Rob Cheng’s Blog

It’s been close to 10 years since I left Gateway, and I often reflect back on those times. I started as the Director of Marketing in 1991. When I began, I would flip through the Computer Shopper and be amazed at how many competitors we had. As I recall, we were competing against close to 200 different computer companies. As time went on, I watched virtually each and every one of them fall or go under until it was just us and Dell standing. Many of these companies were much larger and successful than us, including CompuAdd, Zeos and Northgate. More »

June 9th, 2008 | Category: Technology | Comments (5)

I have developed some new technologies for the web site which enables a dynamic slide show to be displayed through some simple SQL calls. The one thing that I have learned about importing CSV files is that it is far from easy. While trying to solve these problems, I did a lot of queries and again there was little to no solutions on the web. So in addition, to my last article, here are two more common problems and solutions when importing CSV files using Microsoft Excel. More »

May 31st, 2008 | Category: Technology | Leave a comment

Yes, you read that right. HD DVD got it right, by bowing out now, because they realized that they are late to market. The concept of a larger optical format delivering higher quality content may have found success 5 years ago. However, in today’s environment, it is virtually a non starter. There are two basic and overpowering reasons why Blu Ray will fail: More »

March 10th, 2008 | Category: Technology | Comments (3)

I’ve had many thoughts and discussions about the internet and its enormous untapped potential. It’s been a little over 10 years since the internet boom began. Yet, the internet has just begun to impact and influence our lives. No one can predict with any accuracy the future of this technology, but I hope one day, people will read this article and say that I got it right.

The internet is still extremely PC centric. PCs have evolved substantially in the last 10 years in order to accommodate the new demands of internet applications. PCs have more memory and hard drive space to accommodate sound and video which has now become ubiquitous. More importantly, broadband velocities have been following Moore’s Law. Cable is being replaced by fiber as the fastest and most reliable broadband options, opening up even more potential. More »

January 28th, 2008 | Category: Technology | Comments (1)

Recently I wrote about Amazon.com’s new MP3 download site. I still like it, but I tired of it quickly because the selection of music is lacking. In the space of a month, I downloaded all of the music I wanted, but I wanted more, and they didn’t have it. For example, everyone was talking about the Eagles latest CD, but Amazon did not have it. More »

December 9th, 2007 | Category: Music, Technology | Comments (17)

The beautiful thing about technology is that it has a constant and incessant need to continuously improve itself. I am happy to say that two new recently announced technologies are awesome, and give us a glimpse of how technology will further influence our lives.

My Yahoo Beta. I have been a user of of My Yahoo for close to 10 years now. Well after 10 years, it is certainly worth the wait. I use My Yahoo at least 2-3 times a day. It is my prefered way of getting news, sports scores, weather reports, stock quotes, financial news, and currency rates.

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November 12th, 2007 | Category: Technology | Leave a comment

Since PC Pitstop is a virtual company, twice a year everyone gathers for the company meeting held in a difference locale. This fall we had the company meeting in Boston. We had three days of meetings and the team outing was a Red Sox game right before the playoffs began. The weather was close to perfect although it showed a little toward the end of the game. The photos were taken by Sheila and Sandra. Sheila wrote all of the captions and then I put it all into LyteBox. Cool. More »

October 10th, 2007 | Category: Photos, Slide Show, Technology | Comments (1)

When working on the photo part of my web site, which is a many-to-many database layout, I recently ran into the following frustration. I have found that it is much easier to manipulate my tables in Excel, and then uploading the resulting CSV back into MySQL. But I kept getting a wide variety of errors stating that I had an error. More »

July 30th, 2007 | Category: Technology | Leave a comment

I wrote this song while thinking of many of my friends that still work at my ex company Gateway Computer. To be honest, they are struggling right now. My friends in South Dakota are frustrated for change but at the same time, it is hard to change the negative inertia. So rather than be frustrated, they should Lay It Down. More »

July 8th, 2007 | Category: Music, Technology | Leave a comment