February 23

Edsa Revolution Holiday Questions

  • Why did the holiday only cover the schools? Shouldn’t it be an all or nothing deal?
  • If the holiday declaration is to avoid having more non-working days this year, why not hold it on the actual date of the original bloodless revolution?
  • Why can’t the roads be like what it was today everyday, a joy to drive through?
  • Why can’t MMDA do something about the traffic that the Kalayaan fly-over construction is causing?
  • Why does our system punish the drivers who obey the law and reward those who bend it to the breaking point?
  • Why didn’t I win the 6/49 lotto?
  • Why do I feel I am beginning to suck at everything that I do?

ciao!

Category: Garbage | LEAVE A COMMENT
February 22

Sum of the parts

I have decided last week to keep both my twitter and tumblr accounts. This blog now has the widgets that gets the feeds of both micro-blogging sites. To enable me to blog from areas that prevents me from accessing them *cough*office*cough, I have signed up with twittermail and ping.fm which allows me to post via email and instant messengers. The instant messenger portion was previously handled by imified.com but their bot is no longer reliable thus a need for replacement.

To keep things simple, this blog will contain the full flege ramblings. The twits will be limited to short updates and “heat of the moment” rants while tumblr will retain my initial purpose for it: a host for shorter blog posts that may or may nob be converted to a full post.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? 🙂

ciao!

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February 15

The percent fallacy

How many times have you heard the phrase “I will give my 101%” or “You can count on a 120% effort for this project” and think its a good thing? It is becoming one of my pet peeves because people are getting more stupid each time that escape their mouths.

The word percent comes from the root word “per centum” which literally translates to “by the hundred”. Nowadays it is taken as “a portion of the whole” where whole is pegged at 100. When it comes to effort, there is no such thing as going over the top. It is just plain impossible. Some might argue that they just mean going the extra mile but in that case that person was squandering because they were not giving it their all during the other times that they are giving their 100%. They were lying when they said that they were giving their all during all those times so what makes you think they are not lying to you now?

In the fields that require physical exertion like blue-collar work or sports, it is not uncommon to hear that somebody has died because they went past their limits. These are the people who gave their 100%. These are the people who really gave their all and paid for it dearly. Keep that in mind the next time you hear somebody spouting a figure over 100%.

ciao!

Category: Rubbish | LEAVE A COMMENT
February 15

Might as well be dead

I can’t believe that it has been three months since I posted something here. Time flies when you are really busy and when you are pissed off (not in that order :P). Hopefully I will be able to finish up some items I want to blog about and stop being a slacker. 🙂

ciao!

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November 10

The ultimate solution for company data loss…

Or your money back!

Sounds like a pitch for snake oil medicines. 😀

Tonight I opened my company mail and I found a curious memo about a new guideline about backing up data on company owned machines. The first though that entered my mind was “WTF, another roadblock for doing backups?”

Reading the memo, it made some sense if you apply some common sense. And then I tried reading it from a “Security Expert slash Manager extraordinaire” perspective who follows everything by the book and then my world shrunk by a magnitude of ten. The phrasing combined with current practices is enough to give me the shivers if I think about embarking in a simple task of performing backups.

In line with the company’s commitment to protecting client data, effective immediately we are implementing the following process for backing up data on company-owned machines (desktops or laptops):

You may not back up any sensitive data residing on a company-owned computer (Laptop or Desktop) without permission of the IT Support team and obtaining a signed form. Only encrypted back ups are allowed, including copying files to flash media or CD.

Not bad eh? Not until you read that you need a very high approver before you can even think of performing a backup. If you need an analogy then think of the company as ruled by a god and you need the approval of the high priests. That approval is now on top of soaking one’s self in gasoline, rolling in live coals, and dancing a cha-cha number on top of broken blades and glasses.

To top it all, the last sentence was like adding insult to injury:

Further details will be released this week, as the IT Support team mobilizes to handle this task.

Yeah, I am brimming with confidence that the over-worked and ticket-closing trigger happy support team is able to take on this new task while spreading cheer and world peace. I am saying goodbye to backups then. I think it is easier to just slaughter some chicken and offer it to my anito to protect the company data that I am working on from sudden glitches and electronic crashes.

ciao!

Category: Rubbish, Work | LEAVE A COMMENT
October 23

Feeling stupid

A common computer prank is to take a screenshot of an unattended Windows desktop, configure the desktop to hide all shortcuts and the taskbar (for more kicks, move it in the left or right side) and then set the screenshot as the wallpaper. The pranksters then wait on the wing for the unsuspecting user to keep on clicking the applications in the screenshot and scratch their head why nothing is happening.

There is another behavior that makes this prank effective: tunnel vision. If using a big screen then people would have a tendency to zoom in on the middle portion and not pay much attention on the edges unless really needed. This and my work on “environment support” ensures that I make an ass of myself once a week. I normally take desktop screenshots when working with different applications. I usually position the different application windows in such a way that all the information are in a little portion of the screen. I then past the screenshot in mspaint, select the portion I need and send it to the other support team.

And then I move on to the next task and sometimes I forget closing the mspaint. Sometimes the mspaint window ends up getting the focus and then I start clicking on the the app window buttons or menus and wonder why nothing is happening. It is only after a few seconds that I notice the palette on the left side, or the title bar at the top. That is the time I press alt+f4 with a vengeance for using part of my 5-minutes of daily foolishness at that moment. 🙂

Just letting out some steam and sharing as this is the second time that it happened to me this week.

ciao!

Category: Garbage, Humor | LEAVE A COMMENT
October 16

Daredevil motorcycle drivers

I hate driving and find it as a chore that needs to be done. What makes me hate it even more is the amount of reckless and daredevil motorcycle drivers that are on the road today. These motorcycles give their riders enough mobility to wheeze in and out of traffic but it does not give them to right to start cutting off four-wheeled vehicles just because they think they can squeeze through. They are the ones who should be doing more of the defensive driving but they are the ones who are always on the offensive. I had my engine stalled twice because the traffic in C5 while going uphill on the bridge was already worse and a batch of these damn cycle drivers keep on squeezing through between my bumper and the edge of the bus on the lane on my left. To make matters worse, my right is also infested with motorcycles and bikers who think giving enough space across the vehicle is a sign of weakness. I have a word invented for these drivers: BORATE which is a hybrid from words meaning dick-heads and worms.

Taking lives is never a good thing but I wouldn’t really mind if some of these daredevils gets some jumpstart in getting to hell faster than the rest of us.

grrrrrr!

ciao!

Category: Garbage | LEAVE A COMMENT