Imperial Rank 9th in the world

I know -- college rankings only make sense when you are in the top ten for something positive. Ask Tufts University, they know. So, since my Alum, Imperial College, ranked 9th in the WORLD. Why not gloat? Imperial has been ranked ninth internationally and third in Europe in the Times Higher Education Supplement’s World University Rankings published today. The top ten are:

1. Harvard University 2. California Institute of Technology 3. Massachusetts Institute of Technology 4. Stanford University 5. Princeton University 6. University of Cambridge (joint) 6. University of Oxford (joint) 8. University of California, Berkeley 9. Imperial College London 10. Yale University

Hong Kong Music Scene

Compare to end of last year, seems that several new CD's released by local stars are releasing DVD's with their music CD. i.e. for almost the same price you are now getting a music CD and a concert DVD in the box. They used to do short video VCDs. Now it's DVD. On a similar note, several of the hot new U.S. CD's are released with copy protection here. Not sure if it is the same in the States. The new Norah Jones CD is one of them. So -- how can I rip it in iTune?

Outsourcing Inventory Management to the Max

Today's (2003.09.11) Wall Street Journal front page has an article describing how J.C. Penny in the U.S. has outsourced the inventory management, including sales forcasting, of some of their men's shirts product to a company in Hong Kong called TAL group (company website). This Hong Kong based company pull sales data directly from each JC Penny's store and forcast inventory needs for them, manage the manufacturer in Taiwan and ships the shirts directly to each branch.

Letter, A4, Paper size

Is it merely an annoyance, inconvinience, or absolutely stupidity that the U.S. uses a different paper size standard then the rest of the world? How many times I print a document from our other offices and resulting in text on the wrong page, or loosing columns on a spreadsheet? If the U.S. want to get in the global game, how about following the rest of the world and start using International Standard Paper Sizes. While we are at it, how about adopting GSM as the cellular network standard !!