Interloper View

I heard of Ray Kroc when some people approached me to join a multi-level marketing group, using him as an example how networking and franchising can help make me rich. I joined the group for a short time but was not really successful in it. As a result of the above experience, I was intrigue when I heard of The Founder, a movie about Ray Kroc. I was able to identify with him the challenges of trying to sell five-spindle milkshake maker, the frequent rejection he had to face (but I did not find his sales pitch that convincing). His experience with the slow service and wrong orders at the various dining establishments are still present today. It was incredible to see how Dick was able to remove all things that did not add value to their business and developing a process that made their restaurant very efficient while maintaining quality and consistency. However, Ray Kroc found more value in the brand name. One of the things Ray learned when he recruited franchisees was

I just finished reading Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. It introduces the theory of thin slices where attention of details performed within a second or two can tell us a lot. One of the examples provided in the book involves a marble known as kouros. The problem was first identified by Federico Zeri, an Italian art historian. He could immediately see that the kouros did not look right but was not able to articulate the problem. The next person was Evelyn Harrison, one of the world's foremost experts on Greek sculpture. In both cases, it sounds like intuition. This was confirmed much later that the kouros is fake. The gift of reading deeply into the narrowest slivers of experience is incredible and is present in many professions. Imagine making quick and accurate decision using this approach and if this is part of what it means to be human, the potential is immense. Our unconscious thought process is more superior when the choices become more complicated (and we have to ju

The anime is also known as Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso. This is the kind of anime that you either love or hate. It was hard to see the suffering the protagonist had to go through as his friends try to support him but were not able to reduce his pain. The following are the characters in the anime and my thoughts: Arima, Kousei is protagonist who was known as the human metronome because of his piano playing ability at a very young age. He was unable to hear his own music soon after his mother passed away. He has given up playing the piano but held on through his assignments in school.  As far as he is concern, he has no other skills other than playing piano but he has lost that due to his disability. As the story progress we are given a glimpse of his tortured childhood where he is forced to play piano and nothing else. He started taking up piano again after much pestering from Kaori Miyazono. Miyazono, Kaori is a free-spirited violinist introduced to Kousei Arima by his childh

Imagine being in high school and believing that everyone hates you - that is what Handa Kun believes and as a result he has creates a wall between him and everybody else in school. Due to his paranoia, he was unapproachable and those around him mistakes his actions and get the wrong impression about him. The story takes us through his experience and how those who felt threatened by him ended up becoming his fan. As his fan base grew, our hero is totally unaware and just see more and more threats. All these events makes for a very funny anime. Some examples of the situations are as follows: When one of the girls in his class tried to confess to him, he thought the letter was a chain letter like the ones he used to get and refused to read it. When he threw the letter away without reading it, another classmate (the best friend to the girl who wrote the letter)  scolded him and then pushed the girl to confess to him. Instead of confessing, she asked him to see him after cla

I had the privilege to drive Perodua Bezza for last week for five days. I had not read much about the car prior to using it so had used it without any expectation. I am impressed with the experience. The one I used was of the highest range which cost RM 50k. I was initially uncomfortable with the keyless feature. I was afraid of dropping it or misplacing it but got used to it after one day. One thing I missed was the lack of auto lock. All cars I have driven since the introduction of central locking has that feature. To make up for the lack of feature, the remote control will only unlock the driver door by default, you can open all the doors if you press the remote longer. The idle stop is an interesting feature, when the feature is enabled, pressing the brake (and holding it down), the engine will be turned off when the car is fully stationary. It will stay off up to three minutes if the driver continue to apply the brake. However, if you are like me and prefer to take your le

I recently watch this anime that was in Mandarin with English subtitle. The story revolves between a girl and two brothers. She met him while crossing the road without looking. He knocked her down and caused him to lose the food he was delivering. This chance encounter explains why she calls him and why he calls her stupid girl. The anime consist of 24 episodes. The development was good, the first episode focus on her looking for a job as a fresh graduate at a job fair (where thousand of others are doing the same thing). Later she receives a text to attend an interview at night. While walking towards the interview, she looked around and realized that the building looked spooky. She then started thinking of why a company would call her for an interview so late in the night - human traffickers or organ traders. By then she was lost in Rakshasa Street filled with demon soldiers. Turns out that she is in a place for the dead and humans are forbidden there. I enjoyed the story.

Term Life is a story of Nick Barrow, who plans heist, but does not participate in them. A failed heist resulted in the death of the son of a cartel leader, Victor Fuente. Victor believed his kid was killed by Nick and wanted to kill Nick for it. The movie was slow in the beginning, but as the movie progressed I started enjoying it. Nick kept away from his daughter, Hailee because he did not want her to be involved in his world of crime. However, he had to went Victor sent his men after her. Hailee did not want anything to do with him either slowly grew to understand and love him. It was interesting to see how Nick uses his understanding of human behavior to plan out his work and how he uses it to hide in plain sight - especially when he told his daughter using wigs and sunglasses will make her stand out instead of helping her hide her identity. Later she asked him to show her how she plans out his heists. He did that by describing how to knock off a bakery - number one knowi

This is an R rated movie and not a movie for children, so this is not one of those movies that I want my children to watch. The movie beginning was refreshing, Martha’s classmates shared what they wanted to be when they grow up - policeman, lawyer etc, but she came out and said that she is a T-Rex. Years later, she was having problem finding the right man and her best friend was trying to help her after her last boyfriend cheated on her. Mr Right is a reverse hitman, instead of killing people he is assigned to kill, he kills the ones who hired him. He noticed her in a convenience store and immediately took a liking to her and asked her out. Even though he told her that he is a hitman, she thought it was a joke until much later in the movie. After finding out that he is a real killer, she tried to break up with him but could not. Instead, he promised not to kill, even though there were many people out to kill him. Great jokes throughout the movie and love how the way he kills

“We get what we measure”, that is why I want to measure my cash flow to make sure that I am spending within my means. Quicken has been helped me do that for a long time, but I wondered whether that is any open source solution able to replace Quicken. GnuCash and KMyMoney are close enough to fulfilling my requirements but there are gaps. Encryption and password Files created with Quicken can be protected with password. I am able to do that by encrypting KMyMoney file using Gpg4Win but not for GnuCash. KMyMoney recognizes the encryption will prompt for the password when I open the file. No such feature is available in GnuCash. Accounts and category Quicken and KMyMoney support both accounts and categories. However, GnuCash supports only accounts. In Quicken and KMyMoney, when a new category is entered, the software will prompt with an option to create it. Categories can be organized as subcategories of other categories. For KMyMoney new account or sub-account have to b

I had this book for a couple of years but only started reading it a couple of weeks ago without any expectation. The story starts with a young maiden (Edyt) standing over her dying father as the Norman invaders entered the gates of their castle. Edyt then hid in plain side as one of the maids to avoid marriage with the Norman Lord (Alain De Crency) - Rufus, the king of England had promised her as a bride to him. It was fascinating to see how she attempted to protect Alain while pretending to be one of the maids in the castle. Even after her identity was revealed, new elements were introduced to keep me interested. It was obvious that the knights and servants of the castle loved her and would anything for her and that she in turn wanted to keep them save even though she expected to be killed at any moment. She believed that she was evil and was a daughter of Satan and if her secrets were discovered she would be burned as a witch. The pace of the development of the

I took my children to watch this movie last night. It is a Japanese live action version of a popular anime series (with English subtitles). I was surprised that both of them immediately agreed to watch the movie at night.  This is the first time my daughter has been to the movies at night. The poster for the movie is a picture of a person with a smiley face was not very impressive. However, after watching the movie, I found it funny and understand why my children wanted to watch the movie. The story is about an octopus-like creature threatening to destroy the world on March of the following year. The creature had just destroyed a large part of the moon leaving only a crescent. It is strange that such a powerful creature wants to be a teacher for 3-E of a prestigious Kunugigaoka Junior High School. It appears that the creature was fulfilling a promise to a former teacher to class 3-E. The students gave the teacher a  nickname Koro Sensei. As the movie progress, we get to learn