Greatest Tennis Player for now

Yesterday in Wimbledon, Roger Federer and Andy Roddick played a tennis match which will be remembered by those who watched it for a long long time. It was an epic battle between a tennis great and a suddenly rejuvenated player. It was interesting to watch between the artistic game of Federer and the streetfighter style of Roddick. Really a superb contrast in style and both showed they are the masters of their chosen style.

Federer was majestic with his game and made superb forehand shots that still mesmerizes crowds. He also made an astonishing 50 over aces during the match which shows his real power behind his artistic moves. Roddick, on the other hand was serving like a machine, without any any long movement. His serving steps are one of the quickest and seems to work well against Federer, who didn't have the time to read Roddicks intentions. This made Roddick's serve unbreakable until the final set.

The first set was won by Roddick and the next two by Federer. In the final set, the game went until 14 set each when Federer won his set. By this time, Roddick seem to be losing his strength. His shots were wayward in this gave Federer the chance to win the 16th set and the only time he broke Roddicks serve.

Quite an amazing finish and in the end the crowd was very appreciative of Roddick because of the tremendous challenge he posed to Federer. Alas, the night belonged to Federer as he broke the Grand Slam record held by his hero Sampras, who was as the venue watching the game. The win also catapulted him to the number one position in men's tennis.

A truly amazing game to watch and a superb game to mark a new Grand record.

Potential Pandemic again

There is a new danger originating in Mexico in the form of a disease. It has been called as a swine flu and has already cost 60 + lives. The sudden reports of the large number of casualty by Mexico in the past few days and the role Mexico plays in providing workforce to the largest economy in the world has raised alarms worldwide. Depending in the severity, the flu can pop up all over the world in short time and cause massive problems to the global population.

It has been reported that the new swine flu is the combination of bird flu, 2 types of swine flu and the human flu, making it potentially deadly since it can spread and infect all spectrum of the human population. As of today, there are reports that the flu have been detected in New Zealand. The global medical community must combine its efforts to once again solve the problem of a devastating flu from wreaking havoc around the world.

High Tech Lying

The Formula 1 race in Malaysia last week was stopped before it ran its course due to huge rainfall. The tracks got flooded and the poor daylight due to the late start of the race forced the organizers to cut short the race. This has caused anger among the various F1 supporters who came from all over the world to watch the race.

But the real drama actually happened even before the race started. The McLaren team was found to have lied to a committee looking at McLaren's complaint on a rival drivers action in the Australian race, which was held a week earlier. The issue was whether McLaren's star driving and reigning world champion Lewis Hamilton willingly allowed a Toyota driver to overtake him back during a safety procedure. Lewis and McLaren said that they did not but evidence later showed to the contrary. The committee heard Lewis being interviewed by reporters just after the race, where he mentioned that he allowed the Toyota driver to overtake him.

Its amazing that these sort of things happened in such a high tech sport. Even though McLaren can argue that the Toyota driver was wrong in overtaking Lewis back after making a mistake, they should not have lied to get their points across. They should have been clear from the beginning and told the race stewards what really happened and then the Toyota driver may have still be punished for overtaking.

Sadly that did not happen and McLaren and Lewis are made to look like untrustworthy people. Lewis' brand image may have been damaged due to this incident and will hang like a cloud over his career. What really happened between Lewis and his team are still not clear but usually when the organization that employs you orders you to do something, you trust the team to know what they are doing. This is not the first time that McLaren was found to have been behaving in less than stellar manner - Fernando Alonso, McLarens former star driver was responsible in divulging some wrong doing allegedly done by McLaren's staff and for this the team got fined very heavily.

Lewis rightfully made a press conference and salvaged his reputation somewhat. McLaren must pay the price and they could end up losing much more than money.

F1 is one of the most technologically advanced and complex sports in our modern history. Each team employ hundreds of specialist staff with budgets in the hundred of millions just to get 2 cars compete around a track for about 2 hours each alternate week somewhere in the world. Yet with all these mechanical and electronic wizardy and with organization excellence, people still hark back to their evil base self - hiding the truth.

Is it any wonder then why civilization destroy themselves after achieving the zenith of their culture and technology? What can we do to control the urge of people to destroy all the work they have done in achieving great things in life just to indulge in some base feelings? Or is it an inevitable test of humans, to see their true characters in extreme times, whether in joy or despair?

I think it will come as a shock to many people, especially fans of Lewis and McLaren if all the accusations are proven true. The F1 sports organizers need to ensure that team and drivers are provided ethical training so that each know their own personal responsibility when cheating or appearances of wrong doing appears. Unsavory actions like cheating and lying can turn off huge number of fans and may end F1 look like a wrestling championship.

Digital Personal Assistant

We are taking information for granted these days. Its so bad that for some of us, there it seems to be a huge burden just to sift through emails in our Inbox to sift through the useful and the time wasters. There are tons and tons of information and data available but how can we categorize them effectively so that only the useful will be fed into our brains? Not all of us are fortunate enough to have a personal assistant to do it for us.

Perhaps the answer lies in a modified search engine technology that sifts through all our emails, social networking content, electronic magazines and even the web so that only relevant information to us is filtered through. The system can be a filtering mechanism where information can be divided into Urgent, Normal and Trash. We read through all content under Urgent, go through when we have time for Normal and finally trash the Trash.

The main challenge will be to create a system that understands our priority in life. The priority could be in social life, family circle, work environment and even trivial things like a bowling group that meets up every week. The system can channel to us the right type of information at the right time, all the while filtering the vast amount of information in the digital space. It would be great to have such a system in place and the only downside I see if this becomes a reality is, we may end up being robots!

Using old technology during economic uncertainty

There are a lot of negative views of the global economy in the news recently. Although most of us would like to continue our lives in a positive way, we should prepare ourselves - just in case the worst scenario played by the 'experts' becomes true. A few steps can be taken to ensure that we can maintain a modicum of normal lifestyle if things becomes tough.

First of all, print out all important information on survival tactics in case of total economic meltdown. The reason for printing is obvious and it is also important to store all the survival kits somewhere where it is easy to access.

Next, do stock up on batteries. These will be useful to power clocks, torchlites and radios. Get solar powered electronic gadgets such as wristwatches and calculators. Get some cheap, low powered transistor radios if you don't have one already.

Transportation may become expensive due to fuel cost so it will be wise to get a bicycle. Get one with added storage containers so that it can be used for grocery shopping effectively. If possible relocate to an area near to amenities so that you dont have to travel far to maintain your life.

Other things to get will be water container (dont forget to fill up with water!), tissues, durable clothes, foodstuff, candles and matches. Also get mosquito coils. Finally try to be more friendly with your neighbours!

Government and Technology

Technology is just a tool to make our lives better. At the very basic level, if we have enough knowledge and desire to live thriftily, we can leave off the environment for a long time without electricity or piped water. This extreme lifestyle would be suitable for individuals or small groups of people. For larger groups of people, the system breaks down and the the lifestyle can deteriorate badly.

For a modern society to function well, technology is the key for peaceful existence. The growth of human population around the globe and the desire to leave near the workplace forces people to live in close quarters with each other and this necessitates investment in high technology to keep the society functioning and citizens happy.

As we grow as a society, we require stable government to nurture complex studies and programs to develop newer and more sophisticated technology. If we look at the semiconductor industry, the advancement have been amazing. As limits of chip fabrications have been reached, a new method or process or substance have been found which then pushes the boundary of what can be created to another 5 years or so.

The same thing with the auto industry. 40 years ago, many car manufacturers were unique and each make cars in the areas they are good at - speed, comfort, fuel economy. Nowadays we have cars that can do all of the above at very reasonable prices. We can also find similar advancement in the aerospace industry and almost any other modern technology based industry.

All the above are only possible with the existence of stable government, both at the country level and also at the regional level. Without its inherent stability over the past 150 years, USA could not have been the superpower it is today. The same goes to Europe and Japan, who in the past 50 years have not involved in any major wars or civil strife. Therefore the progress technology and continued expansion of the human population globally requires a stable global geo-politic environment.

WiMAX update

WiMAX have been touted as the challenger and the real alternative to 3G technology for quite some time. Unfortunately, it hasn't been successful in dethroning 3G as the network technology of choice for high speed wireless broadband service. For now, there are only scattered service providers around the world using the WiMAX technology.

The main issue is still technical problems associated with getting all the network components to work seamlessly with one another. Although the standards have been around for quite some time, the biggest problem is the realization of the products in the real service provider environment. There is still a lot of work that needs to be done.


On the other hand 3G has a big pool of manufacturers and most of the manufacturing and implementation problems have been sorted out. They have also speeded up the deployment of the 3.5G or HSPA technology and now there are many services around the world that provide 3.6Mbps and even 7.2 Mbps services for their consumers.

What can the WiMAX providers and manufacturers do to address the problem? The first thing is to get their act together and investigate the full extent of all the issues still pending with the WiMAX ecosystem. One should know all the problems out there so that a concerted effort can be made to fix each and every one of them so that it will be a much smoother roll out for the operators. By ignoring some of the problems, it will only scare away potential interest in the technology and make existing implementers face a lot of pain using them.

The Quest for viable alternative energy source

Imagine our world without supplied energy .... our lives will become unbearable within a day for many people and most social systems will probably collapse within a month. Our daily lives and the economic systems are fatally dependent on continuous energy supply. If the energy is choked, it can be used as a tool for war and suffering.

The recent speculative price hike proves that we need alternative fuel supply so that our safety, comfort and security can be planned with much better confidence. It had caused a race to get alternative energy supply such as from the sun's rays, wind power, geo thermal power and even nuclear power,which used to be bad word for the young and informed generation.


Alas, with the recent reduction in the price of oil, governments and public have begun to abandon their quest for a viable alternative energy. This should not be the case. We should still strive to find a good alternative to the oil and strive to maintain a good balance between both - ideally between 30% to 50%.

One aspect of the energy race the government needs to look at is what will their action will be if somehow a new source of energy is found which is tremendously cheap and freely available. They should plan for a minor social upheaval as the industrial and financial structures change happens to counteract this.