Tinker, Tailor

They say that there’s no free lunch.

Well, I beg to differ.

One of the benefits of quitting one’s job which nobody ever told me about was that you get to have a lot of free lunches. And I’m not one to refuse free food.

Unfortunately, everyone who knows me in the company seemed to know that. Whenever there was an event, within the company or outside, and I was there, someone would always ask me, “you’re here for the food, right?”

I’m really there because I’m interested in the event (at least most of the time), but nobody actually believes me. Ah well, may as well eat like that’s the truth - if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

Anyway, the past few weeks have been good. Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Mexican, American, French, Egyptian… these are some of the cuisines I’d been treated to. I never realised that so many people loved me. Maybe I should rejoin the company, then quit again, just for all that free food (I even had to refuse some free lunches simply because there wasn’t enough lunchtimes).

Strangely, the Matriarch of all people didn’t give me any free lunch. And I thought she loved me. Maybe she was too distraught that I was leaving. Or maybe she’s waiting to invite me over during Chinese New Year.

Updates:

I forgot Russian. I also got treated to Russian lunch. Lovely борщ (borsch).

Also, I gained 3kg. Woohoo?

After so much bitching about life in a cubicle, I shall post a photo of my cubicle. It’s safe now, since I’m gone from this company.

This shot isn’t a true representation of most of my cubicle life, where I had around 3-4 screens to contend with. During this particular day I had 6 (not counting the dead one on the left).

(Click to identify the different parts of the mess.)

This following shot is my previous office - the one where my office phone had to be on the floor.

(Click to identify the different parts of the mess.)

Unfortunately I don’t have pictures of my offices with communist flags hanging from the ceiling, posters of dictators, or graffiti on the walls. I miss those days…

If you’ve read enough of those Mars vs Venus books (I haven’t touched any), or those why-women-can’t-read-maps-and-men-fart-out-loud books, but you’re still interested in gender differences, this book may be for you.

The Essential Difference: Male and Female Brains and the Truth About Autism
by Simon Baron-Cohen

Baron-Cohen has 2 simple premises in this book: (1) males tend to be better at what he calls “systemizing” - building and understanding systems, and females tend to be better at “empathizing”; and (2) autism is just an extreme form of the male type of brain.

This book (and maybe this post) is bound to generate a lot of controversy, because of the first premise, that males tend to be better than females at “systemizing” - which means that guys tend to be better at science, engineering, computers, figuring out how a machine works, etc. The feminist in me would have protested too, if I didn’t read carefully enough.

It’s really no different from saying that men tend to be taller than women, something which reasonable feminists readily accept. This of course doesn’t mean that all men are taller than all women, it also doesn’t necessarily mean that the tallest man in the world is definitely taller than the tallest woman (although chances are that he is taller, and in reality it happens to be so).

So this also doesn’t mean that all men are better than women at engineering. Or that the best physicist is definitely a man (but there’s a good chance that he is).

But, women tend to be better at empathizing, at reading and understanding the emotions of another human being.

Which leads to the other premise - that autism is an extreme form of the male brain. People with autism have difficulty relating to others, and most of them don’t realise that a smile or a frown indicates anything. Males do tend to be more insensitive (just ask any wife with a hubby watching soccer on TV), and bring that insensitivity to the extreme, and you’ll get autism. According to the book.

Most of the book is really about building the case for the 2 premises, and presenting the (pretty convincing) evidence. It also has a number of pretty fun tests to determine how male or female your brain is - my favourite is probably the “reading the mind in the eyes” test, where you’re supposed to determine a person’s expression just from a picture of their eyes and eyebrows. I did better than a lot of my female friends (hah!).

The book will be an important one (if it isn’t already), and it’s quite readable for a somewhat-academic book. A must-read only if you’re seriously into gender differences. Otherwise, if you’re just interested in the tests, check out BBC’s Sex I.D. site, where a number of tests are based on this book.

Turns out that I have an androgynous mind, according to the tests. Which might be a good thing.

Reading this article, Brain sensor allows mind-control, reminds me of an incident some years ago…

My boss sent me and a colleague to this rather low-profile education-related exhibition to show one of our products.

Because the exhibition was really part of a conference, after we set up our booths, we had a couple of hours to kill because the delegates were still stuck in the conference. So naturally, we abandoned our booths to visit the other booths.

The other booths were mostly from schools showing off some new technology they were using with their students, or from some company promoting their education-related product. Nothing really interesting.

Soon, we exhausted all the booths, and the delegates hadn’t appeared. We were quite bored.

When you have 2 bored jokers feeding off each other’s ideas, things happen.

My colleague created a powerpoint presentation there on our iBooks for our “new product”.
The slide went something like this:

BRAIN CHIP
Implant our new and revolutionary
brain chip into your child’s brain.
Your child will become smarter
and have photographic memory!

Of course, some of the other exhibitors stopped on their tracks when they saw our Powerpoint slide. A good number of them even asked us about it. People can be so gullible.

Soon, that too became boring, so we decided to try something else to have fun.

At a nearby booth were these primary 5 kids who were showing how they used PDAs for learning (PDAs were still somewhat of a novelty then). We asked them over to show them our brain chip presentation.

They were interested (who doesn’t want to be smarter and have better memory?), but the idea of getting a chip implanted in the head was a little discomforting, even for 11-year-olds.

“Any of you interested in the brain chip?” I asked.

Uncomfortable silence, as they looked at one another, waiting for someone to make the first move.

“He already has the chip in his brain,” said my colleague, pointing to me. “That’s why he’s very smart.”

“Yep you can ask me any difficult question, and I’ll know the answer, thanks to the brain chip.”

Silence.

“Why don’t you ask me a difficult question?” I prompted my colleague.

So my colleague asked me a general-knowledge question, and I answered immediately.

Of course, kids these days are smarter than that. Soon, one of them came up with a question I couldn’t answer.

“Hey,” I glared at my colleague accusingly, “you didn’t load in the answer to this question!”

Then I turned to the kids. “Having the brain chip doesn’t mean you’ll know everything,” I explained. “You’ll only know the things that have been loaded onto the chip. This means you won’t have trouble with spelling and biology any more!”

“Can I look at the chip?” one boy asked.

“Sure,” I replied, fishing out a brain chip from my pocket. It was the SD card from my PDA. At that time, most people had never seen an SD card before.

The eyes of the kids widened in wonder. So we were telling the truth all along. One of the boys even decided to let us implant the chip into his brain.

Thankfully, the delegates were released around that time, so we didn’t have to perform the procedure or tell more stories.

But I’m sure gonna miss that colleague in my new job. It’s been great working with him.

Left to right/back to front: an old Samsung LCD monitor, a crappy Toshiba notebook, the Macbook Pro. With miscellaneous junk strewn over the available real estate.

Don’t ask me how I type on the Toshiba.

The Most Frightening Company On Earth.

That’s what Harvard Business Review calls it.

St. Luke’s is probably the only company in the creative industry (advertising) that seriously takes creativity seriously.

Experiment at Work: Explosions and Experiences at the Most Frightening Company on Earth
by Andy Law

This book looks at some of the philosophies and policies behind St. Luke’s. I’ll list down some of them:

- Everyone is a co-owner. This mean that a portion of the company shares are distributed equally among everyone each year, with additional shares reflecting the number of years the co-owner puts in. This encourages teamwork, and everyone benefits from the effort put in.

- Fear, greed, and ego are outlawed, and the lack of co-operation is a firing offence. This, of course, encourages teamwork as well.

- Poor performance isn’t necessarily seen as a bad thing - people have their good times as well as bad, and the strong teamwork helps people get back on track.

- Co-owners are indeed really the most valuable asset. Of course every other company claims the same. But if a co-owner has a personal commitment which clashes with a professional one, the personal commitment is allowed to take precedence. Whoa. And of course, there are no fixed hours, and co-owners can work anywhere (at home, etc.).

- Sabbaticals (1-3 months) are given every few years, recognising the value of learning and resting and satisfying one’s curiosity.

- Sharing everything, and total transparency. There are no offices nor personal desk spaces and co-owners are discouraged from staying in one place for too long. All meetings are open and all information is available to co-owners, including salary details. This point is probably hardest to swallow, but it’s because they felt “it represented the most human form of a networked environment”.

- Only clients have fixed space, so the office is organised around the clients. Meetings happen everywhere, with people popping in and out of rooms to meet other team members or clients to cross-pollinate ideas, or at the lunch area, the reception floor, or in the garden.

- The office is an art canvas, with the colours and theme changed monthly. So the office may sometimes look like a hospital ward, a Catholic church, a beach, or look like a mass murder has just taken place. (I was pretty proud of my graffiti-covered walls of my old office until now.)

- The Make Yourself More Interesting Fund pays for courses that co-owners attend to make themselves more interesting. Like parachuting, anthropology, Indian head massaging, and horse-whispering.

This company challenges even some assumptions that I’ve had, but at the end of the day, I realise that what they do makes a lot of sense. Agreeing that it makes sense is one thing, actually implementing it is another - you’ll need a lot courage and gumption, and loads of support from people who are equally crazy.

A great book to blow away some barriers in your mind, even though I find some parts a little too airy-fairy (when they explain their metaphysical assumptions and beliefs). Not for the narrow-minded.

Addendum

I forgot to add an important point. One of the reasons why St. Luke’s is so frightening is that they don’t have any plan. As in 10-year or 5-year 2-year plan. No, they don’t believe in planning, because most plans don’t come to fruition anyway. Instead, they rely on serendipity. They survive on serendipitous events, which bring them business. Frightening to most, exhilarating to some.

My resolutions for the new year:

1) Stop procrastinating

2)

[The rest will be filled in later.]

This is what really happens when the ad agencies sell you their ideas:

Well, if that doesn’t work, there’s always the option of going “viral”. Since viral marketing isn’t easily achieved, you can always learn it by attending the Viral Learning Center:

I can finally breathe now.

I was in my office cubicle just now when I needed some data that might be in the hard drive of an old computer, so I decided to turn it on.

The LEDs on the CPU turned on, followed by some beeps and whirring noises, then some clicks from the monitor adjusting itself.

Then the screen blanked out.

And I smelt something funny. Like lychee or something. Smoky lychee.

Then I saw it. Smoke was pouring out from the back of the CPU.

I pushed the on/off switch on the CPU. Nothing.

I dashed to the outside of my cubicle to pull the plug. The plug was somewhere else.

I dashed back into my cubicle, squinted my eyes in the cloud of smoke, and groped for the power cable, and ripped it out from the back of the CPU. Coughing away, I finally ran out of my office.

Phew.

The next time you smell smoky lychee, check your computer.

I’m pretty interested in business management, even though I don’t run any businesses myself.

But that hasn’t stopped me from giving free advice consultancy to friends who run businesses. I should start charging for my consulting services someday, perhaps when I have more credibility. Give my friends some credit - some of them actually take heed to some of my wacko ideas despite my lack of credibility (other than the fact that I read business books, and that I have method in my madness).

And not surprisingly (to me), they are doing quite fine. I’d like to think that they’d be doing much better if they were willing to try out my more extreme ideas, but well, maybe it’s just my lack in persuasion skills.

Or perhaps I should just pass them a copy of Alpha Dogs.

Alpha Dogs: How Your Small Business can become a Leader of the Pack
by Donna Fenn

In Alpha Dogs, you read about how different types of seemingly ordinary and mundane small businesses like a bicycle shop, an ice cream parlour, or a sock company overcome great odds using seemingly insane methods to survive, and even thrive.

My favourite example is the bicycle shop, Zane’s Cycles, which uses seemingly unreasonably good customer service to fight against the likes of Wal-Mart and thrive.

A customer had saved for months to buy her husband an expensive Trek bicycle as a surprise. She brought the husband to the shop window of Zane’s Cycles, where the bicycle, with balloons and a “Happy Valentine’s Day, Bob” sign, was supposed to be displayed. But the Zane’s Cycles employee forgot. Needless to say, the customer was humiliated, and didn’t have a very happy Valentine’s Day.

Then here’s how they responded at Zane’s Cycles:

Ciocci, [the employee] who had simply forgotten about the bike, was mortified. He immediately began fretting over the long-term ramifications of his mistake and calculating the probably cost to the business. Zane and his store manager, Tom Girard, sprang into action. Girard drove the bicycle to the customer’s house and told her that the store would absorb the $200 balance. Then Zane called Cilantro’s, a coffee shop in nearby Guilford, and arranged for a catered lunch to be delivered to the customer and her co-workers. Lastly, he gave the couple a gift certificate - with no spending limit specified - for dinner at Quattro’s, an upscale Italian restaurant in Guilford.

Because the customer didn’t expect such a response from Zane’s, while she ordinarily would have become a sworn enemy of Zane’s, she was turned into a huge evangelist for them.

Check out this book if running a small business interests you. Not all the chapters/case studies will be relevant, but Alpha Dogs will certainly inspire you push unexplored limits of the business.

After I recovered from my emotional outburst yesterday, I realise that I don’t really want the iPhone.

- No physical buttons thus no tactile feedback, especially when entering text. Steve Jobs called them “plastic keys” - making them sound cheap. But I think I still want plastic keys. Even if the multi-touch display works as advertised (so people with fat fingers won’t find it hard to use), you can probably say goodbye to the good ol’ days of SMSing during boring meetings or while driving, since you’ll probably have to stare at the screen while you type.

- Finding contacts to call, which is one of the most important features of a phone, is fun and really cool in the iPhone. You just have to flick the list of contacts to scroll the list. Assuming that it works as well as advertised, it’s still much slower than on my Treo. All I have to do on the Treo is to type the first couple of letters , and within 2 or 3 seconds I’m already dialing the number.

- No 3G. They’re using EDGE now, and maybe the 3G version will be available when it comes to Asia. But right now, the iPhone has no 3G, but my Treo does. (Ok, my Treo has no wi-fi.)

- One of my favourite details on the Palm Treo 750v is the small hardware switch for the silent/vibrate mode. You don’t have to go through a few clicks to turn on or off the silent mode. I doubt the iPhone can beat this.

- Earring unfriendly? Admittedly I have little experience with earrings, but I wouldn’t want to place the lovely large screen against my ear if I’m wearing diamond earstuds. And bluetooth headsets don’t look too good with diamond earstuds. Fine, my Treo isn’t exactly earring friendly either.

That said, and discounting my sourgrapesical attitude, I think the iPhone is really brilliant, with many interesting innovations. What I’m most impressed by is the use of OS X, and the fully-developed browser implementation, not like the handicapped baby browsers we’re used to on PDAs and smart phones. That really blew my mind.

But *sigh*. Still no perfect phone.

Damn you Apple. For introducing the new iPhone just 2 weeks after I buy my new toy.

Dammit.

I’m still trying to breathe.

First, one of my ex-classmates is getting married in a few days. Okay, that’s no big deal, since he’s already told me about it ages ago.

Then I was chatting with a friend last week when she reappeared after a few months of disappearance from MSN:

Me: so what have u been busy with these days?
Anne: err….same..work
Anne: and wedding preps =)
Me: YOU’RE GETTING MARRIED?!?!

Then as I was reading another friend’s blog last week, she had a post:

I got engaged!

2 wedding/engagement announcements in the same week. Gosh.

Then today, I chat with yet another friend on MSN, after reading her new and descriptive MSN nick.

Me: YOU’RE GETTING MARRIED?!?!
Shirley: yups you read it huh
Shirley: haha
Me: excuse me while i breathe
Me: anyway, congratulations
Shirley: hehehehe
Shirley: thanks
Shirley: blissful sigh

Anyway, this other friend has been bugging me to get married:

Cindy: eh when are you gonna get married!??
Me: maybe after i have kids
Cindy: -.-
Me: then i’ll have to find someone suitable
Me: anyway why are u asking me to get married?
Cindy: i wanna be the bridesmaid!
Me: warrau!

Okay. According to a friend, all these point to “a sign from the heavens”.

Fine. I shall get married then.

But what shall I get married to??

If you’re hoping for me to post a picture of my naked face here on this blog eventually, here’s an MSN conversation that might address the issue:

Friend: so when are you posting a full pic?

Me: when i go insane

Friend: but you’re doing good progress

Me: stop encouraging me!

Me: u know some girls who pose in bikinis?

Me: but they’ll never pose totally nude?

Friend: ya

Me: same concept lah

Friend: *roll eyes*

At Essential Brew, Holland V.

The service there is normally quite bad especially if you’re sitting by the window on the second floor, since the waiting staff is stationed right at the other end of the building, pretending not to notice.

Like the group of 3 cute girls who were sitting right in front of me. They flailed their arms in the attempt to get the waiter’s attention. No response. In frustration, one of them even had to walk all the way to the waiting counter to get some service.

For some reason, it was quite different for me today. Every time I looked over towards the counter and half-raised my hand, the rather-feminine waiter in black uniform and matching black nail polish would soon be at my table, at my service.

Let’s hope he didn’t add any extra potions into my tea.

P.S. The picture was taken with my new Treo. It’s got a strange 5:4 aspect ratio.

Just got myself a new Palm Treo 750v.

It took me ages to decide on this one. PalmOS (stable and user-friendly and mac support)? Windows Mobile (powerful but clunky and poor mac support)? Symbian? Linux (huh)? Thumbpad or not? Big or small screen? Do I need 3G? Or wifi? Both 3G and wifi? Battery life? Tri-band or quad-band? Camera? Size and form factor? Build quality? Usability?

The research took me to decide on the O2. No, the Palm. No, maybe the Nokia. Wait, there’s the Samsung. And the Motorola. And Sony-Ericsson. Maybe the HP. Nah, the Dopod. Nope, the Palm. Wait, how about the rumoured Apple?? Heck I’ll just go with the O2. Dammit let’s get the Palm…

The biggest frustration is that there’s nothing on the market with everything I want. I can have all the money in the world, and I can’t get the one I want.

I couldn’t wait any longer - I have to give up my old company-issue iPAQ soon, so I went ahead and got me the new baby.

Here she is…
(I haven’t given her a name yet.)

Ok, I admit it. This post is just an excuse to camwhore.