Rob Cheng’s Blog

Rob Cheng’s Blog

Formerly, My Stoned Thoughts

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Archive for Technology

What Made Gateway Great, and How It Fell Apart

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 »

Importing Excel CSV’s using PHPMyAdmin

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 »

Blu Ray is Dead

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 »

The Future of the Internet

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 »

MP3 Sparks

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 »

Two Great Technologies

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.

More »

PC Pitstop goes to Boston

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 »

Importing CSV’s using PHPmyAdmin

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 »

Lay It Down

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 »

Gateway Badges of Glory

Solange was cleaning up all my old stuff and she found a bunch of my old Gateway badges. I decided to scan them and finally throw them out. Kind of interesting to see everything in a different perspective.

Gateway Badges of Glory

Polls

All time home run champion, Barry Bonds, was recently indicted for perjury. Which one of the following outcomes is most likely?

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Books Read

9 Dragons
by Michael Connnely
Read in Feb 2010
Check it out at My Book List.
When The Game Was Ours
by Bird & Johnson
Read in Jan 2010
Check it out at My Book List.
Transfer of Power
by Vince Flynn
Read in Jan 2010
Check it out at My Book List.
House of Cards
by William Cohan
Read in Oct 2009
Check it out at My Book List.
The Yankee Years
by Joe Torre
Read in Oct 2009
Check it out at My Book List.
Memorial Day
by Vince Flynn
Read in Oct 2009
Check it out at My Book List.
End The Fed
by Ron Paul
Read in Sep 2009
Check it out at My Book List.
Scarecrow
by Michael Connelly
Read in Aug 2009
Check it out at My Book List.
Free
by Chris Anderson
Read in Aug 2009
Check it out at My Book List.
The Gate House
by Nelson Demille
Read in Jun 2009
Check it out at My Book List.

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Welcome! I've been building this web site since 1997 and it's a work in progress, and so is my life.

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