Sometimes the best things in the world is free(or cheap). I’ve been looking at telephoto lenses for the past few weeks. I’m thinking of buying the DA* 50-135 f2.8(IQ is excellent but heavy and expensive) or should I settle for a DA 55-300(light and IQ is good for the money). I’m also considering the FA 77 Ltd(IQ is great, light but not flexible).

The last Wednesday night I saw a second-hand Pentax SMC 75-150mm f4 on the Clubsnap’s buy and sell forum. I got the lens for SGD 110 after bargaining. The lens is small but heavy. The zoom creeps a little when I put it on 75mm. I need to hold it when I shoot at that focal length. It is fully manual. I don’t mind though. At least I can work on my manual focusing skills.

For now my lust to buy new lenses is satiated.

Note:

IQ = Image Quality

This is old news but I still shook my head when I stumbled on it again.

Snippets from the Inquirer. This is a proposal made by Chiz Escudero.

Subjects like trigonometry, calculus, geometry, and algebra, should be taught only in college or as high school electives since these are not relevant to the everyday life of Filipinos, he said.

“If by any chance they are able to reduce the curriculum by half, we would effectively double the number of classrooms in a day and overnight, because we can now use the classroom twice over instead of simply being used once, given the overburden curriculum that our children have,” he said.

Sheesh!

I’ve been thinking of buying a telephoto lens. While my lenses are fine(12-24mm and a 43mm), they are a bit intrusive when covering events since you need to get closer to get portraits. The dilemma? Teles are Pentax’s weak point. We don’t have an equivalent to Canon’s 70-200mm, cheap(relatively) but excellent. We have a 60-250 f4 but its heavier(1.2kg vs .7kg) and more expensive(1.9SGD).

Anyway I don’t think I could afford it and the weight just sucks. I think I will just settle for the Pentax DA 55-300. Its not a constant zoom but for the price and the quality, its spot on.

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I’ve been wanting to stream my audio to my AV40s using Airport Express. Right now, only AirTunes support that and it can only be used by iTunes. The problem is you need to synch the video with the audio.

Enter Rouge Amoeba’s Airfoil. It has a video player that does just that.

Now I can watch movies while in bed and have excellent audio from my speakers.

I finally got to install Snow Leopard last week. Not much changes. Arbalest(my MBP) seems a bit snappier. Quicktime looks better with the black trimmings. Screen looks different because of the default gamma (1.8 to 2.2). But you can change this into Leopard. Most of the changes are internal(Grand Central Dispatch etc).

I did a clean install. I just like things clean.

The upgrade cost me 48SGD. Not cheap. But not that expensive either. I looked around the price of Windows XP Pro OEM. Its around 129 SGD.

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Its been two weeks since our project was cancelled. Im bored now. Im supposed to be reviewing for a financial certification but the reviewer is too boring. I was lucky if I was able to read a chapter in a day.

One good thing though is that I was able to read again on computer hardware. I’m a hardware enthusiast before. Monitoring how Intel and AMD has been slugging it out during the Pentium 4 vs Athlon era, reading graphic card review and knowing the prices of pc hardware on Gilmore stores. When I came to Singapore I lost my appetite for assembling PC hardware. I don’t have a house here. Collecting a  lot of stuff is a pain when you transfer house or when you go back to the Philippines.

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Bless me father for I have sinned….

Finally I bought a pair of M-Audio AV40. My cheapie Altec Lansing 2.1 I bought two years ago is not that bad, but the quality is below my Altec 621 back at home. I’m not really an audiophile( and I don’t know if this is just self-justification) but this speakers are good. The vocals are much much clearer. Its only a 2.0 setup(no subwoofer) but I’m not really into gaming nowadays.

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I was putting-off buying these speakers until June. Stress though has a strange way of overriding my Scrooge persona. Even though I have a dinner to attend, I made a trip to the store to buy these sweet pair of speakers.

After running the JPMorgan Run (5.6km) I almost had my knees busted again. Its not really painful. It could have been if I did not walk the last 500m(or more).  My time is not so decent. I ran it for 40 minutes. I was gunning for at least 35 minutes. I did run the 10km for 1hr and 9 minutes. 

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One thing that I like about long distance running is that you don’t have to compete that much with other people. You compete with yourself. You train your mind to reach a goal. To run without stopping is psychological( assuming you are physically fit of course). 

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You can cheat on running. But it will always come back for you.

I like this tagline by New Balance. Saw this on the MRT some months ago.

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I bought an Apple Airport Express. Now I can play my MP3s wirelessly. The easiest solution would be to use quality earphones. But I don’t like airphones that much. Creative has those wireless solutions. But you need to have a PCMCIA slot. 

It’s currently hooked to a cheapie 2.1 Altec Lansing setup. Once I get some funds I will hook it to something better.

My boss got annoyed using my teammates keyboard(the so called recession keyboards.. the cheapest you can buy) that he replaced two of my teammates keyboard with an Apple keyboard. He did not replace mine.  I’m already using a Microsoft natural keyboard. 

I tried the Apple keyboard. Can’t use it. Too small for me. 

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For the nth time our project plan changed. Tasks were reassigned here and there. Some of the design tasks are moved later in the project timeline. I was already done with them though. Talk about cowboy project management.

Hope is not a Strategy

After reading those economics and behavioral economics books, I ventured into a sales book, Hope is not a Strategy. Its my first time reading sales book. This book is less than 200 pages so I was not expecting to learn the science of sales. I was just curious when I saw this book in the bookstore. My previous manager likes to say “Hope is not a strategy” whenever we start our replies during standup with “I hope( I can finish this task by blah blah)”.

I am less than halfway through this book. I already learned that there different kinds of salesman. There is teller type(level 0). This type of salesman will go through with you the whole product line in their catalogue but does not know anything other than what is written there. 

There is also the farmer. The farmer is in-charge of repeat sales. Those who stays within the account for repeat business. Opposite of the farmer is the hunter. The hunter is the special forces of the sales world. They are like challenges, think fast and their sole purpose is too win accounts. 

Business developers on the other hand develops demand rather than responds to demand. They create opportunities by creating the needs.  

The last type is the Industry Network Consultant. These type of salesmen work on only one industry sometimes on only one account, regardless of their employer. People in that industry know them. They have the connections already. They may change who they work for. But they will still sell on the same industry or organization.

This will not be in my list of favorite books. But this is a good read especially if you want to know some interesting things about sales.

Arbalest online

I finally bought my first mac last week. It’s a macbook pro with a 2.4 Ghz Core 2 Duo(was actually thinking of waiting for an Intel i7 based MBP) and a 9600GM(256 Mb) video card.  I like the macbook pro over the macbook but the price difference was keeping me from buying it initially. Damn those aluminum macbook. If those aluminum macbook did not exists it would have been an easy decision.

What made me buy the MBP? My girlfriend was actually trying to bargain a good deal on the Macbook Pro and the sales lady gave us one. Rules of bargaining. If you bargain and they gave it at the price you wanted, you must buy. Besides, this is my first time to splurge for myself. I pushed uncle Scrooge this time around(but now he is haunting me).

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I did have some trouble setting this thing up. I replaced the hard drive and I don’t have a torx 6 screwdriver. I had to borrow from my cousin.  I bought my mac on a Saturday and was able to install the hard drive on Tuesday. Talk about wasted time.

The biggest problem I had was transferring my files. My external hdd is formatted in ext3(linux file system) and OS X cannot mount it. Doing it(mounting an ext drive)  in windows is much easier. 

*Update: I used the original hard drive and formatted it to fat32(using GParted). OS X can’t still mount it. I used OS X’s Disc Utility to format it. It worked. OS X is a pain sometimes…

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One of the few reasons that I don’t want to buy an MBP is that I will buy accessories for it. Spending does not stop from buying the laptop alone.  I already bought a bigger hard drive(WD 500Gb) for it, Monde Palm Guard and Monde Clear Case. My girlfriend(thanks bebe!) even bought me a Zephyr cooler(also by Monde). 

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Arbalest is the arm slave(mech) of Sagara Sousuke in Full Metal Panic.

Outliers

Pop quiz hotshot.  What does pro-hockey player have in common? The answer will surprise you. Most of them are born on the first quarter of the year.  This obviously has nothing to do with astrological signs. This is due to the cut-off date for age-class hockey which is January 1.  Kids who are born on the first quarter are naturally bigger and has more experience playing hockey. And when the time comes when the coach chooses an all-star team, the older players, being bigger and more experienced, has a greater chance of being chosen. With better coaching and all that extra practice,  those players has more chance to make it into the big league.  This example shows that talent does not necessarily translate into success. The environment you are born with(in this case the cut-off date) has a large impact whether you will succeed or not.

This is the thesis of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. People does not necessarily rise from nothing. The environment, parentage and patronage has a very profound effect on whether we succeed or not. It not just talent. You just need to be good enough.

Take for example math. Why are Asians more talented in Math? In Outliers, the main reason he said is because of Asians tend to work harder. They tend to work on math questions longer. And math is one of those things where hard work really matters. If there is a Math Olympics that will be held, you can tell which country would win even without asking a single math question. You can tell if you can measure how hard they are willing to work.  The next question is why Asians tend to work harder. It is because Asians work in rice paddies. Working in a rice field is ten to twenty times more labor-intensive than working on an equivalent-size corn or wheat field.  Hard work is embedded into Asian culture, and that culture is inherited by Asians of today.

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Another interesting thing that is mentioned in Outliers is that in order to become an expert in a field you need ten thousand hours or about ten years(reminded me of Peter Norvig’s Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years).  He mentioned Bill Gates and Bill Joy(creator of vi) as examples.  They have accumulated ten thousand hours of programming. And those ten hours of programming was because they are (very )lucky enough to have access to computers at those times.

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outlier(copied verbatim from the book)

1. something that is situated away from or classed differently from a main or related body
2. a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample