Sampah Nonsense

What a Week It Was!

- Trashed by SampahMan @ 8:06 PM

Just thought of adding my thoughts about a VERY eventful week, while waiting for my chicken wings to defrost.

As you know, Sunday was Wesak Day and that is why we had a holiday on a Monday (Yippee! No need to work! Or so I thought...will tell you a short story on that a little later.)

EXCITEMENT

It all started when my girlfriend bought me "The Da Vinci Code" by Dan Brown. I always resisted reading it, thinking that it's gonna be some bullshit about some historical items, but boy was I wrong. It was ALL bullshit about some historical items(ok, just joking!). From the start of the book, it was apparent that this was going to be one heck of a thriller, and a fast-paced one (95% of the book was set within 24 hours). At least it was fast paced to me, considering I stopped reading "One Hundred Years of Solitude" (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) to read this. Here's how excited I was to read the damn thing:
Saturday 7.45pm - 9.45pm (70 pages)
Saturday 10pm - 1am (0 pages, went to watch FA Cup Final)
Sunday 1.30am - 5.30am (Few hundred pages)
Sunday 11.30am - 2pm (Finished the book)

The last time I actually finished reading a book so feverishly was Harry Potter.

My verdict is: If you have not read the book, and you like fast paced thrillers, then GO READ THIS BOOK!

3 things I think about Da Vinci Code:

1. I want to be part of a secret society.
2. I wonder if I will hesitate to make a V-sign above a person's head(especially girls') the next time a picture is being taken.
3. Sophie Neveu seems HOT.

DESPAIR

Manchester United 0 - 0 Arsenal (Arsenal won 5-4 on penalty kicks)
Faced with the possibility of ending the season without any silverware, both teams should be motivated enough to go all out for it, and the game certainly showed that MU were the hungrier team. Arsenal, totally outplayed, only managed 1 shot on goal (with Pires, Ljungberg, Bergkamp, Van Persie, and Reyes, that's a pretty rare statistic for an Arsenal team), while MU managed a little > 10 I think.
I honestly wouldn't have minded losing to Arsenal if they had played the way Arsenal normally plays, but losing on penalties to a team that played one of their worst games against MU in recent years, well, that's just hard to swallow.

But hey, that's football right, that's why everyone(outside of N. America anyway) loves the sport. There will always be a next year :)

WAR!

That is how Star Wars Ep. 3: Revenge of the Sith starts out.
***Don't worry, no spoilers here***
And boy...what a movie! After watching this one, you know you can finally forgive George Lucas for ever making Ep. 1 and 2, and also forgive Jar Jar Binks for ever being created.
What's a Star Wars movie without space dogfights, light saber duels, that short green thing that speaks in reverse. Thankfully, this one does not disappoint!
This movie is really dark, and well, if Anakin is going to turn into Darth Vader, the story better have lots of evil elements in it.

All I have to say is, Anakin, you should burn in HELL!!!

And to everyone else, go watch it! There shouldn't be any reason not to!

P.S. Supposedly there were lots of cameos in this movie, and the second time watching it should be well spent trying to detect them. Millennium Falcon? I didn't see it!(Yet)

Anger and Hate

"Fear leads to anger,
Anger leads to hate,
Hate, leads to suffering" - Master Yoda

As I was explaining earlier, today, a Monday was supposed to be a holiday, a break from work. While I was driving back to the city, I received a phone call from my manager, telling me to look into a problem that my CTO supposedly felt was important enough to contact me about. I was advised to read my email when I got home, and gauge the situation.
When I got home, dutifully, I read my email, and tested everything out myself, and there didn't seem to be any problem at all. (FYI: The "error" was reported by our staff in another country that did not have a holiday for Wesak), but I figured the only way I could be sure of anything, was if I went to the office, and checked if there were any coding discrepancies etc etc.
When I got there, naturally I expected to be alone, and the office aquarium looked different and there seemed to have been MURDER!
Anyway, back to the story:
So I was already feeling really pissed off (haven't felt so pissed at something in months) with the fact that I was supposed to be relaxing and watching DVDs, instead of being at work. To cut the long story short (I don't want to go into details, I'll just feel pissed off over again), apparently the errors that were reported were not personally experienced by our staff in that other country, and that they did not have any problems either. And one of the errors was only reported by 1 person, and yet the email stated the term "candidates", which if you should have noticed, would have implied MORE THAN 1 person experiencing problems. In the end, it turned out that I couldn't have done much because I wasn't provided with enough information to even start any sort of debugging. So my verdict for all this? WILD GOOSE CHASE.
Additionally, from the conversation, such a BIG deal was made out of these "errors" because our r&d team had problems with the same application a month ago, which caused the company to lose money and also the trust of one of the clients.
My big problem with this whole situation is this: It is understandable to feel some worry, but if you can't trust your own colleagues to have tested and assured you that the application will be alright, and you're all set up to assign blame already, how the fuck are you still convinced that you will be a good salesperson for the product?
Another problem I have is the fact that I had to drive 50km to and from the office (a 50 minute commute), go through 4 bucks worth of toll, and whatever cost it would have been for car maintenance (honestly, it's not the money for me, it's just that I feel that this whole incident could have been handled at the next business day). And everyone knows that the monetary costs can be avoided if the company somehow allowed me to log into some VPN so that I could have worked from home. But my suggestion did not seem to merit much consideration when I brought it up earlier in the year, citing reasons like security and cost. I don't know, I just feel like it is actually something useful for ALL r&d staff in each office, because there will be times when working from home is actually better than in the office, and there will be many cases like these. For example:

• I need to handle some support issues, and it is the weekend, or I am in a different city.
• I have chickenpox, but I know I can work at home, I just can't go to work.
• I have the flu, but I need to work on a project with a tight deadline, so I can work from home. If I go to work, I risk infecting other colleagues, who in turn will have to take sick leave, thereby reducing efficiency and productivity.
• You tell me more, so that I can tell my boss.

My feelings in the end can be summed up this way.
It's like this, imagine you have a piece of paper, and one of those pencils with those small pink erasers on the top. Everytime sometime happens at work that doesn't seem right (maybe some shit like the above happens), you can either write a word, sentence, or even paragraph on the piece of paper. If you feel like things are getting better (you get a raise, boss convinces you that times are a-changing), you could use the eraser to erase a word, sentence, or even paragraph from that piece of paper. Eventually of course, the eraser is bound to be used up, so when you feel things are getting better, you can't erase anything anymore from the paper (no, you cannot cross out words using the pencil, the paper has to be neat). So, little by little, the paper fills up, words become sentences, sentences become paragraphs, and it finally ends with a signature: YOURS.
And voila. You have your very own, bonafide, resignation letter.

So today, I have added a paragraph to my letter, with very little eraser left. I feel very demeaned as an employee, and somehow, I think I brought it on to myself for caring or giving too much of a shit about the quality of my work.
So if there isn't any quote out there already that deals with the use of judgement in dedication (are some matters worth dedicating a 100% to?), then please quote me:

"100% dedication, with 0% judgement, makes you a very very very stupid person" - Kenny Law

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