Ronald's ScribblingsPosts
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Advice from a Speaker
I was chatting with a friend about universities and this came to mind.
On the last lesson of my LTB module, my prof invited a guest speaker to speak and share with us about his life. He’s a CFO of an investment company and a good friend of my prof. He shared with us 3 pieces of advice.
The first thing he told us is to never listen to advice that people give you, including his. Listen to yourself. Don’t be obliged to follow what they say as they are not obliged to live your life with the decisions that was made according to their advice. His rational is that you will live your life with the decisions that you’ve made, no one else can or would. If you were to take any advice, take responsibility for the outcome.
His second advice was to know what you want in life. Your so-called purpose. It must be something that you want and not given to you. Once you’ve found it, work tirelessly towards it. He took 10 years to find his. He hoped that we would take less time than he did. “Know what you want and not what others want of you”, he repeated.
Someone in class asked, “how would you know if you’ve found what you want in life?”
He replied saying that you’d have found it when you’re happy all the time, especially at work. To preface that, he told us his philosophy when working for people: when unhappy, just resign. He would wake up every morning and look into the mirror and ask himself a simple question, “am I happy with what I’m doing?” If not, resign straight away. In fact, to drive home his conviction, the first thing he did at any new job was to draft a resignation letter and keep it in the drafts folder. That way, you’ll not be hindered from resigning and be too comfortable and forgo your greater potential.
His third advice was for us all to have a Unique Selling Point (USP). What makes you different from the man on street, or the person sitting next to you. Why should a company hire you instead of the person sitting next to you? It’s something that we all should work on, or think about. Summarise it into 30 seconds.
His final challenge was for us to email him our goals in life and he’d award the best with a free ticket to one of his investment seminars.
He then concluded by saying, “knowing what you want in life is greater than any 1st-class honours you can get”. Knowing what you want is in itself a 1st-class honours in life.
P.S. Randy Murray has something to say about life too.
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The iPad 2
No, I didn’t get the iPad 2, yet. I had to get this on-the-record, as the number of iPad buyers increase. What I’m to say applies to both iPad and iPad 2 models.
Here it is: Between the WiFi and WiFI + 3G models, apart from the obvious lack of 3G in the former model, it also lacks a less publicised feature—GPS. Yes, the WiFi-only model does not come with a GPS chip and relies solely on WiFi triangulation when its connected to a WiFi base-station. However, it can tap into the iPhone’s location system when connected via the Personal Hotspot feature. Even if you do not wish to use the 3G capability nor get a MicroSIM and subscription, the GPS chip works well independently without any network connection.
So, here’s my advice, invest $180 more into your iPad purchase and get the WiFI + 3G model, it is worth more than the $130 upgrade for any additional internal storage. You are unlikely to need so much storage anyway, unless you plan to carry your movie collection around. Then, after awhile of using the iPad, you would most probably, like me, invest in MultiSIM at ~$10/month to get your iPad connected via 3G.
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Reeder
I’ve been using Reeder for both iPhone and iPad for quite sometime and I think it is still the best RSS reader out there, even surpassing Google Reader. These days, I’ve also beta testing Reeder for Mac and have found that it is similarly fantastic.
Although I admit that there are still a few missing features, the basics of what makes Reeder good are all there. A few conventions were copied from the iPad and are slowly refined into the Mac OS X paradigm. As of draft 15, Reeder for Mac looks almost perfect for daily use and is extremely stable for a beta product.
If you read lots of RSS feeds and have a Mac, and would like to get your hands down the rough edges of beta software, do give Reeder for Mac (beta) a whirl here.
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Civilisations V
Finally managed to buy Civ V yesterday at US$29.99 from MacUpdate Promo. It’s a steal given how good the game is and the amount of re-playability it provides. Furthermore, it comes with SteamPlay (allowing PC + Mac play) and it’s really value for money.
Another thing I’m impressed by, albeit late, is that Steam is an awesome game delivery platform. It is even more seamless than Apple iTunes Music or App Store and it has intensive automation. Games that you own are patched automatically without the need for manually clicking through patch-installation screens. Most probably, you would not have noticed that your game was updated.
Given Steam’s streamline game delivery with non-intrusive DRM and fair usage (buy once, play anywhere, but not concurrently), I would expect that prices of games should start falling as physical distribution costs no longer exists.
I would expect the price of digital goods to be significantly lower, not equal, to physical retail products. Otherwise, publishers are clearly ripping customers off. Think about it, would you buy an eBook that is priced the same as a physical paperback book? Or music tracks that are priced higher than compact-discs that you can find in stores? Ever wondered why digital media sales have never taken off, with the exception of Apple managed and operated digital stores, i.e. Music, Movies, Apps Stores.
The reason is clear and simple: consumers do not like being ripped off.
The publishers better learn this simple concept and put it into practice fast or they risk dwindling revenues.
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