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

A friend once told me that I deal life as if it was a chess game. Always thinking ahead. Always trying to predict the opponent’s next move. Its useful to anticipate things and plan. The thing with chess is that it has a finite number of states. It still takes a supercomputer traverse all the possible moves(or at least all the reasonable moves) but still its finite. Life unfortunately is like that. If you don’t know everything that will affect a possible outcome, your computation is useless. A mentat is only good as the data that is fed into it.

I’ve been working as a software developer for some years and have worked on lots of projects. For various reasons, unavoidable or not, project plans seldom reflect reality. I saw the futility of planning too much. More than planning, it pays more to know what is your goal, what is your current status and how you steer to your current state to the desired state. Knowing what are the essential and not so essential is vital. I never said that there should be no planning. Just don’t plan too much.

I was a bit late though to apply it(not planning that much) in life. Everytime I  make a decision, I will try to predict all the possible outcomes. The realist in me will have a bias on a bleak future. Sometimes its better not to look far out into the future. It’s because you usually can’t. We usually based our prediction on what we know. Unfortunately there are a lot of things that we don’t know. Those things that we don’t know, we can’t anticipate. And those things that we cannot anticipate is also a factor on the possible outcome. Knowing where you are happy and knowing what you can and cannot lose is more important than trying to think too much on what will happen.

Now I just enjoy the moment and damn the future. I will just lay out my goals, plan a little then live life. For someone who likes to know what will happen in the future, the pervading uncertainty is really gnawing at my soul. Thinking that you know what will happen is a false sense of security anyway.

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This has been the shittiest week I had so far. Its a bit personal. I just wish that it will be over soon.

Happiness is…*

*Yesterday some of my friends’ decided to have “happiness is <insert your own text here>” as their YM status. I could not think of anything yesterday though.

Last Two Minutes

I started writing this on New Year’s eve and planned to post it before the 1st of January. Alas! I fell asleep and got a lot of house chores to do.

Went down to Starbucks this afternoon to get my daily dose of caffeine. Saw the cute barista there. She was not pretty but she has that really cute smile. Never really talked to her before except for one time when she remarked that I’m a regular customer. I did not see her for a few months. After Christmas she was back. Anyway while she was collecting empty glasses I was able to muster the courage to say hi and talk…

Alan: Hi!

Girl: Hello. What are you doing this evening?

Alan:(did not expect the question) err.. dinner with friends. How about you?

Girl: Playing mahjong with my friends.

Alan: You were gone for a long time?

Girl: Yeah. was in HK for vacation. Its my last day now working here.

Alan: Where are you working next?

Girl: Going to study. School will start.

blah blah blah

Girl: Ok see you around!

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I so blew it up. I did not ask for her number when I should have. Either I’m not really too keen on it at that moment or I’m just a bit concerned that if she says no, the whole office will know because I am with my officemate at that time.

I remember an actor saying that what wins an Oscar are those scenes that made a lasting impression, not the whole two hour of movie.  If there is any consolation because of my lack of courage and wit at least I have a good “scene” before the year ended.

Damn that smile.

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I did not know how it started but I was discussing Star Trek with one of my officemate. I’m not a Trekkie. But I do watch some Star Trek episodes and movies once in a while. The Borgs are cool. And I never knew that there were a species stronger than them until I started to read wikipedia.

After a while the conversation drifted into girls. My officemate remarked that I should not be that nerdy and all. Discussing Star Trek with my eyes lighting up like a child gives that nerdy signal. Totally unattractive to girls. I casually remarked “I won’t sell my soul”.

*BTW there is a new Star Trek movie in 2009 with Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto(Sylar in Heroes) as a younger Kirk and Spock. That would be interesting.

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When it rains it pours. My latest project was a disaster. From lousy requirements, lousy execution, lousy configuration(my fault) and a lot of bad luck.  Up to the last week of deployment the directory where the application is supposed to be installed is not ready. On the day of the deployment itself the storage team needed to fix something. We deployed on the 11th hour, figuratively and literally.

It did not end there. Apparently I made a mistake in the configuration. A really big mistake. Good thing that the project was really not that critical.

Moral of the story: It does not matter if bad luck hits you one after the other. As long as you are lucky at the same time. It cancels out. Its like a basketball game wherein you just scored a point higher than your opponents. A win is a win. The score does not matter after it.

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For this new year I won’t have anything specific that I wanted to do. Except that I will work on something interesting. Geeky and and a bit work-related interesting kind of thing.

For 2009 I will just have some guidelines on how to live my life:

-As much as possible try new things. Don’t be uptight. Loosen-up a little. Don’t think that much. Just do it (and ask the number damn it).

-Be honest. Say what I really feel. Say what I want. Be who I am regardless of who I am with. If you are a jerk then be a jerk regardless of the people around you.

-Stop being conscious on what other people will tell or think. This is a bit related on the item above. But this merits a place on its own right.

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The last two months have probably the MOST impact for this year. So many things happened, from euphoria to sadness, from losing and gaining friends, from hero to goat. Its a seesaw of emotions, an oscillation of feelings. In the last two minutes of 2008, I came out alive. Scathed, but on top by a point.

The 11th Hour

I’m just fresh from a production deployment on the 11th hour before our change freeze. It literally on the 11th hour. We did our deployment an hour before the change freeze. The project was hit by a series of bad luck. We had the usual unstable requirements, some implementation changes(perl to groovy), applying tickets late in the project life cycle and a bunch of misspellings in the deployment directory. Some could have been averted(late application of tickets), some risks could have been minimized(requirements) but some are just simply bad luck(misspelling of the deployment directory).

It was stressful, but it was fun in a certain way. I was laughing the whole time because of the bad luck that came with the project. If we don’t have those ridiculous amount of bad luck this project would only be stressful. Those “I can’t believe this is happening” moments are the bright spots in this project.

Its a year’s worth of negative karma. I hope I burned them all this year.

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It’s hard to lead people when their livelihood does not depend on obeying you. And if your team has a lot of people having strong personalities, its a very rough terrain to tread. I learned these things when I led our team for the Christmas decoration contest. You have those people who have strong personalities, those who can’t help that much because of valid reasons(family) and those who doesn’t want to help at all.

Sometimes in a group project you really don’t expect some people to be of any help. Some really does not have the talent to do what needs to be done. But at least help in those things that you can do. Even I was not much of help on our Christmas origami project(I’m bad at folding papers). Aside from leading the team all I did was buy the materials and help in setting-up the decors.

We won third place.

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My laptop’s case has cracks. I have brought this to the service center twice because of the cracks near the hinges. But this is out of warranty now. Maybe its time to buy a macbook next year(if don’t see a silver 31mm lens).

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Just had my year end review last week. I don’t care much about it. As long as I don’t get kicked out of the job its ok. I don’t care about career that much. But I do want to achieve something next year. I guess I really need to get a bit serious next year.