codesamurai

Ever since I became aware of my thoughts, I have always been thinking about how things fit together. I have always been figuring out why some things work or others don't. I've always looked at people who "don't get it" as handicapped and I don't even bother explaining what they will probably never understand.

Until very recently I have been unaware that all these things that I notice are all elements of design. The little details that I notice about stuff are the aesthetics, consistency and lack thereof. Everything is designed either by man but mostly by nature or God.

When a person who believes that logic is a rule that the world revolves around, looks at the world and sees that everything is falling apart and despairs. When someone knows that there isn't supposed to be any order or logic to anything, they would be delighted at little sparks of design that emerges from all points of life. The former looks at the world as doomed, the latter looks at the world with delight at every discovery and knows there are entities taking care of the world, the universe, and entire reality.

Logic is an artificial construct to simplify reality in a very unrealistic way. If you're purely logical, reality will continually disappoint you. Logic is a very small part in the design of reality.

Colors are driving me nuts! The color complements in the standard color wheel are totally different from RGB, I believe that RGB color wheel is the fake one because it is just a workaround to approximate the real world RYB color wheel. Working with color complements in photoshop is driving me in-fucking-sane!!! Well at least I can play a painter without all the mess. Fuck fuck fuck. Trying to reconcile all the differences is a really big mind fuck. Damn you RGB!!!

I'm delving deeper into Amazon's international shipping. So far, after making an expensive 60 dollar mistake, I've learned that it's several times more cheaper to ship stuff from neighboring countries or not-so-neighboring countries, instead of shipping from the US. First off the standard shipping time (really time is the most expensive thing in terms of shipping) is 18-32 days when shipping from US, while shipping from UK you can ship the same items in 8-12 days with standard shipping rates. Definitely much much cheaper. Expensive learning lesson, sigh, but next time this'll learn me not to buy american. Euro FTW! lol

Have you ever felt the need to turn on the Fan because you don't want to get bitten by invisible itchy insects? Ever wash the dishes and feel that your legs are itchy? You've just been bitten by Sandflies. Yup, once you have one of those pesky buggers you've probably got hundreds buzzing around your home. Nope you can't kill them with bug spray, I've tried for days weeks. The best thing you can do is turn on the Fan to ward them off, they're so tiny they're easily pushed away by air like mosquitoes but even tinier. That or probably Off Lotion, though I've never tried that yet.

For the past week and a quarter I've been laying off caffeine and I feel like my energy level has normalized. I feel *OUCH FUCKING MOTHERFUCKING BITCH FUCKER* I was typing while on my belly and when I moved my injured arm-shoulder it just fucking exploded with pain. I've recovered now, but man did that fucking hurt.

Anyway, the first 4 days I've had massive headaches, was sleeping entire days had constipated turd movements. Haha, that last one was funny because my turd was shaped like that dude with the deformed face from Mask. With random shapes strewn in for more fun. Now everything's normal, I feel less impulsive with things I do, although I feel slightly dumber which isn't too bad I guess. I shit twice today, with no coffee! What have you got to say for yourself now asshole?

Saw both Before movies today on WarnerTV and they're really great. The conversations were rarely boring and I didn't even have coffee. Anyway one particular topic really caught my attention, it's when Celine started talking about being in Warsaw and how she wasn't able to watch any TV because it was in another language and that's when all her thoughts came flowing out.

Are we just too busy these days with TV, Internet, Movies, Games and most media that we never truly find our voice? The opinions that we have, are they really ours or were we manipulated by media into thinking that way? I wish I could go on a vacation away from the internet, TV and media and to just talk with people. You know, real connection and crap.

Another cool stuff from the movie was when Jesse talked about being in a band. Their band leader kept pushing them real hard in order to get a record deal and ended up not enjoying the band experience. Sometimes the goal gets in the way of enjoying the experience. We get caught up in accomplishments that we fail to realise that the journey to get there is actually quite fun.

Really great films, I saw the 2nd one on Cinema and the first one I bought on DVD. Nice to watch them back to back. The third one I still haven't seen, I might rent it on iTunes when they decide to put it out on rentals. Stupid Netflix only available in US, DAMN YOU MEDIA REGULATION LAWS!!!

How others see us and how we see ourselves are usually very different. It varies based on how different your childhood was from the typical. For example, my friends from the FBM, who I actually thought knew me, had a very very different view of me from reality.

I spoke to them yesterday and they thought I was this bookish intellectual that uses everything I read in books and believe them absolutely. Probably a deep seeded assumption that came from the almost messiah-like ring leader, Ramone. I will be the first to admit that my academic memory is really really really shitty. I even got a failing mark in Filipino of all subjects, actual failure 73% not that imaginary below 85% that good students are disappointed by. And I couldn't even memorize the list of China's dynasty even if my life depended on it. But I can remember the emotional moments in my life almost perfectly, with some details that are wrong here or there. And I'm really good at playing video games.

Well I can't blame their assumption, I encouraged and never challenged it. I brought books to work, read books on transit. It must seem to them that my life is just centered on books. Books are my way of compensating for my lack of real world knowledge, I mean how the hell would you know how it felt to invent the first computer or to figure out how hellish it was to make an operating system. You will never know unless you were really there. And I have great difficulty trusting mentor figures.

I also have trust issues against strangers and people who have strong unsubstantiated opinions (and of course, old people who seem weird). Given my trust issue, I would need a reference to gauge who's being shitty from those who actually knows what they're doing. The way I see it there are two ways to approach a problem, a disciplined approach and brute force. People who work in Software Engineering, needs the disciplined approach and there are already established ways of approaching each and every engineering task. Applying brute-force or learning-on-the-job in Engineering is just wasteful, the objective is results not discovery. They saw me applying disciplined approach, which I learned from a book because no school here teaches this sort of stuff, and they thought I was being bookish. I was just doing what engineers do, engineer a product with sound engineering methods. Just because I recently learned it doesn't mean I'm bookish, it's just that I don't subscribe to learning-on-the-job-without-a-mentor brute force approach. I'm not sure if I'm being clear here.

My idea was, shit we don't know what the fuck we're doing and our boss is just blaming us because we're making shit. Why not look to the states and find methods that work. Of course I can't ship international consultants to our company to guide us in our work, the next best thing is to consume the capsule of their work in the form of well edited and well reviewed books. My approach is generally to try an approach and see if it works and tweak it a little each time until it is tuned. Or to throw it away if it cannot be tweaked. My approach would generally evolve outside of what was described in the books as our experience grows. But alas, when you're challenging the status quo (in this case: OUR FOREIGN MASTERS KNOW BEST, WE ARE JUST SLAVES THAT CARRY OUT ORDERS) you become a revolutionary. People find the smallest gap in your experience and magnify that fault. Yeah, it might be all fame and glory after a successful revolution but it is always an uphill battle.

The short gist is I mostly read technical books because I don't want to use brute force on anything.

Hey Check It:



It has a face!

Looking at the design of this controller, it looks like their goal was to remove the appearance of complexity. To make the controller less daunting to first time users. It doesn't have directional controls anymore or 10 buttons that a dualshock 3 have. Instead it has gestures, to replace keypresses and mouse movements. I'm still on the fence about gestures nobody has yet to make it mainstream. Even Apple's gestures, as useful and easy as they are to learn, fail to win over majority of their users who has gotten used to click dragging and manual zooming.

I predict that 10% of PC gamers will try this and only 10% of those people will use it on a daily basis. The problem with adopting new controls when an existing one has been fully ingrained can be seen with the evolution of the QWERTY keyboard. People have been attempting to improve upon it for years but they have kept failing to reach a breakthrough with users.

I wish Steambox the best of luck, they seem to have the best of intentions in mind when putting out a new product. It's a pity they did not use more industrial designers when developing this controller. The way I see it, it's more of a work of art rather than a good controller design. An attempt, if you will, of out-cooling Apple. It will probably win a prize in some design exhibit, just ask m'man Don Norman. ;)

I used to just dismiss design as aesthetics, all looks and no function. But that is just design as it applies to fleeting fancies like fashion and interior design. I'm talking about Industrial Design son! The kind of design that surrounds us, from your stand-fan, to your keyboard, to your phone, to your toilet. Basically every product we use should have passed through industrial design of some sort. They products you use could be copies of a wildly successful design (korean and chinese knock offs of gadgets, cars, whatever), or they actually stemmed forth from an architect, designer or engineer.

A good design resonates with people, it basically just draws them in. It's not the function of a device that makes people want to buy them (although most device-monkeys are dumb enough to just count features and decide to buy the newest in-thing in the market), it's actually the design that speaks to our sensibilities. It's what makes us go "WHOA, I think that would be useful to me."

However going beyond industrial design, I looked at design in general. From the way our planet is designed, the design of our humanity and anatomy, the design of shoes beyond the cosmetics, the design of erasers in how it was intended to be used. Everything has design even clunky tricycles in this here subdivision. Design, essentially, is what the maker intended for something to exist and coexist with its surroundings and fellow entities. Whether or not we were made by a creator is another topic altogether, so I'll cut this short like an abrupt dumping session in the toilet interrupted by someone's loud knocking.

Anyway so what's new. An Afflecktion has struck the dark knight? Stay tuned for the next episode of Superman! Wait wut? Yeah really. WUT??!!! They're casting a comedy/romance dude for a dark character? Are they going for an Adam West camp-style Batman? Granted I have not watched anything the dude has done, I'm not even sure if I saw Daredevil, but the permanent expression stamped on his face just isn't Batman.

Yeah there's a lag of 5 days and a shoulder injury. Mental note, no more rotator cuff exercises and inclined dumbell flyes. Even though it's a minor injury it sure felt ugly, I felt like I could see the muscle, bone and cartilage all misaligning for a sudden ugly pop like House did whenever he's diagnosing a patient. Gah. Still a bit of a dull pain.