Category: personal AnGoL

and simply put, engineering boards for up students are not the same for non up students,
Its a way for people to show aptitude when studying in places where aptitude for a student isn’t a given
(think other state u’s or non-1st tier educational institutions).
As tipz has already stated at least in the Philippines UP students get the benefit of the doubt even with horrendous transacripts of records.
I think the example of this is if you go to other countries where UP students does not have a reputation for excellence and thus do not get the benefit of the doubt. They usually take certification exams of different sorts to prove at least a minimal level of competence.
I imagine an MIT/Stanford grad is not asked SCJP results when applying for CS jobs, but people from UP are, just expound on this.
And if you love programming you’d probably feel the same about the programming certifications as you feel for the Electronics Board Exams.
I’d say this is how the world works and you have to live with it.
I know its frustrating, and it is in some ways a waste of time.
I somewhat had a change of heart whilst writing this.
The younger batches should thank you because of your honesty.
You can create your own path.
But that would entail sacrifice, work in another country where the license is worth nothing, do your masters or create your own company.
I am rambling sorry , lack of sleep.
In conclusion, sorry if nobody told you the how worthless the board exams is, and what other paths you might have taken.
Thank you for starting the conversation.
This too shall pass.

In the Philippines we have a chorus of companies extolling the assertion that because one call center agent position in the states pays for 5 here the downturn only means more jobs. I don’t think so. The real economy is down, and when that happens some companies do dumb things, those dumb things that companies do, they mean lost jobs for countries like the Philippines.

Wal Mart has always had a pay-check related shopping spike – with a substantial number of customers living (as I did when a student) from pay stubb to pay stubb.
But for the first time they are having pay-check driven spikes in the sales of baby formula suggesting the economic pressure is more widespread.
It is about the real economy now.
Bronte Capital: It’s about the real economy now.

I’m beginning to think that this if ready for human ingestion must be regulated.
I believe primarily for people with depression or people who can’t cope with the memory. Basically suicide risks.
We learn by experience and personally pain for me leads to compassion and if we erase every painful memory then maybe we cease to really exist.

The memory losses, report the authors, are “not caused by disrupting the retrieval access to the stored information but are, rather, due to the active erasure of the stored memories.” The erasure, moreover, “is highly restricted to the memory being retrieved while leaving other memories intact. Therefore, our study reveals a molecular genetic paradigm through which a given memory, such as new or old fear memory, can be rapidly and specifically erased in a controlled and inducible manner in the brain.”
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Remembering to forget.

I once ate around 3 kilos of chocolate within an hour period, hmm maybe that caused my migraine attack. But what a way to go!!

Death by Chocolate
Where would we be without the internet and wikipedia?
Theobromine poisoning: Chemists with the USDA are investigating the use of theobromine as a toxicant to control coyotes that prey on livestock. Humans are also susceptible to chocolate poisoning if enough is ingested. The lethal dose is placed at around 10 kg (22lbs).
Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Semi-Daily Journal Economist Brad DeLong.

Nods head in agreement!

Unfortunately, I hear all the time from singles that their work usually lasts until 8 p.m. (or later), and there’s barely enough time to grab some dinner and a drink before collapsing into bed and starting the routine again the next morning. Despite all the possibilities to meet new people, the reality seems to be that a single in a big city is confined to a narrow set of acquaintances and co-workers; sort of like dying of thirst in the middle of an ocean.
Bert Sperling Answers Your Best Places To Live Questions – Freakonomics – Opinion – New York Times Blog.

I’d be lying if I said i would be a little sad If i haven’t even contributed to the field of artificial intelligence and the suddenly all the major obstacles have been solved. I would be but i would also be elated and would do everything I could to help this old but still infantile persuit.
Almost human
October 12, 2008
In the final round of competition for this year’s Loebner Prize in artificial intelligence, held today at the University of Reading in the UK, a robot came within a whisker of passing the Turing Test. In a series conversations with people, the winning robot, named Elbot, fooled 25% of its interlocutors into believing it was a genuine human being. A score of 30% would have been sufficient to pass Turing’s criterion for a true artificial intelligence.
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Almost human.

I’m typing this on opera because firefox keeps on crashing, I want to debug this but I’ve got eclipse open and If I tried debugging it with Visual Studio, I’m sure to get an unresponsive computer.! If Opera had as good as a plugin system as firefox, It would probably be my primary browser.!

Well at least the electorate is responsive. In the philippines except for the presidensy you can buy your way into any elected seat! And because the president cannot go for re-election and there really is no party system , we have a personality system of government, this means we are screwed!

On its own terms, though this can sometimes produce unfair outcomes (like Jimmy Carter getting booted for problems that were far beyond his capacity to control) I think swing voters’ habit of punishing incumbents for poor performance is an okay satisficing strategy. It’s part of the reason why democracy manages to work despite massive voter ignorance. The electorate may be composed of people who don’t understand the issues or where the candidates stand on them, but the people running the government have an incentive to try to implement policies that work out okay in order to avoid “throw the bums out” sentiment. The trouble is that Bartels’ study of American elections, at least, suggests massive myopia on the part of voters. Economic performance in an election year has a big impact on election outcomes, but economic performance in other years doesn’t get you anywhere. If that carries over to the UK (and, indeed, it seems to) that means that Labour won’t get any credit from voters for the fact that current problems were preceded by a long and impressive string of growth. And by the same token, voters don’t understand comparative issues — the fact that your country is doing better than most other countries amidst a global downturn won’t get you any credit.
Matthew Yglesias » Democracy’s Myopia Problem.

At the end of the day what we leave this existence when we cease to be are the ideas, the ideas behind what we write, the ideas behind what we paint, the emotions that we put into each song, dance, or instrument we play.
We can’t live like this forever. We don’t have that much time. We must try doing someting of significane. Making art or music that would endure. Thinking thoughts that grows, thoughts that are passed on!
thanks to j kottke for the pointer:

Beyond Flash

Jonathan Harris recently gave a talk at a Flash conference, attended by a community of people that pride themselves on producing amazing work, and his constructive criticism didn’t go over too well.

With a number of notable exceptions, most of the work I see coming from the Flash community is largely devoid of ideas. There is great obsession with slickness, surface, speed, technology, and language, but very little soul at the core, very little being said. I believe that in the long run, ideas are the only things that survive.

That seems about right.