Pump Up the Quiet!

Today I felt like I was back in Grade School and locked up in the library because I was making too much noise in class. Then as now, it’s something that gives me extreme pleasure.

I was facilitating a training session on an innocent topic, Project and Process Quality Improvement, in one of those semi-aging Ayala high-rises with a mostly-female class of finance people. So we should all be bored and yawning, yes? No! 

First, they don’t make girls like they used to. The girls in my class were in their late 20s – early 30s and were gayspeaking with varying degrees of competence. The funny thing is, they’ve now taken ownership of the lingo so much that they don’t even sound gay. Just girls using colourful idiom. Amazing. Natural lang, ganun, and girl walang ka-effort effort. Wet na wet! But that’s not the reason why we were “locked up in the library.”

Blame it on Pinoy Henyo. Whoever invented this game should be given the National Artist Award. And it’s not like I gave them difficult words to guess. The theme was Christmas. The words were puto bumbong, simbang gabi, parol… Easy no-brainers? Eh bakit kung makatili ganun na lang? Pandemonium! M&M’s lang naman ang premyo!

We were in a row of training rooms and we must have made so much noise because all of them (all talaga!) sent representatives to our room to ask us (1) to please tone it down, (2) to be “not so loud” please, (3) if anyone was hurt, or just to tell us that (4) “elevator pa lang dinig na kayo. May sunog?”

I love this class!

Skyfault

I was there, standing in line for a ticket to Skyfall when I changed my mind and ate pizza instead. Which is just as well because I’d already made up my mind about the title of the post, should the movie merit one. Skyfault. What if I totally enjoyed it? But that wasn’t the reason I turned my back. 

Between pizza and Daniel Craig, the one that I had the more realistic chance of actually eating prevailed.

Asus! 1.0

Antanga-tanga pala nating lahat, and we were bred to be so.

At about this time last year I had to take my trusty Dell XPS M1330 to a shop in faraway QC to have the motherboard replaced. In other words and to skip the brain-freezing techieness, it died. I vowed that I’d get myself a new one within the year but it never happened because shortly thereafter this wonderful thing called Ultrabooks happened. And because I’m cautious about gadgets and would rather be a late adopter than stuck with a clunker I opted to wait until the 2nd and 3rd incarnations before I got myself one.

So the new ones are here, and they’re more wonderful and I got one.

I’ve been staunchly anti-Apple for many years now not because they’re inferior machines or I couldn’t afford them but because they’ve become fashion accessories and I didn’t want to belong to that group of people who used these powerful devices for frivolous activities in public places. Now that this group has migrated to mobile devices, I like Macs already. But I like the new Windows devices better.

The manufacturers finally understand what Apple had known all along. Make the products scarce.

Don’t skimp on the specs, load them up with the best stuff, design them to the point of distraction, and drive prices up to or way beyond Apple levels. Samsung and Asus are getting it. Toshiba is still compromising. Everyone’s raving about Samsung Series 9. Asus’ UX32VD is always out of stock in online stores. They’re almost as or more expensive than equivalent Apple products. And no one’s gushing about or buying Toshiba’s Portege, which was my first Ultrabook crush.

Then two days ago I read Cialdini’s Influence: Psychology of Persuasion and the gazillobytes of observation data accumulated over many many years whirred and clicked into place. Kaya pala! Nothing new, nothing groundbreaking. Mostly common sense stuff we already know, or do deliberately or unknowingly.

The moral lesson is: Antanga-tanga pala natin.

 (To Be Continued...)