Mar
01

My absence in blogging and friend work

Uncategorized

Some days are bad, some days are really bad. This week hasn’t been the best week. A couple of wrong decisions. Been busy (as usual). I stopped talking about me being busy by the way. ‘Cause it really came to me that if I am really busy then perhaps I should spend less time complaining that I am busy.

I still get amused once in a while with videos like the following. They had this Optimus Prime dancing with the music. That really made my day, I hope you don’t think I’m nerdy or what.

And then I go back to work. Work and back to bed. Bed and back to work. A typical routine that troubled me the pass couple of weeks especially. It turns out that I’ve been slow. And stress didn’t really help. I seem to work slower with stress.

I stopped reading my books. I read a lot of nonsense, we’ll leave that to next time. I returned all my library books. I brought back a Python book by the way and once I read the first couple of chapters I realized this book is more of a productivity destroyer. I chunk the book back into the library it came from and returned to work.

You see what I mean by work here is basically work work, school work and friend work.

We all know what’s work work already - it’s basically work in return of monetary value.

Then we have school work which is basically work in return of knowledge. I value knowledge a lot. I love to learn. I don’t have the time.

And finally there is what I call friend work. It really isn’t the traditional type of work as in you work because you want something in return. In reality, ‘friend work’ - as I call - is merely the act of maintaining friends with people (which I admit I’m not at all great at). You basically get closer friends in return by doing friend work and in return we get unexpected pleasure. I use the word ‘unexpected’ because in my opinion, if you were to expect something to come out of dinners with friends or even just a phone call to a friend, it seems to be not much different from work work.

I really is pretty hard to maintain friends and provide for them unconditionally. I often think really hard about friendship, kinship and blahblahship. My friend once told me that there’re 2 types of friends - a mutual friend and a ‘liability’. Liabilities are people whom are seeking you as a friend, come to you when you trouble and periodically just disappear in your life till the next time they’re in trouble.

So I started to count liabilities. Who are my liabilities. Who actually come to me when in trouble and disappear somehow. And then I realized there’re like, erm, a lot of people actually. Then comes to the question if they’re worth helping the next time round.

I think about it. And I think really hard. Eventually I came to this decision that I will help, perhaps not to the extend like I would help my better friends. But I’ll still help. Helping in hopes of maybe one day - just one day - when in trouble, that person might just help you when you seek him or her. The only difference, may I excuse myself, between work work and this type of friend work is that in work work, you work in expectation of something in return. Well… And in this type of friend work, you sort of work in a hope - not an expectation - that somehow, someday, the appropriate someone would be there for you when you need some help.

Anyway, the above is just some thoughts I have and I am writing it down more as personal note.

0

Dec
21

Some random thoughts - DRAM, Tshirts and technology

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You know I’m reading all the DRAM crap and I realized that I don’t get hardware at all. All the engineering stuff - I don’t understand it. All the diagrams they draw are nothing but lines to me though I have to admit some are rather artistically presented.

It would be cool to go out with a Tshirt that has the most complication diagram in your engineering class just ’cause no one understands. And these days with Giodarno coming out with quotations on shirts that are either nonsense or nonsense, it just makes your engineering diagram more and more acceptable. Geek culture you know.

Today, while it may still seem like a terrible conversation starter to talk about how Intel just came out with this new chip, or how Google had this new OpenSocial thingy, or how Hotmail’s going to improve (okay, probably not) - I think, I think we’re actually getting into something when we talk about all these.

We kinda get people excited - admittedly a rather small bunch of people. But one of these small bunch of people may just tell others, and words would just spread, things might just get hyped up too.

0

Sep
13

On why I did not install Java Dev Kit until today

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Because the whole Sun Java website is like a labyrinth. I just don’t know where to get my stuff. I just want a Java compiler and when I am at Java.sun.com I just don’t know what to get.

They have things like:

  • Java SE
  • Java EE
  • Java ME
  • NetBeans IDE
  • Web Services
  • Java Software

The whole process is just so alien to me. I am just trying to find the latest Java compiler which is the 6.0 one. I saw their versioning system too. They had 1.2, 2.0, 5.0 and all the different updates. Seriously, it’s just too confusing.

I don’t think any non-Java developer actually know what’s going on. A bit of reading led me to figure that they separate stuff to Enterprise levels and so on. It took me a while to figure what I want is Java SE Development Kit 6 (JDK) which includes the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) and command-line development tools that are useful for developing applets and applications.

I am aware that Sun has NetBeans and I am just wondering if they’re making compiler downloads harder to encourage people to get NetBeans. The whole website is just horrible. Oh yeah, by the way, Sun Microsystem, your Java website suits the 800 x 600 crowd. Your website is just half the width of my screen. With more and more websites suiting 1024 width, well, consider doing that too.

2

Sep
13

They asked me why people blog and I tried to answer

meta

I was talking a little about blogging today and I was mentioning to this 2 friends how some people blog about everything - cam whoring, pictures of food, daily activities, conversations with friends and er, more cam whoring. They totally don’t understand blogging. Actually the idea of blogging, or broadcasting of thoughts, it’s sometimes just for this feeling of satisfaction, of encouragement, of someone caring about what you do.

I blog for a mixture of reasons. But one of the main reason is satisfaction. I get thrilled to see visitors and it makes me happy that the article I posted actually helped them. I used to post more personal stuff but after a while I just realized that nobody’s really interested I guess. Eventually I switched to funny stuff that I see everyday that made me smile. And I want to remember the moments that I feel happy seeing a YouTube video, angry that the world isn’t fair, proud when people find my tutorials useful.

And thus I blog. It’s hard to describe the feeling. I just concluded to them that they should try it. Try blogging for a little while, get your friends to see your blog. It’s quite a good feeling for me and it may be for you too.

2

Aug
29

Creative finally gets Zen - not Zen Stone - just Zen

Uncategorized

Creative finally learnt some branding lesson. Their branding is almost terrible. They have products like:

  • ZEN Vision W
  • ZEN Vision
  • ZEN Vision:M
  • ZEN V Plus
  • ZEN V
  • ZEN Stone Plus
  • ZEN Stone
  • ZEN Wav
  • ZEN Neeon 2
  • ZEN Neeon 512MB/ 1GB/ 2GB
  • ZEN Neeon 5GB/ 6GB
  • ZEN MicroPhoto
  • ZEN Nano Plus

Looking at all these names make me giddy, I don’t feel zen at all.

“Dad I want a Zen.”

“Oh, is it the Vision W or the Vision or the Vision: M?”

Perhaps this branding confusion is due to Creative being unsure what sort of what products consumers really want. They throw out like 10 designs and just bet that one of them should be favorable among the consumers. Creative ZEN Whatever should be just Creative ZEN. (more…)

5

Aug
29

What the - Symantec thinks OneCare pricing is ‘monopolistic’

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Symantec thinks Microsoft’s security suite is showing signs of monopolistic pricing? Haha, Symantec, you’re so funny, it’s just your anti-virus software being too expensive.

Remember the time when you disappointed me with your ugly yellow interface, your resource hogging tools. You have the most confusing set of products, your Antivirus software is cross-bundled in numerous of your flagship titles. Now you micmic the Windows Live OneCare idea and offer everything in one simple suite you call Norton 360 and you’re calling their price ‘monopolistic’.

Symantec CEO: Microsoft security ware pricing ‘monopolistic’

Symantec Chairman and CEO John Thompson blamed Microsoft on Tuesday for the current pricing competition his company faces in the consumer security market, suggesting Microsoft’s pricing scheme for its first entry into the space is “monopolistic.”

Speaking at the offices of the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York, Thompson said Microsoft’s decision last year to offer Windows Live OneCare, a service that combines firewall, antivirus and backup capabilities, for $49.95 per year for three PCs “clearly recast prior expectations for consumer security technology.”

“I don’t want to say it was monopolistic, but it looked that way to some of us,” Thompson said. (more…)

2

Aug
18

Some thoughts on Web 2.0

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Everyone is talking about Web 2.0 these days. Honestly, I don’t really like to use that term a lot as it has been overused and has, in my opinion, kinda lost its meaning.

Today, Web 2.0 can mean anything - video content, social networking, social news, social bookmarking, Ajax, Prototype libraries, JSON, accordion visual effects, mash-ups, Ruby on Rails, XML, and whatever.

It’s a marketing term for any webservice that is published after 2005. Google managed to revolutionize the way people understand ‘beta’. Today, some products is following some sort of a perpectual beta idea, meaning it’s just beta forever. That, once again, is pure marketing.

Everyone wants the future of the web.

(Facebook has communities for Web 2.0, Web 3.0, Web 4.0, Web 5.0 and in case you haven’t noticed - Web �??.0.)

Has the web really changed that much? Sure it has, but it didn’t just come overnight. It came a long way and Web 2.0 describes the awakening - the awakening of ordinary people such as my mom and my elephant - and the reintroduction of these technologies. Magazines that cover whatever Web 2.0 ideas are selling like hotcakes and if you actually read a couple of them you’ll realize none is particularly clear of what Web 2.0 is.

Because it just is so many things! But ultimately, I think Web 2.0 is about you and me addicted to connecting and sharing information. It’s as if we allow ourselves to be part of a whole movement. Just thinking of that scares me, but the thought never fails to make me tingle with excitement.

2