NU12 #9 - #10 - Spentrep -Kevin Toledo - what pisses you off at the neighborhood?

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NU12 #9 - #10

NU12 #9. What pisses you off at the neighborhood? What do you suggest? – Kevin Toledo

Don’t Block the Driveway, Please!

Since we moved in Manila, we would always have trouble on dealing with parked cars in front of our gate blocking our drive way without even leaving a note on where we could find or contact them. Those instances really piss me off! To further add to insult, some of the owners of these blocking cars are not even apologetic. We tried placing a “Don’t Block the Driveway Sign” but it seems people don’t really care at all. As a solution, I’d like to try to place a proximity sensor in our gate to detect the front of our driveway that would trigger an alarm with a voice recording saying “Don’t Block the Driveway Please”. The sensors would be set in such a manner that it would only trigger the alarm if it detects that 15 seconds has already passed since it detected the car that has stopped in front of it, that way the system would differentiate a car that is just passing by from a car that is actually starting to park in front of our driveway. It could also be set that after 40 seconds that the car has been parked, a wake up alarm to one of the person in our household (depending on who will be handling it) will be triggered as well in order for him to advise the car owner who is attempting to park that parking is not allowed in front of our driveway. This system can solve problems of homeowners similar to our case, and I believe such systems is not really expensive as sensors now a days are affordable. 3.5   <there are LTO and MMDA laws that make it illegal to park blocking driveways, even if you own the drive way>     

NU12 #10. What pisses you off in your office/ What do you think must be done? - Kevin Toledo

Time Consuming Biometric Finger Print Clocking & Attendance System

This year, our office adopted biometrics system in replacement of the manual employee clocking system. This system was adopted for efficiency of getting time records and for safety purposes. I really support the idea as it should indeed provide efficiency and record better data. However, it did not really provide efficiency and it pisses me off where the finger scanning really takes time before it could identify the employee’s finger print. There are also times that these finger print scanner would actually fail to recognize finger prints. Further, whenever a group of people logs in or out at the same time, it would always create a queue and before the last person could log in his/her finger print, minutes have already passed. This could really be troublesome when someone comes in the office with just a limited time and he/she is still at the end of the queue. Even if the employee actually arrived before the required reporting time, there are big chances that he/she could be late because the finger scanning process takes time.

The problem lies with the system provider where the software or hardware being used to identify our (employees) finger prints really takes time.  This doesn’t justify the cost of availing the service and the technology. As a solution, I recommend that the system and technology provider must upgrade whatever software it uses in order to improve its finger scanning process, or better yet, change the scanning unit since it may be defective after all.   

Another solution could be putting up another finger scanning unit in parallel to the existing unit in order to avoid queues.