2010

Happy holidays and Best wishes for the New Year!


The glance back @ 2009:

Wow – what a zoom ride that was… In superstitious ways of the Far East, I’ll be hopping the 2009 will set the long-lasting foundations for the next 100 or some to come…

• TRYING START

- A year ago I wished to all lots of luck in the wake of the economical crisis, and especially applicable to my/stupid/self after making the difficult situation worse by failing the very last hurdle towards the masters degree. I hope the wish came true for you as it had for me:

- Thanks to Ninja for smacking me silly and reminding me that I’m one very lucky f …ellow. I relaxed, embraced the essence and enjoyed few uncertain months of the year as happily unemployed. I bunked with friends in Singapore (thanks Timo and Peteri) while waiting to hear from The Melbourne Uni if they’ll give me yet another life line to complete the degree. They did.

• MELBOURNE

- From March till May I was in Melbourne, attended the Knowledge Management lectures and with it finally completed the degree.

- One weekend in May I flew back to Singapore to evaluate the surprise job offer - 6 months after the last contact with the company.

- Roza visited for few days and met the family in the April. Observation: The love of (same) foods and drinks creates the foundation on which common ground and mutual appreciation between people from varied backgrounds can develop quickly.

• EUROPE

- May till July I’ve spend in Croatia, and then two weeks in Budapest at Roza’s new address.

- In the mean time the contract negotiation for a Singapore IT job came to the conclusion.

• BACK TO SINGAPORE

- On the 10th of July I started the new job. Finally, after first looking for a real job back in 2001 I got one.

- Initially, the plan was to stay with Dr Love only until I find my own accommodation. Before I got something suitable (thanks Aunty Susan), Love and I got engaged (for the technical reasons) and are happily living in the open relationship under the same roof - Much love, Love.

• GRADUATE

- One weekend in August I flew back to Melbourne for the graduation ceremony.

• REAL ESTATE

- On the 30th November the settlement was completed for the two bedroom investment property. When I first started looking for a real job in 2001 I've decided that I'd get into real estate - 10 years later I got there. Appreciation to parents and Roza for helping out.

• HOLIDAYS WITH FAMILIES

The coming Thursday (24th) Roza and I are flying to Perth where we’ll spend Christmas with my family. Then, via a day in Macao, we’ll get to Hong Kong to be with hers during the New Year's celebrations.


Look forward @ 2010:

- Back on the 4th of January I’ll be at the work, hoping to extend my contract, that expires in the mid-January, in spite of the company's current struggles – I can forget about realising any negotiation dreams this time around - next time...

- Work more actively on the on-line identity.

- Give the relationship with Roza a real test by sharing the same mailing address without any pre-booked flying-away tickets between us.

Cheers...!

60th wedding anniversary

On the 10th December 1949, my grandparents (Dad's parents) got married, both of them at the time being at the tender age of 16. Four kids, 7 grandchildren and 4 great-grandchildren later they happily live in the same place where it all stared.

Congrats...!

Hot Technology 2010

Aussie Rules interviews Michael Chanter - IT General Manager at Frontline - where he explains in layman’s terms the five technologies of the moment:

1. Utility storage: growing at 30%p.a.
2. Application virtualisation: one copy of the application per enterprise. Kept at the data server, pushed onto the client per need
   
3. Cloud computing: applications, storage, processing provided as an on-line service (examples)
   
4. Unified communication: an application that combines variety of communication modes (e.g. Google Voice)
5. Green IT: save power expense required for running storage and application servers

Here's the extended list, The top 10 for 2010, by Gartner.

...!

WebFuture

"What I love about the Internet is that it's an innovation engine. You see things come out of nowhere and they'll just catch fire."

Leonard Kleinrock

It was 40 years ago, when the Internet 1st was formed by establishing data connection between the two computers at UCLA. Things have moved along a fare bit since those days, where the current web space is dominated by SaaS news. What is the next big wave to come?

Web3.0

View more presentations from Johannes Bhakdi.

Whichever direction future developments end up taking, the Semantic Web will likely be the part of it. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, talks about it in The future of the Web as seen by its creator. The excerpt is via Coleman:

So, for example, if you are looking at a Web page, you find a talk that you want to take, an event that you want to go to. The event has a place and has a time and it has some people associated with it. But you have to read the Web page and separately open your calendar to put the information on it. And if you want to find the page on the Web you have to type the address again until the page turns back. If you want the corporate details about people, you have to cut and paste the information from a Web page into your address book, because your address book file and your original data files are not integrated together. And they are not integrated with the data on the Web. So the Semantic Web is about data integration.

When you use an application, you should be able to put data there so that you could configure that data. I should be able to inform my computer: “I’m going to that event.” And when I say that, the machine will understand the data. The Semantic Web is about putting data files on the Web. It’s not just a Web of documents but also of data. The Semantic Web of data would have many applications to connect together. For the first time there is a common data format for all applications, for databases and Web pages.

Web Based Applications

The time is ripe for the SaaS. Sunny's Cinergix, since its early days, is gaining the momentum by getting the recognition in the blogosphere for the recently out of a beta Creately.

They made it to the semi-finals of The Best of Rich Internet Applications 2009.

Other notable lists covering the current cream of web-based applications:

• 50 Most Usable RIAs
• Top 10 Web Collaboration Tools
• Top 10 Underhyped Webapps, 2009 Edition

My favourites:

• Google: Mail, Notebook, Calendar, Docs, blog, Task
• Creately - diagramming
  
• Box - storage
  

Experimenting with different presentation tools:

• MindMeister,
• Prezi,
• 280slides

-trying to figure out what's the best way for me to a) learn and b) communicate during the personal brand (career) development.

• ActionMethod

- Action Method is a more sophisticated tool for managing tasks within projects than Google Task, yet not as complicated as MS Project. It allows for collaboration and delegation of tasks. Highly recommended for students (group projects).

...!

Amasing Numbers - Crazy world

The earlier three episodes are equally impressing,

educational...!

via PZ (the presentation on leadership is inspiring, yet humbling).

Honeymoon no more

I thought it would last longer. After being unemployed and on-and-off searching for a job in the industry since 2001, I really hoped it would last longer, but after 2.5 months the initial excitement of having the new job, the honeymoon period, was abruptly halted.

What do you take as tell-tell signs that a honeymoon period is coming to an end?

To me, an end of the beginning at a new work-place starts with uncovering of 'dirty laundry', which subsequently leads to the gradual loss of the initial 'magic'. And in my case, the big smelly pile showed up within a short period of time:


1) Barking-back at COO (the founder)

It all started 10 days ago, Wednesday the 23rd September. The first encounter with the dirty panties was the little dose of bellowed Singaporean 'scolding' attitude. As mentioned before, the founder is – with justification - sceptical of my technical abilities thanks to the lack of my industry experience. And for whatever reason, he felt the urge to remind me, and others, of this point. To make things even funnier, he is all into leadership BS. Guess, COO wanted to demonstrate how NOT to lead:

In the two meetings across two subsequent days with different set of colleagues attending, the COO directly questioned my competency, and in particular the ability to confidently convey to the client that I can 'walk the talk'. In addition, he communicated the displeasure at the title awarded to me (Technical Lead - as I applied for System Analyst role, the title was a surprise to me as well!) without having the extensive experience and going through the thick and thin of the lower positions. As this was all playing out in front of other team-members, I patiently listed.

You will appreciate the effort required to keep my quick tongue from unleashing the counter-attack. Surprisingly I managed to do so, while keeping myself 'amused' with the responses firing between my ears yet falling short from being verbalised.

During the meeting on the third day, some of the responses got to see the light of a day. COO and I were in the meeting room on our own, and shortly into the meeting he started with the exactly same tune as from the two days before. Though on this occasion, with no need to 'save his face' in front of others, I did not let him gain much momentum. I barked back as true ang moh does. I questioned his actions of criticising my lack of experience for three days in a row... pointed that I wrote my own CV, hence I understand the overreaching gap in my career path. - So what am I to do now? (i.e. where is the constructive value of the feedback, apart of bit of extra motivation from the 1st day of 'shooting'?). Also, I mentioned attitude of the company-wide unity instead of isolating one individual in a corner. The last point I made was considering benefits of positive contribution and strengths each one of us brings to the table instead of focusing on inadequacies. Maybe the best value I can provide is not in my technical powers, but rather through those of the BS kind. - I left out the point that they gave me the title so they can charge the premium for my hour to clients, as I'm sure Boss does not need a reminder on that one, though likely CEO had to persuade him to agree.

Later in the evening after that meeting, we caught up once more, where it seemed that my counter-attack had a short term success. Boss took a step, two back and even seemed apologetic. Then again, you can never win an argument with a boss, nor (easily) change first impressions – as seen with my NUS experience – and thus, the real consequences of my 'barking back' are still to be seen.

2) Senior PM departs

Exactly a week later after the 'dirty laundry' started showing up first, on the 30th of September, I was greeted with a shocking surprise from a collage: his thank-you-farewell email to the company following the resignation. Though, he held to his own, as much as I could gather, he was a busy guy. Apparently he was very busy and unhappy guy.

Speculation has it that similar issues that led to his departure, caused 13 (out of 50) employees to depart in the span of two months before my arrival.

3) Operational Deficit

On the 1st October monthly all-staff meeting, CEO shared the ugly graph showing that the company has been running the loss in earnings for the most part of the year. The related news that surfaced a while back is that few months prior my arrival employees were asked to accept for the percentage of the monthly salary to be payed upon the return of the better days. This has not happened yet.

4) Pre-sales focus

Last week after the positive feedback on my performance from the CEO, the two major pending projects that were to occupy my time got bad hits. One took a big step backwards, and the other – to my big surprise – went to another tender. This means that for a while longer I’ll be fully in the BS area of the IT consulting.


Note to self:
- put more effort into entrepreneurship
- apply for PR or business visa
- don’t expect 22% monthly-pay bonus due this month to simply show up in your bank account

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UPDATED: 12th Oct 09

Tonight I had a 2nd chat with CEO. As expected, due the the fact that the major project I was working on has not materialised (as of yet), my bonuses will not happen at the first trimester. I played the understanding card, and suggested that instead of cash paid bonus we could possibly look into win-win training opportunities where they pay for the (part of) training that fills the company's need and yet satisfies my curiosity. Upon which I could give a seminar to share the knowledge acquired with the team-members. BI anyone?