sacha chua

A book I'm reading right now (151 Quick Ideas to Get New Customers, by Jerry R. Wilson) notes that people hate it when you sell to them, but love it when you help them buy. That could be why Microsoft's evangelists are now called advisors, which makes sense in the more-about-helping-you kind of way.

I've gotten many positive comments about the unofficial title of "evangelist" that's in my ~/.signature and my business card. I'm thinking of changing that, though, to reflect market trends. ;)

I'm not too keen on "advisor" because I'm younger than most people, but "advocate" might be a fun word to try. There seems to be an interesting distinction between a technical advocate and a technology advocate. I feel that a technical advocate is someone who's on your side, and a technology advocate is on the technology's side. Hmm...

Something to think about and test on other people.

Tags: Uncategorized by Sacha Chua
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I can't believe I hadn't thought of this earlier. The perfect place for my heavy suitcases is, of course, *on the floor* instead of on the top shelf. Granted, the suitcases very neatly fit on the top shelf and that's the best way to keep them out of the way, but it was just such a mission (and a hazard!) getting them up there in the first place. The sweater organizers I use to keep matching clothes together easily squish up to accommodate the suitcases under them.

Slowly figuring out how to organize my stuff.

Random Emacs symbol: eval-expression-print-length - Variable: Value for `print-length' while printing value in `eval-expression'.

Tags: Uncategorized by Sacha Chua
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I can get pretty bad at responding to e-mail. This is an experiment to see whether the negative reinforcement of seeing just how old a message is will help me be more responsive. Either that, or I can strive for a Mean Time Between Responses of whatever... ;)

Hmm, maybe I should combine this with my blog and start distinguishing between E-mail to and Reply to...

(defadvice gnus-post-news (around sacha/gnus-track-message-age activate)
  "Insert a header showing how old a message is, to shame me into replying faster."
  ;; Before you post the news, figure out how old it is
  (let (days)
    (when article-buffer
      (setq days
            (- (time-to-days (current-time))
               (time-to-days
                (gnus-date-get-time
                 (mail-header-date
                  (gnus-summary-article-header
                   (gnus-summary-article-number))))))))
    ad-do-it
    (when days
      (goto-char (point-min))
      (when (re-search-forward "--text follows this line--" nil t)
        (forward-line 1)
        (insert "In reply to a message sent by "
                (mail-header-from message-reply-headers)
                " "
                (cond
                 ((= days 0) "today")
                 ((= days 1) "yesterday")
                 (t (format "%d days ago" days)))
                ": \n\n")))))
(setq message-citation-line-function nil)

On Technorati: emacs, pimpmyemacs, gnus

Random Emacs symbol: tramp-perl-directory-files-and-attributes - Variable: Perl script implementing `directory-files-attributes' as Lisp `read'able

Tags: emacs, gnus, pimpmyemacs by Sacha Chua
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http://planet.emacsen.org/ by Edward O'Connor. 'Nuff said! =D

On Technorati: emacs, pimpmyemacs

Random Emacs symbol: ido-subdir - Face: *Font used by ido for highlighting subdirs in the alternatives.

Tags: emacs, pimpmyemacs by Sacha Chua
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Squee! <bounce, bounce, bounce>

Democamp10: Back at Mars

Last, and certainly not least was Sacha Chua. If we could harness it I'm pretty sure we could power a few small cities of the energy that's contained in this one, tiny person - especially when you get her talking about Emacs. Sacha's demo, entitled, "Livin' la vida Emacs" was hands down the most entertaining of the evening. Sacha has basically taken this simple, extendable text editor and pushed it about as far as it can go - at DemoCamp10 she pulled back the curtain and showed us all her little systems and apps she's created in it. I like my GUI/Windows so the whole text-based thing isn't for me but it certainly was interesting to see just how strung out she's got that machine.

DemoCamp10: Congratulations

DemoCamp 10 was held last night, and three of the five presentations were from U of T. Sana Tapal (now at Jonah Group) and Andrey Petrov led off with the Online Marking tool; Jonathan Lung (who was part of the student team that presented at DemoCamp 5) showed us all how productive PHP procrastination can be; and Sacha Chua tried to convince us that Emacs isn’t actually bad for you. The other two demos were a social networking/quotes site called Quotiki.com, and Broken Tomb, which advertises itself as the world’s first commercial Smalltalk host. There wasn’t any new technology, but the presenters were entertaining, and it was fun to read the stuff that flashed by on the screen during their demo; the Smalltalk demo had a lot of technical and other difficulties.

Demo Camp Toronto 10 : The return to MARS

Sacha Chua showed off what can be done in the scriptable environment, in this case emacs, as she went from Text editor, to a.i. doctor, to game engine to task / email organizer and beyond. Sacha was six feet tall on that stage, even though she did not actual levitate at anytime (although she came close, as always). A Tour de force of the Emacs, a text editing tool built in a interpreted lisp language environment, bascially a personalized productivity platform which allows for massive customization. Sacha had the crowd entertained and enthralled. (Sacha blogged her own impressions and mentions that Emacs was speaking to her!)

What would you do with Sacha Chua?

Within Toronto’s Web community, Sacha Chua has become one of the leading “personalities”. Armed with infectious enthusiasm, charm and smarts, she would be an excellent person to hire once she graduates from UoT. The key question is how best to use her talents. It would probably be as a “super customer service rep, who can come into a bad situation and get everyone happy by the time she leaves. If I was an HR person from Microsoft, IBM,, etc. I’d be knocking on Sacha’s door ASAP.

On Technorati: :), goodkarma

Tags: :), goodkarma by Sacha Chua
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