RONJ-BLOG

Monday, September 1, 2008

[RAW] IKEA in the Philippines!

IKEA is not here yet but some enterprising entrepreneurs are selling IKEA products here.

One has a shop somewhere in Kamuning, Quezon City. Visit http://ikeaph.multiply.com/

A second one has shops in New Manila and in Makati near Bautista St. Visit http://rooms101.multiply.com/, and http://newmanila23.multiply.com/

Very limited selection though. I noticed that the prices though are as much as 50% to 100% more expensive than IKEA Singapore prices. Oh well. Beats going to Singapore, I guess.

[RAW] wikiHow

have i mentioned wikiHow on RAW? well here's a sampler. it may just become a regular feature on RONJIE.COM. or, go checkout the site yourself. many other interesting content and useful stuff there. :-D

[FOG] SUDOKU

NOTES:

If Sudoku doesn't load properly, please refresh this page (Press F5 or Ctrl+R).
When you refresh this page, the Sudoku game also changes.
Sorry, answers are not given. You'll have to figure it out yourself! But if you send me the puzzle, I can have it solved (and even checked if it has multiple solutions).

[did you know?] eating vegetarian

eating vegetarian is not good. you would want to BE a vegetarian, than to EAT a VEGETARIAN.

okay, enough of the corny jokes. but did you know eating vegetarian - not only is it healthier - but you help save the planet. apparently, raising cows, lambs, swine, and poultry to turn them into yummy meat releases more CO2 that we and this planet could do without.

what can be our source of protein? nuts, beans, and dairy products (e.g. milk). hmmm. a warning though based on experience: soy milk (beans!), while they are good for you, drinking even just a glass per day could result in above-normal levels of uric acid which could lead to the very painful and deadly gout!

if you can't do without meat, eat fish meat instead. if fish meat everyday doesn't feel satisfying, pick white meat instead of red meat. go veggie!

[wikiHow] How to Manage Priorities Using Microsoft Excel

How to Manage Priorities With Excel
from wikiHow - The How to Manual That You Can Edit

Writing your priorities on paper works if you’re able to knock them off in an afternoon. With a torrent of incoming tasks at home or work, many get carried over to the next day (or week or month). This Excel spreadsheet watches approaching deadlines and shifts task priorities accordingly. In 20 minutes the steps below provide a more effective way to manage your priorities.

Steps

Create a "Home" or "Office" tab. Open a new Excel spreadsheet. Right click on the "Sheet1" tab at the bottom and click on Rename. Type in "Home" or "Office".
Rename Sheet2 as "Template" and Sheet3 as "Points" by repeating Step 1.
Create the Importance table. On the Points tab, fill in columns A, B and C:
Define the name "Importance". Select from Cell A2 to C7. Click on Insert Name Define Define the name as "Importance" and click OK.
Create the Effort Table. Repeat steps 3, 4 and 5 to create the Effort table in columns E, F, and G. Select cells E2 to G6 and give them the name "Effort".
Create the Urgency table. Repeat steps 3, 4 and 5 to create the Urgency table in columns I, J and K. Name them "Urgency".
Enter headings on Home tab. Click on the Home tab and insert headings in row 1:
- A - Priority A formula, 1 for the most important task, but can be over 100
- B - Task Name of the task.
- C - Importance An A, B, C, D, E, or F from the table.
- D - Effort A 1-5, from the Effort table.
- E - Urgency A formula based on Due date.
- F - Due Date when the task should be finished. Due dates are not hard and fast. Ramp Up tells you how early you could start the task and Extension tells you how many days it could slide. Getting a haircut might have a Ramp Up of 5 and an Extension of 4 - it doesn’t make sense to get a haircut 2 weeks early and people might notice if it was more than 5 days late.
- G - Ramp Up Days prior to Due date you could start task.
- H - Extension Automatic extension of Due date
- I - Days Left Formula. Number of days before Due date; negative if Due date has passed.
- J - Finished Date task was actually completed.
- K - Comment Any details for the task.
Enter your list of tasks. Note Priority, Urgency and Days Left are left blank. They will be filled in with formulas. Here’s a sample of home tasks.
Enter formulas for Days Left, Urgency and Priority. The formulas below are for row 2.
- I (Days Left) =F2-IF(ISBLANK(J2),TODAY(),J2)
- E (Urgency) =IF(I2>G2,5,IF(I2>0,4,IF(I2=0,3,IF(I2+H2>0,2,1))))
- A (Priority) =VLOOKUP(C2,Importance,2,FALSE) + VLOOKUP(D2,Effort,2,FALSE) +VLOOKUP(E2,Urgency,2,FALSE)
Change the format for Cell I2 to Integer by right clicking on the cell, selecting format and make it a Number with 0 Decimal places.
Copy formulas for Priority, Urgency and Days Left to the remaining cells in each column. Select cell E2 and type CTRL-C. Select cells E3 to E10 and click CTRL-V. Repeat to copy cell I2 to cells I3 to I10. Finally, repeat to copy cell A2 to cells A3 to A10. Ignore the odd values you get for undefined tasks.
Sort the rows by Priority. Select from cells A1 to K, for as many rows as you have data. Then click on Data Sort.
Save your priorities spreadsheet, including the date for versioning.
Mark tasks Finished. As you complete tasks, mark the date in the Finished column. Remember CTRL-; (control key and semi-colon) immediately enters the current date.
Watch Priorities change each day. Here are the priorities over several days. On July 13 all tasks are before the Ramp Up period, so have large numbers. On July 20th, higher priorities (smaller numbers) appear for four tasks, including Mow Lawn which has hit its Due date. On the 21st, the priority is higher because we're in the Extension period and on July 23rd it's even higher because it's beyond the Extension period. Pay bills also goes through an escalation on the 23rd and 25th.

Tips

Keep separate Excel files for family/home and work.
Split large tasks into smaller ones.
Read articles listed below on prioritizing and time management.
Sort the task list every day if necessary.
Copy recurring tasks to the Templates tab, so you can find and recopy them back easily.
Add conditional formats on Due date to indicate when it is overdue.
Weekly, monthly (or perhaps double that) count the number of completed tasks in each period. This may be the only positive feedback you might get on your work.
Feel free to change the points given for each part of priority.
Feel free to add more columns - who assigned the task, category, etc.
Use AutoFilter to select past due tasks (Urgency=1) or highly important tasks (Importance="A")

Warnings

Save the spreadsheet every few sessions for recovery.
The calculated priorities are not ordinal numbers. Completing a “1” priority task doesn’t shift all the others up. Priorities can range to over a hundred and not all numbers are possible. Focus usually on priorities between 1 and 12.
Don't worry about having too many tasks - even two months of tasks can wait at the bottom of the list until their due date approaches.
Time management is highly personal and this spreadsheet may not fit with your needs and preferences. It may feel intrusive or just too demanding to visit daily. It may work for you, but not your friends or vice versa.
Instead of carrying your Excel files with you all the time, use Google Spreadsheet so your files will always be available to you.

Related wikiHows

Article provided by wikiHow, a collaborative writing project to build the world's largest, highest quality how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Manage Priorities With Excel. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.

[Repeat] The Great Mathematician

Every new RONJIE.COM issue will feature some repeat articles from the past, to be able to "bring out to the world" some early RONJIE.COM posts. Warning: I do not necessarily have the same thoughts, ideas, or beliefs today as from so many years back.

Repeated Article
"The Great Mathematician"
Originally from the Prustrations blog (now also under Reactions+Reflections)
October 11, 2003

Our Lord, our God, is a Mathematician. He defined our nature with constants and systems of equations, from the simple up to the most complex partial differential equations, that up to this date, we, human beings, as a whole, have not yet figured out completely. In engineering and science and research, this is what we seek to do, to define phenomena with mathematics. Up to this point, we engineers and scientists and researchers have not yet fully captured the behavior of natural material and phenomena with exact, very defining equations.

In the future--and this I dare say--we will come to that point were we will all, human beings as a whole, will have figured everything out. And there shall be pride among us. And we shall forget nothing but our purpose on this earth. And people and nations, left and right, shall claim to the success of man, the discovery of the perfect nature that God alone created. And love shall vanish. And when people realize that it is vanished, it shall be too late. The end of world shall dawn. And a new world shall arise. And the story of Genesis shall be re-written.

This shall all happen, when we forget our purpose here on earth. That we are to love our God and our Creator, and one another.

Let us not forget our purpose on earth. Let us not forget that we are created out of love, and that love we should create, that this may forever remain a prophecy.

[Repeat] The Matrix The Movie Trilogy

This is a repeated article about a movie review. Please note that my views or beliefs may have changed from the time I originally posted this article.

Repeated Article
The Matrix The Movie Trilogy
Originally the first post of a new blog of its own!
January 4, 2004

I'd rate them...

TWO THUMBS UP! ...I do have two thumbs. And well, if you believe in Zodiac signs, I'm a Gemini, and thus I'm a "Twin", I have split personalities, both of which give the movie a thumb up. Thus, my pathetic justification for two thumbs up. Two thumbs, same direction... That's providence. (Hey, can you try to determine for yourself which statements are serious, and which are sarcastic? Alright, thanks!)

FIVE OUT OF FIVE! ...Did I mention that it's just a movie? You know, some novels are great, and then they become great movies (or not). This was a movie, and was a movie. Get it? No? I did not think so. But it is always good to ask.

Others rate them...

ONE THUMB UP, or THREE OUT OF FIVE.

I say, are you trying to compare this movie with other movies? Didn't your mother tell you that comparing is not good for anyone!!!!??? Why compare The Matrix with The Godfather or Lord of the Rings? Come on! That's not fair!

Anywho, others say that the visuals are great, but the audibles? Hmmm, you know what, now I'm thinking, what college degree did the Wachowskis finish?

Well, I respect everybody's opinions. But I must say, The Matrix got all the praises, Reloaded got mixed emotions, Revolutions weeded out the real fans from the movie-hoppers! And people tend to talk a lot about the dialogues, the "MWAM" (Matrix Within A Matrix) Theory, the MWAMWAM theory, the visual effects, and so on and so forth. But there's more to that. So read the next paragraph because this is the last sentence of this paragraph.I'd like to react more about the symbols and the messages we can get from the movie.

There was this Filipino movie, which was rated "X", or basically, it was for adults only, and it had really explicit adult scenes, I guess. {I think I was referring to the movie "Warat."} Thus getting banned from public showing, getting all the hype, getting attention from "freedom-of-speech users", getting cut, getting a new rating (something like rated "R"), and finally, getting showed to a very curious public. People watched it and said, "There's no story, it's all about sex, sex, sex." Well, of course, we could say, yes, fornication is a bad thing. But there was a message in that movie; i.e., there was a story! And the story was that, there were these two people who fornicated, found out they were step siblings, and in the end, their lives were ruined. Pretty simple, but, I don't know, people didn't see that. Was it too obvious? Instead, people saw SEX SEX SEX. Well I guess if you put a BIG RED DOT beside a tiny green one on a big white canvas, it's easier to notice the color RED.

My point is, beyond the nice computer graphics, "wire-fu" coreography, and juicy dialogues... There was more to The Matrix movies. There were symbols, and hidden or shall I say, "watermark" messages.

Oh well, let me spoil for you one of these "watermark" messages. When I finished watching Revolutions with a friend, she could only say, though in another language, and hereby paraphrased in a way because I forgot her exact line: "The movie screamed nothing but FAITH. I saw nothing but FAITH FAITH FAITH. All I saw in the movie was FAITH." Haha...

Well perhaps, what you easily see first in a movie would be something that reflects of you. I did say PERHAPS, okay? I could paraphrase that statement, still. Anyhow, so I guess this series of short "reactions" to parts and parcels of the movie would be more about things that I, the author, relate to, or something like that. Thus, you may view these posts as viewed from another point of view, some of which might be similar from where you're at.

Get it? I hope so! Enjoy this BLOG!

p.s.Did I tell you guys that it's 4:30AM? Thus, pardon my weirdness, please. Thank you. :-)

[sub-labels: CPC movies]