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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The Standard Chartered 10km run was fun! My legs are aching now but it was worth it. I’m gunning for the 21km run next year or at least a decent time in a 10km run. I clocked 1hr 9 min.  I hope I can bring it down below an hour.

My lack of stamina reared its ugly head again when I hit the 6km mark. I was walking more than running at that stage. My running pattern was to run fast initially then slow down at the end. I was planning to train to run slower but run longer but now I’m having second thoughts about it. I tend to injure my leg when I run slow.

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The best things in life are unplanned. After working on the Christmas decors last Friday, my officemates decided to go to DX0 to party. It was a blast with all of us dancing. The place was a bit empty though. Only 4 tables were occupied. But that did not prevented us from partying and dancing like crazy.

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The Christmas decoration judging has been moved forward on the 12th. Im not so sure right now if we can finish it by that time. As usual I’m having difficulty trekking the personality landscape that our team have. Damn it!

I’ve been busy with real life for the past few weeks. There was a week that I went out for four straight nights because we needed to take our guest out. Burned all my nerd karma that week.

I also tried cable skiing. I only did the kneeboard and yet I was not able to make a whole round. I always fell at the halfway mark. My friends also need to tow me back to shore whenever I fall into the water since I do not know how to swim. Some photos here.

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Recently upgraded my Ubuntu box to Hardy Heron.

Good:

-UOB website seems to work now. Before it would not finish loading. I think it has something to do with Firefox 2’s Javascript engine.

-Bootup seems to be faster.

Bad:

-Got some problems with my wireless. NM-applet cannot co-exists with the older Network manager. Need to remove the the settings(except the loopback) at /etc/network/interfaces and let nm-applet take care of it.

-It stalls a lot. Might be something to do with Firefox 3 being beta. It makes a lot of disk access.

-Citibank’s website is not working. The applet would not simply load. This is a major headache for me. I just hope they bundled the older JRE(1.4). My solution was to install Firefox 2 then edit the post-installation of the java plugin as stated here.

Summing it all up, I think the previous version(Gutsy) is better.

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Since I will soon to be a year older and a friend of mine will be flying to HK I am planning to buy my second len. There are a couple of cheap zooms that I am considering but what I really want is the Pentax 43mm 1.9 Limited. Its beautiful(I like the silver color). What I don’t like about it is that its a bit impractical(and more expensive than the zooms I am considering) since I don’t use my camera that much. I only shoot now if there are events. I still have a week to think about what to buy.

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Decluttering

Been a while since I last posted in this blog. I have been trying to declutter my life(writing have to take a backseat for a while). Lately I have noticed that I have no time to do some serious reading. I have a pile of unread books with bookmarks at the beginning or in the middle. I also haven’t been doing any physical activities lately.

My solution was to cut down on my DOTA sessions, access Google Reader weekly, stop using twitter, and cut back on reading forums. During work I disciplined myself not to read Slashdot. I also deprioritized writing in this blog(hopefully I can do once a month). I still want to write  for my other blog more often.

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Last week I did a non-technical talk on our team’s knowledge sharing session. I talked about branding. I got the idea from Steve Yegge’s talk on OSCON 2007. I was able to read the book he mentioned and discussed it to my teammates. I did discussed the basics in my earlier post. There are other things in branding that are quite interesting and is simple to understand. I would probably write about it next time.

One More Day

In anime/manga or in comics someone is not dead until you see them dead. There are some exceptions like Superman. Resurrecting the dead happened so many time in fiction that you won’t believe it anymore if a character is really dead.

Personally I hate it when they kill a character just to boost sales. But what happened to Spiderman is the worst of all. If you are not aware of the current comic scene, Spiderman is unmasked. The Marvel universe now knows that Peter Parker IS Spiderman. There was this event in Marvel called Civil War. There was a superhero reality show that turned awry. A whole town was destroyed. The US government now wanted to have superheroes to register. Some was in favor(Iron Man, Mr. Fantastic etc) and some were against(Captain America etc). Spiderman was initially in the pro group. To show his support he unmasked himself in public. Later on he switched sides.

Because everyone knows that Peter Parker is Spiderman, Peter Parker is now an easy target. Aunt May was accidentally(the main target is Peter) sniped and was critically wounded. Peter Parker asked for help but nobody could. Mephisto offered him a deal. (from wikipedia)In exchange for Aunt May’s life he will wipe all memory of Peter’s marriage to MJ from all but one part of their souls, so that he may listen to those parts’ pain for the rest of eternity.

It was a selfish and bad decision but I can live with that. Here is the kicker. MJ offered Mephisto something in exchange for the world not knowing that Peter is Spiderman. WTF?!?

This is the worst. What happened already happened. The world knowing Peter Parker is Spiderman is a big change in direction. I was actually curious on how they will bring the story forward. Doing a retcon this early is like making the whole unmasking event just a big gimmick to boost sales. In the end everyone lost. Aunt May, Peter, MJ and the fans.

I only have two adjectives for 2007. Dreary and monotonous. I never noticed that it passed by. Nothing significant happened.  Not that it bothered me. Its just that there is nothing exciting to write about.

For me, this year was about adjustments and acceptance. I am finally used to living alone. Although my laziness in ironing my clothes and lack of delicious food(masarap ang ulam sa bahay) is a strong reason for me to go back home, its still not enough. I still prefer my independence. The money here is also good. I can buy the books and the gadgets that I want.

Most people consider me a cynic. I am a realist actually. Many times I tried to be an optimist. I tried to have a more positive outlook in life and see the goodness in people. After some books on sociology, economics and marketing, I gave up being one. I think I now have a good understanding of human nature that made it hard for me to think that man is inherently good. Its hard to doublethink*. A realist would always be a realist. I will call it as I see it. I value the truth more than hope.

For something less somber here are some things I want to improve on or want to do in 2008:

• Photography – I can now understand basic exposures but I still clearly lack in the composition department. As much as possible, except for white balance adjustments, exposure compensation and some sharpening, I want to take good photos without that much post-processing.
• Cooking – I can now cook tinola. Unfortunately, thats all I know. I want to be half as good as my mom when it comes to cooking.
• Math – I want to read TAOCP(The Art of Computer Programming). My problem is that I am too weak at discrete math. I doubt if I can go past page one of that book.

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*Doublethink is reconciling two opposite thoughts like thinking black is white and white is black. The word came from the novel 1984.

Found this list(101 ways to know your software project is doomed) while surfing this morning. My favorites:
6. Your source code control system is a series of folders on a shared drive

I have seen this a LOT of times. I did this once. We do not know version control then. The last time I saw this I installed a SVN server.

9. You start considering a new job so you don’t have to maintain the application you are building

I experienced this twice. The second time I resigned. The hassle is not worth it. I have more important things to do.

12.Your team still gives a crap about its CMM Level

Good thing they never made me do those documents.

38.FrontPage is your web page editor of choice

I still like the color of the html editor Visual Interdev over Frontpage. I  never used the designer view of FrontPage. It generates bad HTML.

44.All debugging occurs on the live server

I did some debugging on the live server.

58.Management can not understand why anyone needs more than a single monitor

At least they never asked why we have Elsa Gladiac(GeForce 2) on our machines. Hehehe.. :p

65.Now it physically pains you to say the word – Yes

There was this time that I got scared everytime I hear my office phone rings.

75.You bring beer to the office during your 2nd shift

Hehehe…
83.You start wondering if working 2 shifts at Pizza Hut is a better career alternative

I did think of having an isaw stall.

92.Your manager substitutes professional consultant advice for a Magic 8 Ball

To CRS team: We never used the magic 8 ball for registration decisions right?

99.You are using MOSS 2007(Sharepoint Server)

I have no love for Sharepoint. Its hard to configure and its freaking slow.

0

A geek once prayed
For God to answer how he would fare
In the elusive field of love

He wrote his variables
And threw it out into the air

e – is for the nature of love
i – is what we imagine love to be
π – is the constant for what love really is, irrational and transcendental

God relented and an equation he gave:

e^iπ + 1

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Just in case you do not understand the geeky reference:

e^iπ + 1 – Is Euler’s identity which evaluates to zero. It is considered to be mathematically beautiful.

e – Euler’s number, the base of natural logarithm

i – the imaginary unit of an imaginary number

π – is of course pi

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I was actually planning for my birthday post and almost finalized the concept. It was supposed to be an RPG thing. It has a title of “Level Up”, Jeff’s sketch of me and the text “At level 27, Azrael of the Flame has gained the following attributes..”. One of the attributes would be love life. I want a creative way and geeky way of saying that it is zero. Initially I was thinking of an equation of sine and cosine or some integral equation or something with infinity on it. Then I stumbled upon Euler’s identity and I think that it was cool. Then I suddenly have this idea on explaining what the individual elements of the identity(i – is how we imagine love to be etc.) means. I decided to scrap the whole birthday post thing later on since it was already late and I can’t think of anything more interesting.

When did we forget our dreams?*

My manager and I had a talk last week. He was a bit disappointed that I do not know many things about the project. I do not know those change process and the number of those bugs in SIT. I just told him that there are too many emails and sometimes I don’t have the time to read it. The truth is I don’t really care and I don’t want to care. I want to concentrate on coding and designing.

The conversation dragged on. What he wanted was for me to do some other things not related to coding and designing. He wanted me to develop business analyst skills. And he wanted me to want it. He wants me to ask for it. It is some sort of a compliance technique. If I asked for it I will be responsible for it. If I ask for it I could not blame him if I have too many things to do.

He was a bit angry when he learned that: (1) I would not do extra work(business analyst work) voluntarily if it is not asked of me (2) I want to spend more time on non-work related things and (3) no plan to climb the corporate ladder. He also asked me what is my value in the team and why should they keep me. I wanted to answer that he should ask it to himself. The only question I need to answer is why would I want to stay.

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He also said that anyone can code. He is right. Anyone can code, but monkeys can also manage.

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*I got the title from xkcd.