November 6

Viper part deux

Most things they said are sweeter the second time around, but having snake visitors is not among them. After more than 4 years, our house had another snake visitor. Neth is the lucky one to have found it and this time it is between the door and the door jamb leading to the side laundry area. She couldn’t close the door and frantically called me when she finally realized what is jammed in between.

Not wanting to have a repeat of the in-house hide and seek, I opted to forcefully close the door and pin the snake in between. I was hoping that it will have its head out in the open but when I circled around the house I only saw its tail and a part of its body wriggling on the other side of the door. I don’t want to risk it causing more panic in the house and I am not equipped to handle snakes so I took the garden shears and cut the exposed body part into two. Hopefully by tomorrow the snake will already be dead and it would be easy to dispose it.

Sorry snake brethren, you shouldn’t have picked our house as your vacation spot. 🙁

[Nov-7 update] I got pictures! Pardon the quality as they are taken by my aging K618i phone. 🙂

Plastered
Laid out

ciao!

Category: Garbage | LEAVE A COMMENT
October 1

I am Human

I woke up on the wrong side of the bed today so I need to vent out and nitpick… 🙂

I want to reiterate the advocacy of minimizing the use of the word “resources” when referring to members of your team.

A resource is a finite, inanimate stock or tool. A hammer is a tool therefore it is a resource. My time and skills are resources but I don’t want to suffer the indignity of being categorized as a tool. I am neither a tool nor a resource; and I would appreciate not being abstracted to the same level as a computer. Computers are dumb, they can only follow instructions.

Use FTE to refer to the workload unit, but use team member, colleague, personnel or employee when referring to the human being. Respect the person doing the work. The IT industry may be being overhauled and optimized with automation, but this remains a creative industry and not a place for human automatons. Each member is unique and brings something special to the table.

ciao!

Category: Garbage, Work | LEAVE A COMMENT
August 8

Work-induced vomitting

During this lifetime I have heard people say a few times that their work is too stressful that they want to vomit. I didn’t realize that this morning it would be a literal thing for me. 🙁

I went to sleep at around midnight after a healthy dose of boring reading material (aka project work package aka contract) for some big shot discussions this week. At around 2AM I suddenly awoke with a jerk with the words UAT[1] in my mouth and the feeling of having a lot of bile in my throat. Thankfully the trash bin was on my side of the bed so I swiped the cover open and started dry-heaving on it. The icky and rough feeling on my throat was not going away so I ended up drinking a lot of water and munching on fried and salted corn kernels to get the taste of bile away.

Now I can, with credibility, say that I can relate next time I hear somebody say they are sick and tired of their work that they want to vomit. 🙂

[1] User Acceptance Test

ciao!

Category: Garbage, Work | LEAVE A COMMENT
July 17

The most Murphy’s day of my life… so far

In a nutshell, Murphy’s law states that whatever can go wrong will go wrong and at the most inopportune time. This day for me seems to to be the most literal example of that law and it seems to crown a really crappy week:

  • My “so called” team has never been complete the whole week.
  • Nothing seems get to the state that can be called as “done”.
  • Screening of the “fit to contribute” recruits across the company isn’t going well.
  • Issues germinate like dormant spores and each one comes unwrapped with a tag of “URGENT: RESOLVE IMMEDIATELY OR GLOBAL MELTDOWN IMMINENT”
  • I have had the introduction to the project incident report template and mastery of accomplishing one in a single week.
  • I got tagged for not finishing the work I wasn’t even scheduled to do on time even if it would supposedly only take a few hours (and which task isn’t supposed to get done in a few hours?)
  • A little storm called “Basyang” decided to kill the power and water supply in our area w/c forced us to stay in an overpriced hotel-esque place. This reminds me that I need to create a mini-review for that place.

Those are just some examples for the week and just for today:

  • My “change” can’t be completed because it hasn’t passed UAT execution because…
  • The environment decided to crap out the whole week and be excessively stubbon today that no requested build from me ever finishes successfully. It doesn’t matter that I went to the office earlier than usual to get the testing done.
  • I got tagged for not being prepared to present items in a meeting attended by the client. It doesn’t matter that the list items magically appeared in the list and it hasn’t really come into my attention.
  • My change suddenly had a twin ticket that I wasn’t aware of, and the approach is still dubious as it smells of too much patch-me solution.
  • Everybody is too busy to submit admin requirements. And that is because I really don’t do anything each day but be a PHB and think of useless things to assign to my team.
  • I said I will leave at 7:30PM, announced to the powers-that-be that I will leave at 7:30PM, and then get stuck in ten thousand little important tasks that made me walk the hallway with the powers-that-be at 8:15PM. The powers-that-be are on their way to a meeting that I declined because I need to go leave at 7:30PM!

    • And to top it all off, I still don’t feel like I am contributing anything. This is the feeling that I really, really hate. Life is getting consumed by work that is starting to leave a bad taste in my mouth because I don’t feel empowered nor ingenious enough to really make a difference.

    Oh life… I just need to accept that this is one of my “Shit Happens days & it will keep on pouring”.

    ciao!

Category: Rubbish, Top of my head | 2 Comments on The most Murphy’s day of my life… so far
June 11

Sweet nothings

Who said being together for 10 years can diminish the sweetness of a relationship? The conversation below that Neth and I had while having dinner last night is a contradictory statement to that premise. Names were abstracted to protect the innocent. 😉

X: Nakakapagod kang mahalin?
Y: Bakit?
X: Kasi napapagod na ako tapos mahal kita, kaya ganon.
Y: Ganon ba? Then I am sick and tired of you.
X: Bakit naman?
Y: Kasi I am sick; I am tired; and I am with you.

I know it doesn’t make sense but aren’t those declarations sweet? 🙂

ciao!

Category: Garbage, Humor | LEAVE A COMMENT
June 4

Faster file copying over a local network

What I started to do was to copy a 460MB file from the computer in the project network into my laptop before I leave in an hour. The problem is that when I started mapping the drive containing the file and copying it using Windows explorer the ETC displayed by the file copy dialog box fluctuates between 2-5 hours. This instability and slowness is a pet peeve I have against the Windows copy process over CIFS/SMB shares. I know copying from the command line is going to be faster but without a progress meter I don’t know when it is going to be finished.

The next option I did was to share it the webserver hosted in the remote box and then tried to download it. The download speed range is between 30-75kbps so the ETC reported by the browser is between 2-3 hours. It may be faster but not fast enough for my needs. Then I realized that I have rsync inside the cygwin install in the laptop. As I have already the network share mapped to Z: drive so the simple command

$ rsync -avp --partial --progress /cygdrive/z/Temp/bigfile.zip ./

started the transfer which was a whopping speed range of 230-420Kbps. ETC is now 15-20 minutes. Problem solved so I am writing this blog while waiting for the transfer to complete. For those interested with the rsync options:

  • -avp : copy the file in archive mode, preserve permissions and increase verbosity.
  • –partial : if the error fails, don’t delete the transferred chunks so it can be used for resuming the transfer.
  • –progress : show the copy progress.

Why didn’t I just use a USB stick? It is because the company has locked down the USB storage drivers and while somebody who amazingly has a strong resemblance to me can do something about it, it would be too troublesome to pursue. FTP might have been a good choice of protocol as this is a secured environment but from experience the antiquated file transfer protocol only has a slight advantage over HTTP in terms transfer speeds.

ciao!

Category: FLOSS, Technology | LEAVE A COMMENT
June 2

HTC Desire arrives in June 18

According to Yuga, my “current” dream Android phone will start arriving on June 18 but it is expected to fetch a price from Php35-40K.

Ouch. Yuga historically guesses the price pretty accurately or at least off by 1-2K. This one seems like the impossible dream at the moment but between this and the iPad I will opt for an Android phone.

Here is to hoping that Yuga’s guess is over by a big margin, or the Samsung Galaxy S is going to be cheaper….

ciao!

Category: Gadget | LEAVE A COMMENT
May 1

Adobo sa Gata

Posting here for Ate Mai. Taken from Cook Magazine (January-Februart 2003 issue). 🙂

Ingredients:
1/2 kilo liempo w/ skin, cubed
1/2 kilo chicken parts
2 tsp salt
1/2 tbsp ground peppercorn
1/2 cup strong vinegar
1/2 cup water
1 head garlic, pounded
1 pc. laurel leaf, if desired
1-1 1/2 cup coconut milk
about 2 tbsp achuete oil, for coloring, if desired

Procedure:
– Season meat with salt and pepper and leave for about 15 minutes.
– Add vinegar and water, garlic and laurel
– Add achuete oil
– Simmer, covered in a heavy pot
– Reduce till liquid has practically evaporated
– Add coconut milk
– Let the sauce thicken to desired consistency

Knowing me, I’ll just take a look at the ingredients and then create the dish a’la chamba. And add some whole peppercorns at the end for that Adobo-effect. 🙂

ciao!

Category: Fun Stuff | LEAVE A COMMENT