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

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.

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.

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.

Never Gonna Give You Up! – Rick Astley w/ Roderick Paulate

ROFL!

The die has been cast

I registered for the Standard Chartered 10km run!

I just hope my knees are intact after this event…