"I Surf So You Don't Have To" #4

Above pic is from http://impressive.net/people/gerald/2005/oz/surfing.html

If you're new here, enjoy your stay, and here's the original post on why I started this. A quick recap.

I'll do the surfing. You're welcome.
I'll go through my massive amount of feeds on my Google Reader.
I'll bring you news along the tech ally.
I'll bring you news either you care about them or not, muhahha....
I'll bring you tibbits about me, my wife and Charlie.
I'll do all these from Cupertino where I live and work, so maybe there will be somethings about Apple too. But only once in a while, you know how we roll here, Moshe is watching.

Let's do it...

1. Remember how I told you few posts back that I use to work at NASA Ames? Well, I use to work at BEA Systems as well, the company that bought WebLogic. Oracle has decided to acquire BEA for $8.5B, and this time is for real! Good for me as I'm still a BEAS stock holder, so maybe these will offset the AAPL that has been taking a dive.
   
   
2. While we're on the topic of merger. Sun also announced on the same day that they'll buy MySQL AB for $1 BILLION. If you're interested in the details, head on over to Sun's CEO Jonny's blog.
   
   
3. Gmail added a new keyboard shortcut, "e" to archive from any view. If you don't already use Gmail's keyboard shortcuts, you should definitely enabled it via Settings -> General -> Keyboard shortcuts. Some of the ones I use daily are j, k, [, ], r, a, !. You can see the list of shortcuts list on Gmail's help page.
   
   And if you just do a ? in Gmail, it'll pop-up with this handy cheatsheet.
   
   
   
4. If you're interested what I did at Macworld, see my 8 pics on Flickr. My Twitter friend @leese and I got to hang with FSJ for a while and here's her blog post of the day. @iJustine (remember that 300 page AT&T bill girl?) and I exchanged few SMS and voicemails trying to coordinate her doing an interview with FSJ, but she never made it to find us. Oh well, next time.
   
   I also got to meet @verso in person and we walked around the floor and chatted while she showed me where all the cool swags are. Nameste "hello cylon"!
   
   
5. You on Facebook? You play Scrabulous? Hasbro, the maker of Scrabble, is suing Scrabulous and trying to shut it down.
   
   Below is what a game looks like in FB. This one is with a Twitter friend from Sweden, she is a teacher there, so she's gonna kick my behind!
   
   I can understand why Hasbro is not happy to see their board game being played widely on Facebook for free. But they should be happy to hear that as a direct result of playing the game on FB, we got a real Scrabble board game over Christmas from friends. Now, that should made Habro think twice about that move.
   
   
   
   
6. Purdue University's Mackey Arena is listed on USA Today as 1 of the 10 great places to watch college basketball. Quote from the site.
   

   "Forty-year-old Mackey is one of the last of the old Big Ten arenas," Feinstein says. "The team benches are actually situated below the court -- the coaches have to jump up to give their players instructions."
   
   The arena's domed aluminum roof makes the crowd noise reverberate to mega-decibel level. "When the Boilermakers are on a run, you literally can't hear the guy next to you talking."

   Click on picture below to see all ten schools, Purdue is #8.
   
   
   
7. Finally, I leave you with yet another Apple iPod Nano commercial. Parody on the "1234".
   
   

We'll meet again soon...