personal AnGoL – Page 84

December 15, 2009

rePost::Seth's Blog: Who controls your media?

If your Facebook circle is draining your energy and not pushing you forward, why, precisely, is it there? If you are spending more than a few minutes a day on Twitter, is it because you can't stop or because stopping will cost you your goals? Which is more important: a ringing telephone or an unfinished new concept on your screen, waiting for you to type out the rest of it?
via Seth’s Blog: Who controls your media?.

Is it just me , but why is it that I find reading feeds in google reader energizing whilst reading stuff off facebook drains me? Its the same between twitter and blogging. I feel energized when I blog but twitter tires me. What is this, old man of the web syndrome??? yikes.

December 15, 2009

Convention of those wounded in love « Paulo Coelho’s Blog

Article 2 – Once struck by a stray arrow fired from Cupid’s bow, they should immediately ask the archer to shoot the same arrow in the opposite direction, so as not to be afflicted by the wound known as “unrequited love”. Should Cupid refuse to perform such a gesture, the Convention now being promulgated demands that the wounded partner remove the arrow from his/her heart and throw it in the garbage. In order to guarantee this, those concerned should avoid telephone calls, messages over the Internet, sending flowers that are always returned, or each and every means of seduction, since these may yield results in the short run but always end up wrong after a while. The Convention decrees that the wounded person should immediately seek the company of other people and try to control the obsessive thought: “this person is worth fighting for”.
via Convention of those wounded in love « Paulo Coelho’s Blog.

I wish. Read the whole thing!

December 14, 2009

Advice::How To Know You've Hired A Killer Team

Basically, you need people who do their jobs as if the life of the company were on the line.
Why?
Because the life of the company is on the line. Every day. The day you forget that is the day you'll be headed for the scrap heap.
Many talented folks from big companies are seduced by the idea of startup life…right up until the time they actually start working for one. Then they realize that the company depends on them in a way that a larger company never will, and they find the responsibility (and workload) overwhelming.
A great startup executive, meanwhile, wants to carry the fate of the company in his or her hands.
You need to find the latter folks. And you’ll find them, in part, though trial and error. Interviewing and reference-checking helps, but you won’t know for sure that you’ve hired a winner until they hit the ground and start sprinting.
via How To Know You’ve Hired A Killer Team.

I’d like to work in a startup again, hope the second time would be better for me. Generalizing this advice is useful for Non-Profits, Non Governmental Organization, Government Workers, etc. Give me a group and we can use this to determine if you have a killer team. It’s very simple if you think about it. I feel that in most projects you just need one uber mind and the rest just helps in assembling, or making the vision work. I believe this is how Apple operates and in a sense how many open source projects work, with their BDFL.
I love this quote from The West Wing:

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

December 14, 2009

rePost::Now we know why Ritalin works – SmartPlanet

As an ADHD kid myself, and father to two more, this may also explain something I have found troubling my whole life. I don’t react well to praise. Tell me you like this article and I may just shrug it off. Tell me you hate it and we can have a good argument — well an argument at any rate. Praise doesn’t give me the hit it gives you — I need a lot of it to feel it.
via Now we know why Ritalin works – SmartPlanet.

December 14, 2009

rePost::Philippine left backs Villar, Legarda | ABS-CBN News Online Beta

Philippine left backs Villar, Legarda
by Carmela Fonbuena, abs-cbnNEWS.com/Newsbreak | 12/14/2009 1:52 PM
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MANILA, Philippines – After months of courtship, presidential candidate Manuel Villar of the Nacionalista Party (NP) succeeded in getting the support of the leftist group Makabayan.
Senatorial aspirants Bayan Muna Satur Ocampo and Gabriela Rep. Liza Maza on Monday officially joined the NP senatorial ticket as “guest candidates.”
Ocampo and Maza bring with them the support of the eight party-list groups under Makabayan–Bayan Muna, Gabriela, Anakpawis, Kabataan, Katribu, Migrante, Courage, and the Alliance of Concerned Teachers.
“Matagal pinag-usapan ang pagsasamang ito. Di naging madali sa magkabilang panig dahil alam kong ito ay kauna-unahang pagkakataon. Nagsimula sa maraming pagkakaiba, sa pagwawakas konti lang pala pagkakaiba,” Villar said at a press conference in Quezon City.
“I am extremely happy with this partnership,” he added.
It is the first time that the leftist alliance is officially supporting presidential and vice-presidential candidates.
“Ganun kalaki ang pagtingin namin sa mga kandidatong ito,” said Ocampo’s colleague in Bayan Muna, Rep. Teodoro Casiño.
via Philippine left backs Villar, Legarda | ABS-CBN News Online Beta.

This is probably the first presidential election where the two front runners both give me hope that the Philippines can be a great country within a lifetime. There is only so much angst I can live with. We can always hope pray and do.

December 14, 2009

Nice Poster For Amnesty International

Saw this in Boing Boing:

Pricey for a Filipino budget at 22 euros . every poster donates 4 euros to Amnesty International!

December 13, 2009

Learned Today::The .Plan: A Quasi-Blog: More negative evidence on stretching

Didn’t stretch when I played basketball earlier this afternoon. I didn’t have the time, this was somewhat comforting. PS I was able to do some warmups so the evidence is for what I did! hehehe!

More negative evidence on stretching
For Dr. [Stephen] Thacker's paper “The Impact of Stretching on Sports Injury Risk: A Systematic Review of the Literature,” he and his colleagues pored over nearly 100 other published medical studies on the subject. Their key conclusions: stretching does increase flexibility; the highest-quality studies indicate that this increased flexibility doesn't prevent injuries; few athletes need extreme flexibility to perform their best (perhaps just gymnasts and figure skaters); and more injuries would be prevented by better warmups, by strength training, and by balance exercises, than by stretching.
via The .Plan: A Quasi-Blog: More negative evidence on stretching.

December 13, 2009

rePost::Making Light: Peter Watts, distinguished Canadian SF writer, arrested by US border police while trying to re-enter Canada

Peter Watts, distinguished Canadian SF writer, arrested by US border police while trying to re-enter Canada
Posted by Patrick at 12:51 PM * 262 comments
From Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing: Dr. Peter Watts, Canadian science fiction writer, beaten and arrested at US border.
I already linked to this from the sidebar, but on reflection, I have a little more to say.
First, it’s worth noting that comment #2 to the Boing Boing post observes “And now the inevitable ‘we don’t know the whole story so we shouldn’t pass judgments but he probably did something to provoke them’ comments can commence.” Indeed, there seems to be a kind of person who makes it their business to hover around at sites like Boing Boing or Consumerist to explain that probably the police had no choice but to beat up that guy, or that we don’t know that Wal-Mart abused that customer, since after all it’s her word against theirs. And indeed, comment #5 shows up right on schedule: “It’s my observation that most of these cases begin with a person who becomes belligerent when asked to do something he doesn’t want to do (get out of the car, step away from the car, etc.) These officers may very well have overstepped their bounds, but I doubt very seriously that Watts is completely innocent.”
For what it’s worth, I don’t know exactly what happened, but a couple of things seem pretty evident to me. One is that this wasn’t a routine border search. Rather, American border guards in Port Huron, Michigan demanded to search Watts’s car as he was leaving the US for his native Canada. This is very squirrelly. We’re conducting exit searches now?
via Making Light: Peter Watts, distinguished Canadian SF writer, arrested by US border police while trying to re-enter Canada.

This is nothing. If you see a checkpoint here and a car similar to yours in model is flagged one wrong move and you’d get sprayed with bullets or drugs get planted on your car.
Hope people can think more clearly. We give law enforcement people more power to combat something without stopping to consider that we are only helping enemy we are fighting. To foster a society without trust, full of paranoia and other fucking attituted related with fear and insecurity. We cannot let the terrorist win.

December 11, 2009

Advice::Use the wastebasket « What’s new

One has to know when one should be persistent and patient, and when one should be pragmatic and realistic; stubbornly working away at a dead end is not the most efficient use of your time, and publishing every last scrap of your work is not always the best way to meet the standards of quality you expect from your publications (though sometimes it is still worth making your partial successes available in some format). Of course, in today’s digital age it is cheap and easy to backup all your work, and you should certainly do this before performing major surgery on any paper.
via Use the wastebasket « What’s new.

I’ve always had a problem with balance. In a sense excess, persistence or resignation has always been what I’m about, Always about extremes. Hope I can learn to regulate myself one day!