Moved again...

Hopefully for the last time ^_^

http://roytang.net/blog

Farewell blogger!

Users don't know what they want.

Today's Dilbert takes the old programming truism to an extreme - "Users don't know what they want."

How to Organize a Cluttered Mind?

Yeah, I haven't been posting lately. I still have a lot of thoughts running around my head, and often throughout the day I find myself thinking, "I should post an entry about this." But at the end of the day, I'm tired and I'm exhausted from thinking about two hundred different issues and juggling twenty different priorities, so I don't post about it. I note it somewhere and sooner or later it becomes irrelevant and I forget why I wanted to post it in the first place.

I remarked to one of my coworkers that I often find myself remembering dozens of things in my head simultaneously and he of course reminded me of the popular notion that human beings can only remember seven things at any one time. It's the concept of limitation in humans' short-term memory or RAM.

This is probably mostly true, but as I've gotten more and more used to this multitasking mode of mine, I've found that the seven most important things stay on top, but the rest don't really disappear. They fall away for a while, swallowed into your subconscious, only to rear their ugly head again later once you have some free RAM again.

My current role at work forces me to be locked in this mode for most of the day. As one of the senior technical guys, I typically field dozens of technical questions from junior developers during a single day and when somebody's problem can't be solved quickly I physically get up from my desk and go walk them through it. And that's just the queries regarding concerns outside my own project. Aside from that I often have to worry about scheduling, technical risks, physical designs and of course the occasional invitation to go down and buy some food.

Developer multitasking is generally looked-down upon in the tech world I know; people are encouraged to work directly on one task at a time to give them focus. Maybe most people have some short period of time at the start of the day to reply to emails and address issues raised by other people. I wish I could have that sort of luxury, but it seems to me that every issue or problem raised to me needs to be resolved five minutes ago. People can't continue coding unless I help them. Schedules can't be finalized until I give my input. Developers can't write program specifications until I hand in the database design. I literally have dozens of dependencies.

So, how do I cope? Simple, I cope the only way I know how. By instinct. This would be a terrifying revelation to anyone I actually work with, but during working hours I'm typically buried under so many issues, my only recourse is to dismiss as many as I can as quickly as possible, and that requires a whole lot of working from my gut.

Luckily, my gut has gotten really good at this. But I'm pretty sure all the people who are incredibly organized and have moleskin notebooks and stuff would tear their hair at such an unorganized method (or is it madness?). And I know, I'm trying to get organized, I really am. I have to-do lists, a couple of dozen that tell me what I should be doing. I have log files that theoretically tell me what I've been doing all day. I try to turn off my email client sometimes, even though I will inevitably have people coming up to me and asking if I'd seen the mail they just sent.

But I can't help it. That's the role I play. People expect me to help them, to provide them guidance. I've projected myself as being open to consultations, and the company and all of my coworkers appreciate that. And even then I still have my own tasks to perform. I'm considering suggesting to the company that I never be considered working on a project for more than a 50% allocation. The other 50% should be allocated to my on-the-fly firefighting tasks.

At the end of the day, especially during the past couple of weeks, I've found myself mentally exhausted. I have a very easy time separating work from personal life, because by the time I step into the elevator after logging out I'm already too tired to even think about work issues.

Not that I have a bad job, mind you. It's awesome. But I guess sometimes I toss myself into it a bit too much. When my personal load is light, I can easily handle everything tossed at me and people go "You're awesome!" and I nod and address the next crisis. But when my load is heavy, well, then things really get exciting.

I forgot what my point was now, as I unconsciously launched into a narrative of how my typical day goes. I'm still getting by with my gut, but I know from experience that gut instinct only gets you so far. Sooner or later, something's gonna give and I'll need to find some way to make sure I can carry this level of awesome-ness to the next level.

Oh, and yeah I changed layouts.

Adventures in Linux Land, Part 1

So yeah, out of a strange mix of adventurism, inertia, coincidence and plan old boredom, I decided to install linux on this machine. At first I just wanted to see how easy the install would be, but after I nuked my Windows XP install I sort of had no turning back. (-_-!)

Anyway, I went for a dual boot of Windows XP and Kubuntu, supposedly an easy-to-use Linux distro. So yeah, I even watched this video online that showed how to do the installs. (The video shows two guys doing the dual boot install with XP and Ubuntu, same difference.)

Okay, so yeah, I'm cool. I do the install and woohoo, I boot into Kubuntu, I'm awesome, yeah!

But my Kubuntu has no internet. :( It seems to have some sort of namespace resolving problem. I asked around on the kubuntu channel at irc.freenode.net and on the kubuntu forums, some nice guys gave me some stuff I could try, so I'll try again maybe tomorrow if I don't get home too late. (Can't right now as my bro is playing DoTA and his internet goes down if I reboot...)

(To be continued...)

I Wasn't Planning On Making Resolutions...

...but what the hell.

I will try more new things this year.

I Wish I Had Something Snazzy To Say About The New Year

...but I just want to see what happens now.

The transition from the last year felt a bit strange to me. Usually, the new year is a time for letting go of the past, and looking ahead to a whole new future. That so perfectly described the end of the last year, as things changed around me and just naturally fell into positions where I would be able to leave them behind. Things changed, things I had known for a long time and taken from granted.

I look forward to the coming year. A new beginning I suppose. I hope it's interesting at least.

Games - Civilization 4

Sid Meier's Civilization - one of the most highly-acclaimed strategy game series in existence. Any serious gamer worth his salt knows about it - whether he plays turn-based strategy games or not. And the fourth installment was eagerly awaited in our home - two out of four brothers were eager to play the latest update.

And Civ4 is in many ways the same game all over again. The basic premise is still there - explore, build cities, research technologies, kick other civivlizations while they're down, race to space, etc. But several other new features have kicked in, many of them adding a new layer of management complexity to the already complex strategy game. Great Persons, National Wonders, cultural expansion, luxury resources...well, I'm not sure if some of these are new since Civ3 - I didn't play that one much. The most important change has to be the streamlining of the interface such that it becomes easy to tell at a glance what a city is building and how long it takes for it to grow.

Anyway, as expected, the game is still incredibly engrossing. I sat down yesterday morning to "just give it a try", and after what seemed like a few short turns found myself contemplating whether to nuke the Arabians in the early 17th century.

So yeah, awesome Civ4 gameplay, as expected. I finished two games in short order, one took me 4 hours because the silly Germans and Spanish kept trying to declare war on me, and I had to be satisfied with a Time Victory. The second took less than two hours - full peace/diplomacy, science/culture all the way, never entered a state of war.

But I'm not playing it again. Why? Because the game's performance is crap-tastic! You can play smoothly found maybe 5-10 minutes before the game starts slowing to a crawl. Going to the lowest possible settings and quitting all running programs doesn't help at all. Apparently I'm not alone, as I've seen numerous message board posts lambasting Firaxis for the terrible performance of the game regardlesss of the system running it.

It's a testament to both the addictiveness of the gameplay and how much patience I've gained recently that I was able to finish two games at all. But as it is, I'm not playing it again until some radical performance improvment happens.

Maybe I can still find a copy of Civ3...

How Would It Feel to Be A Developer-Slave?

As I watched my brother playing the latest incarnation of EA's FIFA game, I can't help but consider that there must be a staff of developers over at EA dedicated solely to the task of churning away to release updates to EA's flagship lines of sports games year after year.

I wonder how fulfilling that kind of job actually is...

Games - I Give Up On Dragon Quest VIII

Not that it's a bad game mind you. From the ten or so hours I've played it's definitely a lot better than the previous game in the series. And the voice acting is really great this time, with a bunch of British people doing the over-the-top voices. The battle system is still a bit simplistic, and the main quest seems very straightforward. From what I've seen, it's probably an above average game.

That's the problem. I don't have time for above average games. It was okay when I was still in school and had tons of free time, I could afford to waste my time with midcarders like Legend of Legaia or Wild Arms, but these days there are so many things competing for my attention (thanks DSL), and work sched is a lot more tight than school, so I have to be a LOT more selective in my choice of distractions.

And "above-average" just doesn't make the cut anymore.

Moving Things Around A Bit

I was getting a bit bored with the place, so I spruced it up a bit, switched some colors, moved stuff around. You know, just to pretend something's happening. And to showcase my sorely lacking UI design skills. :p Screenshot captured for posterity.

I also cleaned up some of the global files that were being accessed from fateback, since I will eventually drop that host completely. Right now, the external files used by this site are hsoted on my geocities account (which I should also organize/clean up in some way.)

For the curious, this site is maintained in several layers:

• the blogger template - ideally, I shouldn't have to change this too often


• an external javascript file - ideally, if I want to do small changes to the site, I'll just modify this and use DHTML to do it


• an external stylesheet - ideally, if I want to make changes to layout, I just adjust this one

A while back I was also wondering if it was viable to use XSL transformations for a blogger blog...but I'm too lazy to try to figure it out now.

Music - Ultraelectromagnetic Jam

I'm no music critic; often I can't even carry my own tune. But I do know what I like, and I know I like the Eraserheads' music. If you don't know who the 'heads are, they're basically the Beatles of the Philippines, galvanizing the local music industry and serving as an example and inspiration to numerous other bands that followed after them. It's only fitting then that many of the current crop of Filipino performers pay tribute to them in the form of Ultraelectromagnetic Jam. This fantastic album features several artists performing their own versions of some of the Eraserheads best hits, namely:

• Alapaap by 6-Cycle Mind
  
• Alcohol by Radioactive Sago Project
  
• Ang Huling El Bimbo by Rico J Puno
  
• Hard to Believe by Cueshé
  
• Huwag Kang Matakot by Orange and Lemons
  
• Huwag Mo Nang Itanong by MYMP
  
• Ligaya by Kitchie Nadal
  
• Magasin by Paolo Santos
  
• Maling Akala by Brownman Revival
  
• Overdrive by Barbie Almabis
  
• Pare Ko by Sponge Cola
  
• Spoliarium by Imago
  
• Superproxy by Francis M.
  
• Tikman by Sugarfree
  
• Torpedo by Isha
  
• Para sa Masa by all of them!
  

I wanted to comment on each track separately, but I'm too lazy :p They're all pretty good, mostly because the originals were great in the first place. Paolo Santos carried Magasin surprisingly well, and Superproxy was just the right track for Francis M. Radioactive Sago's Alcohol is hilarious, and I like the way Orange and Lemons mixed a little bit of Julie Tearjerky and Tikman in Huwag Kang Matakot. I also think I actually like Cueshé's version of Hard To Believe better than the original. My least favorite track on the album is Kitchie Nadal's Ligaya, (cute laugh on the "inaahit" bit notwithstanding) as I really prefer the more upbeat original.

I wish more bands had contributed to the effort though, as the 'heads probably deserve it. According to my brother, the participating artists were all from the same recording studio (I don't really pay attention to studios, so yeah I'll just agree here.) Still, it would've been nice to hear some renditions from 'heads contemporaries like Rivermaya and Parokya ni Edgar.

All in all, awesome album. If you have listened to the Eraserheads music at one time or another, go find a way to get it.

The Left Half of My Mouth is Numb, Thanks

I had three teeth taken out today, all of them deep in the bottom-left part of mouth. One of them was apparently a wisdom tooth that had lodged itself in a peculiar angle. That one required surgery (and was not covered by my health card).

When you're there, even when your mouth is numb, even if you're not really scared or anything, once you start to feel that pressure on your jaw, you can't help but be at least a little bit anxious. It's not so much whatever pain gets through the anesthesia that's annoying. It's the fact that you're mentally anticipating that pain. When you start to feel the dentist pushing and pulling at your tooth, you can't help but worry that somewhere, some resilient little nerve of yours has avoided the anesthesia and is just waiting to send you into a world of pain.

Luckily, not only is my dentist very good, but I'm quite comfortable with her, despite the often corniness of her jokes :p

Random Java Programs

So, my brother needed to present 20 java programs for school. He didn't have to make them himself, he said. Just to print them out and submit them. (What kind of ridiculous compsci teacher asks for hardcopies of source instead of softcopies?)

Anyway, I said, sure. I'll make some, it'll be easy. After all, trivial programs shouldn't take me more than 5 minutes each right? It was true, each one didn't take long. But I spent quite some time thinking about what I would actually code. The usual suspects are there - Hello World, prime factors, factorial, simple arithmetic, palindromes. It was just harder than I thought making up twenty diverse trivial java programs to write. I'm not a teacher after all :p

Anyway, in case someone in the world finds these examples useful:

Twenty random java programs.

Comics - Batgirl

Cassandra Cain was raised as an assassin. Growing up, her father never taught her to read or write, only to fight. She grew up knowing only one language - body language. Her mind processes human motions as fluently as ordinary people speak their native tongue. She can see moves before they happen or read a person's intentions simply by following their movement patterns. She was an experiment to create the ultimate human fighting machine. At the age of eight, she made her first kill. Then she ran away. She wound up in Gotham, under the tutelage of the Dark Knight. She has become Batgirl.

I read through the current 70 issues over the weekend. It's pretty good. Batgirl almost always faces up against normal people - goons, thugs, mafia and whatnot. She's not metahuman either, but her superior abilities allow her to dodge bullets and kill with her bare hands (Not that she does kill mind you, but she CAN.) The fact that she's illiterate and basically ignorant of how to interact with the rest of society makes the comic all the more interesting and provides a lot of room for her to grow as a character.

The only thing I don't like about trying to follow a single comic series - crossovers. You read an issue, and suddenly there's several other comics you need to read to get the whole picture. I can see why they do it.

Yeah, I'm Not Gonna Make It

(Cross-post from here.)



I think I would've had a good chance to make it if I had started on time though. :(

I'm not gonna stop though, I think I'll finish this novel.

An excerpt:

“I really should organize my stuff more. You’d think someone living alone deep in the woods would have a lot of time to organize, but no, there’s always one thing or another. Squirrels, usually. Silly things keep insisting their friends are nuts! Or the nuts are their friends, something like that; I never was very good at understanding their chitter-chatter, most of it is about nuts anyway. I think they have like two hundred different sounds to represent nuts, did you know that? It’s funny too how they attach the same meaning to the term “nuts” as humans do. How do you suppose they picked that up? I hope it’s not me, I don’t think I have a tendency to say people are nuts. Aha there it is!”

Are Filipinos the Next American Minority After Blacks?

One of the panels from Marvel's House of M (second issue) made me think so... (Click for bigger view)



I'm not sure whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.

Context: Mutant scientist Hank McCoy and human scientist Henry Pym were discussing the moral issuess surrounding Henry's isolation of the mutant gene.

Stand Tall, Shake The Heavens

Sometimes I can't help but look back on the story so far and wonder where the hell I'm going. I'm in a pretty good place right now I guess, compared to a majority of people in this country. I've got a good job with a more than decent salary that lets me consume the mythical three-square-meals-a-day and pile on a bit of luxury on top of that.

But sometimes you stop and think to yourself, is this all there is to life? Slaving away as some company's employee, getting promotions and raises, then retiring to watch your kids grow up? Don't get me wrong, I love my job and the company I work for is great, very responsive to its employees. And I'm sure retiring and raising kids is a worthy goal for some people. But I highly doubt I'm that sort of person.

I get antsy sometimes, I often tell some people at work that I think of resigning at least once a week. The thing is, I don't really know where to go or what to do if I resigned. All I know is at some point I would like to be doing something else with my life, something other than a regular nine-to-five (well in my case more of eight-to-seven) job, something that leaves a mark on the world. Stand tall and shake the heavens, I always like to say to myself.

My biggest problem right now is fear - fear of burning bridges. There was this awesome article somewhere by this shareware guy about how to start your own indie business (I'll credit him sometime when I remember), and I remember one of the things he said that struck me the most: Don't be afraid to burn bridges.

But I am afraid, and with good reason. Like I said, I've got a good job, it's decent pay and I even enjoy the work a good percentage of the time. And of course, I'm also providing financial support for the rest of the family.

It becomes more frightening when I take into consideration what my passions are. The main ones right now are: gaming and web development. Taken together, it points in one direction: I should work on a web-based game. But the size of this task at this point is too huge for me to imagine, and the risks far too obvious. It would be very hard and it may take years to turn a profit, I would need some considerable financial base before doing this. And I would also need an idea of what game to do...

The second problem is focus. I lack focus. This I've known for a long time. Even if I decide on one course of action, I'm never sure that I would have the will to carry it on until the end. I can have focus and determination in the short term, i.e. a task that takes a week or so I can easily focus on. But the sort of life-changing ambitions I'm considering right now can't be done in a week, and I fear that I will run out of steam half-way through and all will be for naught.

I need to overcome these problems. I need to overcome fear. Well, now that I think about it, it would be far easier to overcome fear if I knew that I had focus and determination. I need to be become stronger than I currently am.

Yay For Default Blogger Templates!

Temporarily shifted to one after someone reported some javascript redirecting to a porn site. Doesn't happen on my machine though. Sheesh, now I have to debug a non-replicable bug on my blog. And I didn't even get any porn :p

Update: Moved now to roywantsmeat.blogspot.com

Why Do I Blog?

girl from work (10:19:57 AM): may blog ka ba roy?
zroytang (10:20:18 AM): haha bakit mo natanong?
girl from work (10:21:04 AM): nagbabasa kasi ako ngayon blogs ng high school friends ko e
girl from work (10:21:11 AM): e ikli lang :D
zroytang (10:21:28 AM): I have one with entries dating back to 2002 :p
girl from work (10:21:49 AM): tlga... updated?
zroytang (10:22:01 AM): minsan
girl from work (10:22:24 AM): may icky luv stuff dun? >:)
zroytang (10:23:15 AM): haha maybe, maybe not
girl from work (10:24:46 AM): haha :))
zroytang (10:26:30 AM): sometimes you write something and later, you think, "maybe I shouldn't have written that"; you look back at it later and think "what the hell was I thinking", but you should keep it up anyway, so you remember what it was like at that time :D
girl from work (10:27:23 AM): hehe oks lang yan... alam ko yan... nagligpit lang kami last week dito sa house... and i saw an old journal from 1996 pa :))
zroytang (10:27:50 AM): except yours is not in public for people to find by accident :p
girl from work (10:28:06 AM): hehe yep :p
girl from work (10:28:21 AM): anu isearch ko to find ur blog by accident >:)
zroytang (10:29:00 AM): ask and I will tell you; I have nothing to hide :D tsaka mostly boring stuff lang naman un, kailangan mo isaisahin yung posts to find anything remotely interesting
girl from work (10:29:31 AM): sige... something to read while i wait for breakfast :)
zroytang (10:29:49 AM): 10:30 is not a time for breakfast
girl from work (10:30:20 AM): brunch :D
zroytang (10:30:51 AM): I am thinking if it is a good idea...nobody else at work knows the url, and I am not sure if I have written anything stupid about work haha
girl from work (10:31:14 AM): haha... baka may mga ***** sucks ba :))
zroytang (10:31:23 AM): no, of course not
zroytang (10:31:41 AM): if I give you the url, you must give me something interesting to read in return :D
girl from work (10:31:54 AM): hindi akin na blog pwede? :))
zroytang (10:32:08 AM): mas maganda kung iyo hehe
girl from work (10:32:37 AM): haha... sabi ko nga wag mo na ko bigyan ng url e :))
zroytang (10:33:03 AM): haha bat ayaw mo
girl from work (10:34:02 AM): I am thinking if it is a good idea...nobody else at work knows the url, and I am not sure if I have written anything stupid about work haha
girl from work (10:34:10 AM): familiar ba? :))
zroytang (10:34:47 AM): :p

(Edited to remove the name of my company, and keep the name of the person I'm chatting with anonymous. Not that I have anything to hide, but more because it feels like the right thing to do.)

Sometimes I wonder why I do. When I started keeping a website for myself back in '02, it was more because I wanted to experience having to maintain one, and to sharpen my HTML skills (I'm pretty good at it now I think, although my web design still sucks); When Blogger started becoming prominent, I figured, might as well convert to a blog to take advantage of automatic archiving and stuff, as it was becoming tedious to update a website by hand.

Even now, I'm not sure why I go on, when I'm not even sure if any people read this (I am aware that there are some that probably do, though they usually remain quiet :D) I'm not sure why, but I guess I feel a need to maintain an online "presence" as it were. Part-time therapy, part-time boredom, part-time egotism perhaps?

Why then am I hesitant to let a coworker (who is also a friend) know the url? Like I said, I don't have anything to hide (and I'm pretty sure I haven't said anything stupid about my work, mostly because, hey I like my work!). If I had anything to hide, why blog in public at all? You could always hide behind Livejournal's protected system (they have one of those right?) or use an anonymous name.

I don't have an answer. But if she (or anyone else) asks again, I will give the url. :D

The Bible Promotes Capitalism

At least, that's what I was thinking when I was listening to today's Gospel regarding the parable of the talents.

Bsically, I think the gist of it is: God gives us talents, we should do the best we can; if we don't, how can we complain when others do better?

Yeah, I pay attention in Church. Go me!