Hartsord's Random Stabs in the Dark

One thing I've been getting interested in lately is photography. I have an Olympus C-50zoom, which is a little 5 megapixel "point-and-shoot" camera, and I recently joined a local online photography group ( PinoyPhotography.org ), so I can practice and get feedback on my pictures. (You can check out my pictures at online at http://hartsord.photo.net.ph/ ) The problem that I have with pinoyphotography.org is that while almost everybody there has a lot of passion for photography, most of them have passions (and pockets) big enough to drive them to get digital slr cameras. While I do enjoy photography, my passion is not yet enough to make me get a dslr with my budget. I'll continue to hone my skills with my p&s for now. Which brings me to the question: how much camera do you really need? Nowadays, the rage is to have cellphones with cameras, and I consider myself a bit of a stubborn dinosaur because I still stick with my trusty Nokia 6100 (no camera) - I don't ne...

Happy New Year everybody!   I haven’t been able to post here in quite a while, as I’ve been pretty busy.  I’ll try to get a few more blogs in here in there.   As for new developments, I’m trying to get into photography now, so we’ll see what happens with that.   Until then, see ya!

Lean Manufacturing is what I do. That’s what puts the food on my table, and that’s what everyone at work looks to me for. I also happen to find it very interesting and fulfilling, so it’s a great job for me. Funny thing is that most people have no idea what I’m talking about when I say that I’m into Lean Manufacturing. The semi-technical definition I use for Lean Manufacturing is “a continuous improvement philosophy that focuses on the relentless identification and elimination of waste.” No, I’m not talking about garbage disposal, what I’m talking about is waste in a process: “Thoughtless or unnecessary expenditure, consumption, etc.” according to my little desktop dictionary. “So what’s so fancy about that?” you might ask. Nothing much, really, except that most people have difficulty actually seeing the waste in a system. About half of the work of someone doing lean is actually seeing waste for what it is, and the Lean way without waste can almost seem counterproductive; for example, ...

Hi there! Welcome to the second post in Hartsord’s Random Stabs in the Dark. For this post I thought that I’d write a little about the service that allows me to present this article to you: Blogger . I have always been a big fan of the service that Google gives. In virtually every way, they have given their users the best service that they can, starting off by giving an honest (for the most part) web searching engine that tries to come up with the most relevant sites to a search query in a logical manner. They have also kept the service as clean and as straightforward as possible (as evidenced by their main page ), yet have expanded their suite of services considerably . Among the tools added to the Google family is Blogger. Apparently, this used to be Blogspot, but the old service seems to be transitioning over to Blogger. The basic Blogspot URL (http://www.blogspot.com/) now redirects over to Blogger, but the blogs themselves are still on the Blogspot domain, as evidenced by the URL...

Hi there! Welcome to Hartsord’s Random Stabs in the Dark. I’m Hartsord and this is my blog. A little background on me: I’m a 31-year old father of two beautiful little girls, and I live in the Pearl of the Orient Seas, the Philippines. I work as a Lean Manufacturing Superintendent in a manufacturing plant located in the province of Laguna, and my interests range from computers, to singing, to reading, to RPG’s (the face-to-face kind), to playing collectible card games, or to just thinking about the nature of people in general. This is actually not my first attempt at putting up a web page, but it’s something I haven’t done in a long time. This is my first blog-type work though, but the format seems to be one I think will suit what I want to do here. One of the things I’ve thought about doing for a long time is collating all the random thoughts I go through from day to day. I consider myself as a contemplative guy, and I do enjoy going over thoughts in my head on occasion. Alon...