Black Orange – Peter Du’s Blog

A Singaporean journalist shares the difference between a columnist and a blogger:

A columnist is as good as the last column she wrote, while a blogger could lose her audience for a while and regain them later on more relevant posts.

This is the event that I attended in Ogilvy Centre

While she, a SPH scholar who worked for SPH for 10 years, a veteran columnist for Straight Times, who reads blogs through search engines instead of Google Feed Reader, thinks blogging is similar to or exactly same as journalism, they are intrinsically different – the most obvious: journalists are paid to write the sensational, the factual and the political, bloggers volunteer their time to create a voice of her personality. The motivations behind them are not the same.

Exercise: create a compelling ultra short story with 6 words. This is the most enjoyable part of the conversation when I am in the position to create. If you’ve been paying attention on twitter, there was this 6 word/twitter short story event a while ago.

Anyway, here is my 6 word story:

Beer with a woman, later suicided.

Compare with the most famous one:

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

You don’t need a lot of words to tell a compelling story.

So I’ll end my post here, and I’ll do a post about creating a compelling story another day.

It's Magical

Milk, OMG.

Jason Lee has published an amazing series of photos as a dad and a photographer.[via jnack]

I always wanted to be a photographer, these images start to tickle me. I shall envision a 5D Mark II with Leica lenses will come right at me soon. Meanwhile, I’ll continue my Flex programming.

Update:

I forgot to put in this link, which is an awesome-long short:

“We’re all Gonna Die – 100 Meter Experience“

Boagworld explained to me today 10 techniques for an effective ‘call to action’. In which he wrote:

Studies in supermarkets have shown that if the shopper is presented with too many varieties they are less likely to make a purchase.

Many Pantenes on one single shelf

I am a bit skeptical about this “studies”, which I thought could be a conjured case, so I did some googling, leading me to an article published on American Psychology Association.

In the article there is my familiar jam/food/shampoo picking experience:

when shoppers are given the option of choosing among smaller and larger assortments of jam, they show more interest in the larger assortment. But when it comes time to pick just one, they’re 10 times more likely to make a purchase if they choose among six rather than among 24 flavors of jam.

And in an experience where 800,000 employees at 647 companies are given multiple choices about their retirement plan:

When given two choices, 75 percent participated, but when given 59 choices, only 60 percent did

While these two types of experiences remain true to my shopping experience in the supermarket and electronic store, I have also noted what I think is one important aspect of this choice situation: when I have something to buy in mind, especially those products that cost more than $500, I would have some criteria in mind. Fitting those criteria would mean I achieve the goal of buying the right product for use. I have recently bought my Canon VIXIA HV30, a very nice high definition camera. I didn’t go through all the available products on amazon like I would do in the supermarket, looking up and down, being afraid of missing any important product on the shelf. Instead, I just set up some simple filters to pick the features I want (Live Firewire Connection + HighDef), sort the price and read some reviews before I hit the checkout button.

That is explained by Nobel Laureate Herb Simon:

when consumer enters with an articulated preference, they often choose the first decent choice that fits their preference as opposed to exhaustively scanning all options until finding the perfect, or “maximizing” one.

Hope you’ve learnt something, I did.

It’s been a while since I visited Xiaonei to check for information and socialize, and I found this:

431079 Personal Messages

I thought it would take me ages to clear all the spam and real personal messages that could ever accumulate to that number, but when I clicked it, I found none of the claimed half a million messages acutally existed. Not sure if that’s the result of clearing spam or a miscalculation.

What I learn from Xiaonei and Facebook is that when numbers are catching up, you better learn to ignore selectively.

Ignoring on Facebook

And since Youtube has this HD function, let me try it out here:

Because I am caught in between all the social websites, I am trying to have a life as well. I think the following video does speak some of our geeks’ heart out, well, only occasionally.

There are few things I am monitoring lately, starting with Google’s I/O conference with much attention on the upcoming Android system, the event is covered extensively online. If you are a devel geek, and in love with Google’s awesomeness, wait for the Google I/O videos to be online.

Then I started to use Twitter more often since days ago, which unfortunately had lately a lot of down times and service outbreak because of the backend service platform they are using are not quite scalable than they had thought.

Since Estee and I started our own show with Michael Cheng and Bernard Leong, I am constantly thinking how to improve, and when I stumble upon this video interview of Leo Laporte, I am really inspired.

That’s pretty much all is happening, remember to Follow Me Me, and Kevin Lim. If you really like Leo then follow Leo Laporte and Kevin Rose.

I was browsing Facebook today and stumble upon a fairly interesting website: MagMyPic. It does one very simple thing for you: using your stylish photo on your computer, it creates a magazine cover for you to show off to your friends. So here is my take:

Well, I love the effect I create from the photo uploaded, but the function of zooming and panning is missing. Moving your photo around until you are satisfied is not that easy to do with the web interface yet. Not talking about customizing the fonts, the wordings as well the removing the watermark at the bottom of the photo.

Yet, I bet you could have loads fun with this as well.

I bought a 3×3 Rubik’s cube when the retro wind of toys blew on the land a while ago. That little cube reminded me of all the childhood games I played, which of course included those traditional and have-to-play ones like Robe Skipping, Pallets (I think pallets came around first), Ants Squashing etc.

But for me, I always had the advantage of being a playful boy, so I dismantled radios, getting AC current in a bowl of water to get oxygen and hydrogen (which caused a little explosion and colored my hair gold) and placing fully saturated copper sulfate solution into a microwave oven to heat in order for it to crystallize. And that curiosity of mine led to more things like a sodium-copper sulfate “bomb”, the first radio I wielded, and anatomy of a frog on drugs .

Before long, I mastered the ways of playing with a 3×3 cube, which I thought was boring enough once you knew the secrets. And then I bought this professor in ToysRus for 3 times the price, and I let it sit still on my office desk ever since, until I started playing with it yesterday.

To my amazement, using little bit of rules, this piece is actually easy to solve, and it could be really something to show to your friend when they were bored with the recent movies like Juno or TV series House.

My suggestion: get one and show to your friends how talented you are!

PS: If you find Juno and House not boring, you are not the only ones!

I just came across this piece of comics by Geek And Poke. As a Christian and IT loving person, I simply find it hilarious to read the what is written there. DMCA to us is always a hot topic to discuss. File Sharing = Stealing? If the person could not win the market by forcing them to buy the cd, shall he prevent people from copying the song from his friends as well?

Vidfest is going on Vancouver now, check the post by Bill Claxton:

1. From Cinema to Cellphone (I tempted to write Handphone..)
2. Sci-Fi in Lo-Fi and HD (Hmm.. Tricky Title)

This is really an interesting event we shall watch out for, perhaps it will come to Singapore one day.

When I was playing the 3D games in old days, like Tomb Raider, I found the character was not easy to control and I would wonder if the character came into life, what would they be doing? It seemed they looked like Zoombie when they tried to be a beach animal. (Or people who lack sleep like me?)

Enjoy this short clip

Peter is not a hardcore evolutionist believer, but he is a hardcore believer in art and design.

I watched a video clip of beach “animals”(10 mins) from TED. What astonished me was not only the simple material and mechanism which makes the beach animal with numerous tubes walk by itself, but the concept of creating a new type of life from scratch.

(click to view)

Theo Jansen created the walking beach animal. To me, he is an artist, a scientist and an engineer, and much more than that. The genius idea inside his creation is not only stirring up an new phenomenon, the sensation and chill caused by it is more than what I people handle: we are seeing a new type of life form!

After watching the video, the question of creating life in this world has come into my mind again and again: are we creating something new that would ultimately destroy human race? Inspired by Raymond Kurzweil, Stanford university held the “Singularity Summit“. Perhaps there is more answers there.