Yes! I am celebrating my first day of work at Yahoo! be writing this post. I am going to be working as a Software Engineer with Yahoo! Mobile oneSearch. Currently this product beats Google’s mobile search. And if you don’t believe me, check it out yourself in Yahoo! Mobile site. To the left is my Yahoo! security name badge I got today. It gives me access to Yahoo! buildings and to the Gym.

The following post represents my personal opinion and not that of my prospective employer.

I have a stock portfolio which I check every day around noon (PST Time Zone), and that is the time which stocks are usually at their picks. I was surprisingly shocked seeing Yahoo! made a big jump from $29 to $33 a share. I am a big fan of Yahoo! and I had the opportunity to cheer up and celebrate the big jump, but the news that made the big move in Wall Street did not come appealing to me. The rumor was that Microsoft and Yahoo! are back in talks to merge.

The prospective merger has its own benefits and drawbacks. The one benefit which I could see is that Microsoft and Yahoo! may, and I am going to stick with ‘may’ here, join forces to become a giant competitor for Google, but it follows a series of problems. I think that if both companies merge, there is a bad sign for the market that they cannot compete with Google individually, and makes Google simply look unbeatable. The second drawback could come from the differences in each company’s corporate culture. Yahoo! is a fast paced creative company whereas Microsoft is a bureaucratic slow follower in products and services development. This means that merging the companies both together, may not result in a happy outcome as the insiders may feel the differences in two cultures resulting in lack of motivation and productivity. The second wow to the merger could be that Microsoft and Yahoo! have too much in common. They both offer services like email, messenger, maps, and search, thus the merger would be like which products to keep? They could keep both brands but, what is the merger deal then? And it would be waste of resources to keep two versions of services running. They have already jointed Yahoo! Messenger and Live Messenger together such that users can instant message in between two platforms, but I don’t think if this methodology is applicable for maps, and email. There is just too much overlap there.

However, I am proposing a resolution. Microsoft may offer Yahoo! $50 billion dollars for the merger, but I am thinking they should instead give up their MSN network to Yahoo!’s hands so that they can control their revenue making machine, and I believe that with the new Panama platform that is doable. The rest of the resolution remains on how they are going to split the revenue.

After all, what both companies should think about is that how they can attract users to use their search engine service. Lots of the problem is that not too many users use MSN for search, and proposing a merger cannot be a definite solution.

This post is disgusting. Don’t read it if you are easily disgussed.

I was watching the Discovery Channel while eating my dinner tonight and they had this show called Dirty Jobs. Out of all, one job came to be interesting to me, and that was making a complete reuse of cow’s poop.

Apparently some farmer and entrepreneur in a town somewhere in Kentucky, makes 100% use off cow’s poop. He has a farm with over 1000 cows and imagining each cow producing 6 pounds of shit every day, you do the math for 1000. What to do with all this shit? Well, he extracts butane gas from them and burns it for heating and cooking and he even sells the leftovers in gas tanks. Secondly, he uses a mechanical butt whole to extract the juice from the shit and uses it to water his crops. I bet the crops feel good about that! And lastly he uses the concentrated dried shit to make plant pots; in addition, his wife works of the flowers that are put in the pot, and together they do wholesale of those plants with the pots made at of the cow’s shit.

As an engineer, putting this whole situation into equations, we get:

Step 1:

g(Cow’s Raw Poop) = Butane Gas + Left Over Shit
g(x) = y is a function of extracting the gas (butane) from the given shit.

Step 2:

f(Left Over Shit) = Concentrated Dried Shit + Shit Juice
f(x) = y is a function of passing fresh shit through a mechanical butt whole which juices it.

Step 3:

p(x) = Plant Pot
p(x) = y is the function of making pots from dried shit.

Adding flowers we have:

Plant Pot + Flowers = Flower Pot

In conclusion, the cow’s poop is conserved in this system. When was the last time you made a good use of your poo?

I gave up the penguins this past weekend to study for the EE103 midterm exam I had today. By penguins I mean the Linux guys at Southern California Linux Expo. I also had a discounted ticket but I had to give it up to a friend. After all, the exam was hard and no matter how much you prepare for it, you would perform the same way.