Happy New Year, folks!
Fingers still intact, I assume? Hopefully.
Thus begins another year for The Coffee House Chronicles and yours truly, your humble brewer. Here's to hoping that this 2011 may be more fruitful for TCHC in terms of getting more posts done without sacrificing the quality. Last year, I recorded a measly 37 posts, down 10 posts from 2009's tally of 47. It's quite a pitiful number if you compare the number of posts I did in 2008 when I recorded 86 posts.
Aside from work, Facebooking, took a chunk of my time otherwise spent blogging or writing or doing one of the dozen-or-so projects I have in mind. The phenomenom that is Facebook -- what with its messaging, status updates, and games -- has ensorcered yours truly, in the process, making me realize I'm not much of an anti-social fellow myself if you base it on the amount of time I've spent on Facebook.
However, recent turn of events, particularly the loss of my rig, has made me realize I can still live without Facebook and even the internet at that. For several nights now, I've been choosing reading a book over the surfing internet even though my wife's laptop is quite available for my social networking use and the FB games I play. And while I think about the lost coins, the growing trees, the wasted energies, and the waiting passengers every now and then, I can live with that. I may miss messages sent by my sisters and friends or fail to catch up on the latest status updates of my FB friends, but I know I'll be checking up on those stuff when I get to FB again this weekend.
So folks, drop me an email through my Yahoo or text me if you need to reach me. I'm not online all the time, I'm not on FB everyday for the meantime, but I still check my trusty Yahoo email daily and I still answer any calls and text messages sent to me.
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Budgetary limitations will most likely force us to get a netbook rather than a full laptop for now.
Cyber-research has yielded that a full laptop with specs attuned to my needs (graphic design, gaming, and multimedia) will require a budget of P35K to P40K. Unfortunately, that is not in our planned budget for the next few months but a little help from the Desk and a little help from a small plastic card will probably be enough to procure a netbook.
After a sorry experience with HP/Compaq (read it here), we'll also be considering durability along with the usual tech-specs with the purchase of the netbook (and that extends as well to the next power rig when the budget seems more possible). And thus, we're looking at buying either an Asus or a Lenovo. An Acer can be a third option (as demonstrated by the Acer rig at my parents which has been around for about 3+ years now with no major problems except for the audio part). Hopefully by end of this month, I'll be online using either an Asus Eee PC, or a Lenovo Ideapad, or an Acer Aspire One.
While I mentioned a few paragraphs back that I find no need to be really online for now, the reality is being online is fast becoming a necessity. My sisters communicate with me online via FB, email, YM, and for actual conversations and video-calls, there's Skype. And as I mentioned, I'm also working on several online projects that will hopefully be generating moolah for the family one of these days. With limited internet access at the Desk, the only way I can work fully on those personal projects would be at home. Plus, our broadband connection at home would just go to waste if there's no computer hooked to it.
Sadly, I can't take on any design work for the meantime and that also means I won't be playing Sims 2 or Sid Meier's Pirates anytime soon. Oh well, there's always Ravenwood, and Cafe World and my latest FB game addiction, CityVille.
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Work at the Desk is piling up and this is one of those times when I wish I had another person who could do tasks for me.
Back at the old desk, I managed about a dozen people, more than half of them designers. That still left me with several people to delegate tasks to. But don't get me wrong, I just don't dump everything to my people -- I leave a lot of stuff with me. Most of the time, the stuff I delegate are already ongoing meaning I've already done initial phases of the projects before I turn them over to my staff to fully work on -- the nitty-gritty. But then again, don't get me wrong again as I also do nitty-gritty stuff -- stuff that can't be handled at my staff's level.
A leadership training I've attended made mention that as one goes up in rank, the mechanical / clerical stuff you work on diminishes but the brainy stuff gets more and more. I believe that is true but that doesn't mean you have to leave everything to your staff. You also need to keep yourself abreast of the nitty-gritty because who knows you'll need to substitute on those nitty-gritty stuff if one of your staff calls in sick, is overloaded, or worse, has resigned and you've got no one to replace him/her with. Plus, working on the nitty-gritty stuff keeps you grounded.
However, if you're working on both the brainy and the nitty-gritty stuff -- both at the same quantity and level -- that gets too tedious and you end up getting sick (you tend to work extra hours thus losing on sleep and rest) and your work suffers.
That's what's going to happen to me real soon if I don't get any help.
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Speaking of personal projects some paragraphs above, I've got to restart updates on my health-related blog, Diabetic Daddy.
As usual, after the holidays, I'm sure to have gained several pounds and breached the 200lbs limit so I've got to ease myself again to a respectable weight. With a visit to my endo due in February, I need to show her that I've somehow managed to work on my weight, my sugar levels, and more importantly, my cholesterol level. Working on the former two, I believe, are easier than working on cholesterol :P
Sadly, the other blog I maintained for my daughter, Ikai, has not seen an update for quite, quite some time now. That blog was put up before FB became the "it" thing -- meant to be a documentation of my daughter growing up. But now, I've got a second daughter already and it has become easier to update on one's life and loves over at FB where you're sure it'll be seen by people who care about you and who you care about.
It's going to be wait and see what will happen with that blog and whether I'll decide to finally close down that one.
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This blog post has been four days in the making. Started the first item when I got back from the holidays last Monday.
This is one crummy day for me today. Had a hard time sleeping last night ... fell asleep a little past 10pm but woke up some 40 minutes later. Tossed and turned, read chapter after chapter and even viewed some TV but to no avail. I think I finally got to sleep sometime past 2am.
And now, work has piled up!
I want to go home and sleep :(
