We had our team’s Christmas dinner at Twist (which, incidentally, was the caterer for the company Christmas party in Speedzone, The Fort, last Sunday). The food was great — loved the roast beef, and oyster (the hollandaise was a bit icky, though). And for Php500++, the buffet was a steal.
We exchanged gifts, basing on the gift registry wiki we set up. Here’s what I got:
Before the dinner, we had our year-end team performance report. Guess who came out on top. 
And for those endless parsing of log files and lab-environment setup, I got a rip-off iPod nano. Yay. 
(I’m having it replaced with a real one, hopefully. Hehe.)
Check out RFC 2397, which defines a new scheme that let’s you embed data into a URL. Using the data: URI scheme, you can now encode binary files as links on any web page. Here’s a pic.
To encode a file, you can use this CGI program.
[via Lifehacker]
Christmas gift exchanges, that is.
Here at work, we’ve also set up our own. Unfortunately, we only have until Friday to pick Php300-worth gifts for our Kringles. To, er, “facilitate” the process, we put up a wiki where we can anonymously post our wishlist and gift preferences.
I know, that takes away the creativity, but we’re so sunk in work that we’d rather do this down-and-dirty rig just to keep up with the holiday spirit.
Some of the wishes are pretty interesting, though. Where can one find a sake bottle, for example? Who would have thought of a “Bratz Petz Dogz“?
As give-away for the global year-end report, we were given Cube World Digital Stick People:
Cool.
Some quotes from the executives:
Be cool, but not cocky. Be constructive, not merely complaining. Cooperate, don’t compartmentalize.
Instead of meeting competition head-on right in that wide red ocean, seek the river and a blue ocean of our own.
The current trend in the Philippines is business process outsourcing. Hello, we’ve been doing that for ten years now — we can claim to be the first global company to set up a full-blown IT shop in the country.
We won’t outsource R&D and support — our core competencies. Why would we move away from what we are strongest?
[Big-name IT company] suffers from a credibility problem in the security space. They’re not likely to take away that edge from us anytime soon.
We are always open to changes, so long as they are consistent with our core values.
We thrive in our willingness to make mistakes, and of not being afraid in making them.
