I’m going to be giving a brief talk at the Far Eastern University-East Asia in Manila this Saturday at 11am that’ll introduce the concept and philosophy of Web2.0, as well as talk about the process of building one of syndeo’s current social network projects. As always, I’ll be cramming the presentation itself the night before, which is how I prepare for all of my talks. Thankfully, I never get invited to talk about anything that actually requires me to do any research. (That doesn’t mean I don’t end up embarassing myself to some degree each and every time, of course.)
-
5
Web2.0 at FEU
29 Mar 2007 -
2
Hostage-taker wants free education
28 Mar 2007I don’t usually comment on current events, but there’s something patently ridiculous about this little hostage crisis currently unfolding in Manila:
The head of a day care centre in the Philippines has seized a busload of his children, saying he is demanding better housing and education for them.
[ ... ] “I am so sorry I took these children in a violent action to call the attention of the Filipino people to open their minds to the police reality,” he said.
[...] Officials said Jun Ducat [the hostage-taker] was involved in a hostage-taking incident using fake grenades 20 years ago.
You rarely see anyone take hostages of the people they are trying to help, but I guess the notion of staging a dramatic hostage negotiation from inside a bus in the middle of the crowded streets of Manila was just too much to resist. The biggest question on my mind: is this Robin Hood going to actually do anything to those kids if his demands aren’t met? Seems to me like there’s a logical disconnect in threatening to kill these children if they aren’t given better housing and education. On the other hand, this guy is clearly operating on some different plane of reasoning so maybe it makes sense to him.
The second biggest question on my mind: is it customary for day care centres to have ex-hostage-takers on their payroll? Might not be the best kinda guy to be taking care of your kids, know what I’m saying?
-
1
World Shutdown Day
21 Mar 2007Ia recently pointed to this interesting worldwide event, which asks its visitors: “Can you survive 24 hours without your computer?”
Honest answer: Dude, I can’t even survive 24 minutes without my computer, are you for real? My Macbook Pro has a record uptime of 16 days and 3 hours, and some of my colleagues have managed to keep theirs on for over a month and a half. (Note that I would have done much longer than 16 days if Apple wasn’t constantly updating OSX and forcing me to restart each time.)
Although: I will actually be going to Bohol on the 24th, my first vacation in over a year. Kinda interesting that it would fall on this exact same day, but it does give me a realistic shot at not powering up my machine for at least a few hours. I’m pretty sure my girlfriend would appreciate it.
-
0
Digg vs. Cranky Geeks
20 Mar 2007My two favorite podcasts got together last week in a strange kind of free-for-all — on one side, Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht from Diggnation; on the other, John C. Dvorak and Sebastian Rupley from Cranky Geeks. As usual the digg boys had their requisite six-packs in tow and John and Sebastian spent most of the show marvelling at how many beers these guys were knocking back.
It was really pretty interesting listening to them all together. Anyone who’s familiar with diggnation knows that Kevin and Alex play the straight man/funny man combo just perfectly, and that they have a tendency to ramble on for minutes on whatever happens to interest them. In contrast, the conversations on Cranky Geeks are like machine-gun fire — short, loud and someone usually ends up dead afterwards.
During the first half of the show, you could hear both parties trying to feel their way around each other and get into a good conversational rhythm. Eventually though, it was the Geeks that had to adjust their tempo to give way to the far more boisterous Digg guys. I’m not sure if Kevin and Alex are ever gonna be invited back to Cranky Geeks, coz their style just overpowers everyone else’s. It’s like comparing Entourage with Curb Your Enthusiasm — both exceedingly funny HBO shows, but you laugh out loud a lot more watching the former than the latter.
Check out the podcast here.
-
1
Business Logic
16 Mar 2007Once a year around March, I have breakfast with the owner of Mag::net cafe and spend the morning trading war stories and sharing interesting anecdotes about our respective businesses. We talk about our personal philosophies and our ideas on various industries, and a dozen other little things. It’s fun because there’s no pressure to say something smart or memorable; it’s just two guys having coffee after all.
Last year, he said something to me that turned out to be fairly prescient. He said, “I can’t trust a businessman who has never made at least One Major Mistake.” At the time I was a hotshot freelancer making PhP90 to 100k a month, and I remember wondering how I would handle it if and when my turn at the chopping block came around. Well, six months later, and the answer was staring me right in the face (but that’s another story altogether). Suffice to say that my partners and I are all still reeling from that One Major Mistake, but we’re still around, and at the very least I can say that we definitely learned something from it. (Also, I think I needed a nice hard slap in the face to set my priorities straight.)
This year, the nugget of wisdom came from me, pertaining to the subject of ownership and the notion selling off bits of your company to investors: “I’d rather own 1% of SM than 100% of my sari-sari store.”
Business owners, especially those in startups like us, tend to be really tight-fisted when it comes to accepting outside investment because it means diluting your control of the company. At some point though, you have to decide whether you want to stay where you are (in terms of profit), or try to take it to the next level. The former means you’ll own your business 100%, the latter means you’ll have to share it. The thing is though, that kind of decision should be a no-brainer: you should always be trying to take it to the next level. In the long run, all businesses will fail if they don’t try to expand or enter new markets or otherwise improve their offering. It’s like money itself: if you had $1,000,000.00 in 1967 and you sat on it for 40 years, it would only be worth $250,000.00 today.* The only way to protect it would be to spend it on stuff that would grow in value, i.e., businesses, land, gold, astronaut spider-monkeys, etc.
* Assuming an average annual inflation rate of 3.5%. Note also that your $1 million doesn’t magically transform into $250,000; it just buys 75% less stuff in 2007 than it did in 1967.
-
223
$3million per second spent on pr0n
15 Mar 2007Interesting study about how porn is a moneymaking machine on the internet (no shit, Sherlock). Worldwide revenue from porn in 2006 amounted to just over $97 billion, which breaks down to roughly $3million spent every. frickin’. second.
… And that’s why I don’t pay for my pr0n, friends and neighbours.
-
9
Worst Movies of All-time
11 Mar 2007RottenTomatoes has a really fun feature on their site right now which lists the 100 Worst-Reviewed Films of All Time. Before actually viewing the list I made a mental note of some of my own personal picks for worst-movie-of-all-time, and ended up with this:
Imagine my surprise when I found Catwoman at the #100 spot. I wasn’t expecting it to be in the top 10, but it was certainly a pretty horrible movie, and I felt it deserved a more prominent position. The equally horrible (but far more crappy-looking) Battlefield Earth was at #14, and the bottom-of-the-barrel thriller Alone in the Dark was at the rather prestigious #2 spot. What’s at #1? Well I won’t ruin the surprise, but it wasn’t a movie I’d actually seen so I wasn’t all too impressed by the particular choice. (Here’s a clue though: Antonio Banderas is in it.)
Interestingly, videogame-adaptation fiend Uwe Boll’s entire filmography is on this list, with the aforementioned Alone in the Dark at #2, Blood Rayne at #33, and House of the Dead at #26 (and if the Dungeon Siege movie ever gets released, I’m fairly sure it’ll be fairly well-positioned as well).
-
21
Random Commandline Tricksies
10 Mar 2007A bit of experimentation and research this weekend on the MacBook Pro has resulted in some interesting little commandline tricks:
1. Export the results of a MySQL query to a textfile.
One of our social network projects has a database of a few thousand email addresses that we needed to retrieve for use with the email-marketing wonder CampaignMonitor. After a bit of fussing about I found a really simple way to generate this list:$ echo “SELECT email FROM users” | mysql -u root db_name > list_of_emails.txt
The resulting text list has one email address on each line, which is exactly the format expected by CampaignMonitor, so this was a particularly useful shortcut to figure out.
2. Sending email from the commandline
Of course, now that I had my little list, I then had to send it to my colleague who would be managing the marketing campaign. That turned out to be even easier:$ mail -v -s “addresses for marketing campaign” < list_of_emails.txt
The “-v” switch means “verbose,” so it’ll actually print some SMTP output to the screen when you run this command. “-s” is the subject, as you probably guessed, and the “<” towards the end means we are using the content of list_of_emails.txt as the message of the email.
3. View the current directory in Firefox/Finder/any other app.
A couple of hours later (and in a totally unrelated capacity), I found myself downloading the entire LinuxCommand.org website for offline viewing (a full archive is provided by author William Shotts here). After doing the usual “tar xvzf” to extract the archive, I started thinking about how cool it’d be to then be able to send a command to Firefox to load up the HTML for viewing. After a little research, it turns out you could do that pretty simply:$ open -a Firefox `pwd`
The brainstorm here was using the output of pwd (which will print the working directory path) as a parameter to be fed into the particular application. You can do the same thing with Finder as well, just replace the word “Firefox.”
Nifty :)
-
4
New Macbook, and a rant about Photoshop CS3
7 Mar 2007A couple of interesting things during my blogless days:
My girlfriend and I bought a new Macbook for her birthday. (No, it wasn’t my money … although technically it was, except it wasn’t really. Whatever.) We got a brand-new, entry-level model for Php54,000, which is a pretty decent price considering these things go for PhP68,000 at the Power Mac Center. SIDE RANT: I am constantly amazed how these guys can still be in business — let alone thriving — with the kind of price-gouging they pull. There are people out there who believe that Macs really just are expensive, and its places like PMC that help perpetuate this myth.
Anyways, it’s impossible not to appreciate how much Apple has managed to pack into their little starter model. The glossy screen is a real beauty (high-gloss isn’t really something you would recommend for designers due to exaggerated color-saturation, but it sure is purdy-lookin’). And you gotta love the little frills like the built-in webcam and the included Apple remote; at that price range, those things are unheard-of in the PC world.
I’ve been goofing around with Adobe Photoshop CS3 Beta. It supposedly contains numerous optimizations for the Intel Macs, but I haven’t really been working with anything big enough to stress the hardware or the software all that much. I write about this experience only to say that the new Adobe family logos really bug me:
I mean, I get the whole “Table of Elements” look, but man.I’m going to avoid using the word “uninspired” here, because I know that this probably went through a veritable royal-rumble of artistic dissonance before being vetted, and I’m trying to be respectful of the countless designers who lost their lives in the process.
The main line-of-thinking here was that Adobe’s product family has doubled in the years since CS2; the Macromedia acquisition has resulted in a Medusa-like mess of applications. I suppose the only way they could standardize the look across the entire line was by stripping everything down to their bare minimums. (My main issue is that once the rest of the applications have been launched, my Dock is gonna be a whole mess of two-letter icons against slightly different color gradients. Not exactly the easiest thing to differentiate, if you know what I mean.)
In case you’re wondering what the rest of logos look like, here’s a largely nonsensical depiction of the whole gamut (pun intended), which I spotted here. For added fun, try looking for Premiere Pro’s icon in there. Yowza.
-
0
guttervomit is on the move!
6 Mar 2007the blog is dead! long live the blog! if you’re reading this, your ISP has found guttervomit’s new address.
« Previous Entries