadian.

The story becomes decidedly shiftier if and when I announced that I was a Yankee in a rural Texan bar. But I wouldn’t understand why. By all objective accounts, we would be citizens of the same country, we use the same currency, and share similar belief systems. The point is, things would get weird before any of that was made known. There must be a set of assumptions that all New Yorkers would be liberal hippies who look down on the hearty, nation living Texans.

Where does that come from? I am sure the opposite is true as well. Again, where does that mis-or-not-conception come from? The media? the ignorant tourists? I don’t know, the generations of isolationist education? That is something I just made up, but I think it describes the situation quite well.

I can understand the xenophobia that comes with meeting the first human of a different color, but it goes way too far when people from one side of a country thinks the people from the other side are completely out to lunch.

There is a strong promotion for cultural sensitivity in the Netherlands (Europe in general but I can’t verify) where it is taken for granted in Canada where there isn’t a dominant culture anymore. It is not that we are more sensitive about other cultures, it’s just that we learnt to stop making assumptions because they are always wrong and we end up looking foolish.

We were in the Rijksmuseum one day and one lady said “hey, you look Japanese, can you help me with this audio guide / iPhone thingy. Japanese people are good at technology.” She was perfectly friendly and with no ill intention or insult. Indeed, besides being completely wrong (we are not Japanese, have no clue how to use iPhones, and no idea how good Japanese people are at technology [my stereotype would be that the Japanese copied the Germans and made everything cheaper, look at Leica and Nikon, but I would never say that in public, or would I?]) she was kind of complimenting us.

An older lady bystander started laughing hysterically (or just being an old lady) when we told the lady that we were Canadians, not Japanese, and we were clueless about iPhones. The older lady wouldn’t stop laughing and told her husband and continued to laugh.

Almost felt bad for the original lady, it really wasn’t her fault since she had never faced such a situation before. But then again, lessons to be learnt. We would, as a group, never make these assumptions because they will be wrong. Where as the probability of these occurrences are low enough in Europe that, as a group, no one gets bothered.

Does that make us less racist, or just more smart about it? Is stereotype bad (besides being people look foolish)? A statement such as “Asian people are good at math” would be a stereotype, where as “Asians on average score the highest on standardized math tests” would be statistics. Yet there is no difference in implication between the two statements.

When the stereotype works in my favor, others look at me with secret resentment (so I assume), and it would of course be completely racist to adjust scores base on race (positively or negatively).

In the end, it would be wise to be the old lady and laugh hysterically. After all, Obama became the president and some Asian kids are flunking every math subject in school.