Mood: Discoveries & Relevations

Some women are from Mars

Somehow during lunch today, the conversation touched on the topic on how I often think/react like a guy. Working everyday with users on the floor, female users sometimes think I’m cold or insensitive to their problems. I guess I lack in the empathy department, at least according to their standards.

When it comes problem solving and debugging, the most important thing to me is always the end result: which is to understand why things happened the way they did. Rarely does it occur to me think about the methods I use to analyse the issues. An innocent but blunt question could come across as interrogative, or even accusitive.

Apparently, most women aren’t really interested so much in getting the problem solved than being reassurred that things are going to work out fine. In other words, they like to have someone who would tell them, “I see, don’t worry too much about it, it’s not your fault.” Most men fail miserably at that, allegedly. Perhaps they’ve come to accept the fact that men don’t usually mince their words, but have yet to realise that some women just don’t think/act like the rest of them.

Subjects: General

Mood: Discoveries & Relevations

Tags: empathy, gender

Colibri

Met 傑義 for dinner tonight. He passed me the autographed copy of Fragile Things (which I very shamelessly got him to carry back from San Francisco), but the coolest thing was learning from him about this software, Colibri, which allows one to open software on one’s PC, favourite URLs (FYI: it even opens a new tab on Firefox), etc, without having to use the mouse!

I have a love/hate relationship with the mouse: I need it especially for designing stuff but really hate using it to open software. The XP pinup menu makes it bit easier, but still, you have to either click on the Start button and keyup/down, or search through the gigantic list of items in the complete Start Programs menu AND remember to sort them alphabetically.

Mac users have probably been going nahh nahh ni nahh nahh for ages and ages. Argh, this makes me feel like saying good riddence to WinXP!!!

Colibri Banzai!

Subjects: Books 書物, Technology 技術

Mood: Discoveries & Relevations

Tags: book, Colibri, Neil Gaiman

Absolute Sandman

Woohoo!!!!

I want this so bad…

Any one wants to buy from me a complete set of Sandman 2nd edition (save two 1st-edition books) softcovers in relatively good condition for a discounted price? …I guess not… (It’s a good thing the USD is quite low right now.)

[EDIT]
How about cost-sharing the shipping… Any one interested in preordering? :-)

Subjects: Books 書物

Mood: Discoveries & Relevations

Tags: book, Neil Gaiman, Sandman

Code Switching

I’ve just spent the last half an hour watching three Kaneshiro Takeshi 金城武 interviews (lol), having read about him in the New Paper today (the shame!). The first was an interview in Cantonese, the second an CNN interview (video divided into 3 parts) conducted in English and finally one in Japanese. I’ve got to say this guy’s mastered the art of switching between languages. In the Cantonese interview, there are a couple of situations when he, unable to express in Cantonese, switches to Mandarin without missing a beat. I’m insanely jealous. If that happened to me, stutter would first come, followed by complete silence. It’s as if my brain were a receiver that’s been jammed by radio interference. Of course it’s not like I don’t understand at all when I’m spoken to in a language that out of my comfort zone (meaning: anything other than English). It’s just that comprehension ability does not necessarily mean the ability to express. Singaporeans in general seem to be really good at code-switching; I’m inapt, there’s no doubt about it.

Subjects: Learning the Japanese Language 日本語勉強

Mood: Discoveries & Relevations

Tags: Kaneshiro Takeshi 金城武, language

Tales from Earthsea 「ゲド戦記」 Anime Preview

Is it an understatement to say I’m looking forward to this film?

FYI, the American TV movie was such a disaster I couldn’t get past 20mins of it.

I’m of the opinion that most fantasy novel adaptations, especially narrative kinds, should be left to the hands of the Japanese to be animated :-) That is not to say I didn’t love Lord of the Rings — that was an anormaly (plus Gandalf wouldn’t be Gandalf if he wasn’t speaking in English).

The trailers:

And for those who can’t read Japanese:

Subjects: Film, Television & Anime 映像

Mood: Discoveries & Relevations

Tags: anime, Studio Ghibli, Ursula Le Guin