I will be the pattern of all patience; I will say nothing.

A recurring theme over the last year was how lousy a communicator I am. It was a little surprising to me, since in my head everything sounds good, and I thought I wrote fine.

But no. I don’t do well at face-to-face communication, especially in a larger group, and even more so with people unfamiliar.

I’m blaming it on the I and the T in my Myers Briggs profile. Wee are who wee are!

Identifying the problem is often easier than fixing it, and I guess it takes more than being conscious of the pitfalls to communicate efficiently – to me, that is having the person receive the information the way I intended. I could rant about how people should just take what I say at face value and discount all the body language and the tone, but even I read that in other people so I guess that put an end to that rant.

Anyway being conscious of what I do is one thing, being conscious as I speak is a whole other. It’s harder than I think – communicating well, and so I’m always mesmerised by people who do. I read Guy Kawasaki’s blog because he’s just that: he puts his point across, his point is simple, yet valuable, but he still manages to keep it light. Neat! That and he’s got a healthy regard for technology.

And from his blog, I found this: Bert Decker’s Top 10 (Best and Worst) Communicators of 2006. It’s worth a read, as is the rest of the blog. It’s neat when his categories are labelled – Avoid Powerpoint Abuse and Insights in Behaviour. And they’re just that.

Bert Decker put Guy Kawasaki on his list of 10 Best communicators because apparently, Guy’s presentation style is SHARP. He uses Stories, Humor, Analogies, References and Pictures/Visuals.

Hey, Steve Jobs is so SHARP he sold me an iPod! After months and months going on and on about how iPods sucked because they’re not solid state and how the batteries are going to be the bane of every owner’s existence, as soon as I watched him unveil the 4gb Nano – I had to have one, as did millions others.

So there. Be sharp. It often pays.

A recurring theme over the last year was how lousy a communicator I am. It was a little surprising to me, since in my head everything sounds good, and I thought I wrote fine.

But no. I don’t do well at face-to-face communication, especially in a larger group, and even more so with people unfamiliar.

I’m blaming it on the I and the T in my Myers Briggs profile. Wee are who wee are!

Identifying the problem is often easier than fixing it, and I guess it takes more than being conscious of the pitfalls to communicate efficiently – to me, that is having the person receive the information the way I intended. I could rant about how people should just take what I say at face value and discount all the body language and the tone, but even I read that in other people so I guess that put an end to that rant.

Anyway being conscious of what I do is one thing, being conscious as I speak is a whole other. It’s harder than I think – communicating well, and so I’m always mesmerised by people who do. I read Guy Kawasaki’s blog because he’s just that: he puts his point across, his point is simple, yet valuable, but he still manages to keep it light. Neat! That and he’s got a healthy regard for technology.

And from his blog, I found this: Bert Decker’s Top 10 (Best and Worst) Communicators of 2006. It’s worth a read, as is the rest of the blog. It’s neat when his categories are labelled – Avoid Powerpoint Abuse and Insights in Behaviour. And they’re just that.

Bert Decker put Guy Kawasaki on his list of 10 Best communicators because apparently, Guy’s presentation style is SHARP. He uses Stories, Humor, Analogies, References and Pictures/Visuals.

Hey, Steve Jobs is so SHARP he sold me an iPod! After months and months going on and on about how iPods sucked because they’re not solid state and how the batteries are going to be the bane of every owner’s existence, as soon as I watched him unveil the 4gb Nano – I had to have one, as did millions others.

So there. Be sharp. It often pays.

September is going to be a busy month for me. I think I’ll be spending a whole of 12 days at the office. We’re with a packing in a record amount of travel with a generous helping of meetings in between.

On the bright side, Netjackal (my favourite hosting provider on earth) found this new Six Apart product today. Check it out at Vox.com. Yes, it’s yet another blog platform, but it’s really got it down right. I love it so far. Why? It’s Typepad meets Flickr. Really.

Tagging replaces subdirectories (or none at all on blogger)

Easy integration of videos and photos.

Moblogging is easy.

Shows you updates from your friends.

Privacy settings (albeit kinda basic).

Oh, and it’s free. Hee.

It truly is an awesome product, even though I know it superficially. The drawback is that it’s invite only at the moment, which is a pain in the ass. I’ve 4 invites left, and if you’re looking to switch blogs, ping me and I’ll send you an invite.

After mulling over it for all of 8 hours (or so) I went to the salon again. A record for me – going more than once a quarter, and so I’ve now fulfilled my quota for the year just shy of September.

It’s a little weird how I finally picked the place – I first searched for the name of the Korean hair salon at Wheelock Place I read about that did a straight perm that didn’t flatten. The thing about rebonding your hair (not that most of you care) is that it gets so flat, it sticks to the sides of your head for a week or 2.

So I searched for the Korean hair salon, and found it. I also found a couple of forums that reviewed it. One of these, was http://www.cozycot.com, is a local health and beauty forum. Read a bunch of reviews, and most of the users there didn’t have great experiences at Jiwon – the Korean hair salon. They also said it cost something like $400 in total.

But good thing was I found related threads and everyone seemed to like the Soft Straight process at Supercuts. In particular, Supercuts at Far East Plaza. The thread started way back in 2003, but is still going strong 3 years later. So I found the name of a stylist someone liked, found the Supercuts phone number off Yellowpages.com.sg, made an appointment (half an hour in advance on a Friday evening, how cool), and scrambled my ass there.

It was a cinch finding the salon once you get to Far East Plaza anyway. And after you get past the frustrated homosexual at the reception, the ladies who shampoo and treat your hair are really nice and friendly. They were so amused that I found them from the internet. They were all really nice, asking if I was hungry, or if I needed to go take a leak. And they were crowded too, but they always manage to get back to me with a smile.

So that concludes a pleasant trip to the hair salon. All thanks to the wonders of the internet.

It’s still a bad day
But it’s been made better with the Ricky Gervais show podcasts that KF downloaded earlier. It’s hilarious – but it’s not for everyone. Fans of The Office would probably find it interesting, though. Fans of our regular Itchy and Scratchy show at the office will also enjoy this. There are no fist/rocket/nerf gun fights, though.

The other amazing discovery I made this week was Yahoo! Answers. It’s really hard to describe why this product is so “addicting” – as some of the users call it – but let’s try.

The basic premise of Yahoo! Answers is this: someone asks a question, everyone jumps on in to answer it. To incentivise people to answer well, you get 10 points for getting picked as the Best Answer, as judged by the person who asked the question. The person who asks the question has to pay 5 points to ask, so that there are more answers than questions. Scratchy says that’s so that the product can be called Yahoo! Answers, not Yahoo! Questions. So crever hor!

You get points for participating in silly things, like casting a vote for what you think the best answer is, or for giving the best answer a thumbs up. If you’re the answer that got a thumbs up, you get points again.

So at the end – your score gets tallied – and you collect points to move on to the next level of expertise. So for example, everyone starts with 100 points. You need to get to 250 points to get to Level 2. So if you answer 15 questions and get picked as Best Answer for all 15, you’re there! Simple enough, innit?

Not until you see the questions that are asked.

And yet, I’m quite glued to it – mostly because I want to keep my score ahead of Eeevahn. We made a mad dash to Level 2 over the week, and now that we’ve reached it, and we need another like 800 points to get to the next level, we kinda lost steam. We’re just like cruising on now.

It’s sad, and juvenile, but it was sure fun. I get to go, hi – I’m so and so, Yahoo! Answers Level 2. This will bring positive effects to my sad life I’m sure.

Flickr completely rocks!
If there’s anything worth fawning over on the internet, for me, it’s Flickr. I’ve always found it hard to part with my money for an internet service. The first real internet service I purchased wasn’t extra mail storage, or Yahoo! Music or a premium blog service. It was this domain. And I thought about it for a very long time. All for something that costs less than US$10 a year.

I got properly acquainted with Flickr yesterday. Today I spent US$25 on it. And I’m completely in love with it. It’s a brilliant product, simply because it’s so well thought out.

Yes, DHTML and all. But what does that mean?

It’s really easy to edit your photos, their descriptions, their titles. Just click on the area directly and it turns into an edit box. No more waiting for the next page to load to do it. No more waiting for the page after to save those changes.

It’s easy to sort your photos – you can tag ‘em. Bloomba users should appreciate that. Makes searching for ‘em later much easier. Multiple tags allowed.

You can organise your images by sets too. Kinda like albums.

They’ve a sweet Organisr that makes all this a breeze.

You’ve 4 categories of relationships for extra access control: family, friends, contacts, everyone else.

The slideshow is very intelligent. Instead of the slow-medium-fast slide settings, you get a sliding scale to control speed.

The community is way cool. View or join groups, view similar themes, learn new tricks. And due to the vibrant community aspect, they’ve also (so thoughtfully) stat report pages for you to check out your most viewed pic, and comments on your pics.

Your friends can tag your photos to the My Yahoo!, add comments.

The blog stuff they’ve built is a winner. So I can blog my photos (or someone else’s for that matter) straight from the photo page, with pre-set layouts. Phlogging is going to be easy. Won’t need server space to keep the photos, won’t need to code it by hand. Easy peasy. Works with Blogger, Livejournal, Moveable Type, Typepad and the crummy MSN whatchamacallit.

Do I really have to go on?

What’s the difference between Flickr and Yahoo! Photos? A whole world! It’s the difference between the library and the internet, right? You can get the same information, it’s a question of how much easier it is with the internet, and how much more vast the internet is. Ok. So I’m lame at examples. But you get the picture.

I’m a happy camper this weekend. Now comes the hard part. Keeping myself from uploading more photos over my 250mb a month broadband plan…

The internet is a fun, fun place
Every so often something cooler comes around the horizon and it’s exciting and then a wannabe shows up and its cooler still.

Today someone introduced me to Buzznet. It’s another photo share site, but in 2005, a photo share site is no longer just Yahoo! Photos. It’s got the whole communities, blog culture infused in it the way everything went all i- after the first iMac.

You have to give it to Apple, they’ve consistently been the design Adam for most things tech and cute.

Back to Buzznet. What creeped me out was how it looked and felt like an MSN product. If you liken Flickr to Apple, Buzznet is Microsoft. Functionally there, but just robotic and devoid of emotion. You can share, and blog and tag your photos (buzzwords), change your buzznet theme (premium service), and you can save up to 120 photos there before you need to pay for an unlimited account. It costs US$36 a year – for unlimited storage and an ad-free experience.

Flickr on the other hand, is a shrewd deal. It’s prettier, has a more intuitive UI, gives you cool tags for your blogs and sites to promote itself (but they’re oh-so-pretty). You can edit each photo page dynamically, and again you can share, blog and tag your photos, but you can only upload 20mb of photos a month. You’ll have to pay US$25 for the same unlimited storage and ad-free experience.

Well for now if I’m inclined to spend the moola, I’d spend it on Flickr, not because it’s now a Yahoo! company, but because I’d really be paying less for a better designed site.

Check out the posts below from the 2 photo share sites. Have fun.

Front: KF found me a way to cut down the bandwidth I consume!
Trust KF to find me stuff like that – its so way cool! If you use Firefox, you should get Adblock. The page claims it’s better than the built-in image blocker, but what’s neat is when Adblock thinks it finds an ad you haven’t added to the blocklist, you’ll see a tab on said ad, that gives you the option to block it. WAH!! Quite clever.

Even block Adsense Adwords. Lovely. No more nasty weirdads on Samblog.

Middle: The orange pound cake turned out pretty good
Yup, the One Two Three Four Cake turned out to be a pretty decent pound cake. It was a little dense (I insist that that’s how pound cake should be) but it was spongey and moist. The orange rind and juice worked great – just the right amount of tart and sweet and frangrant. Best attempt ever.

Thing that was a little disappointing was after I popped it into the fridge, it really went like way dense and quite a lot less fluffy than before it went into cold storage. Ah well. Perhaps it’ll be good toasted.

As usual, when I brought it home the jury couldn’t come back with a unanimous decision. My mom liked it – she’s sick of chocolate cake, so she welcomed the change. My dad didn’t, he insists that cake has to be chocolate, cos it goes well with vanilla.

As for me, I think it’d be a hard fight too if I get that Fudgey Chocolate cake right. And that cake requires almost no creaming! (read: no butter) That alone stands out as a personal favourite. Try it. If I had gotten it right, it would’ve been spongey, moist and really chocolatey. And easy too!

With recipes like that, it kinda makes it hard to get one of those all-in-one package mixes, as beautiful as the serving suggestion turns out.

End: Square pegs
So I’ve been spending my evenings watching Square Pegs, it was on tv some weeks back, but I kept missing it on and off. I saw it at the vcd store the other day and just had to get it to finish the story.

Netjackal said he watched it and didn’t like it. Without spoiling it for me he said the writers wrote themselves into a corner and came up with a yuckky ending.

My mom went one step further this weekend. I told her I got the vcds, and she proceeded to try to tell me what happened. I told her I hadn’t finished the series, hoping she’d know to stop. She figured since I didn’t know, she’d tell me what happened in the end. Sweet. Then she said it was a terrible ending.

I just finished the last 3 discs, and I thought the ending was fine. Yeah, yeah. Everyone wants to see things tie up nicely, and Jessica Hsuan happy and all. But surprisingly, the story was quite modern, perhaps the writers grew up in the Sting and the If-You-Love-Somebody-Set-Them-Free era. I liked it better when Ah Wong was still an imbecile anyway, at least he was funny.

Read somewhere that they’re filming a modern version of Square Pegs. Wonder how it will work out, since they had to film without Winnie Yeung (who plays Ah Wong’s fiancee) since she was pregnant at the time.

Postscript: Where in the world is Neil Gaiman
At a bookstore and library near me.

Gadgets galore
This week, KF has been really chatty – apparently there was a huge PC show in the US (CES 2005), so last week I heard a bunch of talk about the Sandisk SD card with a built-in USB connector. Sweet huh?

This week, he’s been checking out the new iPod Shuffle and Mac Mini. And now we’re watching Steve Jobs sell his two new babies at MacWorld.

You gotta hand it to Jobs, he’s a salesman. I doubt Bill Gates could sell it like he does. Mr G couldn’t even sell it himself at CES 2005, he needed Conan O’Brien to help him along, and even then his software couldn’t work. I’m putting that down to karma the years and years of bluescreens we had to put up with.

Back to Apple
The iPod Shuffle is basically a flash memory based mp3 player.

The Pros
• It’s small
• It’s cute
• USB 2
• USB connector attached
• Partitionable for file storage
• Solid state is superior!
• Comes in 512MB and 1GB models
• It’s relatively inexpensive. The 512MB model will retail for US$99. The 1GB one US$149

The Cons
• Li-On rechargeable battery? It’s a stupid system. 12 hours of continuous playback? Please – that’s what they said about the iPod too. Didn’t see that work out.
• No display – you can’t tell what song is playing. It’s a shuffler! It’s a “surprise me” kind of mp3 player. Not for control freaks.
• Not sure about the partitionable bit. Could be a pain in the ass.

What’s really tempting is the Mac Mini. At US$499 for a small form factor PC, and this one is *really* tiny, it’s a really compelling buy. Relatively fast 1.25Ghz processor, 40GB harddrive, USB 2 and firewire, combo dvd and cd-rw drive, analog and digital display output, . I’m sure the ram’s upgradeable though. For US$100 more they’ll throw in a faster processor and a larger harddisk. Oh, and it comes with the OS (duh!) and some smoke and mirrors (AKA digital media apps).

What sucks about the MM? Sucky graphics card: ATI Radeon 9200 32MB DDR SD RAM AGP 4x. I have no clue what that means, but KF translated that to SUCKY. Also 256MB of RAM is kinda lame ass, even though upgrades are available. Only 2 USB 2 slots are available, doesn’t come with wireless connectivity. And like the combo DVD-reader/CD-writer drive thing is so 2003. They should’ve just gone straight for DVD writer.

Jobs also boasts that the Mac Mini is a BYODKM. Bring your own display, keyboard and mouse. Which is probably better in a way. I really don’t like the Apple mouse.

Check out the Mac Mini specs.

Well, if Apple wanted to corner the market of people who kinda want a Mac, but always fell back to their PC ways – they sure have something compelling on their hands this time.