Transformers 2: A teenager’s wet dream

Hot chick. Check.
Two hot chicks fighting over you. Check.
A sports car your friends would die for. Check.
Burn down half your house and your parents shrug it off. Check.
A parent that gets high on drugs in front of your classmates. Check.
A geeky roommate who’s really a hotshot computer wizard. Check.
Trump your professor in front of the class. Check.
Have your favorite toys come to life. Check.
Have the US Marines watch out for your ass. Check.
Save the world before bedtime. Check.
And have your parents, girlfriend and fave toys cry over you while you do it. Check.

I went to see the T2: Revenge of the Fallen yesterday and if it wasn’t for the awesome CG and their use of real helicopters, and I mean US Army issue Blackhawks not those washed out Vietnam-war era Hueys or Bells that you see in B movies, I would have classified this movie as another low-IQ summer flick.

Everything, and I mean everything about this movie panders to the American 19 year old. There are no fat chicks in this fantasy, no whiny parents that cramp your style, nothing lame. You get to diss your professor in front of a hundred students, tear up the place without without getting into trouble, and rock to Linkin Park and Green Day playing in the background. Best of all you get to play with your toys all day.

Not that I’m complaining. I actually found the movie fun to watch. Hate the twins though, which I think is the equivalent of Star Wars’ Jar Jar Binks, not to mention a pathetic attempt at African American stereotyping. I hope they lose ‘em in the next sequel. The shootout at the wadi (Egyptian village) was way too long drawn but overall I thought there was more to like than dislike about this show.

Damn, my mom’s coming up today to do a spot check on me. House is a mess. I gotta get cracking.

Why I don’t assume

When I was a programmer in my first job, I had a team leader who was also an analyst. His job was to “spec out” the client’s requirements through system studies and user Q&A. In other words he’ll take the customer order and I’ll do the cooking. There were 5 or 6 cooks in my team then.

I admired my team leader a lot, I guess because of his immense sense of confidence. He was smart, had an attitude and was the dominant type who never asked for permission or apologized for anything. Everyone seemed awed or fearful of him, even the senior ones. Clearly an alpha male.

So we were doing a project for a large company and after we completed a working skeleton, we called in the client as was the usual procedure. So the big guns came over. I remember an IT Director, a couple of managers, and a few end users.

That was the meeting that shattered my confidence in my team leader.

My team leader led everyone on a walkthrough of the specifications and pilot system. There was complete silence. After the show, the IT Director turned to my leader and asked, “You spent a month on this but its not what we wanted. Did you get a sign off from me before you proceeded with the work?”

“Uh… no,” my team leader said, caught by surprise. “But I got it from one of your managers. I thought he was with you?”

Shaking his head, the IT Director said in a quiet grim tone, “I don’t know what gave you the idea but that manager doesn’t speak for me or the company. Yes he’s in my department but he’s not in the project team. You can’t even get a basic thing right and we’ve just lost one month for nothing. I don’t know if we made a mistake giving this project to this company.”

My alpha male team leader was speechless, as was my CEO who was in the room. Knowing he was cut off at the knees, all my team leader could do was aplogize profusely (which was totally out of character for him) and promise to restart the project and make up for lost time. My CEO was not amused either as a lot of money had gone into the prototype. Lke everyone else, he had assumed my team leader was on top of things.

The mistake was in how everyone assumed. My team leader assumed the manager he spoke to had the authority. My CEO assumed my team leader knew what he was doing. The programmers assumed the specifications were properly signed off (afer all, does anyone ever doubt the big kahuna?) In some ways, the client assumed that pre-coding checks were unnecessary.

In the end the whole thing imploded and the client tore us a new one.

That lesson stayed with me to this day. When it comes to serious work, never assume, even if the person you work with gives you the warm fuzzy feeling. Especially if he gives you the warm fuzzy feeling.

Comment spammers’ new trick: Reposting your friend’s comments

I carelessly approved one comment that bore the nick of a regular commenter this morning. Seconds later I noticed the email address didn’t look right so I quickly unapproved it. If you get a comment from an email address like dodgyproduct17823@whatever.com, you can already guess what it is. Whew they nearly had me there.

The modus operandi is easy and insiduous. The spammer copies a recent comment on your blog, adds in a stupid random line at the bottom like, “Oh by the way you’re my favorite blogger now” and submits it as a fresh comment using your friend’s nick. But he doesn’t have your friend’s email address so he uses his own address.

You’ll think your friend was merely adding on to his previous comment. Maybe he’s having trouble with his usual email so he’s using a different address now.

Once you approve the comment, from that point on your anti-spam filter lets through all comments bearing that bogus e-mail address. Soon the bots will come and unload their junk on your blog.

So if you see a familiar nick in the comments pending box despite you having already preapproved your friend, be extra careful because chances are it ain’t from your friend.

If they can’t beat the spam filters with brute force, they try to use trusted names and flattery to dupe the blog owner into clicking the approve button. Someone out there is working very hard to turn your blog into a spam zombie.

(Btw gapnap, it was your comment that the scumbag cut and pasted to try and sneak into this blog. See, even spammers like your nick. )

Blackberries and meetings don’t mix

Source: abcnews

I conduct a lot of meetings in my line of work, often with managers, and I have a problem when people get mersmerised with their phones and notebooks and forget that they’re in a meeting to contribute.

If they get interrupted once or twice in the heat of the meeting, I shrug it off but when it looks like a permanent thing, I’d take the direct approach. I’ll stop the meeting until the offender has finished texting and got his eyes back to the meeting. Then I’d ask publicly, “So, are we done texting?” They usually turn off their toys after that. If that doesn’t work, I make a blunt request, “Dudes, can we turn off our phones until the meeting is over?”

Unless you’ve mastered the art of out-of-body travel, your mind can’t be in two places at the same time and if I have to have your attention, I have to have your attention.

So what about you, how do you deal with people whose phones keep interrupting your meeting or conversation? And what if they are senior people like Managing Directors, etc.?

Cash or credit?

Lately, I am beginning to see the value of dealing in cash rather than the standard 30 day credit terms that many are using (and sometimes abusing.)

I know it will limit the kind of businesses one can do. You don’t expect someone to cart over $200k to your shop to buy a house although you probably won’t mind if they did an electronic transfer to your account, hehe.

But seriously, during these times you hear all kinds of excuses like, “Boss is overseas. Nobody can sign the check except him” or my favorite, “We’ve run out of checkbooks. Can you wait till next week?” Wtf.

These days I envy some upscale restaurants that can turn over 200 cash-paying clients on any given day. With an average spend of $50 per person, that’s a cool 10 grand a day. I love the feeling of going to the cash deposit machine and depositing that much cash in one go, day after day. Don’t you?

What I don’t always enjoy is depositing a check in the machine and wondering if the bank will call the next day to give me an anti-climax: they have insufficient funds in the account. Happened to me a couple of times.

There are pros and cons in the cash vs. IOU business. IOU businesses tend to be company-to-company. Smaller outfits like mine typically ride on 2-3 big clients, plus perhaps 1 or 2 smaller ones.

The good thing about having 2-3 clients is that your client management costs are low and if you are on a retainer (a fixed service, fixed sum contract) there’s nothing to worry about, provided that your clients are good paymasters. If you have 200-300 clients, your client management costs are higher but if a few of them pay late, the bulk still pay on time so its not that bad.

So if you are starting out, my advice is pick your battlefield carefully. If you have enough cash reserves, its okay to get into a business that gives credit terms. Personally, I’d make sure to have 6 months cash reserves at any time so if collections are slow, you can continue to operate for at least that long. If you don’t have that luxury, you’d probably be better off with a cash-based business (= retail) and build up your reserves before jumping off the deep end.

Growing up pains

I was reminded of something again over the weekend. That if you’re a guy in your twenties, chicks are all you can talk about.

Its not that I’m against girls or relationships or anything but I’m just not used to spending a whole day with a bunch of guys talking about one thing – women’s boobs.

I mean, just imagine parking yourselves at Starbucks and 20% of the time you’d be talking about gadgets and souped up rides. 80% of the time you’d be passing comments about every girl’s tits within eyesight. “OOh… check out those melons!” “Aaah… that’s a D-cup!” “Eee… so flat like a runway!”

Imagine hearing that over and over again for the entire 10 hours you guys are out.

Okay, I know I’m at an age where my hormones are raging but the weekend was just bizarre. I mean, there’s got to be other things on people’s minds than just REPRODUCTION right?

Some time ago, a popular myth circulated that men think about sex once every 7 seconds. Of course, no one could back that up with a source but it was a great line to say that we’re actually nothing more than desperate breeding machines. Okay I did find one credible study by Alfred Kinsey that actually had verifiable statistics:

“54 percent of men think about sex every day or several times a day, 43 percent a few times a week or a few times a month, and 4 percent less than once a month.”

- Source

Okay, so the truth is only about half of men think about sex several times a day and its “several” times, not once every 7 goddamn seconds.

Which I think is about right, considering that if you are the AVERAGE person, you do have other things to worry about than getting into someone’s skirt. Like holding on to your job. Or paying the bills. Or catching up with your hobby – the one that doesn’t involve your reproductive organs.

But hey, who am I fooling. We youngsters have to talk about chicks because a) it lets us forget about things that bug us, b) sometimes its the only way to get respect from our peers, even though much of the ballyhoo is made up. Don’t believe it? Try this – push a ho in front of one of these bros and watch him shake and stutter, hehe.

Anyway I’m glad the weekend’s over. Don’t get me wrong, I like coffee – but if I drink one mug every 10 minutes for 10 straight hours I’d be dead by now.

An afterthought: Hey you guys who think you’re the total macho stud that women can’t resist – check out this ultimate alpha male who had 86 wives and at least 170 children, maybe more. Think you can beat him?

I drank Michael Jackson yesterday

Yup, in this part of Asia Micheal Jackson is a drink made of soya bean milk and grass jelly or cincau as its locally known.

Take this….

add soya bean milk to it and you get this yummy black-and-white concoction.

Source: Oceanic Network Enterprise

My American friends will have a hoot with this. Well maybe not ‘cuz we do have the Margarita, Dr. Pepper and other drinks named after people, although none as famous as the King of Pop.

Anyway it was a shock to wake up to the news of MJ’s passing this morning. He was only 50 but everyone could see the toll he was taking from the scandals and financial troubles surrounding him. I’m glad he finally gets a bit of peace.

It’s cool to know his name is immortalized this part of the world, by his music and a popular drink.

Do cigarette warning labels work?

When you go to a car showroom to shop for a new ride, you’ll not be greeted with pictures like this plastered on the vehicle.

But when you buy a pack of smokes, you’re greeted with pics like this on the box.

Source: ohmygov.com

Yeah, gross.

But that’s different, you might say.

Stats wise, you’d be right. Car accidents kill 115 people a day in the US alone (probably 1,000 worldwide).

Cigarette smoking kills over 300 times that number according to the CDC.

While the figure varies, both can arrive at the same conclusion. You kick the bucket. Painfully.

I’m not a smoker. Wait let me correct that. I work around smokers all day so that makes me a passive smoker. I’ve gotten used to it. The thing is, while billboard pictures of accidents usually work to make drivers more alert, ciggie warning labels don’t seem to have any effect at all.

Any idea why?

How to make banks be at your mercy

Imagine this. You live in a nice big mansion, drive an expensive sports car, have many servants an butlers running around to serve you. You eat the best food, wear the best clothes and sport the latest coolest gadgets. You’re a famous well-respected socialite around the world and you are the life of any party. Your success is the envy of everyone.

What nobody knows is that you actually borrowed heavily to buy everything you’re flaunting. You are paying a monthly installment on this high life. In fact you’ve accumulated so much debt that if you stopped borrowing today, it will take your family 4 generations to pay off your debts.

A stupid way to run your life?

Well, thats exactly how the US federal government is living it up. It borrows money to run its agencies, pay its employee salaries, and run activities like medicare. It borrows from countries like China and Japan to the tune of hundreds of billions USD a year by selling them debt papers like US treasury bills and bonds. China alone has lent America US$1.95 trillion to date. AP reports that this year, the US will borrow nearly 50 cents for every dollar it spends.

And the total accumulated US debt? About US$12 trillion to date, or $37k for every man, woman and child in the US. That’s equivalent to the average yearly income of an employee working in the US. And just like a credit card, they will have to pay interest on these borrowings.

On this, the interest charges alone may top US$500 billion this year. That’s a cool $1 million burnt per second.

John Maynard Keynes once said, “If you owe your bank manager a thousand pounds, you are at his mercy. If you owe him a million pounds, he is at your mercy.”

That’s why the world is at the mercy of the US and that’s how you too can have your neighborhood bank be at your mercy.

Are you an opiniophobe?

I was on the flight home yesterday and observing a captivating moment between a mother and her young son of about 4 or 5 when something occured to me.

The boy had a set of lego blocks and was building what I think was supposed to be an airplane. Actually it looked more like a shapeless chunk with two arms protruding so it could be Optimus Prime for all I know but the way he “flew” it told me it was a plane. Pretty cool for a little kid. But his mom thought differently. “That’s so ugly!” I could hear her say. You should see the kid’s face when he burst into tears.

What occured to me then was how often this happens in our every day life. We present our opinions to others as a piece of work, a song, a blog post, or just an idea, and the response can be anything from praises to a nasty flame war.

Which brings me to a new word which I coined – opiniophobia which is a lot easier to say than allodoxaphobia, its official greek equivalent. Let me give you some traits of opiniophobia.

1. When someone gives you an idea or suggestion, your automatic response is “No!” (hehe, reminds me of a few ex bosses of mine), except when it comes from someone who can whoop your ass.
2. You tend to be overly sensitive and defensive about the choices you make. You cannot accept that you’re still learning.
3. If something bad happens, its always other people’s fault, never yours.
4. You have a habit of telling people to keep their opinions to themselves.

You could say that opiniophobia is extreme close-mindedness, the tendency to believe that only your opinions matter. If it leads to constant anger and depression, since you’re busy either bullying weaker people opinionwise or being bullied yourself, this prolonged hot-and-cold treatment could lead to more insiduous mental problems. Yeah, believe it or not you might actually develop a loose screw up there.

The remedy for serious opiniophobia according to this website: “The most popular treatment for phobias is to see a psychologist, psychiatrist, hypnotherapist, and/or hypnotist.” In other words, go see a shrink.

Personally, I try to listen to all opinions even if I disagree with them. Why? Because a) I accept that I don’t know everything, and b) I actually like variety. Imagine how terribly boring the world would be if everyone ate the same food, dressed in the same clothes, and talked about the same things you do. But if you consider different views as a threat to your personal well being and you are willing to lose everything to assert the “superiority” of your opinion, then your level of psychosis could be deeper than you think.

Now just imagine how many such people are actually out there running big corporations. 

One last word on disagreements. Having disagreements and respecting opinions is normal. Feeling threatened by differences in opinion and making people pay for them is not. The former is constructive. The latter is destructive.