This is technically Project 03, but the real Project 02 was such a fiasco that I’d rather not remember it at all. So I’m basically rewriting (company) history here and naming RedRibbonBakeshop as B&B’s Project 02, coz it looks a lot nicer on the resume and I’m actually pretty proud of this one.

Of course, I’d be a lot prouder if I had gotten my way with all of the bleeding-edge features that I wanted to use, but conservative corporate attitudes won out again unfortunately. I was pretty disappointed when the management finally decided to go with the more traditional shopping-cart approach, but it would’ve been wrong for me to try to argue them down just because I wanted a site I could really brag about.

However! Being the uber-geek that I am, I decided to be really cute and hid an easter egg on the site. (It’ll be our little secret hehe, don’t tell anyone.) Here’s how you view it:

Login with the email address ajaxdemo@thinkbnb.com and the password "ajaxdemo" to see what the shopping-cart would have been like if I had gotten my way. All the products can be dragged and dropped in to the cart and all the server queries occur without page reloads. This site was supposed to AJAX to the max. Sigh.

As always, bug reports and general feedback are welcome.

Filtering out useless information can help people increase their capacity to remember what is really important, researchers say.

Scientists at the University of Oregon in the United States have demonstrated that awareness, or visual working memory, does not depend on extra storage space in the brain but on an ability to ignore what is irrelevant.

"Until now, it’s been assumed that people with high capacity visual working memory had greater storage, but actually it’s about the bouncer - a neural mechanism that controls what information gets into awareness," Edward Vogel, who headed the research team, said.

This partially explains why I can’t be called on to remember anything anymore these days, although I think I may still be having trouble deciding exactly which information is relevant and which is disposable. Read the rest of the article here.

I just watched Audie Gemora in Repertory Philippines’ Man of La Mancha this evening and was reminded why theater can be a much more powerful medium for storytelling than film sometimes. I haven’t seen a really noteworthy play in over 2 years (the last one was Miss Saigon at the CCP) and I was thoroughly impressed by this tight little production. I have to say that very often it comes down to how good your actors are, and Gemora in the dual roles of Miguel de Cervantes and Don Quixote is fairly astounding.

People who know me have been made painfully aware of how much I dislike musicals (i think I may be one of the few people in the world that fell asleep while watching Moulin Rouge), although I think it’s really just because I don’t like how they translate to the film medium. Musicals in the theater have this raw energy that you just can’t capture with a lens, and when you’re watching such a fine ensemble of talented actors, it’s impossible not to be drawn into the performance.

I think one of the things I really enjoy with the theater is the fact that there’s a lot more audience-participation, in that a lot of things are left to the imagination. You can see this in action with set design & lighting, where a few well-placed props and a bit of tinted lighting can transform a 5 by 7 meter stage into a convincingly different locale. One of the best examples i’ve ever seen was in Dulaang UP’s St Louis Loves Dem Filipinos during the late 90s, where the set shifted from modern-day Manhattan to the St. Louis World Fair in 1904 to the mindscapes of the narrator with a little more than mood lighting and gossamer drapes.

You can catch Man of La Mancha at the Globe Theater in Greenbelt 1, with twice-weekly showings through the month of December.

Athlete
Twenty Four Hours EP

When I first heard Athlete’s debut back in 2003, I wasn’t quite as impressed with their work as (I suppose) I should have been. This new EP though, is unbelievably good, mixing some of the noisier, layered elements of The Stills with the sugar pop of early Coldplay. Each of the 3 songs — "Twenty-Four Hours", "Lay Your Head" and "Stand in the Sun" — have a different feel to them, and are so finely polished that it’s hard to imagine how these guys have stayed relatively unknown for so long. I can’t wait to get my hands on the full album. Check out the third track, Lay Your Head, here.

Matt Pond PA
Several Arrows Later

My favorite adult-contemporary singer/songwriter released a crisp collection of 12 new tracks earlier this month. I haven’t had a chance to listen to it as thoroughly as I have his past releases, but on first listen it’s definitely tighter than anything he’s done before. Standout tracks include "Spring Provides" and "It Is Safe" but like I said, the whole album needs to be heard. Definitely one of my favorites this year.

Clear Static
Clear Static

If you’re a fan of Stellastarr (or to a lesser degree, The Killers), Clear Static should be a perfect fit for you. Like Stellastarr, Clear Static’s music crosses the line between dancey Interpol-style post-punk and the blatant homosexuality of 80’s new wave. (Not that I have anything against being blatantly homosexual mind you … except when you use it to get chicks.) With vocals like a pop-rock boy band and beats that I have a sneaking suspicion were lifted from Phil Collins’ "You Can’t Hurry Love," it’s hard to take these guys seriously (the track "Anything at All" is confusingly lovey-dovey and a bit hard to swallow).

Lacing their songs with electronica and layers of noise just presses the point even more: these guys are Simple Plan in disguise!

I learned an interesting new meeting strategy yesterday, while trying to figure out a way to break some bad news to one of our clients.

The situation, in a nutshell, was this: we have a major website launch scheduled for the middle of next week, and we were supposed to present our close-to-final version of the website and all its content yesterday afternoon. We’d spent most of the last two weeks revising and editing based on client feedback, and this presentation was supposed to be the fruition of those efforts.

Naturally, 15 minutes before the big meeting I discover that none of the dozens of content changes they requested had actually been done, and with only 6 days left before the launch, that was Pretty Bad News. (They had called this meeting specifically to go over the content.)

So the problem now was: how do I go through this meeting, presenting a close-to-final version of a website that is anything but close-to-final, and still make it look like I had a better than vague idea of what the hell I was doing.

The solution turned out to be pretty cute. My opening spiel went something like this, with additional information in the numbered list following:

"Hi everyone, we’re meeting today to discuss the close-to-final version of our shopping cart system. First, let me start with the bad news (1). We had a minor technical disaster yesterday evening (2) and could not work on any of the changes you requested in our last meeting (3). I feel really bad about this because D spent 3 hours the other day (4) showing us all the things we needed to change and I feel like I wasted his time. As you can see, the website is practically unchanged from the last version you saw. (5)"

(1) Always start with the bad news because you need to get it out of the way as quickly as possible. Don’t hide it or downplay it. If possible, exaggerate it.

(2) The minor technical disaster being that I had had a little bit too much to drink and had completely forgotten to check the status of the website.

(3) This was a lie. We actually had been able to work on some of the changes, but it’s usually better to generalize here so that you don’t look like you’re making a pathetic attempt to "look on the bright side."

(4) This was the killer line, because it immediately made D (their IT head) look like a tragic hero. D interjected at this point: "Well, in fairness, I did ask for A LOT of changes," and got brief laughter from the rest of the management committee.

(5) This was the closer, and was the point at which I actually showed them the site. I had had 15 minutes prior to the meeting to make some superficial changes to the front page, and I made them as loud as possible so the client couldn’t possibly miss it. Because the handful of changes I had picked were so obvious, they started thinking that we were progressing after all, albeit at a slower pace than anticipated.

The key here was to a) make D look good in front of his bosses (and thus win him over as an ally) and to b) make things sound worse than they actually were and then slowly build up the audience’s spirits throughout your presentation. By the time the meeting ended, everyone had pretty much forgotten that they had just witnessed A Major Fuckup on our part, and were excited to see the progress again the following week.

We received our very first pseudo-abusive user contribution this afternoon on oKs, only 3 short days after our debut. The interesting thing is that I’m not actually sure if I should even consider this an abusive use of the site. It’s not what I had in mind when I said "news and links directory," certainly, but it’s also not a totally useless link either.

I suppose the fact that it’s an advertisement constitutes abuse, but how is that different from someone plugging a gig or promoting a book? It’s not like the user is a bot and he’s just spamming us with links. (I know for a fact that he’s not a bot because he emailed me afterwards asking me to create a "Travel" category.)

I’m still waiting for our first hardcore porn-site contribution, and am actually a bit surprised that the b-grade ecommerce sites got to us first.

I happened to catch Villaluna/Ramos’ Ilusyon yesterday at the Galleria, at my girlfriend’s behest. I’ll go right out and say that we both thought it was crap, so if you’re a fan of local cinema then you should probably stop reading this review right now.

Ok, so back to that piece of shit.

Ilusyon is a movie set in 1950’s Manila. I need to stress 1950’s here because the movie goes to exaggerated lengths to position itself in the timeline. In the first 5 minutes alone, the main character wakes up in an old 50’s car, listens to 50’s music on the radio, talks to a landlady in a 50’s hairdo, and the camera actually lingers on a newspaper with a nice big 1958 date on the front.

You get the impression that the filmmakers’ knowledge of the 50’s don’t really go beyond all the obvious cliches, and their need to go into screaming detail is rather tragic. (There are two terribly-rendered montage sequences where our characters walk through a torrent of glowing movie marquees and other royalty-free 50’s clipart, neither of which serve a purpose other than to hide the fact that they didn’t have any real sets to shoot the characters in.)

This over-zealous production-design is exemplified by a brief scene where the characters visit a doctor’s office. The walls are peppered with charts and diagrams, the tables are littered with medical books, the shelf behind the doctor’s desk is lined with flasks and tubes, and the camera pushes in on the doctor’s notepad, because you know, you can’t really tell if she’s a doctor or not until you see that "M.D."

The reason why I point all this out is because the movie tries (ironically) to be subtle in every other aspect. Ilusyon’s basic plot involves a young farm-boy (Yul Servo) who travels to Manila to visit his painter father. When he gets there, his father has left for parts unknown and he is obliged to stay and tend the house while he waits for his return. Our farm-boy isn’t much of a painter, but when a pretty model (JC Parker) comes for a session, his libido gets the best of him and he pretends to paint her just so he can see her naked.

This has all the makings of a mildly funny arthouse comedy, but the laughs are few and far between, believe me. Instead, we are treated to long sequences of our two main characters sitting at a table, silently eating, or equally long sequences of gratuituous nudity on the part of JC Parker. The movie clocks in at nearly two hours, and the amount of screen time given to these two idiots trying to act like they’re falling in love is unbelievable. (Conversely, the amount of screen time alloted to showing Yul Servo’s growing dissatisfaction with JC Parker after he’s fucked her a few times is surprisingly short, and comes out of nowhere.)

Naturally, JC Parker dies at the end. We don’t know how or why, but she does, and their story draws to a close with Yul Servo seeing her apparition on a lonely country road. The movie makes a small stab at profundity with a voiceover from Yul, noting that his father used to say that life was all an illusion, when in fact, it was the reverse that was true: it was all real.

Given the level of skill that this movie exhibits in portraying "reality" that line lands with a fairly dull thud.

Windows turned 20 years old yesterday (Nov 20) and I thought I’d mention it belatedly just to celebrate 2 decades of BSODs and bug fixes. DownloadSquad has an interesting piece on Windows’ 20th that features some trivia about the world’s biggest operating system that you may probably not be aware of.

The retail price for Windows 1.0 was $100. Adjusted for inflation, that’s equivalent to $177 in today’s dollars — roughly the same price you’d pay today for a full retail edition of Windows XP Home.

Windows 1.0 was out for only about two weeks before Microsoft released version 1.01, in order to fix several bugs.

LOL.

One of our business contacts called me from Cebu last night to tell me that B&B’s Project 01 (http://www.ads4export.com) won a bronze medal in the Araw Awards’ Interactive category. I wrote a lengthy entry sometime ago about how we threw that site together in about a week’s time, and the fact that it still took home the bronze says more about the competition than it does about the quality of our work, I think.

Like the Philippine Webbys (which one of B&B’s other sites, http://www.atayala.com, is currently a finalist for), I find it a bit difficult to take these local awards seriously. My rant on the Webbys hasn’t changed since their inception 5 years ago, but the Araw Awards is a different animal altogether. That site that we built — Ads For Export — is the official site of the Araw Awards, for goodness sake. It’s like awarding a Webby to http://www.philippinewebawards.com for, you know, having a really cool site and all.

Anyway, whatever. If I get anything out of this situation it’s the fact that I can now officially use the word "award-winning" in our corporate profile, and as long as nobody asks me exactly what the circumstances of that award was, I don’t have to admit that I think those "circumstances" were a bit shady.

I debuted my first personal web project in over a year this afternoon, http://www.oks.ph, which is a kind of people-powered link-dump ala diggnation. If you’ve ever tried digg, you’ll already have a really good idea of how the oKs engine works, although I did make some small adjustments to the overall mechanism, which I’ll explain later.

What oKs is, in a nutshell, is an experiment.

Here’s my hypothesis: that the online Filipino audience hasn’t really matured enough to make use of collaborative Web 2.0-style websites. By that I mean, we haven’t yet figured out that sharing is the standard mode by which the internet really functions. Our perspective is still very much "how much can I take" or "what’s the smallest effort i can exert to get the maximum benefit over my peers"?

And I don’t mean "sharing" as in file-sharing, I mean "sharing" in the more general sense, i.e., informing each other and building things together. As an example, I happen to believe that if wikipedia was debuted exclusively in the Philippines, it would go to shit in a matter of days.

So oKs.ph is basically an experiment to prove me wrong.

Like digg.com, it is a completely editor-less link-dump, meaning any registered member can submit a link, and immediately have a chance to be displayed on the front page. Of course, whether or not your contribution actually shows up on the front page is a function of two things, your OKS ratio and the age of your submission.

Basically: the older a submission is, the more OKS it will need to keep it positioned highly. If it doesn’t keep getting OKS-ed, it will eventually sink to the bottom of the pile, leaving the front page open for newer content.

The tricky part is that, unlike digg, I’ve chosen to add a negative button to the mix ("DI OKS", which I’ll continue to use until someone gives me a better label for it). Each negative vote will pull your submission down further than age could, and is meant to be the method by which the community can work together to police itself. If an abusive post happened to appear – for example, something advertising adult-videos — the community would be able to vote it off the island simply by rallying a dozen or so negative clicks.

Of course, the whole point of having a "people-powered" site is to have lots and lots of people visiting and using it, so none of these concepts will work very well if we only get a few hundred visitors. At the moment I haven’t really figured out how to get people to visit and join yet (the only way I’ve ever gotten people to check out my sites are by offering them pictures of naked ladies), but I’m getting pretty close to a decent public-beta release so please check it out and tell me what you think.