Archive for July, 2007
Dance with me
25
Jul
Relationships require a lot of work. It takes time and effort to get things going the way you want and it’s most likely that you’d want it to go smoothly. Being in a relationship is a lot like dancing. You have a partner whom you’re with. One of you does the leading while the other follows. There’s a certain way to move but you have to know when to make those moves. If you make the wrong move and starting moving out of sync with the music, you’ll mess things up.
Like dancing, you have to know what you’re doing to make it work correctly. You have to know how to hold the girl in your arms in a way that makes her feel comfortable. You have to guide her and show her where she has to be when you’re moving. If the dance requires you to do a back flip and then spin a full 360 degrees, you want to be sure that she’s where she’s supposed to be when you come to a complete stop. There’s this whole routine that you go through but before you choreograph the moves, you have to know what you’re doing.
You don’t want to move the girl to move the way you do. You have to gently hold her in your arms and gracefully guide her along. If you’re gentle enough, she will follow your every move. But she’s not the only one that does the following. You have to follow her and make sure that she’s safe.
The dance floor can get very crowded so you have to watch out for her. If there’s another dance couple about to hit her, you have to be fast enough to spin her around and take the hit yourself. If you’re too busy concentrating on your foot work, you’re not going to see danger when it’s on a direct collision path with you. The foot work takes practice but once you’ve mastered it, you’ll be able to concentrate more on your surroundings rather where your foot should be at a certain beat. When you take your mind off the foot work, you’ll be able to hear the beat.
The longer you dance with someone, the more you’ll learn about their strengths and weaknesses. You applaud their strength and encourage them to continue to get better. A good guy will help his girl with her weaknesses rather than exploit them for his own advantage. Everyone struggles in something in life but that doesn’t mean that you put them down for not being good. When someone is struggling at something, you need to give then confidence and let them know that they can improve if they really try. If you try and exploit their weaknesses, you will slowly lose the other person’s trust. If you can’t trust your partner, the relationship will fail. It’s no fun dancing alone.
The reality of it all is that a girl wants a guy who knows what he’s doing. If you don’t know what you’re doing, what good are you? In order to be better at it, you need practice and as much of it as possible. When you’re on the dance floor, a girl will come up to you and dance with you because she’ll see that you’re good. Everyone wants to become better at something so if you can lead them in a dance, they will know that. No one wants to dance with someone who’s completely new at it. Everyone’s on the dance floor to have a good time and not to teach someone how to dance.
Take the money and run
24
Jul
If I found a bag full of money, I would keep it. I’m an honest guy but if I find money that’s just lying around, I’m not going to take the time to track down the owner and return it to the guy. That money goes straight to my pocket. Well, not into my pocket, more like straight to the cash register of a local retail store since I’ll be buying a whole whack of stuff with it.
A while ago, I read a story of a Philippine taxi drive who found $17,000 and return it. For his honesty, he was rewarded $32. I think he would have been much better off keeping the $17,000 rather than returning it. Yes, bringing it back to the owner is the honest thing to do but if this money was really important to the guy, he wouldn’t have been so absent-minded about it and left it in the cab.
No one would have known that the taxi driver was the only with the lost cash. What other people don’t know won’t hurt them. He could have taken the money and made his life a little better. By bringing the money back to its owner, he was labeled an honest made and was rewarded for his good doing. So what? I bet you by now, no one remembers his good dead. The person that lost the money probably remembers that someone returned his lost goods but do you think he still remembers his name? Some how, I highly doubt that.
More than meets the eye
16
Jul
I got the chance to go watch the Transformers movie and let me know it, I was very impressed. I had high expectations for this movie because it’s my favourite movie of all time and I was not let down. I loved every minute of it. I don’t think I blinked throughout the whole movie. If you have seen it yet, I would recommend that you go see it. It was so good that I would go see it again. And I’d take you with me!
This movie has got to be the most highly anticipated movie of all time. All of the people that grew up in the eighties waited a long time for something like this to come out. The cartoon version was okay but the real life version was way better. Cinematic effects has progress a lot since then and now the robots are life sized and more real looking. If you don’t want to go see the movie for the plot, then seeing the transformation sequence is good enough.
Every robot had thousands of moving pieces and each piece had to movie in conjunction with the rest. With a $150 million budget, you’d have to put on a good show. Michael Bay, director of Transformers, did just that. He filled every scene with non-stop action. The robots look more realistic than any other movie that I’ve seen. One of the robot even starts to break dance.
At the beginning of the mode, we see a Decepticon attacking a US military base in Qatar. Blackout, a Decepticon that transforms into a helicopter emits an electromagnetic pulse and disables the machines on the base. After he’s crippled the base, he goes after their database and starts hacking into their system, looking for information. Once he got the information that he was looking for, he broadcasted it to the other Decepticons and they go out looking for their target.
Archibald Witwicky made a discovery of a life time when he found something in Antarctica. Since then, he had long passed away but left his remains to his family. Sam Witwicky is a high school student who’s looking to get his first car. His dad promised that he would help him only if he got three A’s in school which he did.
They go to a car dealership and look around for a car. That’s when Sam saw a rusty old Camaro which is Bumblebee in disguise. The car salesman was trying to sell Bumblebee for $5,000 even though he had no idea where the old Camaro came from. Sam wasn’t willing to spend that much money so Bumblebee helped by destroy all the cars in the area by using his speakers to shatter all the windows of the other cars. The salesman thought that the car was possessed and sold it quickly.
As the movie goes on, Bumblebee flees to a junkyard where he starts to transmit a signal to the rest of the Autobots. When Bumblebee leaves Sam’s house, Sam thinks that his car is being stolen so he chases it down. When he finally catches up with it, he sees Bumblebee in his robot form and starts to freak out.
Later on, Sam runs into Barricade, a Decepticon that transforms into a police car. Sam thought that the police car was there to help him but instead, he tried to hurt him because it wanted information. Luckily, Bumblebee arrives and saves Sam from Barricade. Bumblebee and Barricade starts fighting.
Optimus Prime looks awesome in the movie. The guy that did the voice of Optimus Prime is the same guy that did his voice in the original cartoon series although, he didn’t speak much in the movie. Some of his lines were the same lines in the cartoon. In vehicle mode, he’s just a truck but in robot mode, he’s a two story tall robot. I’ve heard that the designers worked with engineers to make sure that every part is as realistic as possible. Every part of his body is supposed to interact with the other parts. If you want to see the detail of it all, you can view a high quality version of it on Wikipedia.
Anyway, overall, this movie was wicked awesome! I had high expectations for it and those expectations were met. When I have time, I plan on going to see it again. It’s rare that I go and see a movie twice. If I do see it more than once, usually the second time is on DVD but Transformers is so good that I want to see it again in theatres. It’s worth it too.
It’s never enough
05
Jul
I don’t quite understand why people are always looking for more. Why can’t they accept what is given to them and move on? Just because you work for a large company doesn’t mean that you have to milk it for all it’s worth. Some people are never pleased with what they have. Don’t they know that other people in the company have less?
Today, I had to set up a new laptop for a new employee that started a copy of days ago. I had to use another employee’s laptop because we were on back order. This employee walked into my department and requested a laptop because he didn’t have a computer to use. Normally, he would have to follow procedure and request it through his manager. We sent him back to his department and told him to request the hardware the proper way.
The next day, he came back and asked if his laptop was ready. It’s very impatient of him to ask for something one day and assume that it would be ready the following day. I understand that it might not be entirely his fault since he’s rather new to the company. His manager should have known better to request the laptop beforehand.
We’re not expecting another shipment of laptops until the end of the week but we had one that we were saving for an employee that was currently off site. I took that laptop and configured it for the new guy. When everything was done, I brought it over to him. His coworker was pleased to see that we got him a laptop so quickly but he didn’t quite seem too happy.
I was going to just drop off the laptop and get back to work but he quickly stopped me to ask some questions. He brought the laptop back to his desk and proceeded to take out the laptop. No matter how I answered his questions, he tried to talk me into getting him more.
Employee: This is a new laptop right?
Me: Of course it’s new. Why wouldn’t it be?
Employee: Okay, so where can I get a docking station?
Me: I don’t think we provide docking stations.
Employee: Yes, you do. Look, he’s got one.
Me: Well, then I would suggest that you ask him where he got it from because we don’t supply that.
Employee: Come on buddy. Could you get me one?
Me: Dude, I don’t even have one. How am I supposed to get you one?
Employee: Come on.
Me: Look, if you want one, you’ll have to put in a hardware/software request and get your manager to approve it.
Employee: Okay. What about an LCD monitor?
Me: You’ll have to put in a request for that too. If we gave you a desktop and maybe we would have given you an LCD monitor but you have a laptop so you don’t need one.
Employee: Yes, but she’s got one.
Me: Well, I’m sure that she might have requested one from her manager.
Employee: So you can’t get me an LCD monitor.
Me: No, I’m sorry. I can’t do that.
Employee: Okay. What about a keyboard? You can get me that right? It’s just a keyboard.
Me: No, not even. We only hand out keyboards to people who has a desktop computer.
Employee: You can’t even get me a keyboard?
Me: What do you need a keyboard for? You got a brand new laptop. It has an LCD display and a keyboard attached to you. Can’t you use that?
Employee: I can’t work like this. I need an LCD and a keyboard at least.
Me: Then you’ll have to run that by your manager and get it approved. I can’t get you anything without a hardware/software request. I can’t give out keyboards because all the keyboards we have are supposed to be deployed with the desktop computers.
Employee: Come on. See what you can do for me, okay?
Me: There isn’t much I can do.
Employee: Come on buddy?
Me: Okay, I’ll see what I can do.
Like I told him, there wasn’t anything I could do. I went back to my desk and sat down. All of the new desktop computers that we received came with a keyboard. If I gave him a keyboard, one of those desktops wouldn’t have a keyboard. It’s pointless to supply him something that he doesn’t need when someone else can put it to better use. If someone gave me a laptop, I would be happy with just that. I’m not going to ask for something more. This guy is new to the company and already he’s breaking the rules. We have procedures in place in order to keep things organized. There were six people who requested LCD monitors but they did it the proper way. They put in a request to their managers and it was approved. Now they just have to wait for a new shipment to arrive and they’re all set. This guy wants to jump straight to the front of the line, bypassing the manager approving stage. He may be new to the company but he’s already on my watch list. People like this get a low priority in my book.
