Friday, March 21, 2014

Some Free Management Session for You

So this week was the beginning of my new term, which means I have to start socializing with people for real again. It's not that bad though, since they are a lot more accepting than most 'friends' I had back on my bachelor degree even though they were more or less on the same age as mine. And not to mention no one's going to steal my girlfriend this time, especially when she doesn't really exist.

Anyway the first day of the term, which was last Tuesday, started with a subject called 'Innovation and Enterpreneurship', a topic that sounds really interesting and useful for real life at the same time, because I like the idea about innovations and would love to know how someone can be an effective enterpreneur.

However the excitement got killed pretty soon because after about half an hour of paying attention, the facilitator started babbling random stuffs, and at one point he laughed out loud at his own story and every single one of us just stared at him; some forced a weak smile.

At least his bad joke and magic trick got us excited

The second day, which was yesterday, got us to a subject called 'Thought Leadership', a topic that sounds like it was about how Professor Xavier started the mutant academy and train the X-Men, which would be so damn awesome if that's what it was.

Turns out it was about the concept of when a leader has become recognized by their ability within a specialized field and their expertise would be the one to be sought for whenever the said field comes to attention. It's like you will most likely go for a really good attorney whose ability is so well known that you would have no trouble trusting that person.

Being a beautiful Russian is also a plus side

But I do learn several things from those two classes, even though I had a bad start. The first is the spirit of enterpreneur, the things that separates normal people and so-called businessmen to real enterpreneur. One of which is to see a problem with clear mind, make do with whatever you have and try to make something out of it.

Basically, it's a concept of creativity, effectiveness, and innovation thrown together, which is why people with enterpreneur spirits manages to survive a lot better than those who are simply doing things just to reach profits. Which would also explains why there are people who failed enchanting their +8 weapons to the point that it finally broke after spending thousands of gold, yet still able to survive and regained their money back even more than before.

"You're getting there, don't give up!"

The second is the concept of "Good leaders will hire people smarter than they are", this is something quite controversial for a lot of companies, especially in state owned companies. This is actually a good concept because smart people gets the job done a lot faster, and sometimes they would be able to handle the ones that even the leader can't do by himself. Especially due to the fact that being a leader of an organization/company doesn't mean that you should be able to handle everything by yourself, it's easier to just leave some problems to the ones who understand them better.

The problem is that the people who would hire new employees sometimes think that if the person they're hiring is smarter than they are, there is a possibility that they would jeopardize their position within the company, so they decided to go for the ones that are easier to be controlled and pressure their ambition to rise to the top.

Shit, this might be the main reason why I can't get a job.

Monday, March 17, 2014

A Journey to the Temple of Idols


There was a Toys & Comics Fair at Jakarta at 15 & 16 March, so I went there. Mostly because I've never been to one before, and not because I wanted to see if I could find a cheap discounted original PVC figures because I knew I 'd still won't be able to buy one on the spot anyway. That's why I came with no intention to buy anything at all

It was really crowded, although is nowhere as cramped as some other annual event that I know of. However the main attraction (the toys) were all over the place, and it was a beautiful sight to behold. I'm not going to put up the whole album of pictures I have taken in this post because, aside from not being appropriate, I don't want to break the hearts of people who wanted to come but couldn't by showing them the best parts.

There's more where that came from by the way

Aside from the toys aisles, there were also open for public games, new comics presentations, cosplay attractions, and many others that are mostly exciting to see. I even took part in one Need for Speed: Rivals tournament (as part of the promotion for the new Need for Speed movie) because it's free, and I get a chance to finally try a PS4 for the first time in my life, not to mention the winning prizes were good for souvenirs.

Although my inevitable defeat was nowhere as bad as the movie

With all the fun aside and the inevitable leg cramps after I get back home, there are some interesting thoughts that I would like to share. The first thing is that despite the name "Toys & Comics", almost all of the people I see there were around 19-35 years old. There were some kids and the older adults that comes with them, who mostly lurk around the '80% discount' isle where the toys for kids were, but they were the minority.

It's only a matter of time before these things are rated M for 'Mature'

Even after all these years, the concept of "only kids play toys" or "it's embarassing for adults to still play toys" is still the "common sense" for most people, especially the elderlies. But all turns of events show that toys and comics are something for everyone, so much that quite a lot of them are produced exclusively for adults and not for kids.

Did you think I meant something else? Too bad! I was talking about these idols of worshipping

And there's the community as well, all of the toy enthusiasts I saw there were very friendly with one another, even though their tastes were completely different. Seeing Transformers fans sharing their thoughts with Gundam fans accompanied by moe nendoroid fans is quite an amazing thing, although maybe I've seen too many joke posts about how western and eastern factions don't get along with each other.

The point is that no matter what their taste was, they are still toy enthusiasts, and that's a good enough reason for them to believe that they share the 'same interest' and be friendly with each other despite being strangers before that day. This could be something that future leaders of the upcoming election could learn about instead of trying to gain sympathies from the people for each of themselves by any means necessary.

Friday, March 14, 2014

Suddenly Serious Post

Today is one of the rare cases that I didn't fell into a deep slumber during the Jumu'ah (Friday prayer) khutbah (preaching) like the majority of other people, mostly because there are kids sitting next to me that were playing whatever kids these days do and kept talking through the rest of the khutbah.

I did fell asleep, but not to the extent I completely forgot where I was and what I was doing. However, I do notice that I have been developing the ability of still paying attention while taking a light nap, although the required condition is that I shouldn't be too tired to begin with.

Not as good as this girl, but it's a start

That being said, I managed to catch some of the contents, which is the importance of having a muslim leader. Now this is something that I still have a problem to accept, even though it is true that having a leader with the same belief as you do will make tolerance and harmony within the group/organization easier, the fact remains that A LOT of muslim people took that concept literally and with no further comprehension, just like most of other concepts out there.

The khutbah gave an example about a town led by a christian because no muslim dared to step up and be the leader (this is most likely just a story). The non-muslim leader was unable to hold proper funeral rites when a citizen died because he has no clue of how to do it in islamic way, especially since he don't know how to read arabic. However, since he's dedicated to his job he managed to do so with whatever resources and options he has access to.

The morale of the story was supposed to be that "we should be ashamed if a non-muslim can pull it off while other muslims can only sit back and watch him do leadership stuffs while eating popcorn and listening to religious speeches", but many would also translate the story to "a muslim should stand up and be a leader, doesn't matter if he's the worst candidate there is, as long as he's a muslim". This is a serious mistranslation because we already know how bad it would be if a country or an organization is led by a 'muslim' with the worst method of leadership point of view.

"Hi"

And this is an opinion of mine that might get me flamed by islamic extremists; I think the current Pope is a lot more muslim than the we do. Many of the things he did for the people, save the religious practices, are the things that were actually taught by Islamic teachings. You know, like being nice to people whatever their background and religion is, being humble and not a hedonist, accepting the fact that people are different with each other and we should live together in harmony and not judging them simply because of who and what they are, remember all that?

I'm not exactly a proper muslim myself, far from it, really. But at least I know what should be expected from someone who is supposed to be an example for the rest of us despite whatever belief he has. The point is having the proper quality to be a leader is a lot more important compared to the religious 'requirements' for it. If the leader is doing a good job, then support them and help them keep up the good work. If the leader sucks at their job, then they should be replaced by whomever that are more qualified to do so.

Unless, of course, the other candidates are also full of crap

That being said, I believe that every religion's teaching is supposed to make people be good to themselves and those around them as well. And, yes, even though my belief in religion is around the grey area (which mostly involved eroticism ideals), there are rules that I do follow. As a human being, we'd love to live in a world where all people can share the world together despite whatever beliefs they have, because it is something that we can all look forward to.

Your religion is yours, and mine is mine, but when we are interacting please put whatever concept we have aside and let's treat each other like a normal person would wanted to be treated like.

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

You're so Noisy

So I have this headphone with microphone attached to it, a Philips VoIP, or so it claims to be because everything about it doesn't feel like a Philips product at all. It works fine at first, however the volume control on the cable turned out to be a pain in the ass later on, a simple nudge on it or too much adjustment will crush the audio like the ones you get when you tune in your radio and haven't reached any channel yet.

Might want to ask your parents why we need to play with that round thing

The worse part? It was so damn expensive I wiped out my savings to buy any future anime figurines that I might have interest in (only the savings in my wallet though). The worst part? I can get similar headset for half that price which looks a lot more comfortable to wear, and with good rating testimonials too, and it's available for online delivery purchase.

I reckon I should just suck it up and take it like a man, because what else can I do? It's already pass the 2 weeks warranty and I don't believe this is a genuine product so I can't bring it to any Philips outlet to complain about it. That's what I get for getting so worked up and not thinking clearly because I accidentally broke my phone's bluetooth earphone and not checking online stores first.

Which is also the base explanation to these abnormalities

Anyway, it's still working so far despite its frequent annoyance, thankfully. And the mic is solid enough to be used for recording and voice chats, although there was no software that comes with it which means the option settings for the mic is very limited to standard plug-and-play settings.

However, there is another problem. Ever since I decided to clean up my PC around the beginning of the month, I started to get static noise whenever I do recording. I was afraid that I accidentally nudged a component and caused this, or the mic somehow got messed up. Because of that I decided to reduce the microphone transmit volume to dampen the noise a bit, but this only cause my already low-pitched voice became very hard to hear. It's still fine for voice chats though, because I can adjust it within the chat program.

And yesterday after searching for possible causes and solutions, from unplugging the front mic connection to the motherboard up to making deals with Satan, and I still can't find one that works. Curious with the effect of the fan sound I tried to press the casing to try dampening it... and suddenly the noise disappeared right then.

If it was a Pokémon battle, I might have hit myself so hard

Thinking that it was caused by vibrating casing, I tried to place objects to press the casing, but it was to no avail. It turns out that merely touching the casing solved the problem, which might indicate that my pc wanted more skinships than I thought it would. A friend of mine suggested that it might be caused by improper grounding and I should try grounding my PC, but he's not sure himself and I have no idea how to do it anyway.

Even until now I don't know what happened and what triggered it, but for now the only solution I have is to touch the casing with any part of my foot whenever I want to do to recording. Hopefully this won't turn my PC into a weird foot fetishist because that would be problematic in the future.

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

More Than Meets the Eye

This will be more of a story than a rant, especially since it has a happy ending. No, it's not about Transformers. Anyway, here goes.

We had Talent Management course as the last subject of the second semester of the General Management Magister program. And we had the final exam last Thursday in a form of group presentation, the topic was to discuss a case within a company, the catch is that both the case and the company has to be real, the solution must also be reasonable enough to be actually implemented. So you can't go ahead and make a drug cartel company, sadly.

And here's the problem, my group consists of a super busy workaholic who actually (claimed to) love her job, another super busy and dedicated ladies man whom I strongly suspect is being manipulated by his company to be a constant overtime slave, a this-shit-has-nothing-to-do-with-my-life-so-I-won't-even-bother guy, and a lazy introverted jackass (me). I think you know where this is going.

Hint: not Narnia

We decided to pick a case that comes from a company owned by my uncle, which is good for us because aside from the fact I know the owner and the HR manager, I can easily find any data that we would need. However there was never a concrete discussion on how we should approach the case, nor how to analyze and provide solutions. The only thing I knew was what data should I gather to cover the basics, and yet when I delivered those data not a single soul made at least a commentary out of them, everyone just maintained silence like they have been ordered by some mafia or something

After several emails which were participated by me and me alone, we (minus that other guy who still ignored everything) finally made a proper discussion... and it was on the day of the final exam (our class is in nightime, which explains the frequent encounters with Batman). So in the end we were able to make the presentation powerpoint, 20 minutes before the class started, and with barely no time to practice anything because, well, there was nothing to practice with before. It's like we finally got our lightsaber but have no goddamn clue on how to use it.

We all know how dangerous it is

We were already discouraged by how the other groups seemed to have discussed their case thoroughly, and not to mention their presentation were a lot more detailed and flashy compared to ours. And the facilitator only added the salt to the wound by destroying the first groups with questions, so much that I really wanted to go home so badly right then.

And then it was our turn, we stuttered a lot during presentation (no practice, remember) and the guy who didn't get himself involved completely missed the point of his part. I was already panicking. Finally the questions came up.... and the facilitator kindly pointed out the answers that were already within our presentation powerpoints. And to top it all off, he praised us for "simple yet effective presentation" and told the rest of the class that they "should follow our example".

I just lost it right after that, my face burned red, I was snickering so much to the point of near all-out laughter. We were hoping to gain points during the presentation itself by improvising stuffs along the way because the presentation slides was so plain, yet those slides were actually our strong points.

He might be infatuated by kemonomimi Verniy, which totally makes sense

After the 4th group done their job (we were the 3rd) the exam was finally over, 2 hours later than it should've had, and everyone finally breathe a sigh of relief. Granted, that was the most challenging exam we ever had compared to the ones we used to do which were written tests, because we needed to improve on the fly. And of course the Group Final Project for our graduation later will be a lot harder, so it was actually a very nice method of practice before that.

Sadly that day also mark the last day of one of our buddies, he will be attending in another college next semester (which earned him a lot of teasing from everyone). He's a good man who have the inner talent to make jokes out of nowhere and make people laugh, although sometimes he use that talent to get out of serious discussions. Hopefully he'll be happy and make a lot of friends over there too, and not regretting his decision.

Well, that's pretty much it. So the morale of the story are as follows:
- Never give up even though the situation looks hopeless
- Sometimes you need to take one for the team
- Don't be an ignorant member, there is an 'i' in a 'team' which is right there in the A-hole
- The content always worth a lot more than the accessories
- Hibiki/Verniy is so cute

Sunday, March 9, 2014

I Don't Always Make a Newsflash Content...


I'm not a good reporter, but this event is pretty big so I'm going to give it a try.


Long story short, a Boeing 777 class airplane flight MH370 that departed from Malaysia to China suddenly disappeared midflight, and no one has any idea what happened, let alone how. There are possibilities of crashing or even terrorism due to the fact that there are 2 passengers that are believed to be travelling with stolen passports.

It's been all over the news sites/channels, so if any of you don't know that this happened, I feel sorry for you.

Unless you're a cat, which is okay, I guess

Even now there has been no confirmed sightings of the plane's whereabouts, whether it crashed somewhere or sunk down the oceans. There have been reports of debris and oil slicks sightings, but it's still not confirmed yet if they belong to the plane or not.

Somewhere around here, probably

The thing is, one of the passengers was actually a junior of mine back in my bachelor degree days. And even though I don't know the guy, and most likely vice versa, it's still something that would get my attention.

I can only pray for the best out of the worst possible outcomes and hope that there are at least some survivors, or that they manage to locate the black box so that we can finally figure out what the hell happened.

My deepest condolences to the families of those onboard.

Saturday, March 8, 2014

And Who Might You Be?

After a very long hiatus, I believe a brief reintroduction is necessary.

My name is Isaac Pendragon - which is just a pen name if it isn't obvious already, and I am currently on my way to 28 years old now. I am an Indonesian, which pretty much gives me an excuse if I'm typing things in foreign language wrong, let alone speaking it.

Also an excuse to laze around before deadlines

Speaking of speaking (?), I'm not someone who can talk to people easily unless I have to because I am naturally a shy person. However that does not mean I don't want people to start the conversation, I don't mind the company, but don't force it.

I love video games, a lot. Although I almost always burn my productive hours because of it, which brings me to the solution to be creative and actually make a footage of me playing, especially since I know there are people out there who loves watching other people play games as much as playing games by themselves.

Oh, and I'm also a bachelor graduate of Electrical Engineering and currently attending a post-2nd semester Magister course on General Management.

And since I don't want to turn this to be some kind of a godforsaken CV, I'll stop there.

If it was for a real interview, your face will look even more confused than these people

Introductions aside, the main purpose of this blog is pretty simple: To encourage me writing things again (world domination and infinite money comes after that). I love it when I'm writing any kinds of stuff aside from assignments, because it makes me feel.... free. I can just pour every single thing I have in my mind right now on this sentence and I can go on and on and boobies and on if I wanted to.

The main problem is the motivation to actually start doing it is very hard to come by, there's always something that either distract me or gives me an excuse to not doing it in the end. And when I think about it later on, I feel really guilty, because this might be the one thing that I'd love to end up doing the most later on.

And if some of you feel like I'm writing with a method that you can find in joke articles, the answer is yes. I am actually inspired by them because I really like how they manage to keep the content interesting and enjoyable at the same time. That, and indirect motivations from certain friends of mine, is why I managed to spank my own butt and get my shit together, and finally start writing again.

Again, hopefully I will be able to keep being productive for years to come.

Thursday, March 6, 2014

Rebirth

Hello everyone, this is your favorite unknown writer Isaac Pendragon and I am BACK from a long hiatus of not writing stuffs.

It's been almost 2 years since my last post on the previous blog. So I thought of starting fresh this time. Hopefully there will be no interference to the passion of updating this journal of whatever-the-hell-I-want so I can at least share things with everyone of you who have different interest from one another.

This is merely an opening of a new journey, so I'll just keep it brief. See you soon.