The Last Lap

In less then a week times will be the Opening Show for the Beijing Summer Olympic 2008 or the Games of the XXIX Olympiad. But seems that things are not all that rosy.

Firstly the pre Olympic problems that caused some problems with the route and along the route of the flame. Then the air quality of the skies of Beijing having reached unacceptable standards. Recently some freedom of press issues. Followed by the changes in visa rules. Also the alge boom and the locust problem. And now a video of the top secret opening ceremony by the famous director Zhang Yimou has leaked out. The clip filmed from the Bird's Nest by a S Korean station SBS, leaked out images of the closely guarded show. The clip of about 2 min is quite an eye-opener. Imagine all those 15,000 performers never breath a word to a soul till SBS manage to film the controversial report.

We should maybe give China a break. After winning the rights to host the Games on 13 July 2001, they have bee trying quite hard to host a good game. Build stadiums, buildings, theater airport, train routes, roads. Trying to clear the air, helping the residents of Beijing to lose some of their bad habits. Well I really do hope that they can deliver a good game from Aug 8 till Aug 24.

Some tech news...

Watch out Google, here comes Wikia from the people who brought us Wikipedia. According to them their way of search is different from the usual algorithm-driven like Google or Yahoo. But is based on a freely-licensed open source, where users can enter to change anything. Thus allowing you to add a webby to the search results if you think that it is relevant. Seems that you can tamper with it to promote (spam style) your own goods. but the friendly people at Wiki are working on it.

Next up is cuil which was launched early this week. They claims "Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft." With a small team of 30 people not bad rite. The founders are a group of ex-Google employees who promises that they will not keep any data about you. No name, No IP, No cookies. No search history stored/kept. They believe that analyzing the Web rather than the users or superficial popularity metrics. (Ohh... Touchy.) BTW in case you were wondering Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge.

Before I close this post let me say a big THANKS to the people in white. (Mmm... Ok maybe they come in many colours now. Like light green, purple, blue etc) Well it is International Nurses Day.

Randon Musing:
Light Brown Cat was grazing beside the Young Slender Zebra.