Jan 31, 2009

Final Fantasy Advent Children Complete Trailer

I digress a little bit from my Loco Roco 2 series and temporarily switch to fanboy mode. Anything about Final Fantasy triggers this mode. Most especially if I happen to just learn that there is another Advent Children movie version coming out with extra 25 minutes footage. The Japanese release will be on April 16. The wait will be torturous again. For now, this amazing and gorgeous trailer (as expected from Square Enix) will suffice. Enjoy and click here for more details.





Jan 26, 2009

Visual Guide: Unemployment Rates

unemployment
Image from Microsoft Office Clipart

Courtesy of the good folks from Mint's blog, here's another excellent and visually stunning guide about the truth behind the unemployment rates.

Enjoy: http://www.mint.com/blog/finance-core/a-visual-guide-to-the-financial-crisis-unemployment-rates/

By the way, you can also find a small note below the article pertaining to WallStats.com. It seeemed that these visual guides were collaborations between Mint and WallStats. I visited WallStats.com and voila!, found a site dedicated to information designs and visualizations. I will definitely be sharing more visual guides in the near future as I dig deeper into this marvelous site. Stay tuned.



Jan 22, 2009

Infosynth


image from Mediation from Darkness to Light

This is a by-product of my reflections on the ideas I put forth in my last post regarding digital interconnectedness. My initial reflections revolved around the story of the blind men and an elephant, on how reality is perceived based on each individual's perspectives, that reality may be is an amalgam of these various perspectives.

In lieu with these thoughts, what if a service is developed which unifies all sources of these "perspectives" and aggregate them in order to come up with a single, unified viewpoint for "reality." Imagine this service crawling and mining all possible websites and show the information gathered in a single, unified, synthesized form.

To use as a metaphor, the closest that we have right now to this service is Microsoft's Photosynth. Through this program, all photos related to a specific subject are synthesized to come up with a unified, 3D-dimensional, 360-degrees experience about the subject. Here's an example, Photosynths of President Obama's inauguration.

Imagine the same thing but besides images you are dealing with all other forms of data (e.g. text, videos). This service will mine all websites such as blogs, mini-blogs, social networking sites, news headlines and the like and synthesize all these information into a unified, 3D-dimensional representation. This will be very powerful indeed and I think quite scary in the sense that, let's say, you search for Din Cordero. The results will pretty much give you a unified picture of who am I in "3D glory." Not a pretty picture if I imagine it. LOL!

I am pretty sure that someone, somebody out there may have already thought about this idea as well. If you can point me to the right direction or in even to a service that is already developed similar to what I described above, I will definitely highly appreciate it.



Jan 21, 2009

Digital Interconnectedness

I was reflecting on President Obama's inauguration speech when a thought suddenly hit me. I immediately browsed the Web to help validate my thoughts and found, staring me in the eye, what I was looking for.

President Obama's Inauguration Day was the ultimate showcase of our interconnectedness, of how unified and interdependent had we become through the digital ecosphere. I looked at my Facebook contacts and most of the statuses, updates and events revolved around the Inauguration. I browsed through Flickr's latest photos and they revolved around the same topic. I checked my Twitter account and it was flooded with Inauguration-themed tweets. The latest posted topics to the blogs I subscribed to all pointed to the same thing. I think I just barely scratched the surface here with the sites I mentioned. There are tons of other sites which provided news, photos, videos, feedbacks, opinions, what-have-yous about the Inauguration.

What I am driving at here is I feel never have been at any point in time that we have become so interconnected this way, unified with a purpose, and connected and communicated via the digital ecosphere. I am very excited on what all of these means for us and our future. Actually, I cannot still fathom the full impact of this global interconnectedness and the possibilities and opportunities in store for the future. This was indeed a historic day!



Visual Guides to the Financial Crisis

data flood
Image from Microsoft Office Clipart

Ever since I read the amazing book, Information Architects edited by Richard Saul Wurman, more than a decade ago, I had become a proponent of information architecture whose main goal is to make the complex clear. This goal has become quite overtly critical in our era where we are all drowning from floods of data.

In this regard, I have been on the constant lookout for publications, online and in print which adhere to the tenets and principles of information architecture. While browsing through the Mint's blog, I found two incredible and visually stunning articles about the Financial Crisis. Part One dealt about what brought America to the current financial crisis up to the government Bailout. Part Two described how the bailout would be funded and how it should have been funded according to experts.

These two articles are good reading materials regarding the current financial crisis but on top of that, and the most important from my point of view, these are excellent and beautiful examples of information architecture. Kudos to Mint!



Jan 16, 2009

Naruto 431 (Naruto Erupts)

To all Naruto manga readers out there, after more than 2 weeks of waiting for Chapter 431 and reading lots and lots of possible spoilers, here at long last is Chapter 431.

Naruto is definitely on a different league now that he learned the Frog Katas in Sage Mode and you can see clearly see it in this chapter. The Giant Rasengan is just awesome!

Unfortunately we have to wait for next week again to see what will Naruto's new move be. Ah, the price of being a manga fanboy.



Jan 12, 2009

Pre (Palm reborn)

Palm Pre
Image from Engadget.com


I didn't want to ride the hoopla behind Palm's new smartphone but when I read about Ars Technica's article on Synergy, Palm's new personal information management system, I decided to jump in the bandwagon right away.

I had been an owner of several Palm PDA models from the IIIe to the Zire71. I followed Palm's growth to become the undisputed market leader and to its unfortunate downward spiral for the past years by squandering its market share and competitive advantage.

But now, with Pre, I am seeing a Palm reborn from the ashes of directionless stupor. Hey, as a side note, that is probably the meaning of Pre, Palm reborn. LOL. Anyway, what gets me this excited is with Synergy. It seemed that Palm has broken free of the repository-based paradigm where data is stored in a PC and it is synched to the Phone. It is instead following a cloud-based paradigm where data modified in the phone is stored in the cloud in whatever service it originated from.

In geekspeak, "Ultimately, webOS acts much like what Daniels described in his interview; that is, it moves away from a repository datasource model to a federated query service model, where the device queries multiple services for state that it then caches locally, before invisibly propagating any changes back out to the cloud." All I can say is WOW!



Jan 11, 2009

Pearl Jam

It was a lazy Sunday afternoon and I was browsing videos in YouTube when I stumbled upon this rare, old-school gem. I am an avid Pearl Jam fan and finding one of their early promotional videos was nirvana (no pun intended).





Feeding the fire

This is from Sacha Chua's blog, she is a popular Filipino techno evangelist and the entry is about her father, John Chua, a well-known and respected photographer here in the Philippines. This article struck a personal chord and had been a constant source of inspiration. I hope that you will be inspired and moved as well in becoming "fire feeders," for being so passionate in life that it will serve as a beacon amidst mediocrity.

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How ashen my father was under the harsh fluorescent lights, I thought, as I pulled a chair up and offered to help him with the small computer I'd just restored. I knew that he needed the computer for his work tomorrow and that he was under a lot of stress. Yet despite the strains of the day, his voice was gentle and thankful, so different from the harried voice I'd heard on the phone earlier - so different from the impatience and grumpiness that frightened many of the employees.

Even as a child I had always seen him with a vivid red sunburn from days spent exploring the world and taking pictures. When he removed his watch or his eyeglasses, you could see pale strips of porcelain-white skin - part of his Chinese heritage. He lived like that, too - fantastic adventures coupled with a surprising gentleness. He glowed with the incredible passion that filled and sustained him: his photography. My father encouraged us to pursue our dreams. He lived his, and that gave us hope. He loved photography, getting up early and working late into the night creating beautiful images. Of all the people I know, he was the one most passionate about his dreams.

Today... today was different. The color seemed to have drained from his face. There was an unaccustomed sadness in the voice that had so often told me exciting stories of wild adventures. Today his words seemed to come from very far away. He asked me for such small, simple things. And because he asked so gently, I wanted to do everything. He was so grateful when I got them to work. Sometimes I couldn't. Instead of becoming cross, he simply smiled and said that that was okay.

We finally got the camera and the computer to work together; all that he needed for the next day's. My father let out a sigh and began to confide in me, unfolding his frustrations and his fears. We talked of passion and frustration, of plans and pains. He was worried about my sister and about the company. Their indifference sapped his strength, undermined his confidence. I looked at him closely. Suddenly he seemed so very old and so very tired. I wanted to throw my arms around him and cry.

How I wished I had been the one to follow in his footsteps, but my heart is in another field. I learned something important: fire feeds fire. I must always be near other people who are passionate about something or my soul will die as his seems slowly dying.

When the next day brings with it the thrill of the shoot and a system that works, perhaps he will rediscover his passion. I can only hope that the people around him realize how important they are to him. Their incompetence can break him. Their interest can inspire him. His work is important to him. He is important to me, both who he is and what he stands for.

May the world never break my father's spirit nor quench his passion. In a world of dim lives and mediocrity, he blazed with a light that so few know.



Jan 10, 2009

Manga Online Sources

I have been a fan of manga for almost a year now. My interest started when I got tired of the fillers on the ongoing Naruto and Bleach anime. Fillers are storylines outside of the manga story arc. I searched the web and found two excellent manga sources, One Manga and Manga Volume.

As a result, I no longer watch the anime episodes but constantly followed the manga chapters instead. I am now light years ahead from the anime storyline. Spoilers galore! Just like this small teaser from the latest chapter hehehe...





Personal Blog

I have decided to create a blog that will serve as the antithesis to my more serious blog, The Bedraggled Manager. This blog will be the Yang to the Ying, the Joker to the Batman, the Sith to the Jedi, the Mojas to the LocoRocos... I think you get the picture.



Disclosure Policy

This policy is valid from 10 January 2009 (when I started this blog).

I am the lone author of this blog. I write and edit all of its contents.

I accept forms of cash advertising, sponsorship, paid insertions or other forms of compensation. On the other hand, the compensation received will never influence the content, topics or posts I make in this blog. All advertising is in the form of advertisements generated by a third party ad network. Those advertisements will be identified as paid advertisements.

Likewise, I am not compensated to provide opinion on products, services, websites and various other topics. The views and opinions expressed on this blog are purely mine. If I claim or appear to be an expert on a certain topic or product or service area, I will only endorse products or services that I believe, based on my expertise and experience, are worthy of such endorsement. Any product claim, statistic, quote or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer or provider.

I make sure that this blog does not contain any content which may present a conflict of interest.

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