2006 in Review

2006 can be summed in one word. FREEDOM!

Freedom from __

Well it was not that bad. I think it was just not for me. I really wanted to resign earlier. I was just hoping that I could finish my graduate studies while earning. One of the things that I liked with that company is the flexi-time and the relatively high pay.

Freedom from work

For more than a month I have no work and just stayed at home to study and play DOTA. I became the official “headhunter” during the nightly DOTA sessions.

My mother was also happy that I was at home. When she wants to go somewhere she can easily ask me to drive.

The only downside from not working is I can’t buy anything since I have no source of income.

Freedom from Studies

It started as an excuse. I started my graduate studies because I am so tired of answering the question: Why are you staying in UP? Though it was very hard to explain that I love what I was doing back then, saying that I was taking graduate studies is a good way to justify my stay.

Initially it was a hindrance to work because I really like my work. Later on it is one of the things that kept my sanity from my boring and mind numbing job.

Freedom!

One of the things that I always think about is whether I can live independently or how it is if I live alone. Now I have my answer.

The worst nightmare of every hardware(PC hardware) enthusiast would be a calamity hitting Taiwan. Almost all the chips(memory, video cards) are fabbed in Taiwan.

Apparently Taiwan is not only important to hardware enthusiasts. Taiwan is also the main hub of Asia’s communication lines. Yesterday we have no Internet at home and today it is a bit slow.

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I’m a bit busy lately and was not able to blog. The only holiday I had was on Christmas day. I came back to work on the 26th. I really miss the Philippines and its long break.

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One of my new year resolutions would probably be to sleep early. I am finding it hard recently to sleep before ten. Before it would be very hard for me to stay awake after 11pm.

My disastrous week was saved by lighting the Christmas Tree(NT)

We will have a code walkthrough with our team leader tomorrow. He told us that there should never be any compiler warnings on our code. I also have some checkstyle(plugin that checks coding standards)
warnings. I’m having a very bad week. I am having some problems with our code repository and testing tool and now this.

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I thinking of buying a game for myself this Christmas. I’m currently looking at NeverWinter Nights 2 or Medieval Total War. Another option is to wait for BattleStations:Midway. It will be released early 2007.

I finally got myself a new phone last week. The SE W850 was on sale at Singtel(99sgd and 2 year contract). Unfortunately I needed to add a hundred more. I am only eligible for a 1 year contract because of my employment pass. The phone has a 1Gb memory bundled which means I don’t need to upgrade the memory. I initially wanted the K800 but it was more expensive by 100sgd plus the memory is ony 64mb.

The camera of the W850 has no autofocus but the walkman features and the bundled memory more than makes up for it.

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One of my housemates left so I got their laundry days(weekends). At least I will be forced to stay at home during the weekends.

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I also bought a vacuum cleaner last week. It was used a lot when my housemates switched rooms. Sulit!

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One of the things that I really hate is logging in your time in those timesheets. Currently I need to fill up three time sheets, two weekly and one daily. I guess some people are really obsessed with metrics.

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After working in the industry for more than three years I noticed their obsession in cutting the development time. Sometimes its good because it leads to automation and better process. Actually automation and better development process should be done because it adds reliability and quality of the software. But did they ever realize that what is taking most of the time is requirements gathering. Maybe improving the way they gather requirements will shorten the overall time of the project.

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Due to my laziness(in reporting my progress) one of the team leads lost track of my progress and sent me two emails telling me that I should have finished my work. Actually I already have. I just failed to inform them explicitly.