Lunch Bits - Edition 15 | The Blog of Rudy Amid

Lunch Bits - Edition 15

April 18th, 2008 · 6 Comments

We went to Curry House today. It was a sunny day when we talked about:

The “fusion” finish look of the new Toshiba Satellite U405 laptop.
Live survey in the all hands meeting, based on a third-party company assessment. My choice of career advancement is “Work from home”, which is not a popular choice, apparently.
American Express still has great customer service. Not perfect though.
Taiwan healthcare system. PBS did a comparison report and said it’s great.
Hospital volunteers in Taiwan are helpful. Miss J has firsthand experience with the Buddhist volunteers in Taiwan. They serve tea and group singing for entertainment, among other things.
A lot of doctors in Taiwan. During Japanese occupation of Taiwan, most Taiwanese became doctors because they couldn’t get into politics or arts. Found a book in Amazon that sort of confirms this:

The achievements in colonial medicine provided one of the most pivotal examples of Japan’s “scientific colonialism” in Taiwan. During the early years of the colonial age, upon the realization that the success of colonial medicine relied heavily on the existence of a body of well trained, native agents, the Japanese state made a great effort to promote and institutionalize medical education in Taiwan. As a result, in less than two decades, doctors emerged as the first modern native professionals in Taiwan, and their professional practices endowed them with very favorable market positions and high social status.

- Ming-cheng M. Lo, “Doctors within Borders: Profession, Ethnicity, and Modernity in Colonial Taiwan“, Page 5.

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Posted in Lunch Bits · Stuff · World

6 responses so far ↓

1 fragileheart // Apr 18, 2008 at 8:25 pm

I’m curious, am I the only one that doesn’t care to even give Toshiba a chance? I like Sony…. am I silly?

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2 rudyamid // Apr 18, 2008 at 8:43 pm

It’s just a matter of brand loyalty. I used to buy only Sony TVs, but since they like to overcharge me, I stopped buying and went with Samsung and Mitsubishi. If you’re happy with Sony, then by all means continue with them. I’m happy with my Toshiba laptops, so I’m sticking with Toshiba.
3 Periapex // Apr 19, 2008 at 3:53 am

I like Toshiba’s laptops, but still have a bad taste in my mouth from their Tecras in the mid 90’s for which I could never find updated drivers. Too much proprietry stuff in them made software upgrading impossible to difficult.

Periapex’s last blog post..8 Random Things About Me.
4 rudyamid // Apr 19, 2008 at 9:37 am

The Tecras are Toshiba’s business laptops. I always have this for my productivity machines ever since the 90’s. I don’t recall upgrading drivers that difficult. Back in the 90’s, we used Windows 95/98/NT which were notoriously kludgy operating systems. With XP it’s much better now, even with the proprietary drivers like the power management software.

I don’t have any experience with MS Vista yet, but I hear that may be a bigger headache than it’s worth.
5 Periapex // Apr 20, 2008 at 4:43 am

Yeah, it was under 95/98 that I had trouble. I’m trying to remember which drivers I had issues with. I think I had trouble with the webcam and the DVD drive/software…

Periapex’s last blog post..8 Random Things About Me.
6 rudyamid // Apr 20, 2008 at 9:27 pm

My guess is that you had a Logitech webcam. They were notorious in coming up with crappy drivers for Windoze 95/98. As for DVD drives, they were new in the late 90’s, so I suspected it wasn’t a common bundle back then. I could remember the driver would not recognize the DVDs, recordable or otherwise.

Ah those were the days…