Recycling campaign

This morning while going through feeds, I found this very interesting as it symbolizes the life cycle of a plastic a male and female milk container. Starting from the factory till grave. Ends up the male milk container was trashed in dump, instead of ending up recycling like the female milk container.

<p>A Love Story… In Milk from Catsnake on Vimeo.</p>

It remains me of a program lead by EHWM at Chulalongkorn University to recycle used mobile battery, with the sponsorship from Nokia. Initiatives like this should be spread around the society to create environmental responsibility awareness.

Useful tips for View Manager

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Providing management reports fast and accurate.

Management reporting (1) has been a topic of interest for corporates to efficiently operate and stay in the game. However, in my years of dealing with management reporting issues, these are the findings I often encounter

• Reporting times are extended well over value period

• Reporting limited to summary level only after disconnected from detail

• No transparency or linked integration available on detail

From careful observation, it was found that data aggregation process requires multiple feeds and iterative massaging with time critical manual processes in final stages, not to mention that data mitigation on errors not visible or accountable plus data credibility present on organizational & segment change. Also, the reports are unconnected with no direct ability to prove, qualify or drill to externally, leaving no option or ability intelligent for business unit level modeling logic. These observations are not limited to the size of the company, in fact, it is even more complex in large organizations.

At this level, it seems almost impossible to achieve what management reports supposed to offer e.g. correct, unambiguous and informative KPIs and reports, increased analytical capabilities and performance management support. Since, what are the most important month-end reports for the CFO and CEO and why is even monthly reporting now too slow? Some suggests putting datawarehouse in place to solve the problem, some suggest using BI. But does that really get rid of all the observations listed prior, maybe not as there are also external influences that much be dealt with. Also, to what level must the detail of the information be? What is considered best practices for management reporting performance, dashboard and KPI. What are they real key figures that drives the business, are among the questions that one also faces when revamping this whole management reporting exercise. IMO, finding the right tool is part of the solution, getting the ones who knows what they’re doing is the ultimate solution.

5 things that Thai Music Society should adapt.

Last week I had a change to read scopes (1,2,3)on the how soaring in revenue generation Thai music faces. It mentions that nowadays, it’s even hard to have a breakeven for an album. The reason occurs from shrinkage of consumer buying and widespread of online music sharing (pirate copying) etc.

After analyzing, here are my suggestions on what Thai music society should do to get their revenue numbers up.

1.       Introduce better artist – Let’s admit it, over 80% of Thai Artist aren’t really considered artist. Let’s not debate about the definition of artist here, but I’m sure there are several good examples that you can reference too e.g. Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Utada. What we need here are true and passion artists that puts all their efforts in producing a piece of music. Korean artist is a good example where artists go over years and years of training and coaching before they can even debut.

2.       Utilize social media wisely – be Facebook, twitter, iPad, iPod and iTunes, you name it. Music and technology doesn’t seem to blend here that much in Thailand, we do see some record company building the empire of digital songs, but let’s admit it – how much sales does it make compared to itunes? An complete end-to-end utilization of social media for Thai songs industry is rarely to find, would take about 3-4 years before we even get there.

3.       More live performance and concerts.  – We don’t see many live performance here in Thailand, maybe it’s due to limited sponsors or what so ever. Concerts and performance are first class revenue generators. Thai artist has an average of 1 concert per year.

4.       Edutainment – Mixing education and entertainment is also not found here. Activities that promote both learning and entertainment is considered a “NO NO” for Thai artist as they go only by the “contract”, so one will ever see Bird Thongchai appearing in public school activities.

5.       Packaging and marketing – If you happen to visit a CD store (online or offline) in Thailand, you rarely see a package interesting enough to grab and buy. Japan, Korea and Taiwan are among the leaders in packaging and marketing.

I wish Thai Music Society survive and grow strong. Let’s hear more of your opinion.

Tthe difference between Page and Group on Facebook.

For those who are using Facebook intensively, you might run into this question as same as me.

“What's the difference between Page and Group in Facebook?”

Facebook provides a tip about it here.  However, from my experience in using it, here’s how I see it.

Facebook Page : One way communication between the page and it’s page. Fans can contribution to the page if allowed. Security is always public, so it is recommended for a public figure or organizations and company that want to promote their activities as it offers promotions and advertisement, supported with a nice “Insights” Dashboard showing sites statistics.

Facebook Group : Multi communication between members in the group. Security can be either public or private (Facebook calls it open or close respectively, therefore it is recommended for communication in small groups. It’s been said that now there are over 50 Million groups created.

So why not give it a try and see how it lead you.

ธรรมเทศนาของหลวงพ่อปราโมทย์

520315.pdf Download this file

ในวันวิสาขบูชา ขอนำ ธรรมเทศนาของหลวงพ่อปราโมทย์ มาแบ่งปัน

Source : http://www.wimutti.net

Blog, Photos and Guestbook discontinued in Yahoo! Pulse

There goes another “content” chest, down the drain. As noted below, Yahoo! Pulse Blogs, Photos and Guestbook will turned into read-only mode starting May 16, 2011, and within a month time, the service will be completely removed. It’s away sad to see these kind of announcement, especially in “human” contribution areas like blogs and photos. Social medias like Facebook or twitter really doesn’t offer the “blogging” type, just a “mini-blogging” wall to post things which will eventually get flushed too.

AIS's MPay website fonts color

Online payment and internet banking in now considered a normal channel for consumers to pay their bills, rents and services.

In Thailand, AIS as Thailand’s largest mobile operator offers a service named MPAY allowing mobile payment. If one doesn’t have any questions about fees and service allow, they won’t have faced the problem I’m facing while trying to go through their website for Q&A.

(snap shot taken 5/19/2011 3:44 PM)

While navigating through the website, I’ve noticed that the background color used blended completely with the fonts used, white and white. In order to read the text, you would have to select the area to highlight it.

As if there was no quality control about this release at all, making hard for the customer to guess the text behind. I hope others will realized and poke this to whom may concern at AIS to correct this.

Private messages from hotmail no longer in service.

It’s official now, effective from May 2011, the private message feature will be removed from Windows Live.

No more “secret” messages folks!

Is Chromebook worth trying?

My answer would be of course, however, you have a least a couple of this behavior listed

-          Internet savvy :  spending most of your time on the net. Things like updating status, checking out what and where friends are, check emails, online trading and chilling out at recommended bars are the among the things you do daily.

-          On the go : confortable with being mobile and always on the go.

-          Techorati type : always happy to learn and discuss new widgets or web apps.

-          Always connected : either HiSpeed ADSL, 3G, 4G, Wifi, Edge, GPRS.

So if you find yourself in the above list, then go for it.

However, a tip, beware that you’ll be totally doomed if your internet is cut or the cloud service somehow died, since all of your files and information are on the cloud. Lately, an disturbed outage of the cloud effected millions of users on blogger. (ZDNET) Also, your stored files could be hacked and intercepted as this was just disclosed on the popular service offered by dropbox. (WIRED)

Chem75 May 2011 gathering

Venue : Ebisu Shabu 6pm onwards

Again, a nice gathering among Chem Eng friends. A total of 7 friends joined, including Art, Tui, Ta, me, Art, Tom and Wish.

Conversation topics covers from updates of each other, projects, topics of interest e.g. renew energy, society and politics.

Updates

·         Art still works at Mitrpol, single.

·         Tui running his own company.

·         Ta has been working at Bangchak for the past 7 years dealing with crude oil trades

·         Art is planning to get married with his engineering girlfriend

·         Tom still works at RSB.

·         Wish runs his own ranch at Kao Yai.

The group decided to meet again 1 week after the election, July 10, 2011 at Oishi opposite to the old แดนเนรมิต

Videos from the event (comment ได้)

Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office

After using Google docs and Microsoft’s Office Web app for a sometime, I notice there is gap overlaid between these 2 services.

·         Both Google docs and Skydive (Microsoft’s Office Web app storing) enables collaboration between colleague and team members as the team can either view or edit the document directly,

·         Both offers an online web editing, although I have to admit that Microsoft did a better job for their function, whereas Google only provided simple formatting tools for each document type, hence it would be almost impossible to create a presentable presentation on Google docs embedded / enhanced with 3d graphics and effects.

·         When dealing with revisions and changes in the document, Google has it all, whereas in Skydive, you got to enable the tracking features.

·         When dealing with sharing features, with Google’s richer integrating with gmail, sharing is a not hassle. In Skydive, you still got to muck around with the folder settings and properties.

So, each world has its strong point, and being able to merge or combine them would be something really neat.

Surfing through the net, I found this tool create by Google as a plugin for Microsoft Office that enables Office documents to be uploaded and shared in the Google docs cloud in the exact same way!

This plugin is calls Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office. After installation, open an Office document, the plug-in will load and check if the document contains a document ID, if not, it will create an ID and upload this to your Google docs directory, with a hash key that stamps the time to the file. As mentioned, earlier, you should be able to share this document with anyone similar to what you can do in Google docs. You should also can control who can view, or edit the file.

Shown below, I managed to add people via their emails, HOWEVER, it seems that I can’t change if they can either only view or edit the document since the drop down button won’t react to my click. I believe up to the moment of this posting, Google has been notified of this problem so a fix should be out soon.

This plugin support Microsoft Office 2003, 2007 and 2010.