Just as soon as the Microsoft CEO started his speech at the Corvinus University (my Alma Mater), a protesting student wearing a “Microsoft=Corruption” shirt stood up and threw eggs at the Microsoft CEO. Not exactly a sign of the famous “Hungarian hospitality”.

(If your feed does not show embedded videos, please click through to watch it in the blog.  Update: Originally I had the index.hu video here, but as it started to slow down, I uloaded it to youtube and am now embedding the youtube version.  A day later this vid received over 223K views)

On second thought, perhaps it was fair enough. After all, his boss, Bill Gates received a full cream-pie in the face ten years ago in Belgium - Ballmer only got some of the ingredients.

Another ironic moment comes at 0:38m in the video: as other students stand up to give way to the departing egg-thrower, the camera closes in on one of them holding up his shiny Apple - and not the pie variety.

Update: The search is on for Ballmer’s replacement.

Another video from a different angle, and it ends with the Gates Pie Scene.

Update#2: OK, enough of the fun part. As the story circulates people start wondering what may be the background, and since the only sources are in Hungarian, here’s a summary of the circumstances:

A Hungarian Government bid, worth $25B Hungarian Forints, roughly $157M was allegedly skewed towards MS. (A ‘competitive’ bid with wording that all but ensures only Microsoft meets the requirements.) A Hungarian Watchdog Body (sort of like the FTC in the US) challenged the bidding process via the Court system, and a trial date was set for today. The trial was suddenly and unexpectedly rescheduled just as Ballmer arrived in Budapest. So there may be a perception of the Bully lobbying there.

That said, they could have protested with banners, without eggs. Or displaying more of those flashy Macbooks.

Tags: Apple, bill gates, budapes, egg-throwing, gates creampie, mac, microsoft, prank, protest, steve ballmer

… from almost two decades ago. A found this gem amongst a bunch of old photos I saved by digitizing them. This was a rookie consultant’s SAP knowledge base. Search wasn’t quite as powerful as it is on SDN, Wikipedia or just about any Knowledge Management tool today. Oh, and it was quite local: you either had to right binder with you or not. SAP Consultants typically bought big heavy pilot cases trying to carry at least 3 binders for Client visits. If they lucked out, the correct three …

It was quite a good workout though.

Today’s equivalent: a laptop? Perhaps an iPhone?

Tags: Knowledge Management, sap, SAPedia, SDN

OK, OK, so SAP’ s annual conference was supposed to set everything on fire - but did they have to take it literally?  We barely made it home and now Florida is burning.  Oh, and one lucky person owns a miracle home: everything is charred except his house and lawn.

Do you think it’s Photoshopped?  That’s what I thought, too, but Orlando Sentinel photographer Joe Burbank says he took the shot from a helicopter tour of the area.

Tags: brushfire, fires, Florida, sap

I haven’t posted for over ten days - and my feed readership is going up.  Is that a message about my blogging, or what?

I had a few fun and hectic days @ SAP’s annual conference, SAPPHIRE - am still stuck here, got airplane ears on the flight here, which turned into a full-blown ear infection (hey, I even gave up my Eric Clapton ticket), and now the doc ordered me not to fly, to avoid risk of permanent damage.  Yikes! 

But this is all temporary inconvenience, nothing compared to what others have to go through.  Yesterday an old family friend passed away.  He was originally my Dad’s best friend, I remember seeing him around when I was a kid.  Later he taught me how to drive a car. (He had his car tuned like a rocket - manual shift, mind you -  and I think he got the fighter pilot and driver roles confused.  I only got to the driver level…).   Even later I played with his little daughter, was something of a “big uncle” to her - she is now a Mom herself.   A three-decade, multi-generational friendship, passed from my Dad to me - cut off so abruptly.   Just two months ago I was in Hungary and met him - energetic, dynamic, good-humored as always. Hospitalized a week later, diagnosed with leukemia another 2 weeks later.  And now gone, forever. This is just crazy.  We’re all so vulnerable.

All this put a bit of a damper on my blogging - but I’m coming back soon.  And to all those new readers - not sure what brought you here, but thanks!

<rant>

TV news in the background - they talk about how we can expect more laptop searches at airports, agents searching for child pornography.  This is insane.  I am not supporting child pornography, but fighting it should not be the mission of airport security or customs officials.  Air travel is already bad enough, searching through today’s huge hard disks would bring it to a screeching halt.

</rant>

Tags: air travel, customs, laptop search, rant

Pardon my French.. it’s not exactly my style, especially not in the title, but enough is enough. I’ve long given up detailing Vista’s countless failures, but somehow, unconsciously I still hoped things would get better after installing SP1.

Not that I could get it - I was one of the “few” who had an offending Intel graphics chip in my HP PC, so I could not get it for a while. Then today it showed up on Windows Update, so off I went to a spare laptop (XP) since I knew the update would take about an hour or so.

Checking it an hour later:

Service Pack did not install. Reverting Changes. Do not turn off your computer.

WTF? So now it’s gonna spend another hour, a total cost of two hours to get back to where I was in the first place? And they wonder (?) why everyone says Vista Sucks.

P.S. Windows 7, whenever it comes, should be released as “Vista Final”, free to all Vista victims along with Microsoft’s letter of apology.

Tags: sp1, vista, vista sp1, vistasucks, Windows

Update (4/20): parislemon:  If Twitter Breaks in the Woods and No One Can Tweet About It, Is It Really Broken? 

Tags: Twitter

This gives “hands-on” education a new meaning…

Update: originally I posted this with a typo in the title - one that made the whole title dull and meaningless:

College Curriculum Includes Brother Visit.

Ouch.

This would be funny, if it wasn’t said. Yet I can see all the late night shows making fun of Mexican police trying to shoot on a moving target: killer bees.

Africanized Bees Attack Mexican Police

MEXICO CITY (AP) — At least 70 police officers were hospitalized after so-called Africanized bees swarmed a police shooting range in southern Mexico, authorities said Tuesday.

Talk about precision targeting.    But wait, there’s more:

The attacked occurred Monday in Tapachula, Chiapas, after one of the policemen hit the bees’ hive with a bullet.

Oh, so Police started shooting first.  AP has the wrong title, it should read:  Police Attack Killer Bees - They Launch Counter-attack.

Update (4/9):  Simple math from the Beemaster Forum:

70 cops with 36 bullets each (appox) = 2520 shots
1 hive = 50,000 bees (minimum on a healthy well established hive.

Sounds like the bees win.

Tags: killer bees, mexico, police

Zazzle, the online T-Shirt business has been ill for a while.   I wanted to order my own T-shirt, but needed a slight addition to the design.  Well, it’s kinda difficult to work on the design when images are not displayed properly…

Today Zazzle’s condition appears to have worsen: any time you try to talk to her, she just blurts out:

An error occurred on this page which may make it unusable. If this occurs please refresh the page.

I did. Refresh. She blurts again. Again.

Ouch.  Dear Zazzle, I hope you recover soon…

Update: I am not experiencing the above errors from another laptop, running XP.  But it’s not browser-specific either: on this Vista computer I run into the same problem whether using Firefox or IE7.  And yes, I cleared everything (cookies, permissions, cache) on both browsers.

Tags: cafepress, online retail, online t-shirt, t-shirt design, zazzle