Martin Antonio G. Cruz

Writing Portfolio

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Table of Contents

Guide 2

NARRATIVE 4

GUIDE 5

COVERAGE 8

LIFESTYLE 10

EBOOK 11

WHITEPAPER 13

REVIEW 19

FINANCIAL 23

Infographic 25

Bibliography 27

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Guide

The Best Home Brewing Supplies

Brewing beer at home is a rewarding activity, and nothing beats designing and creating a drink using supplies and ingredients especially made for home brewing. Home brewers find their taste by crafting their beer with various ingredients, including malts, malt extracts, hops, yeast, sugars, salt, and finings with the use of a range of hardware that can fit the home brewer’s needs and preferences. Cleaning your Equipment

Cleaning tools include brewing gloves, brushes for various equipment, and blast bottle washers. A carboy brush is the best tool to scrub the inside of a carboy. A bottle washer sprays the insides of a bottle and makes it easy to remove hard deposits. There are also various cleaning chemicals for the different equipment, such as cleansers that remove fermentation residue and other organic deposits that can affect a new batch’s fermentation process. The best cleaning agent is the one that is odorless and tasteless, doesn’t contain chlorine, bisulfites, organic compounds, or phosphates, to avoid having more residue to clean up.

Brewing Equipment

Any pot that can accommodate at least 3.5 gallons can serve as a brew kettle to boil the wort in, but it is best to use those made of stainless steel for its durability. Enamel pots wear out after time and are prone to chipping. Fermenters come in the form of glass carboys, conical fermenters, and plastic buckets. The safest and most durable are plastic buckets; however, glass carboys offer significant advantages over plastic: they are easier to clean and sterilize, are more airtight (plastic is porous and can leak oxygen if stored for long periods), and because of the clear material, it is easier to determine when fermentation has completed. Tiny scratches in plastic carboys (due to brushing during cleaning) can also harbor unwanted microbes. Glass may be more fragile, but it is still the safer choice for fermenting. To compliment the glass carboys are carboy stoppers and air locks. Chillers

Although wort chillers are not necessary for home brewing, they do help cool down the wort much faster. Wort chillers come in various styles and sizes; one can even make a wort chiller using copper tubing and a tubing bender. Copper is the recommended material rather than plastic for immersion chillers because copper is a good heat conductor. Plastic may be damaged by newly boiled wort. Measuring equipment

Tools such as hydrometers and dial thermometers measure all of the vital statistics of the wort, beer, and the brewing liquor for easy and reliable monitoring during the brewing process. Measuring cups, measuring spoons, and scales also allow for consistency of hops or grain weights. 3 © Copyright varies. All rights reserved.

Transferring the Beer

The best racking equipment would help in avoiding oxidation and infection when transferring the beer from one vessel to another, which greatly lessens the quality of the home-brewed beer. A racking cane made of stainless steel or hard plastic tubing with a bend on one end and a special cap on the other allows liquid to flow through with a minimum of sediment. Another handy device is the autosiphon, which combines a racking cane with another tube that allows the user to siphon effortlessly and in a sanitary manner.

Bottling and Kegging Beer

A good bottling bucket, where the priming sugar is added prior to bottling, is one that is made of food grade plastic. For convenience, there are available buckets with spigots at the bottom. Bottle fillers and cappers will also help in reducing the trouble of filling and capping each bottle manually. Other bottling supplies aside from the recommended brown and green bottles are bottle caps and labels. However, if you find bottling a hassle and a messy chore, kegging is an easier, faster, and simpler alternative. Soda kegs are very practical and convenient, saving you time and giving easy access to your brew. On another note, it is also possible to bottle from the keg using a counter pressure filler, should you have the need for bottled beer.

Ingredients

Water used for home brewing must be free from chlorine or other chemicals, and should have some basic minerals. Tap water is sufficient after the chlorine has been boiled away. For easy brewing, barley malt extract comes in syrup or powder form, as in this form the barley malt is ready to boil up and ferment. As for hops, these should be fresh and green in color. Brown or yellow hops indicate oxidized or stale hops. If the hops smell like cheese, these are also well past their prime, and must not be used. Home brewing will not be complete without yeast, which can be classified as dry or liquid. Dry yeast is cheaper, easier to use, and can be stored longer than liquid yeast. On the other hand, liquid yeast provides a fresher pitch of healthy cells.

Kitchen items

What seems to be everyday items in the kitchen can become a home brewer’s necessary tools, such as whisks (used to aerate wort before putting it into the fermenter), tongs (used to remove the hot straining bags), and funnels (used to transfer liquids). Spoons, paddles, screens, and straining bags are small items that also execute important tasks such as stirring wort, steeping grains, and boiling hops. Each component of the home brewing system truly has its own specialized task in brewing, and different brands are available in the market. Home brewers shopping for supplies will surely have lots of choices of equipment and ingredients, making the possibilities of different home brewing techniques and styles endless.

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NARRATIVE

CREATIVE DESIGN 101: The History of Creative Design Go for a walk in your local mall. Look around, and you’ll see a plethora of advertising, mixing colors and text into one dynamic mix that, to the untrained eye, is just part and parcel of advertising. For a Dubai graphic designer, this cannot be more obvious, but even in the more discreet corners of the world, I wouldn’t be surprised if the long arm of consumerism isn’t present in one way or another. That, however, is part of a bigger whole. In the creative process, these graphics that you see all around you—anywhere from the overall motif of a billboard to the template of a letterhead—is part of a big process called creative design.

In a nutshell, creative design is the process—and the results of this process—in which images and text are put together in such a way that the completed result becomes a creative draw for the general public. There’s a reason why so much money goes into advertising every year. Businesses usually lack the creative manpower to come up with compelling designs that will help them target and attract the market niche they’re aiming for. To supplement this need for a creative arm, ad agencies employ artists and writers who work on the text and graphical layout of the material to be used by marketing. If there are multiple disciplines that cover the whole gamut of the visual, literary and musical arts, creative design is the art of competent dissemination of information, or the art of selling through images and words.

But that’s only the twentieth-century application of creative design. Back in the day, before the advent of the movable printing press, creative design was mostly unheard of as a discipline. However, evidence of pre-fourth century creative design processes can be found in a variety of sources. Before the Printing Press

Of course, since most of the population back then didn’t have the capacity to read, it only goes to show that most of the creative graphic design within the pages were put there primarily for the nobility. One could assume that early proponents of creative design were geared towards providing pleasing visual aids for the rich and the powerful.

The term “graphic design,” the proper subject used by advertisers who dabble in creative design and advertising, was coined in the early 20th century. The dividing line between art and commercial design became more and more defined as more and more experts entered the field. Initially, the acceptance of creative design as a field completely different from the visual arts, but after the Second World War, the booming economy in the U.S. propagated the need for creative graphic designers. 5 © Copyright varies. All rights reserved.

GUIDE

Exercise During the HCG Diet

Generally, exercise is a recommended part of any dietary regimen. If you’re trying to lose weight, then you’ve got to exercise and go on a calorie-restrictive diet. If you’re trying to gain some muscle, then you’ve got to do the same thing—except you need to eat more. So it’s usually counterintuitive when we encounter a diet that actually espouses no exercise whatsoever. In a way, the HCG diet is no different from most of these other diets. It’s a super low calorie diet, sure, but some form of exercise is actually encouraged. The problem is, you’re working with a caloric deficit that’s not much of a joke. What kind of exercise can you do on an energy budget as low as the one you’ll encounter when you’re on an HCG program?

Knowing Your Boundaries

Exercise isn’t something that we should normally worry about, but at 500 calories, it pays to know just how much you’re burning with a workout. It’s also good know what factors can affect your energy expenditure, since no two people are the same. An exercise that helps your neighbour burn 200 calories, for example, might actually be more difficult for you to perform, and burn even more calories than what you’d expect.

But despite all of these case-to-case restrictions, the good news is that work and energy is still a scientific value, and can be approximated. You can ask your doctor, or a fitness professional, for their opinion on how much energy an exercise you’d like to do will require. Their opinions will vary, but the point is that you’ll have an idea of how tired your body’s going to be afterwards. 6 © Copyright varies. All rights reserved.

Once you have a working idea of what you’ll be burning during your exercises, add that additional energy requirement to your base metabolic rate. Your BMR is how many calories you need just to exist. This number varies depending on your weight, height, age, and gender, and is what you’re generally trying to fill up every day by eating.

Once you’ve got your BMR and caloric needs figured out, start subtracting your caloric intake from that. If you’re on the HCG diet, you’re going to see that you’ve got a long ways to go. Of course, the idea of the HCG diet is that you’ll be replacing the calories you’re not eating with the fat you’re releasing from your body, but psychologically, that’s still a pretty big caloric requirement, so you might want to take it easy on the exercise.

What Kind Of Exercise Should You Avoid?

This is pretty easy to figure out. Any kind of exercise that burns gargantuan amounts of calories should be avoided, since you’re going to put your body into a defensive starvation mode. This means that your metabolism is going to slow down to a very slow crawl. If you were a bear, you’d be hibernating! Weight lifting is definitely out of the question. You can’t expect to build muscle at your present caloric state; any and all proteins you’ll be eating will go straight to nourishing all the cells in your body, and you won’t have much left over to forcibly convert into energy, let alone grow new muscle cells. But, you say, this is a high-protein diet! That’s true, but the protein you’ll be eating isn’t high enough to sustain any muscular repair.

High intensity interval training’s out, too. Even a short session of HIIT is going to burn through your current energy stores like a fire in a kerosene plant. Do whatever you can to avoid it, or anything similar to it, like carrying a sack of rice for two miles.

So what Exercise Can You Do?

It should be said that you can do some exercise—just don’t overdo it. A general rule of thumb is that your normal chores, moving around the house, going to and from the office, can be enough of an exercise to keep your metabolism from plummeting. But if you’re the type of person who still wants to sweat it out, then skip the gym and do some light work instead.

If the weather’s great out, pull on some trainers and some sweats, and go for a walk. Don’t run; running takes a lot of effort and energy long after you’re done, which isn’t what you’re after. Walking at a leisurely pace for around fourty minutes should be enough exercise for your body at this point. If you don’t have the time to walk, that’s okay. You’ll just have to get creative. If you’ve got a long commute to work, you can choose to take a route that involves more stairs / walking that usual. If your office is at one of the upper floors of a building, take the stairs to the second or third floor before getting on the elevator every time you go up. And then take the stairs down from the same floor when you’re headed out.

If you’ve got a backyard, then you have one of the best avenues for exercise there is. Puttering around in the soil can be a great, yet relaxed, way of keeping your metabolism busy. Or you can choose to do more housework more often, which will increase your general level of activity. You’ll be surprised at how many calories fixing the living room can burn.

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Just to recap: being on the HCG diet doesn’t mean you can’t do any exercise at all. It just means you have to be mindful of what kind of exercise you’re doing. Anything strenuous should be out of the question, since it’s going to burn through your calorie intake and put your body into a defensive starvation mode. Light exercises are best for you at this point; check with a health professional to find out more about what your base metabolic rate is, and what exercises will harmonize properly with your diet. 8 © Copyright varies. All rights reserved.

COVERAGE

Tesla to restart Fremont plant next week

Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed in an internal email last May 9 that he plans on at least partially restarting operations in Fremont this coming Friday.

According to Bloomberg, in the mail that was sent out to its employees, the company says that it plans on reopening with at least 3/10 of its workforce per shift. The company’s decision to restart operations stems from California state’s move to slowly restart industry by allowing manufacturers to resume operations.

Two separate emails

Both Tesla CEO Musk and Tesla HR head Valerie Capers Workman sent out emails regarding the resumption of work.

Musk focused on California Governor Gavin Newsom’s announcement that manufacturers would be allowed to resume work. Workman’s, on the other hand, outlined the specifics of the arrangement, such as the 30% workforce per shift rule.

Musk included in his email, however, that the call back to work was strictly voluntary. The Verge reports that the CEO told his employees to employ their personal discretion on the matter.

“In light of Governor Newsom’s statement earlier today approving manufacturing in California, we will aim to restart production in Fremont tomorrow afternoon. I will be on the line personally helping wherever I can. However, if you feel uncomfortable coming back to work at this time, please do not feel obligated to do so. These are difficult times, so thanks very much for working hard to make Tesla successful!” he said.

Alameda County says no

The Alameda County government, which is where Tesla’s Fremont factory is located, was quick to respond to the company’s intentions.

It reiterates its stand that Tesla should not reopen its factories despite what the governor has said. It does not agree that the company is an essential business, and meets the criteria of exemptions for reopening.

Despite its statement, California state allows local governments at the county level to set restrictions that override state-level restrictions. Alameda County intends to extend shelter-at-home restrictions until the end of May in order to curb the spread of the coronavirus disease. Tesla has been at odds with the local government since it imposed these restrictions in March. The company went against the restrictions for about a week until the county sheriff took action. 9 © Copyright varies. All rights reserved.

According to Reuters, the county has discussed this time and again with Tesla, even going so far as telling the company to monitor situations for another week before restarting operations. Images courtesy of Craig Adderley/Pexels, Maurizio Pesce/Flickr. 10 © Copyright varies. All rights reserved.

LIFESTYLE

James Deakin, the Epson P-2000, and Formula 1 (pre-2005) For James Deakin, C Magazine’s editor, writer and photographer, his recent trip to the Formula One races in Monza, Italy were literally just another day on the job. But this is a job he enjoys immensely.

“The race is an amazing event,” he breathes, “whether or not you’re into car racing. Each team has approximately 700 people [working] just to put two cars in a grid.” That’s considering that (according to James) the entire Formula One season lasts for eighteen to twenty races throughout the span of a year.

“And then one week later, they’re gone, they’re in a new place, and the frenzy begins all over again.” He wasn’t there just to cover the cars, though; he was shooting the event for C Magazine – the local F1 Glossy – to give the Pinoys a fellow citizen’s take on the races. “I shot some of the cars,” he explains, “but mostly I was concentrating on the personalities.” And this was a special event; aside from the race itself, rumor has it that legendary F1 racer Michael Schumacher would be announcing his retirement plans during the celebrations after the race. “So you can just imagine how hard it was for the winner.” James is chuckling as he says this. “I mean, here I am fresh from the win, and everybody’s paying more attention to this pro who’s leaving the sport.”

For the entire shoot, James was alternating from three different cameras, two of them high-speed Canon DSLR’s, with 400 and 600mm lenses loaned by the local Canon distributors in Italy, which made him a very lucky-ass photographer. The Epson P-2000 image tank was just icing on the cake to begin with, but after using it for the first time during the F1 races, he can’t imagine living without it. “As a photographer, to be able to hold 40GB easily is a big thing. And the thing fits in my belt.” He averaged around three thousand photographs during his entire European trip – that included travel photography and two other car launches, aside from the F1 race – and ended up using twenty gigabytes of the image tank’s full fourty. “But then, I wouldn’t have shot as much if I didn’t have it,” he says. “You’ve always got a mental balance of how much memory you’ve got left, whenever you’re on coverage. But again, I tell you, 40 GB is a lot of memory to be carrying around.” He was taking five take of each shots during the F1 shoot, and that took up 1400 of the three thousand shots in total that he had upon going home; that’s considering that a photograph is five megabytes large. And the best part of it all? “I [can] sit back after my event, go through my photographs, which is made so much easier by the screen. It’s a pleasure to look at. It flatters you a little, actually making you look a little better than you really are.”

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EBOOK

Chapter Title: What's Stock Photo?

If you’re new to the world of marketing and advertising, then you probably wouldn’t have an idea of what a stock photo is. The variety of photographs available online can make it difficult to tell which one is available for use, and which one is protected by an ironclad license. To add to the confusion, stock photos can be both of these, which makes it hard to figure out if we can use a given image or not. And that’s what this book is for. In this chapter: we will discuss the following questions in brief: 1. How is a stock photo different from a regular photo? 2. How are stock photos produced?

3. What are the different licenses involved in the usage of stock photos? Stock VS Regular

If we take the name itself into consideration, then you’ll get a close approximation of what a stock photo is:

Stock, noun: a supply of something that is available for use Photograph, noun: a picture or likeness obtained by photography Given those two definitions, we can assume that a stock photo is a supply of photographs. While in the most common of terms, that isn’t a wrong assumption, the working definition of stock photography is more than just that.

Let us illustrate that point by discussing what a private photograph is. A private photo is anything that has been taken via photography, whether it be by a professional photographer, or an amateur. These are shots that are owned by somebody for their own private, limitless usage. If they want to use the photo for a flyer, on their website, as an accompaniment to a blog post, or for a billboard, they are free to do so. This photograph is not in the public domain in any way, and therefore is licensed only to him by virtue of private ownership.

This means that you can view the photo if the owner so wishes for you to view it. But you can’t use it without his permission. And if you do so, you are infringing on the owner’s de facto copyright ownership of the photograph in question and can be brought to court for intellectual theft. On the other hand, a stock photo is the exact opposite of that, given some limitations, depending on the type of copyright attached to the photograph in question. These photos are images that have been made available for widespread and public use, within legal limits. Some photos are completely free for anybody to use, while others can be purchased for a much lower price than the fees one would expect when hiring a photographer.

Stock photos generally make the lives of people in need of a large dossier of photos easier by making a large number of photos available for a low price. If you’re a marketer on a budget, turning to stock 12 © Copyright varies. All rights reserved.

photography collections can be a great way of creating effective copy without having to burn through your funds. We will discuss this further in the next section. Production

Stock photos don’t magically appear from out of the ether. These are still taken by photographers; the only difference is that they usually aren’t contracted by an agency for the shoot. These are photos from their own collection that they make available for the use of the general public. They do this by selling the photographs to image stock houses. These are like hubs of stock photos that buy image rights from the photographers. They either buy these photos outright, or have shared ownership with the photographer by providing them with a percentage of the profits that their images are bought.

These photos are then made available in various resolutions that determine their price and availability. That’s right; some photos are available in low, medium, and high resolutions, and this affects the price and copyright. Half the time, low resolution images are available for free, or with a watermark that makes it rather awkward for use as a practical visual aid. But these low-res photos are in the public domain, which makes it free for everybody to use.

What are the Different Licenses Involved in the Usage of Stock Photos The various licenses involved in the usage and ownership of stock photography is a tricky business. We will be discussing this at length at a later chapter, but we will end this chapter with a quick discussion of stock photography and copyright.

Let’s go back to our discussion of photos in varying resolutions. These resolutions are important in that it is part of what qualifies a given image for which license, divided into varying tiers. The first tier, macro stock, is of the highest quality. These are high-resolution images of varying subjects, and are generally less generic in terms of composition than most stock photos. At the other end of the spectrum is micro stock, the lowermost tier of photos. These are cheap, or free, and are of such low quality that they can hardly be used for professional material. Mid stock photos is the happy medium between the two. These aren’t as expensive as macro stock, but they’re not free either. Most of these photos are royalty-free, but are still protected by copyright. In the next few chapters, we will be discussing the usage of stock photography in marketing, as well as the reasons why these photos can be detrimental, depending on how they are used. We will touch on various aspects of what has been discussed on this chapter at length, especially in the sections devoted to the ethical and legal use of stock photography. 13 © Copyright varies. All rights reserved.

WHITEPAPER

What Is Project Management Software

What is project management software? Simply put, project management software is a specialized suite of software designed to help its users improve the efficiency of their production team. These types of software are multi-user platforms that are used for tracking the implementation, progress, and completion of single or multiple projects.

In this definition of project management software, a project management system is basically a tool that helps business owners, project, and people managers track the progress of deliverables. These tools make it easier to collaborate, track, and complete tasks as they come. It’s also a great tool for knowledge sharing, as it encourages proper documentation throughout the organization. In a case study by the Project Management Institute, the company Du Telecom was able to achieve a 32% growth rate in its first four years. The company attributes this growth to having secure project management practices. This underscores just how important having secure project implementation and management is—and using a project management software can assist you with this goal. Aside from learning about how does project management software work, this article will teach you more about:

- The benefits of using project management software

- The types of project management software

- The features of project management software

- Factors to consider

- Pricing of project management software

- Examples of project management software

- Potential issues

What are Examples of Project Management Software?

Wrike - Wrike is a winner of FinancesOnline “Best Project Management Software Award for 2016” for a reason: it’s one of the best project management software available. It’s used by Google, Adobe, and HTC, and is a user-friendly system that’s easy to understand. One of its best features is the task tool, which allows you to manage tasks individually; with this tool, you can oversee overall progress, identify bottlenecks in your campaign, and even cross-reference tasks with other tasks, so that you can identify dependencies across multiple projects.

Asana - One of the best things about Asana is the fact that it is an all-in-one solution. Users won’t need to use third-party applications to make full use of the services of Asana. In fact, in our review, we discovered that users won’t even need to use an email for the notifications. And collaboration is also made easier within the workflows of Asana. Likewise, each individual user will have their own workspace within the system that they can arrange to their own specifics—which makes it easier for each user to simplify his or her own personal workflow.

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Trello - If there’s anything that Trello has going for it, it would be its simplicity. The entire interface of Trello utilizes boards (for projects) and cards (for tasks), and it is all presented in an easy to understand graphic user interface. Whether you’re using it via the web application or your phone app, Trello simplifies the way you approach each project. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t powerful; users can openly discuss tasks within the cards via the commenting feature, and this also works as a convenient documentation feature. And you can also integrate this app with third-party file storage solutions—making it a great tool for anybody dipping their feet into the project management software world for the first time. Podio - Podio’s strength comes from the fact that its user interface feels pretty similar to most popular social media platforms. The collaboration within Podio happens in real-time, and the threaded view of each page is organic and uncluttered, making it easy to take in visually. The interface makes it one of the best documentation-oriented apps in the market, and coupled with a strong technical support staff, Podio is more than enough to tackle the day-to-day activities of multiple projects of varying scale. Why Use a Project Management Software?

What does a project management software do for small, medium, and large enterprises? They largely address a lot of concerns in the middle management, and are a vital component in keeping an eye on the general key performance indicators of a company. This means that ensuring your projects, each one a unique venture on its own, is properly and efficiently completed. Here are some of the features of a project management software:

Real-time collaboration - Project management software are great collaboration tools because they give users the capacity to work in collaboration with each other on a shared space—without sacrificing each user’s focus. This means that teams can focus on their own

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