Brand yourself

Just finished a book “The Dip” and one of the key ideas evangelize by the author is about making yourself as the best in your own industry, such that you can develop your desired career – a little bit easier. I am sure it is right and nothing is impossible – but nothing is easy as well. The very first difficult thing is how to tell other people you are one of the best in your industry.

In the world of Internet, one way to advertise yourself naturally is to brand yourself in the popular social networks such as Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter. All these social networks have a profile page that you can dress it up with good information about yourself. For example, you can include your friends’ recommendations in Linkedin and your interests / groups in Facebook. Both will let your friends or potential employers understand more about you.

And for Twitter, looks like not much you can do with its simple profile page. However, inspired by Twitterbacks.com, you can actually beautify the background image of your Twitter profile and include some important information about your twits.

And, here is mine … how’s that ?

Twitter Profile

WordPress 2.7.1 upgrade

WordPress 2.7 is not new but I just managed to upgrade it two weeks ago. I have delayed this major upgrade for quite some time because you know making a major upgrade is quite a pain. You need to disable all the plug-ins, back up the database, download the software, unzip the new software, transfer to the host, then upgrade the database and software … of course, with a hope that everything runs fine. It is not a pleasant one hour, you know.

However, one major selling point to me about version 2.7 is you can now upgrade the software easily (after the above tedious step for version 2.7), that’s why I made the jump two weeks ago.

Then a couple of days ago, WordPress released the vesion 2.7.1 … oh, perfect time to test the automatically upgrade utility. Just backup the database as usual, then go to the Tools menu of the 2.7 dashboard, click upgrade option and confirm the upgrade.

15 seconds later, the upgrade is done !! Perrrrrrfect.

Wordpress 2.7

User Experience – Fare Conversion Table Part 2

One year ago I blogged about how stupid the taxi fare conversion table was designed. Just around end 2008, there was another taxi fare adjustment and therefore our clever Government officials published another fare conversion table and it looks pretty much like that:

So every time after the taxi journey, the driver and you need to find the adjusted taxi fare from this table. And I can tell you, it is a tough job as your eyes need to keep hunting the correct numbers. And the problem is about how the table was designed.

Can you see how this table is designed ? Every 5 fare amount figures are grouped together, but it is not grouped based on the fare amount (e.g. ~$20, ~$30, ~$40 etc.). You may wonder why it is designed that way … and then I found out the reason. The amount figures are grouped per kilometer !! So the first group is the fare amount within the first extra one kilometer, the second group is about the second extra kilometer.

So, why it is designed that way ? Who will search the correct fare amount this way, other than the super smart Government officials ? And here is my design of this new fare amount conversion table. Is it a lot easier to use ? Of course 🙂