Dissertating 16

For a moment there, things were looking up. My adviser gave me the greenlight to proceed with the defense of my proposal, one of my readers gave me encouraging (if not enthusiastic) feedback, and a presentation was sheduled for mid-November. All that remained was to get feedback from the other reader, to whom I'd already sent a draft. Not a big deal, given the circumstances, and thus ever so briefly it appeared that I'd be able to make some significant progress after months of work.

How wrong I was.

Let's just say that the feedback I was waiting for was anything but positive. I can't even say it came from left field, because somewhere in that conversation I was told, in so many words, that I shouldn't even bother pursuing the topic. To paraphrase, to do so would be a very bad idea for me, for the gaduate program, and even academically.

I'd rather not relive the episode. Suffice it to say that after trying to remedy the situation (clearly, both I and the other members of my dissertation committee disagree), it was decided that the prudent thing to do would be to postpone the proposal defense. Meanwhile, it appears that the reader in question will opt not to continue on in my committee, while another faculty member has agreed to take that place. Hopefully, things are back on track now for a rescheduled defense in the spring.

Frustrating? Sure. In fact, there was a stretch back there where I was unable to write coherently about any of this because I was so upset. To think: this was only for the proposal; how much worse can it get for the defense of the dissertation itself?

But it's time to move on. This much I will say, though: I'm glad that those who signed off on my proposal understand what it is I'm trying to do, why I want to do so and ultimately see where I'm coming from. At the end of the day, those two votes of confidence mean more to me than those negative remarks should trouble me.

In the meantime, my work continues.

Hermosa Ecozone [Presentation Thursdays]

Here's a presentation I made for the Hermosa Ecozone Development Corporation:

View this and other presentations by brianbelen on Slideshare.

In designing this one, there were a couple of things I wanted to try out aesthetically. First, I thought it would be nice to use a color palette not too far removed from the colors already on the company logo; hence the heavy use of the green and white combination. Second, since the idea was to get potential investors and/or locators interested in the project, it made sense to emphasize location, thus giving me an opportunity to use a fair bit of Google Earth screenshots as part of the presentation.

Of the presentations I've had to put together recently, this was challenging because of my desire to keep things simple and the need to craft the slides in such a way that they could be used as leave behind materials (per requirement). In the end, however, I think the final product struck a decent enough compromise with the text-heavy slides balanced out with more visual ones. In terms of flow, the presentation was designed such that the "watermark" background images on the text slides fully reveal themselves in the subsequent slide (which is more effective when viewed as a slideshow and not as printed material).

Personally, it was interesting to see how this presentation evolved since the first draft was developed in July '09. Specifically, with each iteration the key points to focus on became more refined. To cite an example, the seventh and eighth slides, which show relevant landmarks and the site's accessibility via major airports, were late additions to the presentation that brought together the message of the Ecozone's locational advantage in a more concrete way.

(And yes, the compass on the seventh slide is from my iPhone. It was the simplest way I could think of to get a nice-looking compass on the slide.)

A couple of notes for future reference: Best to avoid using white text reversed on any background. While the presentation displays well enough onscreen or in print, the white on green text can be hard to read. If I have the time, I'd like to try out keeping the underlying slides white with faded background images (maybe even in grayscale) or reversing the palette such that the slide is green and the strips are white. Finally, when using maps or location plans, it's absolutely necessary to show both orientation and scale. I wasn't sensitive about this at first but now know better, if the questions that have come up regarding the presentation in the past are anything to go by.

[About Presentation Thursdays: Every now and then, on a Thursday, I post a presentation from my archives and include some accompanying commentary not just about the content but also my thoughts on designing it. The presentations can also be viewed and downloaded from my Slideshare page]

Hello, Neighbor!

From the Tycoon Center at Pearl Drive in Ortigas. Been meaning to take this picture for a while now.

You just can't make this stuff up. Or maybe you can: if the branch manager(s) of one (or both) of these franchises thought this up, that's quite a sense of humor right there.

Brevity

Something I came across in a book I was reading:

• Pythagorean Theorem: 24 words
  
• The Lord's Prayer: 66 words
  
• Archimedes' Principle: 67 words
  
• The Ten Commandments: 179 words
  
• The Gettysburg Address: 286 words
  
• The Declaration of Independence: 1,300 words
  
• The US government regulations on the sale of cabbage: 26,911 words

Now, I won't bother citing the aforementioned book since its author was upfront about the fact that this little gem has probably been making the rounds on the internet for some time, not mention may very well be printed on any variety of t-shirts by now.

Which is true! I haven't found any such t-shirt and I apparently missed the email (because I do live under a rock), but it turns out that this "cabbage memo" does have quite a bit of history.

Anyway, it got me thinking: wouldn't it be neat if legislators around the world could devise laws befitting the age of the tweet? Sure, it'll be nigh impossible to craft a bill around 140 characters (for most laws, the title alone can run for much longer), but it would be cool if legal eagles were to draft laws whose articles/relevant sections did fit in that word limit, and were indeed short overall.

Then promulgate said laws by tweeting them 140 characters at a time.

Wouldn't that be something?

Lima Park Hotel: One Year Later [Presentation Thursdays]

Backstory: Over a year ago we got involved in Lima Park Hotel, a 60-room hotel in Malvar, Batangas. A few weeks ago we had a meeting with the previous owners and thought it would be appropriate to make a presentation about what's been up in the year since. So I had to put together a short presentation on the fly, and this is what I came up with:

View this and other presentations by brianbelen on Slideshare.

Because I was short on time, I decided to make the presentation more visual (and just wing it later on). Along the way I decided to play around with the text layout, which I would say gave the slides a little more character than a straightforward photo slideshow. If I had my way, there would be some before and after shots, but the slides worked well enough considering the intended audience just needed to know what the hotel was like now.

Some other tidbits:

• The jacuzzi in the suite (sixth slide) is off camera to the left of the photo. It's actually the signature design feature of the suite. Unfortunately, there wasn't time to fill it up with water while the photos were being taken, so it ended up left out.
  
  
• Obviously, there wasn't time to get any models for the photos either. I would have preferred to use photos with people in them, but had to make do with what was available.
  
  
• I took the picture of the pool with my iPhone, along with three other photos in the presentation.

Overall, I'm quite happy with how this presentation turned out, not to mention bemused that I ended up creating a pseudo-brochure for the hotel.

Speaking of which, for inquiries and room reservations please contact the sales staff at (+6343) 98 11 555.

[About Presentation Thursdays: Every now and then, on a Thursday, I post a presentation from my archives and include some accompanying commentary not just about the content but also my thoughts on designing it. The presentations can also be viewed and downloaded from my Slideshare page]

Exceptionally Odd

Hot on the heels of the Newberry award-winning The Graveyard Book comes Neil Gaiman's latest, Odd and the Frost Giants.

It's another children's book from the celebrated author, this time rooted in Norse mythology. Here we meet Odd, a rather unusual boy that serendipitously comes to the aid of Odin, Thor and Loki. Trapped in the form of an eagle, bear and fox, respectively, these gods have been banished to Midgard (earth) by a Frost Giant who has stolen Thor's hammer and managed to wrest away from them control of Asgard, the city of the gods. So begins Odd's journey to aid the gods in their quest to defeat the Frost Giant and save the world from an eternal winter.

While aimed at younger readers, Odd and the Frost Giants has much of the charm typical of Gaiman's work that will appeal to a broader audience. It also demonstrates how Gaiman has further refined his talent for crafting fable- and fairytale-like stories. Compared to his other recent work aimed at a younger readership, such as Coraline and the aforementioned Graveyard Book, Odd and the Frost Giants has a much simpler, streamlined, and thereby more efficient storytelling dynamic. Overall, the tale is told in a compact fashion without meandering too much to develop an overly rich backstory or setting, a quality most suited for the target audience to whom the book is directed.

The only drawback to this finely crafted tale is the cost: ponying up around fifteen dollars for a short story of about 120 pages might seem a bit much. But sometimes that's the price to be paid for a good yarn, which for the work Neil Gaiman does is almost always well worth it regardless of the price.

FB and WP Offline [The Internet is Down]

Stephen sent me an email a few days back with the header "Your wish is my command" and an attached screenshot of Facebook. I was clueless at first (because I'm an idiot) until it dawned on me that I did ask for it when I wrote about the "whale". (See? I am an idiot!)

Thus, prepare to be amazed (or not) by what Facebook looks like when it isn't working:



The error message reads: "Account Temporarily Unavailable. Your account is currently unavailable due to a site issue. Please try again in a few minutes."

Pretty underwhelming stuff, to be sure. Because it's practically pro forma, it comes across as rather cold, if patently dull. Certainly, the Twitter outage notice is much more appealing.

In contrast, check out how something even less polished might be more effective. Here's the message I came across when Wordpress.com suffered a temporary outage:



Sure, it's even more barebones, but it communicates a couple of things, intentionally or otherwise. Based on the look of the page and the curt message -- "Writes to the service have been disabled, we will be bringing everything back online ASAP" -- one gets the sense that downtime for the site doesn't happen very often; if it did, they'd probably have a more polished error message. Second, and more importantly, the tone of the notice gives conveys the notion that the site's administrators are working feverishly to resolve the issue. Heck, the message itself almost seems hastily composed, as if to say "Can't chat right now; we're working here!"

Or I could just be reading too much into these things.

Got a screenshot of what happens when things go wrong on the Internet? Send them over! We might just be able to turn it into a meme.

Rhythm Heaven

When I first heard of Rhythm Tengoku for the Game Boy Advance, I didn't know what to think. How could a game revolving around "keeping to the beat" be so popular in Japan? Mind, this was well before I'd even tried a "rhythm" game, so for the most part I chalked it up to the craziness that occasionally arises from Japanese culture because, let's face it, sometimes the Japanese are simply wired differently.

Then came games like Patapon and Ouendan/Elite Beat Agents, which after I'd tried and enjoyed got me interested in Rhythm Tengoku's sequel on the Nintendo DS, Rhythm Heaven. By the time I'd gotten a chance to try out the first-stage demo (Built to Scale) at the neighborhood Gamestop during the last trip to the US, I was sold.

My brother jokingly describes it as ADD on steroids, and in a sense that's true. Overall, Rhythm Heaven is nothing more than a collection of mostly senseless and often punishingly hard minigames. How senseless? Along the lines of dancing frogs/soldier ducks/ninja dog kind of senseless, to name but a few. And just how difficult? Let's just say that gunning to perfect each and every stage is almost a masochistic exercise, because when the game demands "perfect", it demands perfect.

Yet how can one not be won over by Rhythm Heaven? While it may fall under what some consider the "casual game" category (if you buy that canard, which I don't), at its core it's a title that is deviously creative, precisely because the gameplay mechanic is absurdly simple. There's a lot of monkey-see-monkey-do/tap into the beat/watch the offbeats going on in Rhythm Heaven, and while there are a couple of forgettable clunkers in this compendium of mini-games there's much more that'll have most gamers shaking their heads at how ingeniously everything just comes together. To take do-re-mi and turn it into addictive gameplay? That's downright clever.

At a time when many games distinguish themselves by their graphics and involved storylines or promise to offer massive multiplayer experiences, it's refreshing to find a game like Rhythm Heaven. It serves to remind us that simplicity itself can make for a fantastic game, even if only for the few minutes you do decide to pick up and play.

Where's Bing?

Bing is the new kid on the search block, albeit from an old hand in the tech industry. As I've noted previously, it's got potential, even if it does some things rather oddly.

If you happen to like Bing and are also an iPhone user, though, it doesn't look like you can set it up as your default search engine (at least, not yet):

And while some might pooh-pooh this with the obvious "It's an Apple product; of course it won't play nice with Microsoft!", I should point out that things between Apple and Google haven't been entirely coming up roses of late either (and Google has its own iPhone app, besides).

Granted, a lot of this owes to the advantage of the incumbent. The iPhone's only been around some two-odd years now, while Bing only went live in June 2009. Hence it will take some time for Bing to make its way into the iPhone OS' search engine options. In the meantime, it's good to see that Bing is already equipped with a mobile version to suit handheld devices:



But until Bing legitimately makes its way onto the iPhone's settings, there will always be that disconnect of seeing the Bing search page on screen with a Google (or Yahoo) search box on the toolbar, just because the latter can be set as default while Bing can't. Assuming this means anyone bothers to use Bing on an iPhone at all.

Meanwhile, on the plus side there are a growing number of Apps for the iPhone dedicated to downloading the ever-changing wallpaper featured on Bing. Novelty aside, I suspect this might be more useful than most folks realize.

(No) Candle

Seen at the crypt where my grandparents (mother's side) happen to be interred. This isn't their tomb, though.

The crypt itself is in the basement of one of the smaller neighborhood churches. Typically, the place gets busy during All Saints' and All Souls', either with visits from families and friends of the departed or ornaments to mark each tomb.

Because the place is below ground with only one point of ingress and egress, it does tend to get stuffy from candles that are left burning throughout the day. Hence, this year the church administration decide to put up signs like that above reminding visitors to refrain from lighting candles altogether. Still, when we visited, there were several tombs marked with lighted candles, the most noticeable one being that in the picture which was situated right beside such a sign.

Regardless of whether this was someone deliberately thumbing their nose at the policy or if it so happened that the sign came up after the candles were lit, I find it amusing. But it's also an apropos opportunity for introspection. Do we honor the dead by disregarding the wishes of the living? Or, is each opportunity to show respect for those who have gone before us so precious that such acts of remembrance must take precedence? After all, it's a simple thing to pay homage to our departed loved ones.

You just have to light a candle.