Battery recalls

Sony is used to be thought as the first choice when purchasing IT products (audio, TV, laptop, etc) a few years ago, but apparently this has been a passed history. Recently a number of battery recalls have been announced; each of which are associated with the batteries manufactured by sony. DELL recalls 4.1 million batteries: Dell Announces Battery Recall (14/Aug/06, on DELL.com) Dell takes heat over battery recall (on CNET.com) A week later, iBook and PowerBook from Apple (1.8 million batteries)... Battery Exchange Program iBook G4 and PowerBook G4 (on Apple.com) Apple recalls 1.8 million batteries (on CNET.com) ...and now Sony VAIO from Sony itself: Laptop Bursts Into Flames - Owner Says Laptop Was Charging Looks like MIJ is not necessarily trustworthy any more.

Golf

Peter to abroad

Peter is going abroad to give presentation during the next 3 weeks (13 Sep till 31 Sep). The destinations would cover Japan, Hongkong, Malaysia and Taiwan. However he's a bit nervous about his powerpoint slides as the slides keeps breakinig as soon as he fixes the powerpoint file - the position of pictures moves away from where they are supposed to be, the size of text fonts varies, the animations behave oddly , and the most weird thing is that the powerpoint file size goes up to more than 200MB! I'll have a look on the file and see what the hell is the problem with it.

M$ Excel inadequates for statistical analysis

Key words: Excel, inadequate Using Excel for Statistical Data Analysis Report in 1999 (pdf) Spreadsheet Addiction Problems using Microsoft Excel for statistics (pdf) Is it practical to use Excel for stats? Statistical flaws in Excel (pdf)

Unknown contamination

The subcultured plate looks quite yuck: Apparently they've got capsule on them and they're also hemolytic (beta-hemolytic). Due to the capsule, the colonies are so sticky that I've got trouble with making slide smear from its single colony. The Gram stain of the "unknown contamination": Sticky colony, clogging cells. Looks like these Bacillus-like cells indeed have got capsules on their cells. Strangly, the thick capsule somehow can't be seen on some of them.