The Weekend

The weekend was good. I was able to create a new look for my blog-spot and at the same time be the minor assistant to @jackie_of_kim with her new blog-spot as well. (More on http://mysafari.jackiekimchi.com). Yes, looking at the name, the spot shows pride for your fanbois out there. Her first post is quite inspiring and enough to take some of us down with shame. Her blog discusses plans for reaching out to mentally-challenged children and adults – people who have an idea what Christmas is like but deserve more than just seasonal care and concern from us.

We look forward to joining the rest of the Web 2.0 economy in the months ahead as we accelerate broadband into the next decade from 2010-onwards. 2009, just like all years, will be critical for us to not just lay down the foundation for broadbanding the world but for us to actually take part and be in the middle of it. Our NGN program has a theme that "we may not know it, but we will be right smack in the middle of it.". The last months of 2008 should not just pass us by; rather, we should make the last two months as productive and effective as it could be. The coming week will take another chunk out of what's left of this globally memorable year. It gives us good news and bad news whether we like it or not. Its time for us to identify what needs to be done and actually do something about it.

I write this to cap my great weekend. I spent time with my better half both in the real world and on-line. We took "I'm with you everywhere" to the next level and shared our thoughts on many things from the past to the present to the future.

Wishing you all an advanced Merry Christmas! You heard it from me first!

My Calcu.

Its 10:51 pm in my watch. A Saturday night when I take my better half on a "Let's work and study" date. No, I'm not blogging about President Obama. We have the rest of the world that has been into that for the past months, which escalated last week after the victory. Can't wait for the Change to come.

I type this with @jackie_of_kim beside me; looking up the latest on bacteria ("bacilli") and how they could be drawn and colored for the next medical paper she creates. I love her and what she does. She adds "sexy" to medicine and makes me see hospitals in a whole new dimension: figuratively and literally. I started off the night with a quick visit to the Starbucks outside the gym while lugging all the med stuff with me. Aside from her medical research materials, I also brought my techno toys with me: laptop, HSDPA modem (thank you, Smart!), BlackBerry…

…and my brand new Casio MX-12 Calculator.

(photo courtesy of sharedreviews.com)

With Excel 2007 on the desktop, Texas Instruments in the shop, and even the built-in RIM calculator, having a "basic" Calculator sounds weird. It's a waste of four dollars based on how it appears.

I must admit that this is my first time to use such a gadget. It looks like one of the "Momma, please do NOT buy me THAT for school" things I used to see in National Bookstore. Its matte black with big keys and solar-powered high tech chips! (Pun intended). But, mind you, this electronic baby helped me in many of my meetings this week.

I started off with the business cases I had to make for a series of presentations this week for different audiences. I had meetings with our Finance team, meetings with Procurement, meetings with Network tech, and meetings with Systems tech. Each group required different terms and different terms. The universal language we used: -no, not music- we used Numbers.

Numbers amaze me, as I'm sure it does many of us. It could come in the form of allowances, salaries, statistics, grades, scores, customers, subscribers, sales, etc. Though we all have different ways of manipulating "numbers" to suite our jobs and interests. Finance guys want to see margins and rates of revenue. Procurement teams want to see forecasts and leverage. Network gurus want to see traffic and volume. Systems wizards want to see capacity and sessions. Whatever the requirement, the base of numbers remain the same. And throughout this week, numbers evolved so much and transitioned from balance sheets to network diagrams.

My extremely underestimated MX-12 was with me all week, whether I confined myself inside my cube and went out for meetings. Numbers on my mind that were tedious to place on Excel were jotted down on the MX-12 with the numbers I wanted to see. I feel guilty for seeing and classifying it as a "do not buy me that" calculator in the past.

Lesson learned: the old adage of "Don't judge a book by its cover". Its something we learned in Kindergarten (or a few years after that) that there is always more to what meets the eye. The MX-12 has "old school" written all over it, but it delivered when it had to.

And by the way, 51 is not a prime number. 17 and 3 are factors. Add the digits of 17 and 3 up (1 + 7 + 3) and we get 11, which is the time for me to wrap up. (I started this at 10:51pm). It's a numerical fascination we have, from plate numbers to statistics, to dates, to anything with numbers. It's a numerical bacilli for us. Aren't numbers simply amazing?