I wanted to draw something for this year’s Halloween but I waited too long to start. All I was able to do is digitally paint a Jack-o-lantern and add the words “Happy Halloween” on top of it. I still have plans to finish it though.

Anyway, Happy Halloween to those who celebrate this day.

EDIT:
I was able to finish it just now. Hope you guys like it.

Click here to see the unfinished image

Before moving to Australia, the only time I have the feeling of being electricuted was when I touch an electric appliance or device that wasn’t properly grounded. Now, whenever it starts to get colder, I often get zapped with static electricity when I touch anything conductive.

Supposedly, it has something to do with the dry cool weather. When it is warm and humid, the moisture in the air helps disappate any static electricity charge you have. When it is cold and dry, the only way the static electricity gets discharged is when you touch something conductive resulting in a slight electric shock.

So, getting zapped is something you should come to expect if you are someone planning to migrate to Australia from the Philippines.

Over the years, I’ve tried of different ways to avoid getting zapped. I try to discharge the static by touching my palm on a brick or wooden wall first before touching the metal door knob. For a time, I thought it worked but I still get zapped sometimes.

Recently though, I’ve discovered a method that works the best for me. Before I touch something metallic, I would hold one of my keys and use that to touch the metallic object. I still get zapped, sure, but it isn’t as painful as touching the object directly. The key seems to distribute the charge more evenly. And before writing this short blog, I’ve read that you can do the same using a coin instead. It’s good to know that something similar to my method was something that was being recommended by others as well.

I try to avoid posting about politics in here as much as possible but a recent statement made by Prime Minister John Howard really troubled me. He said, “It’s a plan for reducing Australian jobs and not reducing Australian emissions.”

There are already a lot of arguments amade about how reduction of emissions meant those people who work for coal and oil would lose jobs and how introduction of alternate power sources will generate new jobs.

But at the end of the day, it all boils down to this: If we don’t act now to save the planet we live in, everything else won’t matter as we would all be dead anyway. It should be a no-brainer. Saving the environment should be the top most priority. Our very lives (and our children’s) depend on it.

There was a question posed to the hosts of ExtraLife Radio, one of my favourite podcasts, on its Halloween episode: what creeps you out? Since, it is nearly Halloween anyway, I thought I might also share five things that creeped me out when I was younger.

1. Baby dolls. I hate them even now, specially those with very shiny eyes that close when you tilt their heads back. Imagine a bedroom filled with dolls at night with the lights out except for the moonlight shining through the window. That little bit of light is then reflected in the eyes of these creepy baby dolls just sitting there on the shelf, always smiling and looking straight at you while you try to sleep.

2. Department store mannequins. I guess this is somewhat related to my repulsion toward dolls. When I was very young, I couldn’t stand even looking at mannequins whenever my Mom would bring me along with her to the department store. They looked very unnatural to me because, although they looked human, they were inanimate like some petrified dead person.

3. Windows without curtains (or blinds). I was afraid of opening my eyes in the middle of the night and see somebody (or something) staring down at me from the bare window. Actually, the curtains have to be thick so that I wouldn’t be able to even see the silhouette of someone standing behind the window. What did I think would be standing behind the windows? I was afraid to see a hovering aswang (Philippine vampire/ghoul) or a ghost staring at me.

4. Big old portraits like those serious black and white photos of somebody dead or religious iconographic paintings, specially those ones where the person in the portrait has eyes that seem to be looking straight at you wherever in the room you might be.

5. Odd noises in the middle of the night. One night when I was maybe ten years old while I trying to fall asleep, I heard what seemed like the cry of a very young child from afar. It was crying repeatedly, “Dad! Dad! Dad!” I looked at the clock sitting on top of the desk nearby. It was exactly midnight! What kind of father would leave his child outside at this hour, I thought. If that wasn’t suitably creepy enough, the cry started to grow louder, as if it was getting closer and closer to my bedroom window. I put my pillow on top of my head to cover my ears until I fell asleep. I guess that’s where I got my habit of sleeping with a pillow on my head. In hindsight, I now believe (or at least I want to believe) that the crying was probably just some shrieking cat.

There you go. How about you? What creeps you out?

I’m so glad I joined my Company’s Artist of the Year competition. I’m also glad that I started at the Company just a few weeks before the competition ended or I wouldn’t even have had the chance to join this year’s competition. As you may already know by now, I won the competition and I’m very thankful for the recognition, the award and prizes I got for winning.

However, just when I thought I have nothing left to be thankful for, I got this email from our division’s administrator (I’ve reworded the actual email, of course):

To: Gabriel
CC: Executive Director, HR Director, Executive Assistant
Subject: Melb (Department name) Recognition - Congratulations

Melbourne (Department name) Recognition Program

Rewarding you for your Spectacular Performance for your achievement in winning the Artist of the Year.

Congratulations on your award Gabriel! You have been nominated by the executive director and awarded a JB HI-FI voucher valued at $100.

Kind Regards,
(Department) Administrator

I couldn’t believe it! I’m very thankful to the executive director for nominating me for an additional award. A hundred bucks at JB Hi-Fi is nothing to sneeze at, too. I can buy more iPod accessories, CDs, DVDs or games with that money. I’ll most likely spend the voucher on more iPod gear though.

I told my friends at work that the drawing I submitted was like a drawing that kept on giving. And when I told Raquel about this, she said the exact same thing. Just goes to show how well we know each other, doesn’t it? I now wonder whether there will be any more future surprise prizes or awards for this one drawing. I highly doubt it but who knows?

I admit, I love my current job. I love the work and I love the other opportunities the Company is providing (such as the recent Artist of the Year competition). But there is one more thing I like about the Company (albeit a bit on the shallow side): free snacks.

That’s right. Each floor has a pantry and the pantry has these two wells, if you will, full of snacks free for the taking. There are individually wrapped Arnott’s bikkies of different types, crackers, tiny boxes of sultanas and fruit bars. The wells get refilled at least once a week.

Apart from the snack well, each pantry also has two crates sitting on the counter filled with different fruits. These boxes get emptied very quickly. Bananas seem to be the all time favourite because those disappear from the box the fastest. The trick is that once you see bananas there, take a couple immediately. Don’t wait till you feel like going for a banana as there probably won’t be any in the fruit box by the time you want to have one.

To help wash down all the free snacks, there’s free espresso from the espresso machine, free milk and free tea that comes in four flavours.

Apart from these standard free goodies, there’s the occasional free gourmet sandwiches or muffins sitting on the pantry counter. Whenever a group holds a big meeting, they will usually order sandwiches or muffins from the Company’s catering service to feed the attendees. As is usually the case, there would be a lot of left-overs from these meetings and the excess food get moved to the nearby pantry.

Lastly, there is the rare times when a visiting client from abroad decides to bring some goodies from their home country. Like this week, our client friends from the US brought back Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Nestle’s Butterfingers. How I missed those. The only time I can get these is if we buy them at USA Foods at Bentleigh.

I have recently decided to lose weight but as you can see, it is very very challenging to do so while working for this company with all these temptations. Not that I’m complaining though.

As you may well know by now, I joined The Company as a software developer about eleven weeks ago. Actually, there were three of us developers who started that day. It seemed like the managers were thinking of expanding the team. Including us newcomers, the team was nearly twenty people strong.

I like the idea of working with a bigger team. It meant that the project and product knowledge is probably spread out a bit more. It’s going to be rare that only one person knows about a bit of technology or module and such. It also meant less pressure as everything won’t hinge on only one person (specially if that one person is me).

Anyway, maybe a couple of days after joining, I discovered that one of the contractors was leaving. Well, I wasn’t too surprised by that bit of news because I already knew that there was someone from the team who applied for a job in my old company. It turned out to be that contractor who was leaving.

Then, a few days later, while going down the lifts with one senior member of the team, I discovered that he was leaving the team, too! So, that’s two people who are leaving at about the same time.

But that wasn’t all. Later on, I found out that there was another contractor who wanted to move on to a different client. He left a few weeks after the first two. The team was down three people two months since we started working there. I supposed management already knew about the three people leaving even before we got the job. So, three people joining offset the three people leaving.

However, just when I thought that we probably need more new people to compensate for those that had left, our manager, the guy that hired me, informed all of us that he had accepted a reassignment to the UK. He announced his move during our Friday team-building event at a lawn bowling club. He would still work for the Company but he would no longer be our boss or part of our team. It was certainly a shock when I heard it. He’s a very cool boss and I was partly convinced to take the job due to my interactions with him during the interview stage of my job application. I hope that if they do find a replacement for him, it will be someone who is just as cool.

Come Monday, some of us were still shaken by the news of the manager’s move to the UK. But we were to receive more shocking news. Our director announced that our team leader was retiring in a few weeks’ time. Our team leader admitted that the timing was a bit bad but she had already planned this for some time before our manager’s announcement to move.

During one morning developers’ meeting, we joked that there should be a moratorium on people resigning after the news of our team leader’s retirement. But, there was one person who didn’t get the memo. Just this week, another senior member announced that he was leaving, too.

That’s three people who have left and three people who are leaving soon. We joke that maybe we newbies jinxed the team by triggering this mass exodus of senior people. I just hope that nobody else leaves in the near future. Not until we get more knowledge and develpment experience on the product.

At least our director was kind enough to remind us of the bright side of all these senior people leaving: there would now be more window-side desks available for the rest of us.