ONWARD'S beautiful sentences

Some of the sentences that comes out of this book are beautiful in its
own right. And to me, it becomes a coach psyching up his troops.
Going against conventional wisdom is the foundation of innovation, the
basis for Starbuck's own experience.

Here's another one, a nice sentence:
Sometimes, the earliest days of Starbucks seemed very far away.
Like straining to remember the sound of your child's voice as a
toddler as he or she heads off to college, Starbucks' nascent days got
more elusive as the company grow.

Now that's something.

FROM MY BOOKSTACK: SCORECASTING

Although some of their arguments are airtight, some are not. Overall,
if you're a sportsfan, this is a nice book to see more than what the
HDTV is showing.

The SEARCH: How Googles and it's rivals rewrote the rules of business.

It starts with a computer hamming, then the blue sky in the background, then the typing. Remember those days when you first open up the computer and typed www.yahoo.com?? I do remember those days, around 1995 to 1996 (Internet was released to the public 1992).


This is my second book for the year 2008, and it's about search. What will the internet be without a search engine? It's hard to imagine. So the first thing you type in front of a computer (most likely) with an internet connection, is of course a search engine. I do Yahoo during those days, the banner ads then appear, and then the graphics are lost because the connection was slow. I didn't encounter google.com until 2002, when I was already in the US (from the Philippines).

The book discussed how google came to be. Have you ever wonder what google means? It's a variation from the word googol, which means 1 followed by 100 zeros. In short a huge number. Too geeky? Try this, when google made public offerings for it's stock 4 years ago (2004), it sold 2,718,28 1,828 of its stocks. The numbers are not random, the numbers represent e (e=2.71828 18284 59045 23536), the natural logarithm.

The book concluded that there still no such thing as a perfect search. Search the web for "the meaning of life" and I bet you will be disappointed. Or search why "Julia loves Raymond", there's no perfect answer either. In the end, the book thought me how to do search: and that is, use yahoo and google or ask.com when you are searching for something. Every search engine is unique in terms of crawling, indexing and showing the results to the users.

The SEARCH : History of the search engine

I'm an MS-DOS baby. If you don't know what MS-DOS operating system is, it's the predecessor of Windows. It's old school.

I realized MS-DOS is an ancient technology, after reading the book. Computer technology grow so fast. Although the book is not about the operating system, reading the history and battles of the search engines is like reading how operating systems evolved (and made money). I can't tell you much about the war between Microsoft and Apple; I'm too young to remember. Reading the evolution of the search engine in contrast is nostalgic, I was using the technology, during the growing years of the Internet.

It's a new world economy, but I never thought of the search engine as a business model. It's hard to conceptualize. It's not like the gold rush: gold is synonymous to money. And companies who didn't understand how search engines could be made as a source of income, those companies were doomed.

Who were the casualties of war? If you were old enough to witness the growth of the internet, in one time or another you heard about excite.com, altavista.com, overture.com (I'm not familiar with this, but it was acquired by yahoo), yahoo.com, askjeeves.com and lycos.com. Yahoo is still alive (and struggling). These companies were mentioned in the book, and I was using these search engines before.

Nostalgic. You know why? I just visited those sites a while ago, and the designs of the sites are reminiscing of the late 1990s. Those were the days.

Blink part II

I finished reading the book titled Blink. If I summarize the book, and it's content, the theme lies in our unconscious level of decision making. Very scientific in it's discussion? It's just our bias in judgement, even though you say consciously that you are not bias.

In other words, it's what Larry Bird calls "he's in the zone" (not mentioned in the book) because he have good "basketball court sense", or why we have bias towards a black person. I never knew about the New Coke product until I read it from a Reader's Digest, and I never knew why the product failed until now, when the book discussed the fateful market research.

Blink showed me that little information is the same as more information: you just reach for the most important piece of information. On the other hand, armed with limited pieces of information can also be disastrous. You look at the whole story before judging. Although in some cases (such as when a police encounters a life and death situation, where milliseconds count), you don't have the luxury of time, snap judgements can be useful, but with caution.

Blink

Don't quote me here, but an average person reads 3-4 books a year. I always try to beat the average, so I started looking for a book to read this year. As I was waiting in a mall, I was scanning and reading "Tipping Point" in a bookstore. The book caught my attention. Since I don't want to buy the book, I went to the public library the next day to look for "Tipping Point". Unfortunately, the book is still in loan, so I ended up with "Blink". If there's a consolation, the books had the same author.

What's "Blink"? It's a premise that people think without really thinking. Call it gut feelings or instincts. I haven't finished the book yet, but the story line goes that experts can tell something before testing things in the laboratory.

I remembered asking my adviser if my data was real or not, and by looking at the figure, he concluded it's not real and only a noise. He was right. That's blink in action.

Philippine Daily Inquirer's 'Young Blood' Compilation

In any given Sunday during my college years at Los Banos, my pan de sal breakfast was most likely with The Philippine Daily Inquirer (PDI). And there's no doubt that I was reading the ‘Young Blood’ column. To make the lazy sunday complete, I lie in my bed or the sofa to read. Life was good (and still good to me).

Young Blood column changed the way I read PDI. After checking the sports page, I flipped the pages straight to the editorial section. Reading the Young Blood column connected me with other people of my age. Although you don’t follow a plot, I read the column just like following a story line. But having a morning paper everyday is a premium for a college student, so most of the time, I read the paper from the library. My roommate was resourceful; he took the column page (only the column page) from papers ready to be discarded by store owners, at the end of the day.

During my Philippine vacation last December (2007) after five years in the US, I went to Power Books and went straight to the Philippine section. Asking my cousin what’s the best book from the Philippines, she advised me to read the "Young Blood" compilation (and some Bob Ong books, an Eraserheads anthology and the compilation of Pilipino Scientists and Pilipino Entrepreneurs).

My stopover on my way back to Florida included a long stopover in Chicago. In a crisp Chicago morning, while waiting for my connecting flight, I sat in an isolated table with my bagel (America’s pan de sal) , my Young Blood compilation, and a hot coffee. I was wishing I was lying in my bed, for old time sake.

The Chemistry of Eraserheads

My neighbor back in UP Los Banos, whose brothers were studying in UP Diliman, introduced me to " Ultraelectromagnaticpop". And although the "technical" part of the music was not the best because it sounded like "Combo lata", still, it was appealing to me. It's like eating a buko pie in a box, the box is not the best technical presentation of the product, but the product is way good.

I hailed from the south, and Superferry is the popular transportation for us students from Mindanao visiting families for the Christmas breaks. The nauseating swell of the ocean and the boring 24 plus hours at the sea were countered by playing cards, ordering bubbles of beers and some intellectual discussions. You might know already that intellectual discussions under the influence of alcohol leads to nowhere, jumping from topic to topic. Out of nowhere, injected to the discussion was Eheads, and this person I don't know told the group he heard the music. The music was new and revolutionary; however, the band needs to pass the acid test for the second album or else Eheads will be a one-hit wonder.

(Acid test of a solution in chemistry is a litmus test. Just a side note, the mnemonic for the test is BRA, when a Blue litmus paper turns Red, the solution is Acidic and my students remember this always).

The second album definitely passed the test since their music was everywhere. Even the third album, which I thought they will label it "Star Witness", was a huge success. In a popular afternoon show, the band was telling the audience that their third album is on its way, and they were planning to name it "Star Witness". It was inspired by Jessica Alfaro who was the star witness of Vizconde Massacre. For some reason they changed it to " Cutterpillow", probably in respect to the on-going investigation.

Eraserheads brought the underground Pilipino music scene to the mainstream popular culture. Alternative bands sprouted everywhere just like mushrooms, after an overnight rain. I was lost in the pile of alternative bands during my college days. Then after a family reunion in Bicol, it reunited me again to the music of the band. My trip back to LB was long, and after watching "Crimson Tide" at the bus' television set, I grabbed my walkman, inserted the long lost Eheads first album. I could feel the goose bumps: this is how Eheads music was all about.

In 2002 I went to graduate school overseas, the same year E-Heads disbanded (or disbonded). I don't blame them for disbanding. When the popular Eagles band re-appeared probably ten years ago after almost 2 decades of hiatus, they toured the U.S. again and apologized to their fans, explaining that they "never broke up, only took a 17-year vacation". Again, I don't blame them. Even rock stars deserve a rest, a very long rest. In the process, Eagles produced an album titled "Hell Freezes Over".

Eheads crystalized into an icon and a representative of my generation. It may be a by-gone era someday just like Frank Sinatra's tune (remember your lolo's music), but the music will definitely stay and will not dissolve.

E-Heads will rebond. When? I don't know. Some rebonding processes take long, and others, shorter time. My guess is that the book " Tikman and langit" will be a catalyst (an enzyme) to make the reunification faster. My guess is that the band will tour the Philippines again; make an album from the tour titled "The return of the comeback strikes back again, part 2" . If " Ultraelectromagneticpop" is Voltes V inspired, the comeback album will be from Star Wars.

C’mon Eheads, don’t “shake your heads and walk away” from your fans.

Tikman ang Langit

This is the anthology on the Eraserheads. Honestly, if I didn't paid a visit to dictionary.com, I may never know what anthology means. By the way, the word means "a book or other collection of selected writings by various authors, usually in the same literary form, of the same period, or on the same subject".


Mostly, the authors wrote about their first encounter of E-heads’ brand of music. Others detailed their argument why the band is the best group who ever graced the Philippine music scene. One author made a different way of paying tribute to the god of Philippine music; by searching the web for stories. Some contributors described the Philippine underground music scene, before E-heads made it to mainstream. Reading a part of the historical accounts of the underground revolution was nostalgic and exciting. History class will probably bore you to death, but reading past events that you know you are a part of it is pure nostalgia.

I have my own account of the E-heads and I do agree to most of the writers, although some part of the stories were too long. It bored me to read long stories related to the managers and promoters of the band. In those instances, I can’t follow the characters involved. Some contributions where well written and polished, some where not. Over all, it was nice to view the different angles of E-heads, as recounted by the fans-- regardless of affiliations-- a jolog or a conyo.