Sunday, 8 November 2009

#312 - There is actually a ISO standard (ISO 8601) that covers the "representation of dates and times"

In my attempt to give my weekly musings a bit more structure, I looked up what day and week of the year we were in. The day of the year was simple enough, but the week was actually more complicated that I thought it was! I always assumed that 1st January will be Week 1..but then thinking about it, if 1st January is a Friday, will it still be Week 1? According to ISO 8601, if 1st January is a Friday, Saturday or Sunday it is actually Week 52 or Week 53 of the previous year (ISO 8601 week starts on Monday). To confuse things even further, the system followed by USA is different to ISO 8601 - weeks start Monday, and there are partial weeks at the start/end of the year. If you're wondering, 09/11/2009 is Week 46 and the reason I start on Sundays for these posts is so I can have Sunday to write them up, and it's no fun to come up with the musing for the day and write about it on the same day.

Monday, 9 November 2009

#313 - Magic is awesome! But figuring out how it is done is tricky.

Had been playing around with Ruby on Rails for the past few nights (getting it to work with PostgreSQL is amazingly tricky!), but when I finally got it working I was able to continue with the very basic online getting started tutorial. A couple of commands later I had a "working" web-app - create/update/delete posts and comments was all working. It was great to see it working, but unfortunately I had close to no clue as to how it was all working thanks to all the rails magic. My initial quick attempt (it was like 2am) at poking around to see how everything worked was futile - I just confused myself even more So as much as I like all the awesome magic that makes things "just work", I think understanding and finding out how everything clicks together is important too. (Of course, this applies to 'normal' magic too - watching them is fun, but working out how they work can be challenging, but probably just as rewarding)

Tuesday, 10 November 2009

#314 - An item that is expensive doesn't necessarily mean that it is of higher quality - do your research!

A couple of weeks ago, read "9 Ways Marketing Weasels Will Try to Manipulate You" on Coding Horror, and would say it is definitely worth reading. The 9 points listed are all quite good and I have to admit have been victim of most, if not all of them. Reading/knowing these 9 points will probably not make you immune to sneaky marketing techniques, but hopefully it'll make you more aware when you are deciding what to buy. Though, if you do end up buying something for a bit more than you should've paid, don't worry - a random post I read ages ago (will try to find it) said that you'll grow to like what you own and think it is the best

Wednesday, 11 November 2009

#315 - Even something boring like a business card can be made awesome with some creativity.

To a good majority of people, business cards are probably quite boring - a rectangular piece of cardboard with the contact details and logo of the company. They're all about the same, with some variation in the colours/logo/names, but it is probably hard for any particular one to stand out. Of course there is nothing wrong about standard business cards, but even something as simple as business cards can be made to be simply amazing with some thought and creativity - 100 (Really) Creative Business Cards. In my opinion, some of them are probably a bit overdone, but there are plenty that are just simply awesome - the one I like most is the tooth decay/dentist one. Looking at all the business cards made me want to think outside of the box and take something old and boring and give it a twist.

Thursday, 12 November 2009

#316 - "...the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do." -Apple

Looking into the Evolution of Apple Ads lead me to one of their earlier campaigns "Think Different". It was quite interesting to see how much has changed from when computers first came out and comparing it to what we have now. Though the one thing that stood out for me was the quote above in one of the ads. To me the quote seems to be challenging people to voice what they are thinking without worrying if other people will think they are crazy and/or stupid (something that I find hard to do myself). The other reason I like it is if someone calls you "crazy" you can point them towards this quote

Friday, 13 November 2009

#317 - Window blinds are opened during take off and landing so that passengers on the plane can be aware of the outside surroundings and alert the crew if anything seems amiss.

Was on a plane tonight and the usual take off/landing notice of "please open your window blinds" caused me to think...why? A quick google gave me a reasonable answer which makes sense: with the window blinds open, the passengers can see outside and alert the crew if needed. To be honest, I never thought of it that way - always thought it was something to do with some technical reason such as cabin pressure. As the idiom says: many hands make light work! Well, in this case, many eyes make flying safer!

Saturday, 14 November 2009

#318 - Listening to 'live' music and playing music sounds different (in a better way) to listening to music from the computer/stereo etc.

Without thinking much, it might be easy to think that listening to music from CDs etc would sound better then listening to someone play since the recorded CD is probably a professional playing and recorded in a specialised studio with all the acoustics tuned to perfection. However, I have always found that listening to someone play (especially someone you know) almost always sounds better! They may make mistakes, but somehow the overall feel of the music just feels better. Similarly, playing a song yourself is very rewarding - despite all the mistakes when practising, when you're finally able to part of the song it feels great! Note: I often label myself tone-deaf, so you might have to take this point with a grain of salt, though it'll be interesting to see what other people think.

Sunday, 1 November 2009

#305 - It's amazing/interesting to think about what you have learnt during the day and find one thing that you feel is worthy to share.

This obviously comes from the post from last week as it was the first time I really sat down at the end of each day and thought about what to write about. In the past I have probably casually just thought about the day that has just passed, but never in much depth. It definitely takes some time to pick out the thing to write about, but I feel it is worth it - especially at the end of the week when I read through my notes I've jotted down for each day. Admittedly at the end of some days it felt like nothing special enough happened that day to write about - after all I can't expect all days to be exciting - just have to make sure there aren't too many of them

Monday, 2 November 2009

#306 - Rule of thumb: Red wine doesn't go with seafood - Wine and seafood: Red rags

For those that know me, I hardly drink wine (in fact I hardly drink alcohol). So the random fact of my day is drinking red wine while having seafood can leave a strong and unpleasant fishy taste in your mouth. Iron levels in wine is the cause for the fishy after-taste since iron reacts with the healthy unsaturated fat in fish to form unstable chemical compounds that cause the unpleasant fishy odours. So it seems like it as long as the wine has low iron levels, you can enjoy your seafood dinner - though white wine in general have lower iron levels than red, so probably still a safer choice.

Tuesday, 3 November 2009

#307 - Sweeps is gambling for dummies.

Today was Melbourne Cup and when I came into work today saw an email about entering the "Sweeps". There were multiple $2 and $5 sweeps and I had no idea how sweeps worked, other than you had to put money in and you *might* get some back if you won. It was only after lunch that I found out how sweeps worked - everyone who entered gets assigned a random horse and then at the end of the race, the winnings are paid out in some sort of proportion to the winners (the payout split seems to differs slightly depending on the sweeps organiser).

Guess sweeps works for people like me who don't know much about the horses so getting assigned a random horse is just about the same as picking a horse myself. Maybe I should've tried my luck in the Melbourne Cup sweeps - though it would've helped if I knew how sweeps worked in the first place.

Wednesday, 4 November 2009

#308 - A high IQ doesn't mean much, being able to make rational decisions is just as important. - Clever fools

I've always thought that IQ tests are quite pointless and silly - a person isn't "smart" because they can figure out what pattern comes next in the series. Being able to analyse, think logically and connect the dots are definitely important, but in my opinion what makes a person "smart" is how they interact with people, how they make decisions and how they justify their actions.

This is obviously very vague but that is because being "smart" means so many different things in different contexts. The New Scientist article "Clever fools: Why a high IQ doesn't mean you're smart" talks about rational decision making as being an important aspect of an individual's intelligence which I feel is very true. It's a pretty good read and one of the things that I like are some of the analogies used to illustrate how purely measuring IQ is quite limited: "A high IQ is like height in a basketball player...There's a lot more to being a good basketball player than being tall, and there's a lot more to being a good thinker than having a high IQ." -David Perkins

Thursday, 5 November 2009

#309 - Time flies!

Today was a bit of a strange day, a series of events made me realise how time flies! In the morning news today they mentioned it has been a year since Obama was elected as President - to me it definitely didn't seem like a whole year has passed since all the US election frenzy. Then at work, a colleague mentioned that in a few short weeks we will have reached the end of another decade and will be starting a new one: 2010. Ten years ago it was "Year 2000" with all the Y2K worries. Ten years ago I had just started high school. Finally, while filling out some forms I realised that I had been working full time for nearly 9 months now - it might not sound long to some people, but to me it feels like I'm still new and just started not long ago.

Friday, 6 November 2009

#310 - An extra little bit of attention can go a long way.

Not quite sure how this popped into my mind today, but it just did. Simply put, I believe that an extra bit of thought and attention when we do things can make a big difference. Not quite sure how to express it nicely, but basically, spending an extra second or two every now and then to think about what you are doing and if you can do anything different to make things better pays off. It might be beneficial to yourself (eg. noticing the dark clouds outside and packing the umbrella) or others (eg. suggesting that other idea that they might just find helpful). Many times the extra attention will probably go unnoticed, but sometimes you'll be happy you packed the umbrella and the other person might just find that extra little idea to be perfect.

Saturday, 7 November 2009

#311 - The humble mouse movement is controlled by the "Mouse Acceleration Curve"

When you are using a computer, more often than not you'll also be using the mouse to point, click, drag etc. But have you ever thought of how the physical movement of the mouse is translated into the movement of the cursor on your screen? I haven't, until today. For the past few months been using my MacBook Pro and every now and then I will be using the mouse instead of the track-pad and the mouse movement just felt wrong. It'll move fine but then as I am approaching the target (eg. a button) the cursor seems to slow down and become rather unresponsive - very very annoying when playing World of Goo!

Getting rather annoyed at the "broken" mouse movement, I decided to see if there was a fix for it and after a bit of googling I realised neither my mouse nor laptop was broken, instead Apple just had a different (read crappier) "Mouse Acceleration Curve" compared to Windows.

This article I found explains the whole thing quite well - basically, it's obvious that the movement translation can't be a 1:1 ratio - needing to move 1cm physically to move the cursor 1cm on the screen is not practical (this is about as much though as I gave to the mouse movement prior to today...but there is so much more!). The simplest possible solution is to change the ratio to say 3:1 - but that causes another problem: "you'd have to move your mouse about [2.1 mm], no more, no less, to move from the center of the close button to get to the center of the minimize button".

The solution? Use both. When the mouse is moving fast use a X:1 ratio to move a far distance with little motion; while when the mouse is moving slow use a 1:1 ration to get the precision needed. As the article explains "For mouse motion to feel natural (at least for most people), the curve has to start by moving upward fairly moderately, then gradually flattening out as the value of X increases...A comfortable and useful curve is shaped like a curve. Mac OS X's curve, however, is shaped more like a cliff". This explained the "broken" feel I got when using my mouse - general movement across the screen was all ok, but because of the abrupt flattening at the top of the cliff, when I slowed down to click on the target, my mouse practically slowed down to a halt.

Luckily, it can be easily fixed. There are some 3rd party applications (shareware) that can give you a more control over the acceleration curve. USB Overdrive and SteerMouse seem to be two most popular. However, I went with the free option and downloaded drivers for my mouse off the Microsoft website. Now back to playing World of Goo - unfortunately this means I can no longer blame my lack of co-ordination on bad mouse movement!

After seeing this documentary I decided I wanted to do something similar - make my own time capsule However it wasn't until a few months later in early 2008 when I found an old exercise book which had some short stories that I had written in 1995 that really got me started. Reading those stories made me realise how much can change in a few years (and how much we can forget!). My time capsule is bit different to 21 Up Japan - it does have a set of questions which I plan on answering once every year or so, but the majority of entries are more diary-like entries of times when I feel like something important has happened.

I've only just started my time capsule, so still quite new to all of it - if anyone has any tips please share them Here are some of my tips/thoughts on how to create a time capsule:

1. Start now - it's never too early or too late!
2. You will forget what you've written (unless you've got super photographic memory...in which case you probably don't need to keep a time capsule)
3. Use pen/paper for your time capsule (or at least print it out). Having something on paper is just different to having it on your computer.
4. Include photos! (and write the location/date and names of people in that photo)
5. Have a set of questions (even if you only semi-follow them). It is quite different answering the questions and just writing a diary entry.

Even though I said to use pen/paper for the your time capsule, it's still ok to keep a few electronic ones - this blog for example is a good example - in fact I was reading my old blog the other day and found it very amusing! I've also subscribed to Photojojo's Time Capsule - it takes photos from your flickr from a year ago and emails them to you. Only recently started using flickr (because of the time capsule actually), but I would imagine this would work quite well if you're a heavy flickr user.

Just to finish off, this is a great example of how amazing a time capsule can be!

It probably sounds weird that I have no motivation to blog as it is something that I want to do. However, over the holidays I've discovered something that is annoying me. For many things (especially those you want to do) when you are tight on time your motivation levels are quite high - it's just that there isn't time to do it. While given the same objective if you have plenty of time motivation levels seem to drop so low that it just gets put on the back burner again. Of course there are exceptions, but to me it feels like a good majority of things that I want to and need to do are neglected because of this.

To me, the most logical reason for this is when you are short on time, chances are it's because there is something you don't really want to do, but have to do is taking up your time - so anything that is slightly more attractive will be high on your "must do" list. On the other hand when you have heaps of time it is probably just easier being lazy. While the other things you've always wanted to do seemed super-interesting and you'll do it just when you get some spare time, doing nothing is even better, so nothing ends up getting done.

Having said all this, I think the main problem of the two is motivation. The problem for me is finding a way to get motivated. Given enough motivation and determination, it should be possible to get pretty much anything done. Last year, I was having a conversation with someone and complained that I had no time - he replied with "We all have the same amount of time, it's just how we use it."

Apologies for the rather mashed up, nonsensical and late blog post, but I'd like to see what other's think about this problem.