Problem is, even if I focused on just anime and manga instead of the entire Japanese hobby culture scene (which would include cosplay, collectibles, etc), I still have literally dozens of possible topics to talk about.

After thinking about it for a day, I went with the topic that I could say that I am really passionate about: the story of how we reversed the fortunes of UP AME; from being a hopeless anime organization into a thriving one. Not only is it a significant part of my life, the topic would also be relevant for most of the audience (I doubt that most of them aren’t inside a club or community of their own).

–

I put a decent amount of effort into this talk, not only because I don’t want to embarrass myself or the org, I also don’t want do look like a hypocrite after bashing the presentations in last year’s Y4IT.

Most of my effort went to the slides. It took me at least 3 days to finish them mainly because of my lack of experience (dammit, I’m a software engineer, not a graphic designer!) and because I had to look for good pictures from various sources. I also had to re-read Presentation Zen since it’s been a long time since I’ve made presentations.

Preparation for the talk itself was difficult, though it’s not as hard as the slides. I’d have to thank Scott Berkun for this part, his Confessions of a Public Speaker as well as his Ignite talk on giving Ignite talks gave me invaluable tips for making my talk.

One thing I learned on my own about Ignite was that Ignite presentations are more like song performances than presentations when you have more than 4 points to make. My talk had 7 different points so the timing is important. It didn’t worry me, though, since I have experience singing in front of a lot of people. I just had to practice enough that my mouth goes auto-pilot when on the stage, ignoring the inevitable effects of stage fright.

My script went through at least a dozen revisions throughout my practice sessions. With at least 3 runs per revision, I’m guessing that it took me 60 partial runs (just a 1-minute section) and about 30 full runs to get the hang of things. As you would see below, even with all this practice, I still had to ad-lib and adapt to the situation.

–

Oh and yeah, Ana Santos of Sex and Sensibilities talked before me. Talking about hardcore geeks after a talk on sex was kinda awkward. D:

–

Script, slides, and side comments below the cut.

Those of you who are into the local Japanese hobby culture scene, possibly the Go guys there, should be familiar with the University of the Philippines Anime Manga Enthusiasts, better known as UP AME. This university org is probably best known

[ "Org peeps holding the legendary tarp" picture from from Szusza's CAL photoshoot album. The source was bad so I had to crop it to look good.

The Go shoutout was added at the last minute to add the impression that at least some people in the audience knows what anime and manga is. Mikong was also a former co-worker, and PGA had a booth AME no Jidai.

The slide transition in mid-sentence was intentional. If I waited for the transition, I would not have enough time in the next slide for pauses. ]

for pulling off events that are on-par (or even better) than anime conventions held by commercial companies.

Let’s go back ten years ago,

[ Pictures from UP AME DeviantArt gallery. I chose to crop or use teasers instead of the posters in cases where they would look better in the grid.

Multiple pauses in this slide. The timing is important because the next slide has a lot of spoken text. ]

when a local TV station turned Japanese cartoons, aka anime, into a fad. A small group of anime and manga fans decided it was a good time to start an org in UP. As expected, a lot of people signed up like myself.

[ Instead of having to add another attribution to copyrighted material, I just cropped Deng from the AME no Jidai poster and used a simple scanline effect.

Forgot to add the TV picture's source to slide 20. Source is http://www.flickr.com/photos/pablo_perez/3256295059/.

As I said, this slide has a lot of spoken text. I need to define "anime" as well as introduce the org's founding. In my practice sessions, the "like myself" often goes to the next slide.

The "people" were just simple ellipses and gradients. And yes, the number of people is not far from the actual membership size.]

After a semester of monthly meetings, it was apparent that there was a problem with the org. People were losing interest and just stopped showing up, founding members included.

[ Again, a pretty accurate rendition of the number of active members at that time. ]

At this point, the org’s days were pretty much numbered. It doesn’t take much to see that this geek community would have gone the same way as other similar geek communities that came before it.

And this brings us back to the topic of my talk:

[ Forgot where I got the clipart for the tombstone. Oh well.

The "back" part is ad-libbed because every talk is preceded by a slide containing the title of the talk. Had there not been a "slide 0", I would've not said the word "back".]

How did we save this dying geek community? What did we do to turn things around?

To start things off, we went beyond meetings and

[ Drought pic, as mentioned in the final slide, came from http://www.flickr.com/photos/georgiesharp/371472003/.

Mid sentence transition is important again here. The next few slides only allow 1-2 seconds as a margin of error. ]

actually started doing things. We had a week long merchandise booth, a lobby exhibit, and we even joined the Lantern Parade complete with our own float. This had a couple of side effects.

[ Robert gave me a bunch of old AME pics from his old stash. I've uploaded a copy of the pics here.

The merchandise booth pic is obviously not from 2001. I got it from Fra's multiply album. I blurred it a bit to make it fit in with the pictures.

After a lot of experimentation, I found out that a seamless mosaic is the best way to create slides out of multiple pictures. The location of the text in this slide as well as the next two slides are also a result of trial and error. ]

First, the longer mingling time allowed people to bond with each other. And when people start to look forward to meet each other on a regular basis, they’re a lot less likely to leave.

The larger activities also acted as a filter:

[ The top two pics come from Robert's stash. The bottom left comes from Fra while the bottom right comes from Mic. ]

it weeded out the slackers while it brought to light the passionate people, those who are willing to contribute their time, skills and talents for the org.

Now, when passionate people bond with each other

[ A combination of one of the first (lantern parade 2001) and the one of the most recent (AME no Jidai) large-scale activities of the org: working on the float, hosting (from Wigi/Triccie), painting haori (from Wil), and painting the org banner. ]

a community’s culture is formed. Culture is important, as a bad culture would eventually destroy an org. Fortunately for us, what we got was this “fun org” culture. The “fun” part’s easy,

[ Four slides, four important points. I have to elaborate what this slide means in the next two slides, though. ]

We’re an anime org. We do fun stuff like talking about stuff that would get us weird looks from most of you guys here. We also do other fun stuff like, say, wear costumes. But part of our culture is that

[ Upper row: post-2001 lantern parade, pre-Gakuensai (from Krinkle), X-mas party 2007 (from Tiff), 8th Avenue (from Klaine).

Bottom left is from the post-Gakuensai photoshoot (from Krinkle), middle right is a tambayan pic (from Szusza), and bottom right is from 8th Avenue (from me).

The "most of you guys here" is ad-libbed. Had there been more obvious geeks in the audience, that should have been "most people" instead.

It was only after I submitted these slides that I realized that there are more presidents here than in the next slide. Oh the irony. ]

we know when to draw the line and focus on the important org matters like planning for future events, managing finances, marketing, publicity, and so on. Not so obvious from an anime org, huh?

[ Except for the first picture which is from the 2009 applicants orientation (from Krinkle), all of these pics come from the EALM 2 years ago (from Krinkle again, here, here, and here).

The "Not so obvious from an anime org, huh?" was ad-libbed. I sort of panicked when I realized that I was going too fast, around 4 seconds early. ]

And now we have this list. As you can see, there’s still one important thing missing. Those of you in communities should be able to figure this out. Any guesses?

[ The summary + rest slide. The pause at the end allows me 3-4 seconds of rest while the missing entry provides a small amount of unexpectedness to keep the tension/attention up.

Red and probably Frank guessed "Sex!" prompting me to answer "No, not sex!". XD ]

Applicants. Remember, we’re college students, and regardless of what you’ve heard about UP, most of us actually graduate on time. Thus the need for a constant supply of new members.

[ Pic from 8th batch buddy bidding (from Krinkle).

The UP thing was one of the last things I added to the official script. Just a deadpan comedy attempt to loosen up the audience. ]

Recruitment isn’t that simple. though. We have to have a balance here too. We don’t want to scare away potential passionate members, just like these guys who are just fine with our unusual culture…

[ One Piece cosplay pic from buddy dress up (from Fra) ]

but we don’t want the really passionate people, those who could damage the org with their antics. Probably like these guys.

[ Pic from the interwebs.

I really screwed up in this slide. I don't remember how much of the script I followed here. ]

And here we have this list. Follow these and your community will last for a while.

Before I end this talk, I’d like to share one last thing, what you might call the “secret sauce” behind UP AME’s successes.

[ Summary list. The "but wait there's more" turned out to be a good idea as it's hard for the audience to know if you're at the 5 minute mark or the 4 minute mark. This allowed me to keep the attention up for a minute longer. ]

As an org, we know that the best way to grow would be to take risks, to push ourselves beyond our limits.

A good example would be Una kAME!, the first collegiate anime fair in the Philippines. At that time

[ Pic from AME no Jidai (from Wigi/Triccie).

Not-so-obscure anime reference here. ]

we had no money, no experience, and our venue wasn’t that good. But in the end it was still a resounding success, raising the bar for other anime conventions and was a significant stepping stone for our org.

[ Pics from UP AME's photobucket account. Since the pics are all low-res, a mosaic with pictures of different sizes won't work here. I had to make a collage that looks decent.

The "raising the bar for other anime conventions" was partially ad-libbed. During my practice sessions, saying only "success" and "stepping stone" was the reliable approach. Luckily, I was going too fast so I was able to fit that part in. ]

So whether you’re currently in a geek community or just planning to start one of your own, I hope this talk gave you a couple of ideas to think about.

Thank you for listening, and good night.

[ As Scott Berkun explained in his talk, the first and last slides are usually wasted, hence the "thank you" slide. ]

Related posts:

1. First Ignite Manila!
2. Y4iT 2009 day 2
3. Y4iT 2009 day 3

Two months ago, I was invited by Red, a former co-worker, to talk in the first Ignite Manila event. I’m not really busy at the moment so I accepted the offer.

I’m not in the mood to post a long-winded report on the event so here are some highlights:

• The event was great! There was a good mix of topics and the audience was really into it. The only downside I think would be the lack of stereotypical geeks in the crowd (most of the people there were “closet geeks” ).
• The best talks for the night are ironically the least likely to be featured in the global O’Reilly Ignite site: Norman Wilwayco’s “rebellious” talk (that’s an understatement, pero digs!) and Khavn dela Cruz’s 5 minute presentation/performance on his potentially controversial Day Old Flicks.
• Probably the most well-balanced talk would be from Carlos Celdran. The topic was socially relevant, the slides were simple and were there to enhance the talk, and he was presenting to the audience and not talking to the wall.
• As for my talk, I’ll leave that to the next post.

Congratulations to the team behind Ignite Manila for this successful event! I’ll be looking forward to the next Ignite Manila!

Related posts:

1. My Ignite Manila Talk

Was Manny Villar really ever poor? – Spoiler: No.

Noynoy Supporters are Proof that The Philippines is a Wowowee Idiocracy – one of the few things I hate about having a home office is that other people in the house watch Wowowee instead of doing less inane things like, say, read shounen manga (which are pretty inane when you don’t read them with tongue firmly in cheek). This blog post sums up why I hate the said show.

Related posts:

1. Friday Randomness
2. Friday Randomness
3. Friday Randomness

I’ve been wanting to write a proper post on “crab mentality” ever since I noticed that my post on Ako Mismo unexpectedly got into the first few pages of Google’s search results, but I didn’t feel like writing about something so trivial.

Unfortunately, some idiot tried to use that term as a rebuttal in a Facebook hate group that I passed by earlier today and it looks like it’s a good time to share my thoughts about that Filipino derogatory term.

As I see it, there are two uses for the term “crab mentality”:

As a catch-all rebuttal

You’re just saying that because you’re insecure.
You’re sour grape-ing; just because you don’t have xxxx, you’re attacking it.
Why do you keep on criticizing xxxx? That’s crab mentality!

If you’ve taken high school English or college Philosophy, you know that these are fallacies, not arguments. However, even while knowing this, people will keep on flinging fallacies at each other whenever there is a point to be argued.

To understand why people degenerate to using “What you’re doing is crab mentality!” and other fallacious statements in arguments, we must step back and understand how humans think and how they respond to certain situations. You don’t need to be a psychologist to find the answers to this problem; there’s a book you could find cheap in second-hand bookstores that explains it well.

Yep, How to Win Friends & Influence People, a book so well known that its cliche/parody status has prevented people from actually picking up the book and reading it.

Anyway, one of the chapters in the book neatly explains why flame wars tend to end up ugly in the long run. The title of the chapter?

You Can’t Win an Argument

Here’s Dale Carnegie’s explanation:

You can’t win an argument. You can’t because if you lose it, you lose it; and if you win it, you lose it. Why? Well, suppose you triumph over the other man and shoot his argument full of holes and prove that he is non compos mentis. Then what? You will feel fine. But what about him? You have hurt his pride. He will resent your triumph. And—

A man convinced against his will
Is of the same opinion still

When people see their beliefs being attacked by other people, or even when people just feel that their beliefs are threatened, human nature will make them leap to the defense of that belief. At first, arguments may be logical, but there will come a point in a debate where the fact that humans are not logical animals will come up. At this point, logic will be thrown out of the window and fallacies will start to show up.

The end result is always the same: neither side will concede, and both sides will consider themselves the victor.

This is the reason why when I see people accusing other people of crab mentality in a flame war, I stop watching or participating in it. It just isn’t worth it. Heck, my years of trolling arguing with people with strong beliefs have taught me to stop way before that point, usually when I notice that someone has said something subtly contradictory (i.e. stupid).

In short, this use of “crab mentality” is improper because it’s no different from other catch-all rebuttals. The only proper use of the term is:

As a term to describe a certain human behavior

Pulling other people down instead of working together.

When you think about it, it’s not exactly a Filipino-only behavior. I mean, the Seven Deadly Sins has “envy” and ancient history is full of usurpers. I even quoted Machiavelli once about something that could be classified as crab mentality.

It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new.

- Niccolò Machiavelli, “The Prince”

In other words, it’s a substitute term for a concept, just like using “cosplay” for wearing a costume regardless if it’s Halloween or not; and “color of the bike shed / pissing match” for trivial debates. I guess the term stuck because Filipinos are so deep into learned helplessness that they’d rather blame circumstance that shut up and do something about things.

The term, while depressing in the Filipino context, is actually pretty decent as a substitute term. It’s a bit ambiguous and not that popular outside the country, but terms like these tend to be like that.

The problem with “crab mentality” as a term is its use in arguments. The most obvious problem is that it’s a fallacy when used as an argument. The other not-so-obvious problem is that you can’t use it in an argument because there’s no way you can differentiate “having crab mentality” with “playing devil’s advocate” (which can be malicious or not). You don’t know whether that person is pulling you down or pulling you out of the fire.

That said, there’s no reason why “crab mentality” should show up in a serious debate.

IMHO, the correct response to it would be to raise an eyebrow and suppress a chuckle. If the one saying it doesn’t realize how stupid his approach is, it’s a hopeless case.

Related posts:

1. “Crab Mentality” and Internet Drama

Related posts:

1. About Page Updated
2. Missing Books in Personal MBA?
3. Quick Review of the Best SE Books

It’s a 64GB solid-state drive for only PhP 5,800.

Now you might ask, “Why should I fork over 5.8k for a CD-R King branded drive with a measly 64GB of space when I could buy a 1TB WD Caviar Black for less?”

Well, there’s a couple of reasons why this can be a good deal.

First is the price. 64GB SSDs run from 8K – 15k in the gray market. Putting it in this context, shelling out 5.8K to experiment with SSDs doesn’t sound that crazy anymore.

Another reason is that it’s a rebranded OCZ Core SSD. (Actually it’s a double-rebranded drive; the OCZ Core was rebranded by Verico to Verico SSD-01-64 Phantom then rebranded to CD-R King.) This means that it’s not a no-name product.

–

As for my reason for going out and buying a couple of these babies to replace my primary hard drive, it’s all about the speed benefit. My rig’s pretty well rounded even for a 3 year old one: Quad Core, ATI HD4850, 4GB low latency RAM. The only bottleneck for performance is the hard drive; even at RAID-0, it still takes about a minute to load all programs at startup. With SSDs, I thought I could at least halve that time.

And so I went out and went through about a dozen CD-R King branches before finding 2 final stocks of the drive at SM Cubao. They came in these little yellow boxes that disguised their value.

Almost all of the clerks couldn’t believe that someone is willing to spend (tumataginting na) 11.6K for such small items. There was one jaded clerk who confirmed that the price wasn’t a typo.. I guess she’s the one who got to sell the other stocks.

The first thing I did with the drives was to update the firmware via USB. This was an early version of OCZs SSDs so it still had some issues. Thanks to this TipidPC thread and a bit of searching, I was able to find a firmware update for the drives. I’ve uploaded a copy here (ver 090508S) in case some of you might need it.

Next was to reinstall Windows 7 RC1. I used Windows Easy Transfer to backup my settings then proceeded to re-shuffle my RAID setup. I set my old RAID-0 drive to RAID-1 (for another layer of backup) and set the two SSDs to RAID-0.

I also did some suggested tweaks to the settings, but I don’t feel like looking them up right now so I’ll leave the Google-ing to you.

Here’s the end result:

Compare this with a typical Western Digital 10K RPM Raptor hard drive benchmark result:

258.9 MB/sec vs 72.8 MB/sec and 0.2 ms access time vs 8.8 ms: what do these numbers mean?

It means that in less than 5 seconds after logging in, all of my startup items have already finished loading. After enduring years of 30 second – 1 minute post-login load times (and years of 2-3 minute load times in my office PCs back when I was still working) this was practically instantaneous. For the first time in years, my PC finishes starting up even before I could finish changing my clothes!

–

Conclusion: The drives are a good buy so far.

Still, I would only suggest this drive to computer enthusiasts. Finding one can be a hassle (though you could try contacting CD-R King’s sales directly) and the risk involved is only suited for those people.

To end this post, here’s a pic of my ghetto “drive stand”. There was a cable conflict so I couldn’t put them in the floppy drive bay of my case.

Related posts:

1. Notable CD-R King Items
2. Using CD-R King’s Cheap Modem/Router
3. Gaming PC Builder Challenge, pt 2

Figure out the reasons behind your eating habits.

I’m sure many of you have resolved to “correct” their diets this year, either by cutting down on some types of food or by eating more of “healthy” food. Unfortunately, unless you have an unusually high degree of discipline, you’ll find out that these diet resolutions are impossible to follow.

The key point here is that one’s eating habits, like talents, are rooted to our past. Our experiences in our childhood subconsciously affects what and how we eat. Unless we learn the reasons behind our eating habits, we’ll eventually revert back to them a few weeks or months into a new diet plan.

For example, I was born into a poor family so I had been trained from a young age not to waste any food on the dinner table. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), our family became less and less poor as the years went by and the food on the dinner table also increased. My problem of eating more than I need became worse when I started working because of the free dinners and Frappuccinos the company gave us whenever we went on OTs.

After some thinking, I figured out a simple way of dealing with this problem: avoid free food. Having little free food means I don’t gorge a lot. When I did my fitness regimen four years ago, I didn’t eat at home except on Sundays. I also limited myself to salt crackers when passing by the company pantry (which is stocked with free snacks). Limiting myself to paid food also allowed me to limit the portions of food that I eat every meal, as opposed to the virtual all-you-can-eat meals at the dinner table.

Another aspect of my poor past allowed me to pull this off with relative ease: I can get sated regardless of how little I eat as long as I clean up my plate. It’s psychological, yes, but if I didn’t have this, I probably would have had to use other tricks to make me feel full easier on every meal.

So before you decide to change your eating habits, take time to look back and see what are the things that influenced how you eat today. You might be surprised that some of your worst eating habits could easily be turned off (e.g. you eat ice cream often because as a kid you thought it was the greatest thing ever, but nowadays it’s just meh) and that you could steer yourself to a healthier lifestyle with just a few changes (like my example above).

Related posts:

1. Fitness and Faulty Advertising
2. Kicking HFCS
3. A Mantra for Modern Developers

Learn a new language to complement your programming skills.

It would be a typical New Year’s resolution for developers to learn a new programming language this year. But seriously, what’s the point of learning C# when you’re a Java developer (or vice versa)?

What you should be striving for are programming languages that are orthogonal to your current skill set. If you’re an enterprise developer used to statically typed OO programming languages, try dynamic languages like Python and Ruby. If you’re already using dynamic languages, try your hands on functional programming like Erlang and Scala. Same goes for platforms: web developers might want try programming in RIAs.

The point here isn’t to add bullet points to your resume, but to have different ways of looking at problems, like adding new tools to a toolbox. For example, had I not been aware of the basics of functional programming, I might have tried to force traditional Java-like synchronization techniques in my Google Wave gadgets instead of the more elegant FP approach.

—

Just a short plugging:

Rapid Development’s Classic Mistakes (in software development) was a real eye-opener for me when I read it four years ago. Even though it was written almost a decade ago, a lot of the mistakes listed there were still present in my company.

To keep the list up to date, Construx (Steve McConnell’s company) is now holding the Classic Mistakes survey for 2010. Help update the study by taking the survey here.

Related posts:

1. Polyglot Programming
2. On Software Engineering
3. C.A.R. Hoare on Computer Science and Software Engineering

Forget the “Golden Rule”.

Everyone has different motivations in the workplace. Some are there for the money. Some are there for the titles and recognition. Some are there for the sense of achievement that comes with closing a deal or finishing a project. Some are there for the learning experience to prepare them for their next job.

It is a common mistake when dealing with co-workers to think that what motivates them is the same as what motivates us. You can’t bait fish with cake, nor can you entice people with worms.

So the next time you need to ask something from your subordinates, or the next time you need to convince your boss to do something, put things in that person’s perspective instead of your own. If you can’t, make an effort to find out more about those persons in order to make it putting yourselves in their shoes easier.

Related posts:

1. The Knowledge Worker
2. Business Management and SE
3. Things To Do This New Year: Hardware

Organize your hard drive with the help of a disk space analyzer.

Longtime Windows users should already be familiar with this app. WinDirStat (Windows Directory Statistics) provides a treemap view of your hard drives, making it easier to find out which files or folders are taking too much space.

This is a Windows-only utility, but alternatives are available for other OSs. JDiskReport runs on any computer that runs Java. Mac users can also use Disk Inventory X, while Unix/Linux users should be comfortable with just using du.

Related posts:

1. Things To Do This New Year: Management
2. Things To Do This New Year: Software Engineering
3. Things To Do This New Year: Personal Finance