Mar

31

Online window shopping for fast relief!

Filed Under time management | Leave a Comment

It’s not an obscure fact that I don’t get much sun. Alright, so I stay indoors a lot, working on stuff.

Watching TV is too time consuming, plus you eventually get sucked into one show after another - and if you don’t, you just keep flipping the infinitely many channels until you find something. Rinse, wash, and repeat. Self-fulfilling prophecy.

I don’t condone wasting time on the web either, but considering my options - window shopping online is a nice way to decompress for a few minutes. Plus, consider this. Leaving your desk to go anywhere for a “breather” does involve some hidden overhead costs. Here’s why:

  1. Walk to the parking lot: ~5 +/-5 mins
  2. Getting your car out and driving somewhere: ~20 +/-5 mins.
  3. If during rush hour traffic add: ~15 +/-5 mins.
  4. Driving back to wherever it is you left: ~20 +/- 5 mins.
  5. Finding your parking spot (which you gave up earlier, ha! didn’t think of that didja): ~5 mins.
  6. Walking back to your desk: ~5 +/-5 mins.
  7. (Factor in cost of gas)

I have been very conservative in my projections above. Plus, don’t forget to tack on how ever many minutes (or hours) you spent goofing off doing something when you get to wherever it is you went to.

Doesn’t seem all that bad after all, does it? Although decompressing this way does have its drawback - you get sucked into buying something nice to have that you don’t need, that you will completely forget about after a few weeks.

For me, the new Intel Core Duo Mac Mini is *just too damn irresistable*. Yes, I can proudly say (biting my tongue) that I didn’t buy one. Why? At the end of the day, it is just another shiny geek toy. I can do my mission critical tasks AND more, on my trusty ThinkPad. There’s nothing I can do with this cute irresistable toy that I can’t do with my ThinkPad. In other words, I can’t justify this expenditure just yet.

:(

I suggest doing this as a quick 10-15 minute to decompress - possibly forgetting any negative feelings someone inflicted on you (or negative feelings you intend to inflict). Acting on emotions is generally bad for business anyway.

So anyway, if you’re new to this, I recommend eDealinfo and Ben’s Bargains.

Disclaimer: This article is not meant for people suffering from a serious condition of impulse-shopping.

Mar

13

Writing for self improvement

Filed Under self improvement, uncategorized | 5 Comments

I have decided to be more committed towards writing.

I’m a late-comer to the blogging scene, but I’m not the type to just follow the crowd just because something’s new, cool, hip, and Users 2.0 are all doing it. The “me-too” attitude was the reason for the infamous tech bubble bust.

So why do it now?

Well, I finally found some compelling reasons why I am missing out by not blogging.

  1. Writing is therapeutic
  2. Writing is a type of learning
  3. Placing your thoughts and words in writing is a form of documentation (hear me out before you start hating me for this one)
  4. Web logs (a.k.a “blogs”) may prove its use as a mechanism by which useful and good knowledge that percolates to the top (bad knowledge is shot down by public scrutiny) is readily shared among everyone, and may aid to the development of even more good knowledge (by having good ideas leap-frog each other)
  5. Exercising my rights as outlined by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution

Writing is therapeutic and focuses your thought process

Some people do yoga. Others eat chocolate. I write. Sometimes, I drink. If you don’t juggle a minimum of 5-7 concurrent parallel hyper-threaded thoughts and have a ~2.3 million things to do such that 24 hours is actually enough for you to call it a day — what is wrong with you? This behaviour is completely unacceptable by the North American high tech industry worker standards. Contrary to popular belief, it is not normal to not drink caffeinated beverages daily by the gallon to increase concentration and reduce sleep time. Take it from me, I know this first hand.

In short, if you don’t suffer from a case of self-inflicted ADD, please promptly do some about it before reading this article any furthur. I’ll wait. Actually, I won’t.

Writing forces me to concentrate on what I am thinking about, in one consecutive single-user thought process (no round-robin time quantas need to be assigned). The positive byproduct of this is that I focus more on the topic I am thinking about, and during the writing process, I may discover something flawed about what I had originally intended to write and correct my course before proceeding. Likewise, I may also discover something that I did not originally think about (perhaps an important subtopic to expand upon).

Writing is a type of learning

They say “to teach, is to learn twice”. If you’re writing an informative article to educate, you’re going to have to research the topic and be much smarter than the reader. You can’t expect to write a good article without much knowledge in the matter you are writing about.

Documenting your word and thought

For people who hate documenting your code and believe in writing self-documenting code, I’m with you. But, consider this: by documenting your thoughts,

  1. You may look back in time and see how much your thought process (or problem solving skills, for you computer scientists) have progressed. Or the lack thereof. If you find yourself not progressing, then you ought to be worried. A mechanism to measure progress is key.
  2. You will remember why you made the decisions you made, that you have now forgotten. If you hated having points taken off your programming assignment because of insufficient comments when you were in school, you will probably feel different 10 years down the road if you are still in the same industry. Nobody can accurately quantify how many terabytes of data your brain can hold. The sooner you accept the fact that you will eventually grow old (obviously, you can’t grow younger) and start forgetting things, the better off you are. It is key, to hold yourself accountable to your own action and word.

Evolution and dissemination of information

Have you ever seen a Ph.D thesis ever written without referencing another research paper? I’m gonna go ahead and guess that your answer is no. Information builds on top of other information. If you’re creating new information, a simple form of validation is by having lots of people read it, and agree with it. Odds are that by the law of averages, most people will be right, most of the time. Whether you agree with it or not, this is a form of knowledge-Darwinism.

Freedom of speech

Most of us in the land where people can rebuke the President freely without being severely punished (yes, that would be the United States) take this right for granted. Read up your rights, and exercise them well. I think of it as the muscles in your body. You use them, or you lose them. Sure, no one is going to blatantly take your rights away from you in front of you. But if nobody exercises that right, then nobody will notice when it gets taken away.

Last but not least, as much as I try to perfect my writing skills, I know that you will eventually find typos and grammatical errors. I apologize for those in advance, if you will kindly point them out to me, I would gladly correct them when time permits.

Cheers!