This is the most awaited 2nd half of all 2nd halves I’ve had - the second half of 2009. This particular time of the year is special for two reasons. It signals the beginning of the end of my thesis project and the imminent possibility of having a vacation back in the Philippines next year.

The past few weeks was quite cheeky. I have taken a lot of emo baggage away from me to the point that I felt I was completely gutted and indifferent. Being away from home has taken its toll but I’ve managed to take a good grip on my sanity. Thus, this post.

I do not cry over spilled milk but when the milk’s the best I’ve had, it is hard not to cry.
It’s been years and I thought I’ve mastered the art of forgetting her.
She haunted me still.
Up until this day…

It might not be the best milk after all.

I hear death all over when I woke up. I attempted to go by myself and almost succumbed to an accident. As I bring confidence on the table, the painful reality of ignorance snapped back at me. I thought I already know something. I thought I am already something.

Failures and successes in the past became bigger in proportion.
Failures haunted and wallowed me down.
Successes made me arrogant and self-absorbing.

so I am doomed…

Read the rest of this entry »

When I left Pinas, my mom earnestly told me in our 2-hour long drive to the airport that I need to be physically fit once I get in here. She even cajoled me to do some physically strenuous casual job so as to help me. I promised her that when I get back home, she’ll see a physically-renewed son. At the airport, I was really determined to fulfill the promise but upon getting here and seeing how delicious Aussie food can get, it was hard not to indulge. So, in a matter of weeks, I gained notoriously a whopping 5 kilos.

The food was overwhelming and I had to step back and check my priorities. Since last month, I engaged myself in a project that will be able to fulfill my promise to my mom and at the same time, a personal gift on my next year’s birthday. To date, that project managed to already lose 10 kilos off my weight. To make things more exciting for her, my friends and for me, I promise to post a shirtless picture of mine on February 24, 2010.

That’s roughly in 7 months, 19 days, 22 hours, 34 minutes. See you!

Imelda Marcos by billypalooza

While doing my paper work, my ears were glued to this inter-generational comic show on Channel 10. The show pits in three generations - Baby Boomers, Gen X and Gen Y, against each other in an hour-long battle of wits and fun filled quest with amusing questions, hilarious gags and off-beat performances. The quest wants to know which generation really does know more and more importantly, the most superior among the three. And as Ten’s website would have to put it, “it is guaranteed to put the zest back into zeitgeist“.

The show was one way for me to fight the boredom associated with the excessive amounts of reading I have been doing. The show catched my full attention when during one of the segments of the show they asked the celebrity’s name who mentioned this line, “I did not have three thousand pairs of shoes, I had one thousand and sixty“. The Baby Boomers got the answer right and surprisingly, they answered it a bit faster compared to the other questions. The answer was none other than, a fellow Filo, former First Lady Imelda Marcos, once known as the “Steel Butterfly“.

I stopped when her name was mentioned. I never knew she said that. I really didn’t know. I felt a bit ashamed knowing that some Aussie Baby Boomer knew it even better than a Filo bloke. Haha. If there’s something I am only sure about her fascination on shoes is that she opened a museum in Marikina sometime ago housing her vast shoe collection. The exhibition actually earned her the title of being one of the world’s best shoe collector and at the same being one of Newsweek’s “Greediest People of all Time” together with Marcus Licinius Crassus, Genghis Khan, Bernard Maddof and many others.

And then I remembered my high school history lessons.

The former first Lady, after her husband’s regime of corruption, political repression and gross economic shenanigans and her being dragged in massive scandals, managed to return in the Philippines’ limelight and even got elected as a legislative representative of her native district of Leyte. Talk about the Filipinos’ ability to forget things easily! Look at Erap Estrada now. He gets to even deliver a commencement speech recently somewhere. But, that’s of course, another story. Haha. Now, I am sidetracking again.

It got me thinking at that point. The question remains at the back of my head, why accumulate that much if she’s not going to use them all? Well, it’s like asking how much wealth is enough for a man to be contented and getting that question mark posed on other people’s faces. Haha. Was she trying to live debauchery at its fullest? Or she might just have wanted options, a clear indication that she has propensity for freedom after all. Probably she is suffering from what Theologians would call avarice - a selfish desire for or pursuit of money, food or other possessions.

You might be surprised that Theodore Roosevelt loved hunting so much that he managed to slaughter more than a thousand animals. Genghis Khan was so immersed into conquering the entire world and came very close to it than anybody else. And who would forget Empress Dowager Xi Ci’s megalomaniac grip on her omnipotence when she ruled over China’s Manchu Xing Dynasty for more or less 50 years? As Robert Heilbroner wrote, some of us sees our personality as something contagious that we endow outside things as being parts of our self. That might explain why some decides to plunge and engage themselves in a messy hoarding of worldly possessions and lavish extravagance.

Our universe is filled with unexplainable superfluity. Why would the universe even have more or less 340 exo planets when we only need one? As baffling it may seem, Imelda’s shoes, Roosevelt’s hunting, Khan’s conquest and Xi Ci’s omnipotence are part of the mystery of life.

PS. Generation X won this night’s show.
Is she really that popular? Gawd. Even Aussies really do know her.

Loosing Time by bogenfreund

I have 48 hours remaining for two papers and one presentation and yet I haven’t taken a grip on them. I am beginning to get agitated and I think I am beginning to cram. Well, what’s new? I am a last minute person and that explains my inclination towards a very long planning stage. This is a personal attitude of myself which I reckoned need to change soon.

I think I could have finished everything off last week if I never found that propelling need to delete 10 pages of my literature review. I thought I’ve got sidetracked on discussing the implication of mobile form factors on user interfaces when in fact, I should just have sticked to what my freaking thesis is all about.

To see the sun come up and go down and stay awake in between the two is a feat I’ve managed to put up for the past two weeks. Even my concept of meal time has vanished. Sometimes, I take my breakfast at 3am or at 10am and my lunch normally at 4pm. My dinner? Most of the time I forget to take them, which I find nice because I feel I am compensating the lack of my body’s inactivity.

To date, I’ve lost 10 kilos since I got in here. Not bad.

My Compaq’s two year power adapter companion took its final air today.
Laptop Adapter. R.I.P. 2006-2009.

And so I had to find a replacement but nowhere in Townsville I can look for one. I went to HP’s website and luckily, I saw one. It had a whopping price, $100AUD (roughly 3,600PhP). Being a stingy guy I digressed to pay such amount which led me to an online site offering the same product for $55AUD. Hehe. That was nice.

I tried checking first the mode of payment since I haven’t activated my credit card (and I have no plans in doing so until I get a casual job) and saw that a direct debit option was present. I learned that I had to pay to the Bank of South Australia of which I haven’t heard since I got in here. I tried googling the address at Google Maps Australia and saw a street view of it. It was so great!

Curious I was, I typed in my address of where I am staying and got surprised because it has a picture of our place in its full glory. Haha! It’s a two-storey place which is owned by one of my gorgeous aunts. My old folks are staying at the first floor while I stay at the second floor with some peeps. I have quite a number of house mates, one Indonesian taking his PhD, one Chinese taking his undergrad in Marine Bio, two working Filipinos (one is a Cook and the other is a Geologist) and another Mozambique doctor who’s taking his Masters.

My Place

Then, I checked James Cook Drive, where our building is located. The view is a little bit obscured since there are a couple of trees obscuring the facade of the building. You may go around the map and see the entire University. JCU is a huge place but not as big as UP Diliman probably.

School of Math, Physics and IT - JCU

I also had a short stint at an Asian Restaurant - the Thai-Thai Resto. They needed some additional wait staff a couple of weeks ago so my cousin pitched me in. The place is cool and very warm - distinctive of an asian resto. Their food is likewise great and my Lola is head over heels in love with their mussels.

Thai Thai

Of course, I went on and on using Google Maps to look around the city. Almost the entire country is on Google Maps. I wondered then if my place in the Philippines has been covered by Google and so I tried. I had my fingers crossed because I was really hoping street views of Angeles City. Unfortunately, not even one street view was to be found.

By the way, this is my last week at the University. My first term is almost over! 2 more terms to go!

JCU Flagship | Photo by Marine Girl

My CP5001 class had its fortnightly coordination meeting a while ago with Jarrod and Rosemary. Everyone basically talked about the progress each had made on their own respective projects. Then tips were given to us for our final weeks of preparation for our reviews and for the upcoming semester as well. Jarrod then side-tracked about the idea of actually publishing our literature reviews as surveys in publication journals (tapos, twink!). It was elating to hear that possibility and granted that we’ll publish them, there is a research grant to be given!

I was quite happy coming in the class, knowing that I am almost done with my review but at the same time sleepy, because I was on a “virtual freeze” for three straight days. Moreover, the insecurities I had before due to the nature of my project has slowly dissipated off knowing that there are a lot of other people like me fascinated with how HCI can affect people.

Read the rest of this entry »

3D Mind Map | Photo by dusan.writer

I have finally finished documenting the first part of my Thesis. From a mediocre first draft that I submitted last March, I think I have gone far justifying the thesis of this project.

My supervisor mentioned to me that although a lot have testified on the effectiveness of mind maps, the truth of the matter is, not so much empirical evidence can support that. One famous exception would be the Hennessy paper published in 2002. The paper concluded that there was increase of 10% of factual knowledge however, it cited that if motivation could have been made equal in the groups, the improvement could have been up to 15% more.

Read the rest of this entry »

Most of my friends know that I am bit struggling with my studies at the moment. Well, let’s just say that I thought I’d left math forever once I got into IT but those pesky numbers just kept on hounding me.

Next week, I’m due to discuss Edward Reingold’s paper, “Infix to Prefix Translation: The Insufficiency of a Pushdown Stack” and on the 29th, I’m to present a paper by Timo Jokela, et.al.’s “Methods for quantitative usability requirements: a case study on the development of the user interface of a mobile phone”. I’ve started doing the reports and presentations for the Jokela paper since I chose the topic earlier this month. On the other hand, it was only last Wednesday that I got paper of Reingold. Fortunately, I was given two weeks to prepare for it. I will be posting drafts of my reports and presentations for some of my friends, colleagues and mentors in the Philippines to check and scrutinize. I’ve always believed in the power of collective opinion in generating creative solutions to problems and so getting feedback from other people would certainly be a boost.

Infix to Prefix Conversion | Photo by CodeProject

Reingold’s paper is quite classic. It was finished in June 1972, with four other articles being published that year. Its abstract, one of the densest prose I’ve seen, states that “the permutations of the input string achievable by an algorithm which uses a single pushdown stack and M random access storage locations are characterized, and the characterization is used to show that no such algorithm can translate arithmetic expressions from infix to prefix.” The author who has published 49 journal articles to date, started writing in 1970 and has co-authored with at least 29 others.

The paper is quite short, which made me quite nervous as most short papers are harder to understand. One, the author might have left out a lot of details for the user to understand or the paper is too technical that it became parochial.

On the other hand, the paper of Jokela is relatively new. Together with Koivumaa, Pirkola, Salminen and Kantola they presented their new tailored methodology on determining usability requirements and evaluating the extent to which these requirements are met. It dwells on one of the often neglected aspects of Usability Engineering, and that is Quantitative Usability Requirements. The study used one of their past development projects in Nokia although he didn’t mention which specific phone model was being designed.

So, my plan is to actually present a “critique” to the two papers. Maybe, I would be starting with the positive arguments that were made and then present the negative ones. Hopefully, I would be able to correlate the two as to determine the strength or the weakness of the impact that the paper has created.