Jan. 28, 2007
Post Part I:
This being my first week back to work after a month-long hiatus, I inevitably get the usual sort of questions people ask when you get back from a vacation:
“Hey, where did you go?”
“Do you have any pasalubong?” (souvenirs)
“So, what did you do for one month?”
I’m amused by how very few people seem to get the fact that I didn’t do “anything” in particular over the break. I did a hundred million things, maybe. I dunno. I didn’t keep track. I read a few books, wiped quite a few TV episodes off my backlog, learned a few new programming tricks, cleaned up some stuff, finished a few games, and God knows what else. If I bother to explain this, I would often get that lopsided look from people saying “You wasted your vacation on that?”
I don’t get this concept of “wasted vacation”. The whole idea of a vacation is to have free time to one’s self. Maybe for some people that means going off to some island resort or traveling overseas or something. For me it means I get to waste my time on whatever the hell I feel like doing when I wake up in the morning. (Or often around lunchtime.)
A lot of people burn away all their days working on a job they don’t even enjoy, now that’s what you should consider a waste of time. Not that I don’t enjoy my job, but I certainly wanted that break (and I’m pretty sure I earned it.) I didn’t have anything in particular to do or accomplish. I simply wanted to have free time.
Post Part II:
I came back to work just in time for annual assessment time, a stressful time for many people, as they wonder how much of an increase they’re going to get, if any. Well, it’s not a stressful time for me, as I don’t really care much about the increase. My current compensation was already pretty good anyway, so anything I get this year is just a “win more” situation really.
What I would really appreciate (and I’ve told them this before) is more free time. I like my job, even enjoy it every so often. But I really enjoy my free time as well, and I actually wouldn’t mind taking a significant (say, 20%) salary cut to gain one day of free time per week.
A lot of people say time is money. What many people don’t realize is that time is more important than money. Money is simply one of the things time can be translated into. But time can also be transformed into other, more important things that money cannot provide: personal growth, the company of your loved ones and the freedom to be your own person…things that make the flexibility of free time far more valuable than mere money.
Posted by Roy in Daily Life | No Comments
Jan. 19, 2007
Daily delicious plugin broken down, this is being generated manually.
But I heard that delicious now supports this functionality directly…
Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user roytang on 2007-01-18
- Ironic Sans: Idea: A building shaped like Godzilla —
Tagged as: blogs cool funny - Piled Higher and Deeper —
Tagged as: webcomics - Fumbling Towards Geekdom: A 2006 productivity hot-or-not guide —
Tagged as: productivity - My Freeware Page - AleJenJes Countdown Timer —
Tagged as: productivity software - Dissertation CoachIs Time Your Enemy? Conquer It with an "Unschedule!" - Mar 29.2006 —
Tagged as: productivity - David Seah : The Printable CEO —
Tagged as: productivity - Jim Gibbon.com » Blog Archive » Top 5 productivity tips of 2006 —
Tagged as: productivity
Posted by Roy in Links | No Comments
Jan. 18, 2007
I’m going to try out a new feed aggregator for a while - NewsHutch. Don’t get me wrong, Bloglines is nice and all, but one gets tired of the UI after a while. NewsHutch looks…nice.
And don’t get me started on Google Reader…that one is slow as molasses. (I added it to my Google Customized Homepage though, maybe that makes it better)
Posted by Roy in Tech | No Comments
Jan. 18, 2007
Since I’m going back to work starting on Saturday, I thought I’d try to look for ways to improve my productivity at work.
I’ve downloaded a few utilities that I can try at work to see if it can improve my workflow.
The first one is SlickRun. Basically it’s a Start -> Run replacement - press a predefined hotkey and a small command line tool appears where I can type shortcut-like commands. One of the features I liked while using Kubuntu was something similar - I think it was called Katapult. It sorts of automates an old trick I was using before, where I would put shortcuts to commonly used programs in a predefined folder that exists on the path. I’ll see if this is better than that one, since this one requires less effort to set up the shortcuts.
Second is an egg-timer type app, AleJenJes Countdown Timer - I don’t know why it has such a weird name. But anyway, it’s just a simple Stop/Go timer I can use for timeboxing.
Last is a Window WP right-click menu addon, FileMenuTools. Some nice common tasks can be added to the context menu, some I do regularly.
I’ve also looked at some a few PIM programs, but my experience is that I’m not very good at this sort of thing…the only one that’s stuck to me for a while was GTDTiddlyWiki, and I don’t even use that regularly anymore. I’m thinking I should find some way to integrate task management into my workflow. Maybe I could write the program myself, the requirements are simple:
1. I want to be able to specify tasks that I want to be reminded of. As an initial example, maybe I could schedule daily, weekly or monthly tasks.
2. At the start of each day, or when I boot up my computer (configurable), the program would dump all tasks for that day in the middle of my workflow.
- At the office, it could send me an email.
- At home, I could add a local web page to my Firefox tabs.
That’s basically it. I can add more features or bells and whistles later. I could probably put together a quick scripts + text files solution, similar to the todo.txt series at lifehacker - in fact, I’ll go read that first for ideas.
Posted by Roy in Tech | No Comments
Jan. 16, 2007
The original is here. Yeah, I didn’t like the header image so I removed it.
I’m tired of moving themes around, so I’ll settle on this for a while. Simple and clean. I’ll just fuss around with the plugins later.
And yeah, I’m also changing the categories around. There should be a plugin to search posts and assign multiple posts to new categories at the same time.
My vacation time is almost up…I still have too many things to watch…
Posted by Roy in Meta | No Comments
Jan. 14, 2007
I’m testing the Extreme Video Plugin for Wordpress, and I thought, what better way to do so than to further propagate the extreme music videos of Ok Go.
[gv data="RbdbVhBGETQ"][/gv]
Some of the new guys at the office performed the above dance as their Christmas initiation…er, presentation, and let me tell you, the audience was on its’ feet. Ok Go is an American band that is known for outrageous live performances like the above. The above video is their own song, “A Million Ways.” They have another video for another song, involving treadmills. It’s said that they did that treadmill thing in one take. That sounds too awesome to be true…
Posted by Roy in Pop Culture | No Comments
Jan. 10, 2007
I’ve been meaning to write more about my time in Hong Kong.
One of the many new things I experienced there was the food. People who’ve eaten out with me on a regular basis know that I’m quite the picky eater. In general, I dislike eating veggies and seafood (yeah, I’m an unhealthy carnivore). In Hong Kong, you cannot avoid vegetables and seafood; every meal comes with some form of green stuff or shrimp or whatnot. I’m almost always eating out with the HK colleagues, and since I’m a guest in their country, they’ll always invite me to taste everything. I’ve probably eaten more seafood in those three weeks than I have for the previous years of my life. I’m probably exaggerating, but there’s a good chance of me being correct.
Since most of my days were spent in the Wan Chai area, we often had lunch and dinner at the restaurants there. Anyone who’s been to Hong Kong will probably know about Wan Chai: the area is full of bars and nightclubs and such. It seems that the area is frequented by foreigners. In the evening, many of the clubs have some pretty young women outside enticing passing Caucasian guys to have a drink or two. Of course, I didn’t go into the bars or nightclubs because that’s not the sort of thing I do.
Lunch was the expensive meal of the day, since we usually had to pay for it ourselves (as opposed to dinner which was company-reimbursed). The HK guys would usually decide where we would all have lunch and we just go along with them. Most meals cost around 40 HK$ - more than 2.5 times I normally spend for lunch back home. But these meals are usually larger servings and good quality stuff, not fastfood-level or carinderia-type junk. We get soup, plus drinks (I usually order Lemon Iced Tea or Milk Tea) then the meal itself. Usuallyyou have some meat or fish, plus veggies on the side, and you can choose your viand from rice, spaghetti, mashed potato, etc. Many restaurants allow you to choose from a list of set meals, so sometimes I joke that I can just choose randomly, “Today I’ll have meal B” and just order it without asking what it is. But of course I’m a picky eater, so I don’t.
Since dinner is company-sponsored, it seems the HK guys always choose cheaper places for dinner. We ate once at a McDonald’s and once at a Yoshinoya. And several times at this small chinese place that had a TV. I kept trying to follow the plot of the TV show aired during dinner but the inability to understand Chinese makes it hard.
Well, of course being unable to speak Chinese makes almost everything hard - I need to ask for help whenever I’m ordering, etc. I also started out quite bad with chopsticks. Despite my years of honing hand-eye coordination using the game controller, my dexterity is terrible, and that leads to being really bad with chopsticks. On my first Sunday there, I had to eat lunch alone at a cafe. I ordered some pork with noodles in soup (I like noodles), but I had trouble eating since I’m not used to eating noodles with chopsticks. I tried to ask the counter lady for a fork, but she and I couldn’t understand each other. I wonder if the other cafe patrons noticed me eating the noodles in a terrible manner.
I was wondering if my time in Hong Kong would change my eating habits when I got back home, making me less picky in what I eat. Turns out, not by much.
Posted by Roy in Daily Life, Travel | No Comments
Jan. 10, 2007
Wow. It took me three months to finish FF12!
Fun game, weak story.
No strong lead character to carry the game.
Gameplay is very MMORPG-like. The grinding was ok, but they could’ve done some quests like WoW to make it better.
I’ll fight the optional bosses someday.
Will I play the next FF game? Don’t know. Time is the most difficult factor, as it demands a lot. Took me about 65 hours to finish this one, playing 3-4 hours a day after I came back from Hong Kong. I don’t think that’s a feasible schedule once work starts up again.