I spent Friday with my officemates at the Costa Sand Resorts at Pasir Ris. It was a reunion of some sorts(with our ex-officemates) and the birthday celebration of our one of my ex-officemates kid.

Unfortunately some of my ex-officemates did not came because of one reason(work etc) or another.

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I helped my friend bring the food, plastic utensils and the coals. We actually forgot a lot of things(like fork etc) but luckily the nearby Cheers convenience store has all the things you need for a barbecue. They are actually selling metal nets, tongs, firestarters, fan and even food! They have chicken and pork and you can choose between honey or garlic.

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My head is aching yesterday because of lack of sleep. My officemates snored! This reminded me of my friends who also snored. The most you can do is to swing your hands like an orchestra conductor and pretend that you are conducting a Snorenata.

Drinking from the firehose

Before I transferred to WordPress, I created a separate blog for my tech/geeky posts. Later I decided against it because I was not posting that much geeky stuff and I do not like maintaining two blogs.

A few days ago Nes asked me if I wanted to create our own programming blog. I have been reading some CS and programming stuff lately. Writing about it is a good way to force myself to understand the topic better. It would be inappropriate though to post it in my personal blog since its not the usual tech stuff(gadgets etc.) that I write about. Some things might get a little bit deep and posting in a more specialized blog is better.

All my programming and software engineering posts will now be posted at DFTF(Drinking From The Firehose). My tech(gadgets etc) posts would still be here, only the more arcane stuff will be transferred.

My idle days are over…

I’ve been busy for the week. Finally, I was doing something in the office. Still not my idea of a fun work(it was a support job) but doing some Perl scripts and learning some command-line fu alleviated the pain of support.

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Nestor asked me to buy for him Founders at Work. I bought it at once so I can read it before I deliver it to him. It was a collection of interviews of the founders of startups(Yahoo, Hotmail, Apple, Lotus etc). While reading the book I found some common theme. Most of the founders are really smart(in a nerdy kind of way) and the environment plays a lot of factor for encouraging people to build their own company. Maybe I will write more of this when I finish the book.

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Recently I’ve been researching on DSLRs again. The new guy in our office is a camera buff and he was teaching us a lot of things about cameras. Now I want to have one. But what made me really want to buy one are the pancake lenses from Pentax.

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A few weeks ago I noticed that She’s status in Google Talk is the lyrics of Hirai Ken’s song, Pop Star. Pop Star is the ending song of Kiken Na Aneki(a JDrama). Then last night I saw Yanx’s status “Si <insert_name_here> gustong maging Pop Star”. So I asked her. Apparently it was one of the songs in the Nintendo DS game(Quendan 2).

I liked the lyrics(when translated — I do not understand Japanese) of that song. Another Japanese song that I like is Sekai wa Sore wo Ai to Yobun da ze by the SamboMasters. It is the ending song of Densha Otoko.

Milking the iPod brand

I woke up early this morning to see Apple’s update to its product line.  I’m not exactly overwhelmed(the iPod Touch was impressive except for the capacity). For the price-sensitive, the iPod Classic is a steal(80GB for 249USD).

What caught my attention, having watched Steve Yegge’s talk recently and having read a book on branding, is the overextension of the iPod brand. To build a good brand, what you essentially want, is to associate the brand with something. When you think of BMW you would think of “fun to drive” while Volvo connotes “safety”. When you think of iPod what usually comes to your mind? A white(or black), simple and elegant music player right?

The narrower the focus of the brand, the more powerful it is. Previously Apple has three kinds of iPods. The iPod, iPod Nano and the iPod shuffle. The Nano and shuffle are extensions of the iPod brand. Think of it as the Coke lite of the iPod brand. Now they threw in the iPod Touch and renamed the iPod to iPod Classic. Think of it as renaming Sprite as Coke Clear and renaming Coke as Coke Classic. What does Coke stands for then? What would iPod mean now? The brand becomes diluted and weakens.

Either they are milking the iPod brand too much or what they are really planning(I am betting more on this) is to have the iPod Touch to be the new “iPod” as soon as capacity becomes cheap. Otherwise the iPod brand would look like the (Creative)Zen brand.

3 Things that I am excited about this September:

• New Ipods(Sept 5) – I’m curious on what will Apple do next.
• Barcelona launch(Sept 10) – Will AMD finally have an answer to Intel’s Core 2 Duo? It’s been more than a year since Intel launched Core 2 Duo and AMD’s Athlon line has remained competitive due to its low price.
• Vacation(last week of Sept)

Things that I recently learned/noticed:

• One of the best place(in Singapore) to read a book outside home is the train station. Its cheaper compared to reading at coffee shops. I do not mind the passengers waiting or boarding off the train. They do not distract me.
• I can read on the train but not while standing. I got dizzy if I do that.
• I do not play PC games as much as before. Most of the games these days do not offer something new except for nicer graphics.
• Desktop tower defense is addicting.  It’s a Flash puzzle game but highly addictive. Do not blame me if you start spending countless hours playing it.