:: MIS Insights ::

Here’s why you don’t have your ten million dollars yet.

You are a paycheck player.
You play with your head. Not your heart.
In your personal life? … Heart.
But when you get on the field — you’re a businessman.

After a week of working out at Moro Gym, this is the first day that I’m skipping attendance. It’s just too bad that Moro is only open in the morning during Sundays. I would have wanted to go there today this afternoon for a light workout.

<informative>

For those who want to know, Moro Lorenzo Gym’s schedule at Ateneo is:

6:00 a.m. – 9:30 p.m. (Monday-Friday)
8:00 a.m. – 8:00 p.m. (Saturday)
8:00 a.m. – 12:00 noon (Sunday)

My membership cost me P1,428 ~ that’s one month of gym and cardio machine use. You get a discount for quarterly, semi-annual and annual subscription of services.

</informative>

No matter, the first month of my gym experience is part of a discovery process to find out what times of the day for each day of the week is it best to work out. I want to know the times when the gym is empty, full and full of … *moving on*

This is the first time I’ve enrolled in a gym. John, my instructor, designed a workout targetting my core muscles - something to strenghten my weak back and knees. Moreover, such workout will prepare me for future muscle specific workouts - i.e. biceps, legs, abs and all that jazz.

I was supposed to jog within the village this morning, but since I woke up late, there was no squeezing that into our family’s Sunday morning church habit. The afternoon wasn’t kind to me too. The heavy rains were too much for my rainy day battle gear. Mehn, I’m missing the Moro treadmill so much already… A TV in front of you, adjustable treadmill speed and inclines, Miami Heat beside you, arghhhhhhh! I need to work out!

Several months after graduation, I’ve been thinking about the prospects of taking further studies. My options are:

Another Degree

Another college degree like Management, Psychology or Economics would be a welcome addition to one’s current skill set. The extra units and focus on a certain subject matter would surely help me in my real world work. However, if it’s going to take me another three or four years, my MIS degree might be obsolete already once I graduate. Moreover, that would mean losing three years worth of opportunities. A trade that I don’t think is worth it.

Technology-specific Classes

I’ve been checking out short courses offered for specific technologies out there. Something like a crash-course program for stuff that’s rarely taught in prep school - COBOL, J2EE or Palm Programming and the likes. However, I couldn’t find any decent courses out there ~ or I haven’t looked at all places for such courses. While there are a lot of training materials online, I’m looking for ways to minimize my overhead in terms of time spent learning the material. I wouldn’t mind paying up just to kickstart such training.

Certifications

Bruce Schenier, security guru who wrote Applied Cryptography, recently discussed the relevance of certifications. From the discussion and comments of people, certifications are by no means indicative of expertise. It merely means that one can speak the language of the certification in question. It’s like your grade in school, you might net high grades, but that doesn’t mean right away that you’re good in the subject - at the least, it means that you can talk about the subject.

Will certifications get you hired? It depends on the HR person. Some HRs screen by basis of experience, certification or both.

Should one get certifications? It depends on what kind of career you are building. One cannot just get certification after certification if it doesn’t build up on one’s career strengths. Some HRs actually frown upon people with a zillion certifications. Being a Jack of all trades and Master of None can indicate the lack of experience and expertise in a specific discipline that a company is looking for. Lastly, certifications expire. So, one has to keep taking the tests every once in a while to update their portfolio.

Masters

In a recent issue of BOSS magazine, I read an article about the best MBAs in the world. It turns out that the Philippines houses one of the best and affordable MBAs in the Asia-Pacific - Asian Institute of Management (AIM). Good Job! While this is the option that I favor most, it still costs an arm and a leg if I’m going to pay for it myself right now. In addition to that, it requires several years of full-time employment. As such, I don’t think this is an option for me in the near future.

With so many options, advantages and disadvantages to weigh, this will take a bit of head work to sort through. Maybe I should just take guitar lessons. Or swimming classes. Or even photography classes. Hehe. That would still be fun.

I’m not a good singer. If you pit me against William Hung, you’d listen to Hung any day of the week over me. However, that’s not enough to keep me from grabbing a microphone and contributing to the noise pollution of the world. Last weekend, my Makati friends and I went to Providence Building (in front of DLSU) for a night of videoke. Not really the coolest or best place to be, but hey, who cares when you’re having fun?

Even though each song cost a measly 5(five) bucks, no throat pain was enough to stop us from making short work of P500 worth of tokens that night. We started at 10pm and ended by 3am. Woot! Good thing that the place was open 24 hours a day.

This isn’t your usual bar+videoke machine setup though. Each videoke slot machine had its own room so you don’t have to listen to some schmuck sing My Way for the 412qwerty56th time. There were around thirty rooms all in all - each occupying not more than 4×4meters of floor space. In tagalog, they had small rooms and a batallion of five would just fit nicely with a little room for maneuvering. The walls were transparent and sound-proofed glasses. Transparent to avoid anything kinky or illegal from happening and sound-proof to contain the frustrated sound waves within.

Although it doesn’t really sound much, what got me blogging about it was the computer network installed in their place. At the second floor of the building where we stayed, the server for all the songs and videos was located. In an air-conditioned room on its own, a desktop server can be seen connected to a 48-port switch - most of which had LAN connections that vanished into the ceilings just to reappear in the karaoke rooms. It seems that some smart bastard centralized all the songs (midi+text) so that updating the song list would be easier. Even the videos were reused and just recycled for all the songs. There were approximately 20 different types of videos of scantily clad women and Discovery Channel snippets that were rotated randomly for every song.

If you’re thinking of how the hell did the place become profitable, the beverages man. The beverages. Mineral water, Iced Tea, Beer and Softdrinks cost an arm and a leg there! A mineral water worth P9 outside was sold for P14 inside. Beers P20 outside cost P35 inside. Enough said.

I can’t help but admire such a smart setup! I’d set up something like that myself if only I had capital! However, I won’t just copy such business model - I’m going to improve on it - and I’m going to do it My Way.

The one with Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston.

The.

Best.

Movie.

Ever.

…

Solid.

The latest installment in my computer laboratory is an HP f1905. It’s a glorious 19-inch flatscreen LCD monitor - a big step up from my 17-inch CRT monitor (whose actual viewable area was only 15 inches). Ya-ha!

With a 1280×1024 native screen resolution spread over 19 inches of screen, I get more real estate than my previous 1024×768/17″ setup. Native means I can only set my screen resolution to its default 1280×1024 configuration. Anything more or less than that will just produce crappy visual output. However, with 19 inches of surface area, who needs more? Not me! (or not yet!)

Web Design

One of the things that I’m loving with this monitor is that I can see more of my code while working with Dreamweaver. No need to minimize / hide / close my favorite task panels! They’re always there for fast and easy access along with more of my code! Ya-ha!

Note: It’s not really good practice to write long strings of code when you can always chop it down. I was taught in my Java college class to limit the number of characters per line to 80 characters. This is in consideration of other people viewing my code on lower resoultions. A little courtesy so that they don’t have to fidget with the horizontal scroll bar while reading code. Moreover, shorter horizontal code is more printer-friendly than Telenovela Code.

Linux

While I’ve been using Linux for three years already, I still consider myself a n00b in the field. There are still a lot of instances when I have to refer to manuals, forums and tutorials to help me get my work done. This upgrade allows me to squeeze more stuff in the screen. For instance, it allows me to RTFM on the upper half of the screen while happily typing away on the lower half of the screen dedicated for the terminal. If you think four 1024×768/17 workspaces are a lot, wait till you get four 1280×1024/19! Ya-ha!

Entertainment

Of course, no kick-ass computer kicks ass until it can do everything that it’s master wants it to do. After programming or doing systems analysis or doing whatever MIS should do for a living, I usually unwind with an action-packed level of Doom3 or a funny episode of South Park. The big screen makes me feel like i’m watching from a television set. And yes, all the games I’m currently playing rock with my upgraded setup. Ya-ha!

There is a down side to this setup though. As with most LCDs, this LCD has a limited viewing angle. This means that while everything might look perfect when viewing the LCD at eye-level, image quality diminishes when viewing it from another angle (e.g. i don’t see anything when i’m watching the screen diagonally from the sofa). But I can live with that - that only means that Trailblazer will be dedicated for *cough* work *cough*!

Do You See What I See?

I’d have to say that this is better than my dual-monitor setup with Zoom (laptop monitor + CRT monitor). It offers big savings on the electricity bill (LCD consumes less power than CRT) and sets the right mood for either play or work - and sometimes, that little change in mood makes all the difference between a boring day of problem-solving and a cool day of making progress in work.

A few inches of difference for mankind, a big step for Pipboy.

The world doesn’t need Superman because the times and needs of people have changed. We can no longer rely on shows run by only one person. The plurality of today’s lifestyle has demanded for a methodology that produces varied solutions involving more than one person to crank the good stuff. Though there’s no rule against having a whole football team composed of Supermen, there is a move from having a football team entirely dependent on one Superman.

Businesses have changed already. Businesses today are no longer entirely dependent on its assembly line. Merely churning out products or doing services above the industry’s efficiency and quality standard will not suffice. Such mechanical feat can always be replicated by others, leaving businesses with temporary advantages. What businesses need are more than refinements to its production lines. They need something more substantial and long-lasting. Businesses need ideas - innovative and strategic ideas that can penetrate the competitive and saturated business environment. In this case, two heads are usually better than one.

Customers demand more nines for their Benjamin$. With 24×7 and 99.9nines uptime as a standard for business operations right now, downtimes are intolerable for our customers. It is not enough to have redundant and fault-tolerant hardware backbones for businesses. We also need redundant and reliable people manning the machines so that in case your lead person gets sick, resigns or is held up in any accident or trouble, your business will be able to deliver those four or five nines as agreed upon.

Teamwork rules. Many companies have failed because of one person, but a lot more have been successful because of teams. Well-managed teams usually provide better decisions. It also helps everyone psychologically by addressing the social being in man and distributing work and stress with others. For what it’s worth, a good reason why there are more males than females in mental institutions is because that men think they can do everything. They try to do everything on their own and without external assistance. In cases like this, it is only a matter of time before they find themselves struggling with the situation, desperate and ultimately, disconnected from the world.

Having one person do everything just increases the likelihood of something critical being missed. As humans, everyone will commit a mistake, sooner or later. Whether it’s a mispelled command parameter or a forgotten step in a process, relying on one entity to do everything does have its disadvantages. Something that companies should do well to address.