Aug 09
ErinGarbage
The recruiting department in the company is lauching an incentive-based campaign that blew my socks off. In return for an X number of ‘entries’ the department is willing to give
- 1-2 ‘entries’ = 3 donuts
- 2-3 ‘entries’ = 4 donuts
- 4-6 ‘entries’ = 6 donuts or half dozen
- 7-10 ‘entries’ = 12 donuts or 1 dozen
Notice what is wrong with the above allocation? The first one is that there is a overlap on the first two entries. The second one is that while the last two are grammatically correct, they are syntactically ambiguous.
Rep: Ah excuse me ma’am, would you like 6 donuts or half dozen?
Person1: Ah, I’ll get half dozen, it sounds it has more donuts than 6.
Rep: How about you sir?
Person2: I would like 12 donuts please.
Rep: May I suggest getting 1 dozen instead? It costs the same anyway.
Person2: Gee thanks, I appreciate the help.
Ok, some might comment that whoever wrote that memo was just being smart in providing an alternative term for a half and one dozen prizes. If that is the case then why not say quarter dozen or third of a dozen on the first two? Not being used enough? It doesn’t matter. Whoever wrote that tried to sound smart but ended up being ambiguously retarded.
Too bad it was sent through a generic mailer. Otherwise I could have replied back.
I’m bored.
ciao!
Jul 09
ErinGarbage, Movies
Last Saturday my wife and I went to Robinson’s Galleria to get some well needed RnR. Since we were on a diet and it was burger day,we were planning to leave the car in the parking lot and scoot to the Greenhills area to eat dinner at Brother’s Burger (since their branch in Rockwell has already closed shop). But since we got out late and I spied there was a new Wham! Burgers branch in 4th floor, we decided to eat there instead. Previously we were only able to eat Wham! burgers at Shangri-la Edsa.
We both ordered double whammies, two perfectly charbroiled burgers dripping with succulent juice, with some tomatoes, lettuce and on a soft sesame bun. I don’t know what happened with my burger but it disappeared somewhere in less than five minutes. I ended up sharing my wife’s burger. /lol
I am still debating whether Brother’s Burger or Wham! has the best burgers. But we will definitely eat there again on the 21st when we finally pick up the replacement for Betsy.
And oh, we watched the Transformers movie after to pass away the traffic. Great movie, and I can’t add anything that has not yet been said before. 😀
ciao!
Jun 24
ErinRubbish
Yesterday another kid has the misfortune to have a parent who thinks I will be a good godparent. Carlos Tristan Corpuz, a 7-month old kid, was helpless when he realized that I intend to honor the agreement I had with his father and show-up in his christening.
Carlos makes number seven after Amboy, Gabe, AG, Ian, Io, and Jayda. Hopefully I can be a godparent to him in the full extent of the word and not just in paper. I dislike the latter because I think being a godparent is a heavy burden since a godparent is like a parent who needs to devote 100% commitment and not just during Christmas season. Except for a few, I actually refuse godparent notification if I cannot see the kid in a regular basis. My parents warned me that when my time came to look for godparents for my kid(s) then I will receive karma and also be refused. I just laughed at it and retorted that if they don’t want to be my kid’s godparent then that is perfectly fine because that means they are honest. I am not after having a doting godparent, I want somebody who can straighten out my kid like I would.
The baptism was held in St. Peter the Apostle church in Malate, Manila. Carlos almost had a baptism that I want for my future kid(s): a solemn rite all of his own with no screaming other babies and chatting attendees that I do not know because they came with the other babies being baptized in bulk. The baptismal “chamber” in the church was nice, complete with a marble pedestal where water will be poured on the baby’s head.
What merited a -1 in my book was the officiating priest. He was so haughty and full of it (or Maangas in Filipino street talk) that I was tempted to flaunt my preferred agnosticism on his face to make him aware that his superiority to me is just in his head. I think the priest was feeling special when he asked what Kit and Tetet was asking the “Iglesia ng Diyos” for Carlos. Tetet replied the usual spiel a proud momma would: good health, good upbringing, etc. The priest asked Kit the same question and Kit replied something similar but added through “occasions like this” referring to the baptism. The priest then launched in a “shame on you” tone about his question not being answered and ranted of a spiel about they should be asking the Church to baptize the kid. What a maroon and thick-headed priest, if you cleaned your ears that morning and went down a few steps on your pedestal you would have realized that your preferred answer was given to you albeit from a father’s heart and own words. If you didn’t get your preferred answer then any good facilitator would have coaxed the answer out by providing guiding questions like “do you want the Church to baptize your child and blah blah blah?”. You, err your church, didn’t actually accepted payment from us so you can embarrass us, didn’t you? And attitudes like that is what keeps me away from returning to being a Catholic.
The priest cannot even remember Carlos’ name and he was the only kid being baptized in the rites. Err, Father the kids name is on the sheet of paper you haughtily asked was attached on the receipt and is under your hand resting on the pulpit. Checking it twice to get the name correctly is alright, but did you have to check it everytime you need to say the kid’s name? If Carlos’s name was very unique then probably yes but “Carlos”? sheesh…
Next time somebody asks me to be a godparent, I will first have them verify if the priest allows non-Catholics to stand in the rite. I am officially changing my religion from NPC (non-Practicing Catholic) to Agnostic.
ciao!
Jun 17
ErinGarbage
I have officially ditched Sage rss reader in favor of Google Reader. GR allows me to centralize all of my feeds and lets me read a lot of the blogs that the Websense in the office blocks. I couldn’t comment on most of them though.
Bad Erin. But I stopped caring when they refused to listen. They say apple, I say banana. In the end they still got a fruit. 😛
ciao!
Jun 17
ErinGarbage, Technology
Sometimes the cause of the problem is glaringly simple that you could smack yourself in the head when realization hits you.
Ever since I brought home both Paquito (my IPaq rx3715) home with my Dixie, the DLink DI-624 wireless switch, I was no longer able to make them communicate like what I was able to do in Helsinki. I already tried resetting the device but still no dice. Since I was not able to get any connection from the free Wifi in Robinsons Galleria and Pioneer I decided that it might be something in the PDA. Unfortunately there is no update available so I chucked the task in my backburner until I get an inspiration or new information, whichever comes first.
A couple of weeks ago my Lala, my Mandriva installation in my laptop, lost her ability to connect wirelessly to the switch so I was forced to leash her to one of the LAN ports. I already tried reloading the PRISM driver and ndiswrapper but nothing was working. My schedule is to hectic that I decided to just let Lala be leashed for the time being. What makes me squirm is that Stubborn, my Windows installation, is able to connect to Dixie without any problems. Trying to bring up the wlan0 in Lala always churns out an error that it cannot set the WEP key. I viewed it and everything looks fine. Another dead end, it must be one of those updates that I let urpmi download and install…
Last night I was tinkering with Dixie’s web admin interface and happened to click on the Wireless page. Then I noticed something that burned a light bulb in my head; three of four digits were in a different order! I double checked the one I have in mcc and lo behold, Lala have a different key! Eureka, and gundammit! I was elated that Lala was unleashed again, and I want to kick myself for having to subject Lala to the humiliation of being chained to Dixie. I still cant figure out what happened and how the config WEP keys got exchanged in Lala but not on Stubborn is something to figure out at a later day.
This morning after a quick morning nap the light bulb flickered again. What if the same problem applies to Paquito? I switched on Dixie and reconfigured the WEP key again. After a few sputtering handshakes later Paquito was online! All this time Paquito have a different WEP key sequence. My LASIK procedure has done something more than sharpen my vision, it also jumpstarted a portion of my brain.
Typing this in Paquito, and the theme I have sucks when you are viewing it from a portable. The menu column is hugging all the real estate and all the texts are squeezed on a 8-character column. Putting the display on landscape mode is better but only by a slight margin. And for some reason I cannot complete my reply on Apple’s comment on the previous post. I think I am hitting something that makes pocket IE go back to the previous page. I have to reinstall minimo into Paquito. Would be super if Opera for pocketpcs is also free like the desktop counterpart.
ciao!
Jun 11
ErinGarbage, Top of my head
The LASIK was a success, or so I would like to believe! 🙂
Although my glasses has been replaced with a dorky protective google (two of which I have already broken in a span of 1 day), I am pleased with the results. My vision was not a perfect 20/20 but something along the lines of 20/25-30. Not bad coming from a vision that has a lens grade of 525/500 for each eye. I am willing to sport the dorky to the extreme look for two weeks as long as this dream vision lasts for at least ten years.
I am getting ahead of myself. I went on a half-day leave last Friday for the scheduled LASIK procedure (I still dont want to call it an operation). My loving wife met me in the 10th floor of the Phinma building at around 1PM before I went into the preparation room. The whole prep time was about an hour long, about 90% of which I spent snoring on a very comfortable lazy boy chair. I think the mild sedative they gave me have something to do with that.
When they brought me inside the LASIK room I was pretty scared. The reason being is that I forgot to ask Dr. Ang (the eye surgeon) how would they cut the flap in my cornea or if they have an instrument that would make my eyeball stationary. Face it, it is not normal to be unwavering if you see a blade a few millimeters from your eye. Dr. Ang was very cordial and said that I don’t need to worry about it, so I didn’t.
They made me lie down to an operating table with a specially-molded headrest that would minimize head movement. Dr. Ang talked to me throughout the whole process and keeps on reminding me to stare straight to the red blinking light. They placed something like a reverse vise on my eyelids so I wont blink. Then when it was time to cut a flap, Dr. Ang said he will place something in my eye which will darken everything and that I am to say when everything has gone completely dark. After everything went dark he said that I would feel a vibration for 30 seconds. I would assume this was the point that they were already cutting a flap. Again I would like to say that I still havent felt anything but I am completely aware of my surroundings. 🙂
The whole process then continued with my restored vision. Dr. Ang said my vision will scatter which I think was when they lifted the corneal flap. Then he said I would hear something burning but that is perfectly normal. In the background I can hear the hum of the laser and a nurse counting “25 percent, 51 percent, 76 percent, 100% percent”. Dr. Ang then placed back the flap and smoothened it with what looked to me like a small spatula and a thin wire. Then they repeated the process on my left eye.
The whole process lasted around 10 minutes. Then the nurse instructed me about the drops that would need to be administered for 2 weeks. They gave me a protective googles whose ear brace I managed to snap during the night. When I came back the following day for a checkup, Dr. Ang said there is a foreign object in the lower end of the flap and he would need to open the flap again to clean it out. So the short visit stretched to an hour since I had to go back to the LASIK room. The cleanup only lasted a few minutes so I spent much of it dozing on the lazyboy. /lol
The good thing about it is that since my wife works for Rockwell Land Corp, I was able to avail of a whooping 25% discount on the whole package cost. Neat!
Here is to a clear and lasting recovery!
Jun 03
ErinGarbage
Yesterday we went to the Asian Eye Institute for a LASIK screening exam. If you have not yet visited it, getting a LASIK treatment is included in my wishlist.
Anyway, after a few gruelling (or make it stomach grumbling) 3.5 hours, the medical team in the institute deemed me qualified for the procedure so I have scheduled a treatment next Friday. My vision is still blurry due to the dilation but I can now read printed text when using my glasses. Last night I was kinda worried because even if I can read without my glasses, putting them on makes the texts look blurry. Reading far and large texts is not an issue though. One peeve is my eyes seems to be more sensitive to light since the tests yesterday.
The tests yesterday seems a gamut of eye-drops, looking at a far-away object through a special machine, and the dreaded eye-dryness test. The dryness test involves the eye doctor putting some mild eye anaesthesia (this should have been warning enough) and then slipping two thin slips of paper in each lateral tear duct which happens to be conveniently located under each eyeball (yeoowww!!!). I had to look forward for three minutes while two strips of paper happily protrudes from my lower eyelid. grrr….
My wife asked me if I am not scared about the procedure. Of course I am scared, only stupid people claim they are no scared if something valuable (like eyesight) is on the line. But I am fed up with my dependency with my eyeglasses and not being able to enjoy activities like going to the beach and swimming because I have to protect my glasses. I also dislike going to the optical shop whenever some screws in my eyeglasses became lost, or if my eyeglass frame needs replacement because I somehow crunched it between two hard/heavy places.
Here is to having a better eyesight next week. A 20/20 vision would be nice but I can settle for a grade that woudl allow me to see something from far away without scrambling for my eyepiece. 🙂
ciao!
May 13
ErinGarbage
After three gruesome and stressful weekends I have finally enjoyed a weekend wherein saying good morning, hi and “kitakits ulit mamaya” to the manong guards of the work building is not part of the routine. *huraahhhhh*
was the long work rally worth it? i think so, but i don’t want to go through it again. the best part of the whole deal is we aced the external audit. the auditor couldn’t find anything but given that he only inspected us for 1.5 hours then i still consider it luck.
what have i accomplished for my first free saturday? almost nothing. i splurged it on sleep; sweet, sweet and careless sleep. after driving my wife to Makati for their outing and getting some week-long supplies in the Angono palengke I just slept. Let see, I slept from 7AM to 10AM in “The Rundown” on AXN, slept on the couch, did some documentation work for my manager, slept from 7PM to 9PM, upgraded Lala to Mandriva Spring (where I have just finished reconfiguring the wireless card), and now doing some house chores. i still have some leftover bitter gourd for lunch so i don’t need to cook until this afternoon. i still have to do laundry though since the workers doing the garage will still have to work today.
ah, not bad for a lazy weekend. i still need to finish the SCM documentation so i can give it to my manager for review. the current one is pretty confusing but then the person who did it has only the basic knowhow of how SCM works, and she was merely using the copy-search-replace method from a previous instance of the document. i still have a few revisions to make before i can put my name in the revision log. 🙂
my wife is already en route to Manila so i will get to see her this afternoon. the downside is she might miss to much and give me the ‘sermon’ that i didn’t get yesterday. oh well, that is one of the perks of the married life, you no longer have the luxury of just hanging the phone when you don’t feel like listening. harharhar.
and i need to post some blog items that have been floating in my mind, mostly rants about what irritates me during the normal course of my day. 🙂 or make that 🙁
ciao!
Apr 16
ErinRubbish, Work office politics, rant, Work
I have just came out from a long OTy[1] weekend, and when I said long I meant a 19-hour rally with 3 hours of sleep. All because the project I am with has once again been selected for a security audit and an internal audit will be conducted today.
The unplanned rally is caused by the short notice given to the project and the not-so-good state of our security documentation. Before somebody starts that it is our fault for not updating the security docs as we go along then please give us a charge number for that kind of work before you start pointing fingers. In typical corporate wheedling and cajoling, they (meaning the powers that be, or the power trippers as i call them) say that these should be part of the “continuous improvement” (CI) budget of the project. REALITY CHECK: WHAT CI BUDGET? We are on a fixed time arrangement with the client and just trying telling the client that “we would allocate a portion of the time you bought to spend on security work that is not part of the contract you signed, and thank you for understanding.”. Couple this with the fact that we are running overbudget for the things that the client actually paid for! It doesn’t take a super sleuth to figure out that we are between a hard rock and a PHB.
To make matters worse, I am not satisfied with the output because we are tasked to churn out security documentations “aligned” with the corporate “version”. No thank you because
- I don’t believe the return of investment on those documentations is significant.
- The template documents provided are either not enough or an overkill.
- The person who created those template documents should stop using PCP. Reformatting them to look professional entails too much work.I reserve the right to save my co-team members from the atrocities of using too much colors in a document, and loud ones at that.
- If I am going to churn out security measures, then I will at least have the decency of believing those are practical and not just for show.
Why did I go through it? Because of pressure to pass the audit since the whole office accreditation can go up in smoke for failing the external auditors, and I don’t have the heart to add more stress on my manager. She already has enough problems on her plate regarding the project going over-budget and CMMi (yes, that effectively makes it a four-letter word) demands for full compliance.
19 hours and we aren’t even halfway the 100% completion mark. I know I told my manager that what we are targeting now is just damage control but it is really disheartening whenever I see the completion ratio for the project. And after that I also need to consider going back to reality that I am also over-budget on the client deliverable that they want me to submit by end of this month. 🙁
End of rant for now. I need to check what else I can finish before the internal audit today.
[1] OTy, n., Short for O-Thank you, the free version of overtime.
ciao!
Mar 09
ErinRubbish
Post Mortem – After death.
This phrase is usually used in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) to see what went wrong and what went right during the cycle in the hopes that it would be rectified and re-implemented in the next iteration of the SDLC. Unfortunately life is not like that. We only have one shot barring reincarnation that is not yet proven.
Before I proceed I would like to say that I don’t have suicidal inclinations, well at least not at the moment. I do however have the tendency sometimes to think about death objectively since, as they say, the only things sure in this world is death and taxes. 😀
Some have an irrational fear of death, considering it taboo to even talk about it for “fear” that talking about it is synonymous with inviting it. Experts always talk about worst-case scenarios and some of those are not even close to happening. I don’t have any fear of death but I am afraid of dying. There are still a lot more life has to offer but I am not afraid to miss those out if my time really has come. When you die you die right?
This post is really what I want and don’t want when I pass away from this existence. Feel free to join in but I would like to minimize religion to a minimum and deal with physical facts. As my father says, “when you leave this earth you no longer have a stake on what happens after”. Wise words. Death does not affect the departed but only those who were left alive.
Here are the things that I want to be done when I die:
- If I am still young then I want my organs to be donated to those who can use them. I guess my eyes is out of the question and probably also my heart due to my unhealthy living, but somebody might need a liver or gallbladders. For those who are not aware, the back of the Philippine driver’s license can serve (upon accidental death) as a binding contract that will allow the paramedics to tag your organs for donation without notifying your next of kin. I have already checked mine and I think all should too. You won’t be able to make use of your organs after you pass away so it is much better to have somebody put them to better use.
- I originally want my remains to be donated to medical schools for study and experimentation. I prefer if my body is donated to those medical students who have a hard time gathering the funds to buy a cadaver. I am thinking that by offering my cadaver I might be able to help save other lives. But I think this won’t come true as my wife said there is no way she is going to allow this. Since I won’t be able to object by then I don’t think I can do much about this. It is just my luck and bane that I married a loving but sentimental woman. 😀
- If the above can’t be granted then I also would want my body to be buried in a backyard while being rolled in a straw mat. I initially wanted to be buried under a rice field so that my decomposed remains will serve as nutrients to the crops that will feed other people. I realized this would probably scare people so I settle on being buried in a backyard then have a fruit tree planted on top to mark my final resting place.
A mango tree would be ideal. I can only imagine with glee with the thought of the tree’s primary root going through my rib cage, or its secondary root enclosing on my bones. Then after 10-15 years there would be children playing on the tree branches and enjoying the fruits. Some can even hang swings on the straight branches and maybe the thick foliage can help alleviate the heat during summer.
Nice thoughts, I just hope it could still be done given that the land we purchased does not have any backyard and I think my family would get in trouble with the law if they did bury me there. 😀
- The last resort would be to have my body cremated. My family can decide on what they want to do with the ashes. They can sprinkle it in the air (and cause some people asthma attacks), put it in a vase and display it the house, put them in pendants, or use them as seasoning when preparing dinner or lunch (ewwww!).
And here are the things I don’t want:
- I don’t want my cadaver to be put on display during funerals. I don’t want to imagine people peering over my coffin and saying stupid things like “he looks like he was just sleeping” or “he looks very much alive”. Excuse me, you wont catch me wearing makeup and I would take it as an insult if you think I look better dead than alive. 😛
My office mate’s mom had it figured out when she asked her remains to be cremated immediately after she passed away and in the funeral there were only the vase of her ashes and some pictures of her. I want it to be the same if my remains are to be cremated.
- No flowers especially those in wreaths. I am dead remember? In case you don’t realize it, my sense of smell and sight went away with my life so I can’t smell and see anything. Do my family a favor and just give them the donation in cash so they would have something to spend for their basic needs. You can call it my final support to them if you really want to pay me respect.
- I would really hate it if I had a funeral procession. How much respect can you get by clogging main roads just so your remains can be “escorted” to the cemetery in a snail pace? You are already dead and you are still causing grief to strangers. Nope, I don’t want that to be me. I would figuratively turn in my grave, or in that case in the coffin while on the way to my grave.
If there will be funeral procession then please dont let anybody walk alongside the hearse. The practice of walking slowly beside the hearse is no longer applicable since that was done in the old times to avoid getting the light of the candles blown away. Nobody even uses candles during funeral processions today. Let everybody ride a car, jeep or tricycle but nobody walks. Period.
- Don’t let my body decompose in a concrete-enclosed grave. I consumed a lot of food in this life so it is only proper that my body be returned back to nature. Call it “returning to the circle of life” or “ashes to ashes” but I don’t want to be useless at the very end. I have been useless enough when I was living.
Ending with my father’s universal response: “What about you?”
ciao!
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