Posts

• May 1, 2009

  Taiwan

  I’m glad that I’m finally back from southern Taiwan. I was there on an assigned overseas exercise and I managed to meet quite a few NSmen there. The reason why I love overseas exercises is that I get to meet and live with ‘intelligent’ people from all walks of life for a few weeks.

  Having little real-world experience, learning from these NSmen can be an eye opening experience as they share with us their work and past experiences with this organisation. Within the short stint, many of them have infused their common sense and efficiency into our work processes, leaving with us some cool Microsoft Access files (to automatically generate passes with serial numbers) and various useful Microsoft Excel macros to make our bean counting jobs easier.

  Moreover, I finally got to see people using real-world skills, solving unreal problems. Seeing them thoroughly annoyed by the organisation which created all the problems in the first place, namely inefficiency, poor leadership and management, makes me very amused. In fact, it’s quite funny hearing them whine and grumble about the ridiculous lack of directions some people are giving.

  Particularly, I’d met a total of three NSmen whose work involves working with computers and technology intimately – ERP consultant, computer engineer and a programme design manager. Other professions range widely from civil engineer to bankers to marketing.

  These are the times where NS is interesting.

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• Apr 3, 2009

  Fresh

  Here’s an antithesis on what the organisation that I’m in stands for. It also explains the resignation rates.

  As a bonus, he demonstrates the sacred art of presentation.

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• Mar 23, 2009

  Mothership

  I went to the mothership today and was pretty impressed. Intimidating access controls with undulating terrain to protect its inhabitants.

  Also, for the first time in my life, I get to operate a 36" wide colour printer, that prints on rolls of white paper. I mean, these prints would easily cost hundreds and we’re just clicking print as though it is free.

  In addition, I was rather impressed with Photoshop CS2’s performance on windows while dealing with 2 GB huge tiffs. Photoshop displayed a responsive progress bar below on all image operations as they tend to take a few minutes for a file that huge.

  For those of you curious, the image on average was over 50k inches wide and tall, approximately (but strangely) at 1 pixel per inch. We had to resize it down to usable sizes as they only had 36" wide paper available then.

  Oh well, I still love my job. Everyday is a different day.

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• Mar 21, 2009

  HIG

  Andy Matuschak has written a great post on difference between user-friendly software and developer-friendly software.

  A typical response to my reasoning goes something along the lines of: “Yeah, but with Beryl, Linux looks even better!”

  The thought process is typical of people trying very hard to promote the Windows Mobile operating system.

  The computer scientists I talk to just don’t understand that user interface is about how the program acts, not how it looks. And really, I think that’s why there’s so much terrible software out there: these are the people who are building it!

  And you’ll keep getting “touchscreen” phones that require a stylus or sharp fingernails. These should be called pokescreen instead.

  In five minutes, you’ve got to leave for a doctor’s appointment, but there’s this thing you’ve really got to get done first, and you need iFoo to do it.

  Try making a phone call in a rush with a keyboard-less WM phone.

  WM might have improved, but the philosophy isn’t realigned yet. They ought to take a good read of the post. There is a reason why the iPhone takes off rapidly.

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