Every year on the 26th of January, families all around the country gather together to celebrate Australia Day. Its the day that celebrates the anniversary of the 1788 arrival of the First Fleet of British Ships at Port Jackson, NSW. But this day also marks the beginning of occupation for the aboriginal people of Australia. So some call for the date to be changed, chose a more inclusive date to celebrate Australia.
But alas that hasn’t happened yet.
This was my first year participating in festivities and that is where I learned all about the history, but also saw some antique cars!
Нашел вот такое уморительное видео про то как мама пытается сыну отправить файл по емейлу. Концовка вообще убойная, не ожидал прихода бабушки. Советую всем посмотреть.
Конечно у меня мама более продвинутая, она сама умеет книги на планшет скачивать, но когда-то и она вот так с компьютером общалась.
For Shafts 40th anniversary they made a special promotion called Madogatari, where they crossed Madoka and Monogatari. Which spawned some truly amazing art and merch. I wish I was in Japan to experience it, but alas.
However I have found something of equal beauty! A cross between Toradora and Monogatari. My two favorite shows together in one; can you imagine?! And what makes it even better, its Kugimiya Rie (Taiga’s voice actor) singing.
The song is Renai Cerculation, with my Taiga. Prepare for cuteness overload.
I don’t really read many books, but when I do, they affect me in a big way. This book made me question the processes we follow and actions we take in our everyday lives, and evaluate their value in terms of achieving “The Goal”. It was published in 1984, but the concepts that it covers are still relevant to this day. Personally, I strive for perfection and getting the most value out of everything I do and that happens around me. Trying to minimise wasted time and effort, and achieving most results with minimal expenses (financial and other).
The Goal is a novel, which tells the story of Alex, a plant manager somewhere in the USA. And through Alex, the author (Goldratt) shows us how to apply the Theory of Constraints to an organisation and increase its productivity. In the begging of the story Alex’s plant is suffering major losses and he is told that it may have to shut down. However to battle this Alex needs to understand the problems that the plant is facing, aside from the obvious late shipments and loss of revenue. He accidentally bumps into his university professor (Jonah), who, as we find out later on, is a specialist in TOC, so he is able to guide Alex through the process of changing the daily operations of the plant and battle the dreadful situation that it is in.
What makes the story interesting is that Jonah is very intelligent and does not give Alex all the answers on a silver platter, he makes Alex think about the reasons behind curtains events, and guides his thoughts towards the right answers, thus making Alex realise the importance of the concepts and willing to undertake change*. “Alex, if I simply told you what to do, ultimately you would fail. You have to gain the understanding for yourself in order to make the rules work,’’ Jonah says.
* Change is probably the hardest thing for us humans. We despise it, we fight it, we avoid it, and we definitely do not wilfully undertake it when someone tells us to. That is why it is of great importance that the person themselves realise the need for change, and want to change things around them in order to achieve their goals. Anyway back to the book.
CAUTION
If you interested in reading the book, I would highly recommend that you stop reading right here as the next paragraphs will contain spoilers and will do the exact opposite of what Jonah did to Alex - give all the answers on a silver platter.
The first question Jonah asks is: What is the goal? It is very important to understand what the desired effect or outcome of any action is. As a business what do we want to achieve? By doing this particular thing, what is the purpose? This concept can apply to anything from waking up in the morning, to running a multi million dollar organisation.
Once the goal is defined, then Alex needs to understand how to measure it. For businesses there are hundreds of measurements that the senior managers and accountants have come up with to show the “real” numbers. However in any endeavour it is vital to establish measurements which work best for achieving a specific goal. In the case of a plant there there 3 measurements:
Throughput - the rate at which the system generates money through sales.
Inventory - all the money that the system has invested in purchasing things which it intends to sell.
Operational expense - all the money the system spends in order to turn inventory into throughput.
The next important concept to understand is capacity. Each resource in a system, or operation has a capacity, which is usually measured in time. “The tendency for most managers is to trim capacity wherever they can, so no resource is idle” - Jonah. It is essential to manage capacity and to have an _im_balanced system, which would work well with ‘dependant events’ and ‘statistical fluctuations’.
In production, managing the above mentioned phenomenon is key to achieving the goal. And I think that the methods of managing these can be applied to effectively anything where those two phenomenon occur, be it a university assignment, or you cooking a number of large dishes for christmas dinner, the means to achieve the goal don’t change. It would be hard to explain exactly why the system would fail if dependant events and statistical fluctuations occur without a visual guide, so here is a small article with a video to better explain it (even though the solution in that video is not exactly what we are looking for, but its still good). If you want to get the full understanding, read The Goal.
So we can see that if there are just small fluctuations, all the dependant events stall. Even if the first point in the system manages to catch up and go over what they could initially, that doesn’t increase the capacity of the next link, thus limiting it to its own capacity and falling behind on materials. As Goldratt explained in The Goal, these limitations in capacity of a resource are called constraints.
A resource is considered a constraint if its capacity is limited and it is a required link in the chain of production. So if a person, machine, event must happen in order for the whole operation to reach the goal, and that thing is bound by a measurement - be it time, energy, speed, etc, then it needs to be examined, as it right there is the sole reason why the operation is being unproductive. In other words: the capacity of a constraint is the capacity of the whole system. Everything is dependant on it, and without it nothing can proceed, thats why it solely determines the capacity of the whole operation, no matter how much better all the other processes are. This also then means that all the other processes, aside from the bottlenecks (the constraints) do not need to be working 100% of the time, they can not add any productivity to the system since all their work will still be dependant on the capacity constrained resources.
Its also important to realise that constraints are not always present inside the system, they can be outside factors like demand and value. But that does not remove the need to identify the constraints and work around them. Which brings me to the the final point: what to do to be productive? You would need to do the following: identify
what to change (constraints)
what to change to (prioritisation, chunking, balancing, etc)
how to cause the change (…)
And finally as Alex put it: “I must learn these thinking processes, only then will I know that I’m doing my job.”
Featured in Project Mirai 2, this song is a great representation of the robotic nature of Miku and the song itself is rather catchy. Even though its really challenging in Expert mode in the game, I enjoy failing it every time.
When I was a kid, my parents used to take me to watch theatre plays, operas and of course symphonic orchestra performances. I’ve heard my fair share of Bethoven, Mozart, Bach, Tchaikovsky. And during my high school days, I also played a fair share of their pieces as well, while being part of the school orchestra.
But ever since I came to Australia, I haven’t had the chance to go to anything of the sort. And the only time I’ve been inside the opera house, was when I went to watch a rock concert by Tenacious D.
This November, the Sydney Symphonic Orchestra is preforming a rather unusual set of songs. They can not be defined as classical music and they were not even originally written for an orchestra. These pieces are the OST (Original Sound Track) for the Pokemon games! The concert is called Pokemon Symphonic Evolutions and the orchestra performed a variety of soundtracks from all Pokemon generations 1-6. It was truly a beautiful experience to hear soundtracks that defined your childhood performed as a symphony.
And then hen at the end, after all 6 generations, the orchestra played the opening theme from the Pokemon anime - Gotta Catch ‘em All! You wouldn’t believe how excited the audience was for this. I think this was the only time when signing was appropriate during a symphonic orchestra; even better, the conductor conducted us! Watch the video bellow and you will see what I mean! Truly amazing experience, and being there with friends made it just that much better.
Every year the creative minds of Sydney gather together and present a number of exhibitions at the cove between Bondi and Bronte beaches. This event is called Sculptures by the Sea. UTS Drawing Circle, being the more creative club, organised an outing to this event, and since I have friends there and I don’t want to miss out on an opportunity to practice taking photos with my DSLR, I obviously joined in.
The weather wasn’t the best, but I managed to get some good photos. You can see all of them right here:
I’d say this was one of my most successful cosplays, if not THE most. I have cosplayed a number of different characters in the past, as outlines in this post about cosplay. But our joint NO MORE Eiga Dorobou (NO MORE映画泥棒) with Amy definitely tops the list.
SMASH! 2015 was held on the 8th and 9th of August 2015 and so we decided that I would go as the camera guy for both days. I can say for a fact, that the people loved the cosplay. We had probably over 100 photos taken in those 2 days. People were excited to see us, even though a lot of them had no idea what the cameraman or policeman were, or where we are from. Thanks to the Gintama Movie some people knew the cameraman from that, but only a handful actually recognised us as the characters from the stop movie piracy ad, played in Japan before every movie. It was a very fun experience, now lets think of what we can cosplay as next!
Who is the best villain? Well to answer this question, we must first identify who is a villain? Does he have to be human? How bad are his deeds supposed to be for us to decide wether he is a “bad guy” or a “good guy”? These questions are rather hard to answer on the spot, but I can definitely say that for me a villain is a character that acts against social norms, but not just for the sake of it, but because they have a good reason behind it. For example Lelouch is a great villain, because he has seen the world, wanted to change in, and accomplished his mission, even though he kinda screwed everyone over in the process. I like characters like that, as they have a good motive for their actions, and ultimately want change. *SPOILERS AHEAD*
The villain I have chosen is Shounen Batto from Paranoia Agent. He is supposedly this boy on rollerblades with a metal batt, whacking people on the head whenever they are in peril. Well in reality there is no Shounen Batto, he is just a materialisation of peoples stress and paranoia. They want to make their problems go away by blaming someone else - Shounen Batt. They want to be free of pressure and stress by being the victim of an accident. And they want to escape the scary reality and hide in their safe space.
This concept makes Shounen Batto the ultimate villain! Reality hits you hard - literally with a metal batt. People are afraid of it, people try avoiding it, people hide from it, because reality is scary, but you must face it! Strong people overcome hardships, can you overcome the stress and paranoia of the real world? Can you beat Shounen Batto!
Shounen eh… Thats a genre of anime that I rarely watch. I haven’t seen any of the big 3 (Naruto, Bleach, One Piece) and have ignored most of the shounen stuff that would come out in every season (with the exception of Haikyuu of course). Thats is why picking a favourite would be most challenging, if it were not for Shaman King. This was one of my first anime, actually before my first first anime, because I watched it in Russian/English dub.
Why is it great? Well simply because it has loveable characters, none of that fan service stuff, none of that filler episode crap, a clear set plot, and a lot of funny scenes. That is what makes a shounen anime great, it shows us that even a teenage boy can become the Shaman King, but as long as what he believes is right, has a clear goal, and he has fun along the way. Even though the anime is old, I would still recommend people watch it, alongside with Law of Ueki, as they are very similar (Shaman King still better though).
