The WISIWYG Blog

5 Things I’ve Realized About Performances

noreply@blogspirit.com (Amiel) — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 23:55:00 +0800

This is the speech I delivered at last Monday's morning meeting, with the exception of realization number 5, which was omitted to prevent any commotion inside the office. :p

In less than one year, I have been involved in three performances. The first was on the AWS Christmas Party last December; the second was on the Company Outing last May; and the last was on the cheer dancing competition of the recently concluded AWS Sports Fest. We won on two; we’ve lost in one. And from those wins and loses, I have realized five things that I would want to share with you.

1. “Many” works better than “few”

A group of people swaying altogether rhythmically, no matter how simple the dance steps, looks far better than two or three people performing the best they can on stage. On our two wins, the number of people who planned out the act equaled the number of people who performed the act. And the result was far better than what we had on our only loss, where a lot of minds planned the act but only a few were willing to do the act itself. There is magic in “many” that can never be achieved by a few.

2. Don’t complicate things too much

Stick with the simple and everybody understands. Stick with the intricate and everybody gets bored, if not confused. On both of our winning performances, we did nothing but the basic stuff. Simple dance steps that everyone can perform, a plot that everybody can understand, and a shower of comic moves that everybody can laugh at. It’s the simple things that matter. It’s the simple things that people appreciate.

3. The audiences’ satisfaction is your goal, not the prize

To win the grand prize—that was our goal during the planning stage of the company outing presentation. And we never did get any closer to that goal. On the contrary, we never planned to win on the cheer dance and Christmas party performances. What was our goal during those two instances? Our goal was that sometime during our performance, we would hear a few laughs, a few cheers, and a few claps. On both cases, we achieved our goal. The grand prize was just the bonus.

4. Prioritize enjoying over winning

We were too stressed out during our performance in Dos Palmas. We were targeting the first place, and that in itself is enough to pressure us. The pressure got even higher when after a minute of our performance, we could hear nothing but the deafening silence of the crowd. No laughs, no claps, no nothing. All of this is the exact opposite of the two other performances we did. During both the Christmas party presentation and the cheer dance competition, all of us were enjoying. All of us were pleased with what we were doing.

5. Basta Dev1, iba!

And as for this last realization, you can’t pretty much do anything about it if you’re not one of us. :p

The Power of Alt + Space

noreply@blogspirit.com (Amiel) — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 08:00:00 +0800

Every DOTA player in our office knows how powerful Alt + Tab is. When they hear someone coming up the stairs while they are playing, they just press Alt + Tab and wallah, they can again pretend to work with the Visual Studio window open. But DOTA-ignorant as I am, and add being an honest employee to that (8-}), I don’t have much use for the Alt + Tab key combination, except if I have to browse through the different windows running on my desktop all at the same time. But I do use one Alt + combination often. The Alt + Space combination.

Now, for those of you who are fond of visiting GTD or lifehack websites (or for those who simply knows what I’m talking about), you must already have an idea of what I’m saying. I’m talking about the keystroke combination for launching Launchy, a free and open source application launcher. It’s so powerful that it can, uhm, launch applications! (Another 8-}).

Launch Apps with a few keystrokes…

So what happens after you hit the Alt + Space combination? The Launchy application appears, and from there on, you can launch about almost any application you want to use. Just key-in a few letters on the Launchy user interface and the helper app will give you the application with the closest match to those letters that you keyed in. So should you wish to open the Microsoft Word application, just key-in “wo” and the helper app would immediately present to you the application through its sleek UI. Press the enter key from there and the application you selected opens.

But what if the application you were looking for was not what Launchy gave you after a few keystrokes? Well, give the helper app a few seconds and it will list down the other applications that matched your query. Say you wanted to open Wordpad instead of Microsoft Word after you entered “wo”, just wait for a few seconds after keying in the letters and a list of other applications having “wo” in its name will be displayed, including Wordpad of course. Using the up and down buttons on your keyboard, select the application that you want to open from the list, press enter and the application launches.

… And more

Launchy does not only launch applications, it can also open a lot of other things. Your MyDocuments folder, a text file, an excel file—name it and if it is in your computer, Launchy can probably open it. A little tweaking may be needed though to launch particular files and executables. But most of the tinkering can be done easily through the application’s Option menu, which can be easily accessed by right-clicking on the application and clicking on the Option label from the popup submenu that appears. From the Launchy options window, additional applications and files that you want Launchy to handle can be added by accessing the “Catalog” tab.

If you don’t like the appearance of the user interface, there are selectable skins that you can use to replace the default, all of which are accessible through the same Launchy options window by clicking on the “Skins” tab. And to configure the primary appearance and settings of the helper application, just play with the options on the “General” child window.

Aside from opening files that resides on your hard disk, you can also use Launchy to automatically search for a keyword in Google. Just key-in google, then press the tab button, enter your search keyword and press enter. The helper app would then launch your default web browser and display the Google search result. Aside from Google, you can also make keyword queries from other sites, including msn, wikipedia, yahoo, and others.

Clean Desktop

If there’s one more thing that I like about Launchy aside from launching programs and what-else-there-may-be lightning-fast, it’s how the application allows me to maintain a squeaky clean desktop. On my work PC’s desktop, you can see nothing but my desktop wallpaper, a couple of reminders that I embedded on the desktop with the aid of Samurize, and a few links to work folders (which I still cannot configure to be launched by Launchy at post time) lined-up neatly on one side. The desktop of my home laptop is nothing different, minus the reminders that I wouldn’t need while relaxing at home.

The Verdict

I love it! With fewer mouse clicks and folder searches, it makes launching any PC application an ease to me. And it keeps my desktop clean. And one more thing… it makes anyone who goes near my PC give out a woaaahhh or an ehhhh whenever they see me launching an application. Hehe. Nonsense! Well, that’s all for now, unless you want to hear more nonsense from me. :p

And by the way, you can download the Launchy helper application here.

The Chrome -- Unmistakably Google

noreply@blogspirit.com (Amiel) — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 22:12:12 +0800

It was probably the shortest announcement for a new web browser in recent years. I heard about it from a Code Project newsletter last September 2, and just two days later, a beta version is already up for download! And just in case you, my dear reader, are among those few who weren’t able to catch up with the latest internet news, I am talking here about the Google Chrome—the latest browser to hit the world wide web and join the web browser wars.

Due to the less-than-the-usual amount of fanfare that the release of Google Chrome Beta acquired, I almost forgot that the software is ready for download today. Good thing, I am fond of reading YM status messages while “thinking”, allowing me to chance upon the status message of Roda announcing that Google Chrome is great. (I don’t know if she was just being sarcastic or what?) So I downloaded it at around 1 PM (RP Time). And when the browser started running on my desktop, all I was able to say was that the thing is…

Unmistakably Google

Compare Google with other search sites, or Gmail with other web-based email applications, or even GTalk with other chat applications. More often than not, the web apps created by Google turns out to have the simplest design, yet performs the best. That’s also how I would describe Google Chrome’s position in the browser wars—it has the simplest design, yet… it’s just too early to say how it would perform against the others. :p It looks like a bare-basic web browser, sans the browser tabs, but it does seem to offer more than that. I can’t really say; after all, I have only been using the Chrome for around four hours, and I was just too busy this afternoon to navigate through all the features that the app has to offer.

Features

In the few hours that I was using the Chrome browser, and in the fewer minutes that I was able to surf through its functionalities, I was able to find these few features worth mentioning:

Weird tabs – instead of the usual downward position of tabs below the address bar, Google Chrome tabs are set upright on the topmost part of the browser, above the address bar.

Secret window – or what most of the IE8 testers refer to as “porn” mode browser. Like the InPrivate feature available in IE8 beta, Chrome’s secret window allows you to browse in private—which means no browsing history, no search history, and no way for the next browser user to tell if you were watching porn or not!

Speed Dial (?) – or it may be another thing entirely different. Either way, it looks very much like the speed dial available for Opera browsers, although I haven’t tried using the feature yet.

“Intelligent” address bar– which Google calls the “omnibox". The feature is nothing new to Firefox 3.0 users, but it is still good to know that Google Chrome also shares the feature.

These are but a few of the features that the new Google Chrome Beta has to offer. I wasn’t able tinker much with the app due to time constraints and language difficulties (translate: failure to read instructions in a Japanese OS). For more of the new features available for the Google web browser, just visit the Google blog; or better yet, download a Google Chrome Beta copy of your own here.

Scheduling & Tracking with Google Calendar

noreply@blogspirit.com (Amiel) — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 01:00:18 +0800

To simplify and to organize—that is, according to Google, the very reason why we should use Google Calendar. It’s schedule organization made easy, and I’m a believer!

I have been tinkering with Google Calendar for quite some time now, using it to remind me of project deadlines, appointments, birthdays and all. And yes, it made scheduling quite easier and simpler for me. Scheduling appointments at a mouse click—none could be easier. Another plus is that the application is web-based. So wherever I am, as long as I have a computer and an internet connection, I would be reminded that I have a JLPT internal exam this coming Thursday! Now, that’s the bad part of it. Hehe.

But I have been using Google Calendar in more ways than the people behind the app must have planned me (and you) to use it. Aside from using it to organize my schedule, I have also been using the web-app to track my schedule. Here’s how I do it.

I am actually using the Google Calendar to organize my project schedule. So from our project’s WBS, I transfer the schedule of all the work assigned to me into the Google Calendar. Specifically, I would input the work item for a particular day on one of the calendar’s “column headers”—the “All Day Event” section of the calendar app if viewed by week. This part of the calendar would then remind me of everything that must be done for a particular day.

So what about those parts of the calendar (in Week view) that are subdivided in 30 minutes interval? Do I do anything with them?

Of course! Those will just be wasted space if I don’t use them. I actually use those spaces for two things. First, I use them for timed appointments—meetings, reviews, classes and all other items whose specific time of occurrence is already pre-determined. Then for those spaces not yet occupied by these pre-determined and pre-timed activities, I use them to plot a work item’s implementation outlook. So if I have, say, testing and code revision as work items for the day, I may plot the outlook for testing from 8:00 in the morning until 12 noon, and code revision for the rest of the day.

Now, for the schedule tracking part, here’s how I do it. At the end of the day, or as soon after a work item has been completed, I would re-plot the position and the span of the work item on the calendar. This is made easy by Google, since you can re-position an item or lengthen its time span by a simple click and drag action. ~~And since I can’t explain it well in words, I’ll leave you to experiment with its implementation. Hehe.~~ And should there be an additional activity that must be done aside from those listed on my work items, I can simply click on the specified time and input the name of the activity and its span of time. So if I’ve decided that it’s important for me to go to the CR and stay in there for thirty minutes midway my 8 to 12 testing schedule, I can do so and just add that item on the calendar later. :D

Well, that’s about it for my personalized use of Google Calendar. Using it for schedule organization helped me a lot in getting the important things done. Using it for schedule tracking, on the other hand, helped me analyze my work productivity and made SQA reports on Mondays a lot easier to prepare. :D

How about you? Got some planning and scheduling hack that you may want to share? Again, the comments section is all yours.

1 Litre of Tears

noreply@blogspirit.com (Amiel) — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 00:23:22 +0800

Working in a Japanese company with a lot of people loving Japanese stuff, I am often enticed by my co-workers, female and male alike, to start watching j-drama (or Japanese drama series). According to them, j-dramas are nothing like the typical Filipino teleseryes. The stories are well-written, have light plots and have definite endings, unlike their Pinoy counterparts that go on and on until the ratings starts to dwindle.

So last weekend, I planned to have a DVD marathon of a j-drama I chanced upon at Roda’s former room. She must have left it there before she left for Japan. The title of the drama is 1 Litre of Tears. And to confirm what my officemates have said, the drama was indeed well-written and has a definite ending. The **** with them, though, for claiming that j-dramas have light plots! And the **** with me for believing despite the show’s title! Or maybe I’m just plain unlucky for picking such title for my first j-drama; for there was nothing light on the plot. Instead, it was a heavy drama.

1 Litre of Tears is a j-drama roughly based on a book, a memoir actually, of the same title. The memoir was taken from the diary entries of Kitou Aya, a patient diagnosed with spinocerebellar ataxia at the age of 15 and struggled with the illness until she died at the age of 25. Aya started writing in her diary at the age of 14 up until that time when her illness no longer permitted her to write.

Primarily based on the book, the j-drama version establishes Ikeuchi Aya (Erika Sawajiri), a 15-year old freshman, as the young girl plagued slowly by the illness. It chronicles the life of Aya from a young girl full of dreams until all those dreams were threatened to be taken away by her illness. But while threatened, Aya never gave up on her dreams, just as she never gave up on her life no matter how discouraging the situations sometimes became. Her family, composed of Shioka (Hiroko Yakushimaru) and Mizuo (Takanori Jinnai), her parents, and Ako (Riko Narumi) and Hiroki (Yumi Sanada), her siblings, also showed toughness, despite the fact that they were there plainly helpless watching a loved one slowly succumbing to a dreaded illness. The same were true with her friends, Haruto (Ryou Nishikido) and Mari (Saori Koyde), who continuously supported her on her condition while all the others around her were starting to despise her.

In a gist, 1 Litre of Tears is a story about the importance of life and of fulfilling ones dreams no matter what the obstacles are. In the memoir (which I hope I will be able to read if there is any English translation of it), it was said that Aya emphasized how life, in itself, is very important. The j-drama, on the other hand, shows Aya fulfilling her dream of being able to help others despite being paralyzed by her illness. It showed that not even death can conquer a person’s desire to be of help and an inspiration to others.

So, was I able to finish watching the drama during that weekend? I sure was able to, but not as fast as I planned it to be. I never would have survived watching it episode per episode for 11 straight hours! No, my tears would have dried up fast and something else would have flown on its behalf! And yes, the j-drama did make me cry… like a child… with all the muscles in my face probably getting worked up! Hehe. And despite that, I am not ashamed. The j-drama really made me cry.

Well, that’s all for my kind-of-a review for the j-drama 1 Litre of Tears. Any suggestions of what j-drama I should watch next? Or maybe you would want to share with me your favorite? Well, the comments section is all for you. I’m hoping, though, that your suggestions for my next j-drama marathon would be, well, lighter than this one. Please!!! Ahehe :p