AirAsiaX has added a new route!

MELBOURNE!

Yahoooooooooo!!! (Yahoo Launch/Music advert style)

More the reason for us to travel and visit friends there!
And if I ever do end up there, can come visit la. Budget airline, no? 

AirAsia definitely beats Firefly anytime, man! I don't even want to fly Firefly anymore if I have the choice, after the Redang experience.

Mushroom Bay, at Mornington Peninsula =)
The days where everyone still use old-school film cameras.

I let myself get nauseated every Zoolab session peeping through scores of specimens when the internet has a lot of them, clearer and with more vibrant colors.

And you dunno how hard it is to take pictures of the specimens. Goodness, even exhaling just once is not allowed.

...that I had second thoughts on bringing something. Yesterday, my calculator. I decided not to bring it because I didn't have Math subjects for that day. And yeah, I do think it weighs a lot. Later that day, my cousin asked if he can borrow my calculator.

Today, my music player. Bringing it to school is defined as too risky. But for someone as paranoid as I am, nothing to be worried about. So classes were suspended. Took an FX from Lawton to Perpetual Las Piñas. There's this uncanny noise inside the FX I found very infuriating. I wish I brought the ipod.

Won't let it happen the third time.

 

I wasn't a huge X-Files fan, but I saw a fair number of episodes back in the day. I remember the most random episode about a guy who was the target of a secret military test using sound waves as weapons; the guy got a sound wave "stuck" in his head, and the waves amplified inside his skull. The only way he could relieve the pressure was to drive west - Mulder and Scully devised a plan to puncture his ear drum (leaving him deaf in one ear) to "release" the sound waves, but the guy's head exploded when Mulder ran out of highway to drive west.

Anyways, the only respite I seem to have from my insomnia is to write the random thoughts which are bouncing around in my head on this journal. So, in no real order:

. . .

I'm fascinated by the perception of power and its impact on people. If you give off the perception of power, then you have it. So basically if you trick yourself into thinking you have power, then people believe you have power, and then you have power.

. . .

The tragedy of being an adult is you work so hard for a task, and nobody really cares. For example, we just launched Mozilla's Developer Center on Deki (only four months over schedule!), which was a seriously monumental task. But trying to find people (outside of work) to share my joy of releasing this project was ... hard. No one cares. If I wrote a long entry about the work that went into it (which I may), it'd seem like a huge deal ... but nobody understands that without being explained (if they even care about reading it). This leads me to wonder: how many of my (few) friends out there are working their asses off and not getting enough props outside of work? I'm guessing a lot of them.

. . .

I got a letter from my loft managment company saying that the local police think that it's possible they accidentally disclosed all my personal information, and I should be aware of potential identity theft. This just leads me to wonder: who actually wants to steal my identity? To anybody considering being stealing my life: be prepared to have zero game (and hence never get laid). Sadmuffins.

. . .

I find it interesting that my nonsensical posts draw the most comments. Chances of this post receiving more than five comments? Zip. I guess it has something to do something with "digestible" posts (who has time to read novellas, anyways?!)

. . .

One thing that totally sucks about my job is that I oftentimes don't get to give the amount of detailed oversight to some aspect that falls under my auspices. This happens more and more nowadays, but I'm simply overwhelmed with the number of decisions I have to make per day (maybe one of these days, I'll keep a tally). I simply cannot deal with things and simply have to say: "Later." I never thought that'd be possible. Today's:

For example, this morning, I was being flooded with a few problems at once:

• Triaging bugs from our overnight QA team in Russia
  
• Then I got a heads-up that the Moz guys were running into three issues prior to launch, so I was processing all those issues mentally (trying to figure out the soln, or figuring out who would know)
• My IRC client stopped connecting (wtf)

Then I got an implementation question about exception handling in the control panel. I remember just thinking, "I cannot deal with this" - fortunately, we have very capable devs who are capable of interpreting when I'm overwhelmed, so it was taken off my plate.

I honestly never thought I would be that guy who would coldly have to cut people off - but it really comes down to a matter of not being able to process everything. What's important to other people may be so incredibly unimportant to me (at that moment), that I have to be cold.

As an engineer, I'm used to completely controlilng my little world - the code I write works exactly as I have defined it. The product/engineering decisions I have to make are a lot less concrete and rely on a lot of other factor, and when they screw up (as they ultimately do), I feel incredibly bad. 

For example, I ultimately made the decision to shift our MindTouch store processing to PayPal, due to issues with Authorize.net (and Amazon FPS wasn't active then). We needed to fulfill a bunch of requirements, so I chose what I thought was the best solution. Fast forward a couple of months, and PayPal's API is broken (Direct Payments Pro). And I feel completely responsible for the failures of the store, even though most of the variables were completely out of my control.

And this isn't the only case - almost every single engineering failure, I feel directly responsible for. Every defect I see regarding the product, every other competitor who has "done it better," every customer who has run into problems with any software related to MindTouch - I feel personally responsible.

So I guess it's easier to understand the root of all my stress given that I feel personally responsible anytime any of the other ten+ engineers at MT have bugs in their software.

. . .

Man, there are seriously no shortage of ideas at work lately. Every day, new ideas all over the place. What I've realized is that ideas are worthless. I really used to think that ideas were the real value, but that's so not the case. All that matters is execution. I was mulling over the most "successful" web companies lately (Twitter, Facebook, Yelp) and sometimes they're so simple that everybody's thought of them at some point (sometimes they've even existed before!). Successful execution acts as a multiplier for ideas.

This realization is probably why I'm so frustrated at work lately with some of the ideas being tossed around - great ideas are fine, but unless there's even a inkling of a plan for execution, the idea is worthless. I know that MT has a special engineering team - we are all pretty f'ing smart, and it took us a year full-speed to figure out how to ship an open-source wiki effectively. Even now, we're stretched on resources (I tried to move above the day-to-day fray a bit early, and it bit us in the ass), and I'm honestly not sure how we expect to ship some of the ideas over the next year. Anyhoos..

. . .

My feeling about ideas with a lack of execution also explains my recently-found disdain for "demos." As much as I dislike Apple for their closed mentality, they have had an effective track record for shipping complete end-to-end solutions (iPod, iPhone) without shipping demos. I'm tired of seeing Android demos. I'm sick of seeing things like the Microsoft Surface demo. Please, ship products. I don't care about what I could do ... I want to know what I can do.

To me, companies that build demos can't decide what they want, so they're throw a bunch of things against the wall and see what sticks. Have the balls to have a vision, guys.

. . .

Is it ever possible to build the perfect product the first time? This is an interesting question if you consider my stance on demos above. Steve mentioned that he thought it'd be impossible to build something as great as the iPod or iPhone on the first try - they must have built an internal one, then scrapped the whole thing to find out what they did wrong. Nobody has the foresight to know exactly what needs to be done on the first pass.

If this is true, the true test of a product guy is the ability to say "this sucks" and to throw everything out and start again. This has an impact on project management - how can we ever set definitive schedules if projects are subject to being scrapped at any time?

I certainly don't have that killer instinct in me yet (although I have been known to cull out about half the code before), but it's an idea that's been bouncing around in my head for a while.

. . .

There are a lot of decisions coming up for Deki's product line in terms of procedural - do we move away from the Agile mentality into more of a traditional waterfall methodology? Wish there was a "right" answer, but I know better than that: the right answer can only be found after experimenting with all the different methods...

I'm reading Julia Serano's Whipping Girl. So far I'm finding it both interesting and obnoxious. Some of her new jargon is a little too much, especially when she recasts existing vocabulary and replaces it with what she would prefer. Sometimes I'm like, "Well, we already used X word for Y, but now X means B and A means Y? What the crap?"

And then theres arguements that seem forced, or where she only views and interprets an issue from one standpoint, and one that often seems to be setting up a hierarchy of oppression. For example, she states that MTF transexuals are considered a more serious threat to the value of masculinity over femininity, while FTM transexuals support it, and thats why effiminate boys and MTF transexuals are the subject of so much more medical and physchological research.

While I would argue that a sexist, transphobic establishment probably isn't respecting anyone's gender identity, and therefore isn't even framing male femininity in terms of femininity, but instead as failed masculinity. That male femininity isn't more interesting to researchers because femininity is more upsetting or threatening, but because men are almost always more interesting to the establishment than women, and thats how they're classifying people, despite anyone's actual indetity. They aren't seeing it as a femininity issue, but rather as male pathology. It's still mysogyny, except I think it's applied more to bodies than to expression.

I should probably say that I follow where most of the argument goes--it's just that I don't think the oppresion dice bounce quite the way she insists they do, even if they come up with the same number.

So to speak.

And then theres stuff thats just kind of weird. Like where she critizes 'gatekeepers' for valueing a small number of cissexuals over a large number of transexuals when they want to ensure someone coming to them for transition isn't suffering from some sort of delusion or other mental illness.

Although I would not argue against any of her experiences, how is any given doctor supposed to know shit about any given patient who comes to him? It's not a valueing of one population over the other, when the person in question cannot tell which population a patient is actually a part of yet.

It's just sort of weird the way she makes a big us vs. them situation out of an instance where it's actually more of a "any given trans identifying person is more likely to be trans than to be delusional", but just imagine the lawsuits if diagnoses based on odds? I've been watching these TLC awful worst case disease shows (well, I stumble across them, then can't look away) and everytime people are all, "OMG WTF, how could the doctors think it was just a cold just because it's a cold 95% of the time? OMG WTF?"

Now imagine if you let someone take hormones and get surgery, and it was one of those %5 times? Even over-the-counter topical drugs warn you test them on a small area first, just on the off chance of allergy or bad reaction. Or, hey, how about, "I gave him the anaestetic without checking allergies first, because most people are okay." or "OMG, you're valueing the small number of people with bad liver function over a healthy majority by making me get tests before handing over the drugs!"

I'm just saying.

While I don't doubt at all that medical proffesionals can have their own agendas and probably often implement them in ways that are detrimental, especially in the context of gender issues, I can't get on board with an argument that doesn't address what I think are obvious counter-arguments, or only follows the route that supports their own argument, in spite of other possible reasoning. Even if I'm on the book's side, it makes me think the author might not have a refutation. Or that she has her rant-blinkers on, which is sort of worse.

Actually, I probably shouldn't say anything, because she has sources and a bibliography and a scientific education, and I have a knee jerk reaction and can't spell. I'm also only halfway through the book, and she may be only pages away from pulling it together in way that wins me completely over. Who the crap knows.



In other news, Lucky's has awesome junk food. I have german chocolate cake mini cupcakes. I did not know such wonders existed in this world until Lucky's! Nobody ever told me!

I slept before 11 pm last night. That tired.

It's week 6 of uni, that means I'm halfway through my semester.
Gosh, can you believe it? Well, I can't. My mind's still in lala-land, not at all in the right frame of mind to be slaving 18 hours a day over reports and assignments, and it's week 6 already??!!!

Sigh.

Where's the spirit of not procrastinating so much this semester?
(Note how I say so much, not not procrastinating at all )

Anyhoo, I've got a pile-up of 3 reports and 2 assignments already to last me till sometime Sept, and I expect more from MBB soon. Sigh. And possibly Environmental Micro too. At least, env mic labs are kinda fun and practical. Come on Michy, FOCUS! I just remembered about Miniclip's Canyon Defense yesterday, and it's so tempting to just click "PLAY". And I didn't even buy New Moon last weekend. Simply cos it cost 50 bucks this time around. They're probably sold out too for the cheaper paperback version.

::

Wall-E was, to me, an awesome movie. I know many people don't like it a tad bit, cos it doesn't involve much talking, is not realistic, yadda-yadda..., but it's a really description of how our world could be, without being overly mature for younger audiences, I thought. If you think about it, things in the future could end up really scary. Of course, Wall-E would also be the cutest robot ever so far, even cuter than R2D2 and definitely WAY cuter that C3PO . And I laughed quite a bit throughout the movie. A sweet romance story too, without the mush.

::

Mid-sem break and end-of year plans thus far.

Mid-sem break plan:

* stayover in KL
* SkyBar/LunaBar
* possibly Genting after that with ex-housemates
* and sacrifice tonnes of sleep for work

End-of-year plan:

* learn scuba diving, possibly with a few others from the gang, in Ipoh (only RM580!)
* open water dive in Pulau Sembilan, Pangkor
* maybe a Langkawi trip
* clear up room (both in Sunway and in Ipoh)
* move out by end of November
* turn 21 in a boring manner
* loads of shopping if I do end up in Aussie next year, but not so much if I'm going somewhere with a not-so-erratic weather like Melbourne's
* I want a cheerful colourful scarf please HAHA, the kind that Manda always says is "so Michelle"
* and a proper jacket, possibly from ZARA's end-of-season sale *le sigh - my ZARA biker jacket*
* study-in-Aussie plans
* more random, spur-of-the-moment trips

What happens when USA's Lolo Jones makes a mistake towards the end of the 100m hurdles?

 

Canada gets a bronze....

 

I know, it's just a bronze. But it still helps to raise their standing on the medal count.  Just the other day they were at zero.  All of a sudden, they're tied for twelfth place. TOO HIGH! Can you say Ben Johnson ...aka. Doping Scandal?  

 

You'd think being a DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING would gain me a little more 'spect:

 

Pete, you are OFFICIALLY out of running for "Assistant (to the) Director of Engineering."

Of course, I still reserve the right to grant emergency powers to Pete, ala Dwight: