history and statistics have shown us that one characteristic differentiates the successful country/company/athlete/businesswoman and the loser one is punctuality. This is because, in my opinion, punctuality represents an important trait: discipline (and yes, including the discipline to fulfill our commitment).

while it looks obvious, in Indonesia (specifically in Jakarta) people seems have given up the idea of being punctual maybe more than two or three decades ago. you set an appointment at 10 am (with all your invitees are accept it) then nobody shows up until 10.45 am or so (sometime you are also late). and it happens everywhere including in multinational companies.

so, several weeks ago i typed "punctuality" on google's search box and found an interesting article titled "Punctuality - A Cultural Trait as Equilibrium"written by Basu and Weibull. It's a long article contains many quotes, equations and also some reference about Nash's game theory. Frankly, I don't understand it fully ...however, it has a simple message as I understand it.

The article says that "punctuality simply an equilibrium response of individuals to what they expect others to do." I think it could be translated that we have two possible situations:

Situation A: unpunctual equilibrium - because people expects others to be late, people will choose to come late (in wedding ceremony in my country, the new equilibrium is represented by common agreement that if the invitation says 7 pm, people will start to come starting 7.30 pm).

Situation B: punctual equilibrium - because people believe others to be on time, people will come on time.

Therefore, to make people be punctual, we have to make people believes that everybody will be on time on any event; and it should be started from the top. I think it can be done...at least I want to see it in my workplace. 

¶ 11:13 PM |

the more IT growing, the more confused I am.

if my friends are talking about "windows", "mouse", "client" or any other IT terms, sometimes I am not sure which thing they are talking about. My friend said,"I have just bought a mouse", and I asked if he bought the optical one, and he smirked victoriously then said "nope, I bought a real mouse for lab experiment." He bought mouse the animal.

I think the people in IT should be more creative in creating name for devices, software, or system. They need to invent good and unique name for any new invention. Remember, our old people has given name their inventions with some impressive names such as "laser", "semiconductor", or "aeroplane".

"iPod", "google", "blog" are some examples of creative names...

"notebook" or "mouse" is certainly not a creative name... 

¶ 10:06 PM |