From .bh

Hey my posting is going to be even more sporadic :)
well I am currently in bahrain for some business. though i won't be talking about that now
am going to jot down my first impressions of the place!



So I been here for a few days now (4 I think), although its really small its packed with places to go to.
So far i have been unable to go anywhere but places to eat, one place in particular was very nice. The place is called monsoon it serves east asian food (chinese, thai, japanese and viet). it has been a while since I ate some good authentic asian food, non of the arabisc style asian food.
its an old villa that has been renovated and the setting is awesome.
I heard the owner has a few more restaurents in that area so i'll be sure to check those out too :)

for a proper review of the place and to give it its due go here monsoon

As for Bahrain I think I like it so far, it seems like part of saudi arabia (red light district of sorts) rather than anything. Though still i wouldn't want to live here yet (maybe that will change in the future).

I still need to go the suq, and check out the fish market ! I wanna cook some nice food here.
I am also interested in a couple of events this week i just hope am not too tired to attend them.

Anyways in general this place is much better that Dubai and more active than Doha, its perfectly chilled back. the only draw back is the fact you will hear about 20 different languages/accents in a single conversation.

Till much later, ENJOY

Games and my gaming generation

I have always been a gamer, I grew up with the sense of consumerism "I need to have the latest". I got into computers for the purpose of playing games. I spent hours upon hours of my life playing them, and I still do.
A few weeks ago i flirted with the idea is there some manner that all this gaming expertise and hours be utilized we utilized in a way that is not convoluted.
So I Dug in a bit and found two interesting utilizations that have already been implemented.
by the way both of them had video seminar's on Google video.
The first idea deals with consumer marketing and surveys, essentially the notion that a survey in its current form is limiting due to the number of questions, bias, error margin, and honesty of replies.
That is beside the chore nature of filling one.
The premise is the following:

• You establish a virtual stock market based on attributes you want to survey on.
• You setup session with a group of users
• it depends on two main things, what the user thinks, and what the user thinks other people would think. now that by it self will provide bias results due to people thinking others would like what they would think.
• You are not limited to the 20 question paradigm in this case since like a stock market people focus on say a fraction of whats so offered, so by establishing some common stocks between different group the market will reach an equilibrium and reduce bias of the user.
• values got be extracted out of the test and be assigned to different attributes. this will help with the pricing.
• mainly the people are driven by their competitive nature, so the drive to win will cause the users to exhibit genuine interest in the survey.

This research was mainly done by prof. Ely Dahan. Now am not an expert on consumer market research but from the premise of it. this manner of doing a survey tend to eliminate a lot of the major hurdles of an orthodox survey. It highly resembles Fantasy sports game am not sure how popular they are here but they are another phenomenon of sorts

• it is much faster.
• more accurate(according to him).
• Results tend to be pretty consistent across the different groups it was tested on.
• easily accessible.
• FUN.
• Most importantly cheaper.

The second application I came across was utilizing the collective (internet user base) to solve problems that are simple for a human mind to resolve while currently are to complex for computers. (their example was the captcha)
They applied this idea to 3 online games. the objective for each game built on the other one:

• ESP Game: this is a two player game, people are paired and shown a picture. they are told to guess what the other person used to describe the picture and they are scored on how fast they get an answer. Using those words you can caption the pictures available on the net at a remarkable pace.
• Verbosity game: expanding on the previous game they used context template to describe a picture instead.
• Peekaboom: This is the latest game where you are giving a word and a picture and you much guide your peer to guess the word. this will provide location of object that could be used to highlight keywords in a picture search results.

Just having the satisfaction of actually achieving something other than have fun and pastime is monumentally gratifying.

On the flip side of things there is whole culture that is evolving around MMOG(massively multiplayer online games). For instance world of warcraft is has hit recently more that 8 million active players (at 15$ a month thats a net income of 120 million a month OR $1.44 billion a year) . another popular game is Second life this is not exactly a game, the closest thing I can describe with is a 3d realization of the internet. according to the economist in 2004 it is estimated that more than $880 on online goods and services (search ebay if u don't believe this). just to note 2004 was before those 2 games i mention were this popular.

Currently there are people making part of their income just from playing games.
So the next time anyone tries to undermine you passion for games just through some of those numbers in their face and if they are level minded they would zip it.
The coming generation is a gaming one.

ps. the video seminars i talked about way way way in the beginning of this post;

How can we better understand customers? Prof. Ely Dahan presentation regarding STOC a consumer market research tool

Human Computation This is the second application of games in business i talked about

N/A -_-'

I should be sleeping right now since I have a busy day ahead of me again, but just like every once in a while thoughts and ideas just strangle the sleep out of me.
A single word that people parade shamelessly everyday, on every issue. JUSTICE
everyone demands it, everyone defines it, everyone fights for it.
What I wondered was why the urge for each one of us to play the victims, why is it we always seem to take the easy way out and blame it on circumstances.
Why can't we just take responsibility for choices, paths, options that we took in our lives. give each person his own share of the burden.
Is justice really achieved under any circumstances ?
For example in the case of murder, am not gonna go all cliche and say "it's not gonna bring back anyone".
what am trying to say is that in that case, after the accused has been convicted in what is perceived to be a fair trial, the victim's void tends to fill up with a sense of gluttony.
They get the feeling that they are obliged to help other's like them! they find it hard to accept the fact that there is no justice, just contempt.

If we can't keep our emotions in check they will manifest demons in ourselves that we could not fathom in our pasts.
The Human mind is too fragile, maybe we need to be Ubermen.

p.s. no clue where that came from, why, or what the hell i was trying to say. I guess its just one of those wee hours of the night flip moods
EDIT: I Seem to have hit the wall with this one so i'll give it another shot, thought I hate to give out my opinions on bases of answers rather i prefer to present them as questions

The idea is that Justice is platonic and is not an earthly ideal. In the human eye justice will always be flawed.
If a group will seek justice and attain then the group that lost some of their rights, privileges or whatever will in turn seek their own justice. this vicious cycle will only cultivate bigotry and solve nothing. on The other hand if Justice is not attained it will also cultivate bigotry, and over time this bigotry will turn into a dues Ex Machina for everything involved in that groups life.
The only outlet I could think of in this situation is a reasonable compromise (i use reasonable as a term since it would be reasonable at a point in time). In this case no one can claim to be a clean cut winner, and that way it can cultivate trust on one hand for future renegotiation. on the other hand it will allow a certain degree of confusion which will hopefully paralyze the collective rather than segregate them into Yay and Nay.

One Lucky S.O.B.

I couldn't help but post this as soon as I read it, that is one lucky person. Off to buying a lottery ticket would be the first thing to do after this ! (btw funny thing is i didn't read the comment below it but it turns out there is someone that thought of the same exact thing, using the same words)

Now, first, you have to realize that the truck is facing the wrong way. Look at it.: it’s facing towards where it first crashed.

The truck must have hit a barrier or two, launched itself off of a guard rail, jumped! Jumped a massive storm drain! And either spun or tipped or both, in such a way that it was facing the other way. Somehow it wound up sitting on a ridge, and not at the bottom of whatever that ridge sits on top of…

Which is…

this is off of dailyirrelevant

Listening: DJ Tiesto - Forever Today (a song I think is worthy of a cake show in a wedding, the intro atleast)

What was never meant to be !

Hmm ok so am going down my list, and ever since i fixed up the template am using here i was wondering if i should include my sketches or not. i.e. my sketches for the header of this blog!
So for the lack of better things to do this morning, and the inability of me to structure up a sound argument I will do just that.

<-- So this is one of the first. I actually done this while attending the microsoft security seminar (obviously you can see that some habits die hard) btw this was done with pencil, i just quickly colored it as wildly as I could. I still like it. So this is the second attempt and something I really wanted to get on the header. I even started coloring it ! but then I just had a better image in my head and went with it

So that brings us to the implementation before the last. This I spent sometime working on, I was semi content with the coloring job, and I really liked it as a whole. two problems stopped it from making the cut. First it was too big and i didn't want to chop it up. Second I couldn't figure out a way to fit in the Tag of this blog. So the only thing that was left is the bullet :)

p.s. I wonder if people can figure out the words in the header, and the other word that is spelled out ?
Listening: Shingetsutan tsukihime OST - Sacred Moon

About JP & qwaider - Been a WHILE

Well its been a while since I posted anything here, and just when I mustered up enough ideas about something to write about, I find out that the blogger website is down !
So ya needless to say I lost that energy and i have to settle for this post.
I am still frustrated with the fact that jordanplanet is "bye-bye" its not fair. now I have to dig really hard into my memory to remember which blogs I liked !
Though its an admirable that qwaider.com stepped up but I am still not quite adjusted myself to the notion.
there are alot of things I don't like there:

• The Template for the website is just bland and booring, I offer to help out on that. I am willing to do a more lively one.
• The content of the posts (i hope i don't offend people too much here), seem to lack substance. They are mostly bubble-gum rants :( one thing i miss about JP is that i used to find some nice posts everyday, while on there I can't find any posts I like. So is there a way to categorize blogs ? somehow to sort them by topics discussed in those blogs ?
• btw there are a few things that don't seem to link up well (mainly the comments). Also the date should not be repeated on everypost.
  
• the buzz tag or something (to the top right) is too big and needs to be reduced

Oh well i didn't have the energy to write about things I wanna talk about and here i am bashing someone (I just hope that was in a constructive manner). BLOODY HUMAN NATURE

Listening: Noir OST - Kirei na Kanjou

New Year Tag !

Oh well I been tagged by Tala
and I was so slow to check up on my blog due to the slow internet connection, festivities, then sleeping out the festivities.
So am very late to this party, but here it goes

Best Moments:

• Taking my new job in April i was excited about that for a full 3 months.
• Starting my first start-up :)
• Re-discovering TV which gave me a new escape
• Making some new friends
• Seeing Liverpool Win
• Being able to Enjoy my Favorite thing in the world for the first 6months and then being able to let go for the other 6 months (sorry this had to be cryptic)
• Creating this blog
  
• Seeing a design of mine in the newspaper

Worst Moments:

• The numerous fall outs i had with people i cared about
  
• Losing aim and direction in life
• Green Bay sucking for another year :(
• My startup going through some rough times
  
• Leaving my job early on in the year (though this was good at first)
• Not having the impetus to create something with a pencil and a paper

But all in all it was a good year since i managed to learn new things and experience new things so regardless whether i enjoyed or not it made me Grow

Happy New Year (forgive me its like 48 hours late)

ps. Too late to tag anyone hehehe