Thank you, Jagjit Singh.

Since 1978, the price of tuition at US colleges has increased over 900 percent, 650 points above inflation. To put that in number in perspective, housing prices, the bubble that nearly burst the US economy, then the global one, increased only fifty points above the Consumer Price Index during those years. But while college applicants’ faith in the value of higher education has only increased, employers’ has declined. According to Richard Rothstein at The Economic Policy Institute, wages for college-educated workers outside of the inflated finance industry have stagnated or diminished.

…

As faculty jobs have become increasingly contingent and precarious, administration has become anything but. Formerly, administrators were more or less teachers with added responsibilities; nowadays, they function more like standard corporate managers—and they’re paid like them too… Department of Education estimates that by 2014 there will be more administrators than instructors at American four-year nonprofit colleges.

Person after person came, staring into their phones (we have an app for internal maps), stood right in front of the glass wall and the piece of paper… and nothing registered. Most people kept looking into the phone, with a yearning expression on their face, as if they wished the phone tell them more. A few turned around 180 or 360 degrees on their heels (still staring at their screens), trying to orient themselves.

It’s telling of how much of our lives we’ve boxed-in to a few square inches of space.

Very few people will buy a Nikon D7000 as their first DSLR. The biggest audience for this camera is either folks like me — I’ve been shooting a D80 for four years and am looking to upgrade; or the super-enthusiast or professionals looking for a solid second body. Neither group will care for the 18-105; but both will badly want their hands on a D7000. An excellent opportunity for Nikon to get rid of some 18-105 lenses.

No surprise to see that the “used” section of the 18-105 lens is full of people wanting to get rid of their kit lens.

To toggle instant previews on or off, all you have to do is click anywhere on a search result snippet (or click once on the blue magnifying glass). That will prevent instant previews from automatically popping up, or re-enable them if you had turned them off.

Somehow a lot of mainstream sites seem to recommend using adblock, greasemonkey or other plugins — but they’re not needed just for disabling instant previews.

Sweeeeeeet.

Any visitor probably first experiences Sydney at its harbour, which gives a million vantage points to view the city from. There’s one secret to the charm — multiple perspectives of the heart of the city; each spectacular.

There’s the architecture — a mix of old colonial and modern glass, even leaving aside the Opera House.

And call me stupid, but I couldn’t get over how well Sydney’s signs were written.

In my travels so far, I’ve found cities to be variously amusing or drab, zippy or sleepy, grand or quaint; but I never thought I’d ever find a city beautiful. Sydney, however, had a beauty so unexpected it left me in disbelief.

We had just planned to be in Sydney for only a day. It felt like we could stay a lifetime.

It was a risky venture — six lives had been lost in the previous decade trying to fly across a sea that Brits and Yankees today fondly refer to as ‘the pond’. Whats more, Lindbergh went against conventional wisdom and used a custom-designed plane, hacked together in a couple of months, using only a single engine when all earlier attempts had used at least two.

It was a time of tremendous excitement and anticipation. Over the next thirty years, aviation progressed at a frenzied pace, and in 1957 the venerable Boeing 707 commercial airliner entered service, marking the beginning of the Jet age. What would the next half-century look like?

The sad, no, tragic, answer — exactly the same. Show them a file picture, and 95% of people today wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a Boeing 707 and an Airbus A380, the so-called “latest and greatest” commercial aircraft. And while the rest of may be able to distinguish the two, isn’t it astounding how similar they are?

Yeah, yeah, there have been significant improvements. Carrying capacity, range, comfort, safety, fuel efficiency, blah blah. I’ve read the brochures. Whatever. Significant improvements is polite-speak for no leaps. The cruising speed of the A380 is actually a tad slower than the 707. Meaning it takes the same time for me to get from Point A to Point B while flying today, and don’t even get me started on the airport security lines. What the hell happened?

I don’t know. But this post isn’t about the aviation industry.

It’s about a sinking suspicion that I’ve been having. That the computing world is on the same kind of flight path.

See, when I was a kid, I used to hate having to go out anywhere, except to this family’s home that we knew. Because they had this awesome thing called a Computer. Much later, I would learn that it was the PC XT, the first computer that came standard with a hard drive (a 10 megabyte hard drive). But to me it was just the Computer. It was like a combination of a TV and a robot — it had a screen but the screen responded to what you did. Intelligently. It would produce words that you were typing, or it could show graphics. I played the original Prince of Persia on it.

Then my father bought home our first computer – an AT 286. With a colour monitor. That had VGA resolution. I cannot begin to tell you how much better Prince of Persia looked on it. And it was FAST. It had a small “Turbo” switch and light and when it was on, boy, did the machine race. The only time I turned it off was while playing Pacman because Pacman was so fast at Turbo that it was unplayable.

The next few years of my life were frantic. I grew so attached to the computer that I actually would agree to type pages and pages of work-related documents for my parents just to be allowed to use it. I learned AutoCAD and marveled when we upgraded to a 40 MB hard drive, because then we could keep AutoCAD installed along with the rest of our applications. Then came GW-BASIC, my first language, the first programs. The addition of a multi-media kit, we could actually listen to CDs on a computer!

I remember the two months a friend and I spent running around borrowing audio CDs from family and ripping them. And then filling up a 640 MB hard drive with MP3s and taking it to a guy in a garage who had a CD-burner; praying that the auto-rickshaw ride wouldn’t screw up the drive. And the badass feeling of “do we rock or what!” at possessing a 5-inch disc with 110 songs on it. All the years of painstakingly recording individual songs on cassettes were finally behind us.

Junior college in Singapore, where I discovered e-mail and keeping in touch with family; and finally, 1999, when I bought and assembled my first desktop in undergraduate school; discovered the Internet and that through it, I could get music and movies and news and chat with people half a world away, using these strange but exciting programs called IRC and ICQ. And using a neat little software called Photoshop, I could scan and edit pictures that I took from my little film camera.

It’s more than a decade later, now, and I have much nicer computers. But I’m still listening to movies and music and writing some code and trying to keep in touch with people half a world away. Some of them are using their computers to raise virtual pigs and grow virtual cabbage. I still use Photoshop, and the latest drool-worthy laptops from a company called Apple, I believe, offer a Turbo mode.

When I quote Star Wars it’s usually Yoda or Luke; but Han’s gotta have this one.

I’ve got a bad feeling about this.

What the hell happened? I think I have a vague clue; but I’ll leave it for next time.