Cow’s Life - Thinking Outside Of The Barn

During those good old hotel times I spent in downtown Denver, I got to witness a persistent chase between a young investment banker Lisa (alias used) and my buddy Paco(alias used), a software engineer whom I used to work with. Lisa lived in an exclusive apartment on the top of the hotel we stayed. Paco is a huge football fan, so you sort of can figure that whenever there was a game, he’d be sitting in the hotel bar watching the game. Guess what, the next thing you know, Lisa turned herself into this huuuuuuuge football fan and sat by Paco nights in and nights out until Paco couldn’t take it anymore.

Paco left Denver a few months later and went to Atlanta for a new project. Andy (alias used), a new hire from Atlanta came to Denver to continue the work and stayed in the same hotel. Andy happens to be “Mr. healthy” who usually spends every night in the gym from 8 to 10.

One morning, Andy came in and said, “Guess what… I think a girl from the hotel apartment really likes me. She is an investment banker…Blah blah blah.. “
“Lisa???” And I told Andy Paco’s story.
I didn’t think Andy was taking me seriously at that time.

A few days later, Andy started to panic,
“Christine, Lisa followed me everywhere. When I stepped out of the gym at 10pm, she was stretching by the front desk! I kid you not!! Who would be stretching by the front desk after the gym is closed???”
“Hahaha… told ya!“
I just can’t help but laughing…

I usually go to the same gym to workout and one night when I got out of the gym at around 9:45pm, I saw Lisa doing all kinds of stretching and warming up by the front desk.
“Lisa… the gym closes in 15 minutes. What are you doing here?“
“Oh, just hanging out…Did you see Andy?”
“Oh, Andy got hurt earlier when he was playing basketball… “
“Oh, maybe I should check on him…. “
“Well, that may not be necessary …”
It took me a while to talk her out of that idea.

The next morning when Andy came to work, he just went ballistic,
“Guess what! Lisa called me at 11 last night wanted to come over and give me advil. What the f$#@! This is creepy! Doesn’t matter how pretty, how smart or how nice the girl is, this is too creepy!”
“Hmm, desperate lonely Investment Banker, I guess… “

Andy is leaving Denver in 2 weeks going back to Atlanta since the project is wrapping up. Paco is still down in Atlanta. The last thing I heard about Lisa is that she is ready to move to Atlanta sometime this summer. As their good friend, I gave both of them some good advise, “OK, now since there are two of you in Atlanta, split the workload by half, maybe you can finally share Lisa’s needs and not feeling too overwhelmed. Yeah?”

Use your mouse and drag the person around. Pure physics, yeah? It doesn’t look like a true 3-D model. But hey… this stuff is cool!
Thanks to Paco for providing the link!

For those of you who are not familiar with rock climbing, here is my definition of the difficulty of each grade:

• 5.5 :Anyone who has a little body strength can do it!
• 5.6 - 5.7: Rookie climber
• 5.8: You need to know what you are doing
• 5.9: A damn good climber
• 5.10: You are a Pro!
• 5.11: Welcome to the elite group!
• 5.12: You are out of your F#$#@@& mind!

I have been climbing since Feb, 2005. However, I only started climbing seriously about 2 months ago. Since I can’t do a single pull up or more than 3 push ups, I normally stay away from those over-hanging routes. They just look impossible to me.

Time has come to the point that I have to conquer my fear to get on an over-hanging 5.9 route in order to move on. That route shown on the left is a required step before I can learn any lead climbing (a different kind of climb every serious rock climber has to know). Last Thursday, I put my fear aside and went for it. I fell countless times, hung on the rope like a hopeless little monkey swinging back and forth and couldn’t’ get back on the wall. A few people had to gather the ropes together to get me back on the rock… I got to the top at last only because my team wouldn’t let me down. Oh, boy, what a disaster.

Yesterday, I went for it again with even more fear. I tried to focus entirely on balancing and positioning my body. Surprising, I didn’t have to pull myself up while I was hanging there. I just took time to find the body balance, use fingers to hold on and have my legs to do the rest of the work. It’s amazing how much difference it makes when I twisted my hip a bit here and there. For the very first time, my fingers started to feel the pain instead of my arms. And I went all the way to the top without much of the trouble.

I stayed on the 5.9 routes the entire night and finished every one of them. I finally can announce myself as a 5.9 rock climber! HA!

Food for your thoughts:

So I was chatting with a friend the other day, her MSN name for that day was:

LIFE is like getting raped, sometimes there is no use fighting it, so why not enjoy that brief moment of painful pleasure

So I said to her, “wow, interesting name…”, and she replied, “oh yeah, but that’s not all”.
“What else?” I asked, and she replied:

WORK is like gang-rape, you do one, and another one, and another one, and another one…

I wrote in my previous story about trying to change the work schedule to give people more work/life balance and I thought I was gaining some ground and making progress?

Wow, I am still too naïve about this corporate world.
A few more developments that sort of surprised me:

1. Some people on the same team went to the management and said they had no problems with the schedule and I shouldn’t open my big mouth. Wow! Buddy, if you want to work 18 hours a day trying to climb the corporate ladder and impress the management, go right ahead. I am too old for that!
2. I got criticized publicly for not effectively communicating the issue with direct project managers. The PMs wrote in open emails that such individual should not rely on emails to communicate. And again, my fellow PM, you sure did use the emails as your primary resource to communicate to the rest of the team. So what the hell were you saying? But my bad.. I probably shouldn’t skip a level. That’s the only thing I would do differently.
3. Communication emails have been sent out to the team about.. basically nothing. Everything we agreed upon in those “private meetings” regarding the tactical solutions is not mentioned in the emails.. But I am not giving up though. Second round meetings are requested and I am going to see what I can do.

Anyway, bullshit happens everywhere and everyday in the corporate world. After more than 9 years of struggling in such an environment trying to fight the uphill battle, I seriously think about what is more important and how long I want to be abused by such working environment.

So, there’s been a lot of hoop-la about sharks in the waters of Florida beachs lately. Just today, I was having lunch and guess what was on the news? Really, this is nothing new, Florida averages about 30 shark attacks a year, but with all the media fanfares, now that Eee-Hee-Jackel’s trial is over, why aren’t they doing more about it?

Wait, what’s this? Well, well, well, slap me silly, and call me a smart donkey, somebody has invented, drum roll please, the miraculous “Shark Shield”. It suppose to generate a electric field that annoys the hell out of the sharks, and it might even cause the shark to have horrible cramps and spasms if they get close enough. It’s targeted specifically to sharks, so it won’t harm you or any other marine lifes. The portability is so so, about the size of a laptop battery, with a 3 foot long hose attached to it for the electrodes.

Unfortunately, even with the new improvements, the original technology this is based on is only effective 60% of the times, which means 1/3 of the time, you are still shark bait, and the price tag for this thing is over $700. Come on Walmart, this is perfect investment opportunity for you guys. I’m sure you can get the price down to $69.99, and QVC will sell it for 3-easy payments of peanuts.

Well, time to strap on my laptop battery and jump into the boiling hot pool at the hotel.

Did your Dad ever complained about his old beaten up mouse pad? Thanks to my friend Mike C’s discovery, here goes another fantastic gift idea for your next father’s day.

In my entire 9 and half years of IT career, I have been able to dodge the bullet and never needed to carry a pager…. until now.

Saturday night around 11:20pm, my cell phone started to spit 10 text messages per second at me for a good half an hour with this wonderful high pitch tone I picked. The worst part is that you can’t do anything with the phone while it is in the process of notifying you that “You got a text message”. I finally had to yell at the damn phone on the top of my lung, “SHUT THE F@#$ UP!!!” The next thing I knew, I stayed up on the SWAT call until 3am. And this happened the night before! The weekend was ruined… Oh, and the best part is that I HAVE TO DO THIS on EVERY weekend in July.

I am not the only one who has been losing life over this job. Majority of the people on this project haven’t taken a single weekend off for a very long time. And working late hours without sleeping is expected by the client.

When I worked in Richmond, VA for a year, most of my friends had to be on call for an entire week. I don’t know how they survived those horrifying “You don’t get to sleep” nights for years. Gloria is probably till doing that. My gosh, I think this is time for me to consult those On-Call experts back in Richmond, “Yeah.. exactly.. How did you keep your sanity when you don’t even have the rights to sleep, let along living your life???”

I finally gathered all the courage and wrote a memo to the top project execs and copied to my own department managers to address the issue and suggested a few things to give back people’s life in some way if not all. I sat down with bunch of managers yesterday to work on the resolutions and it seems that I have gained some ground: 1. If people worked on nights and weekends, they have the rights to take week days off. 2. No one should work more than 2 weekends per month and the schedule has to work around people’s personal plans.

I remember Tom Cruise’s character got fired because of a memo he wrote in Jerry Maguire. I guess I am luckier than him in this case.

I was happily eating my sweet&sour shrimp while the news started to report the “fascinating one night stand” between Princess Di and JFK Jr. Apparently, Di’s former “energy-healer” Simone Simmons felt the need to catch media’s attention by spitting out the steamy secrets of the dead princess… And the media went all over it… Looks like being killed by the paparazzi isn’t enough. Princess Di has to keep paying for whatever she owns to the world even after years of her death. Why can’t the world leave the dead alone?!

Or, I should say it is Christine’s most wanted RPG! Finally, after an online based XI, mission structured X-2, a traditional Final Fantasy is back!!! I really hope this one can live up to the standards of FFX.

There were talks earlier that Square Enix may rework or drop the project because of the long painful 12 months silence. I really got worried for a while and wondering when in the world would I cast another Phoenix Down?! Looks like the wait is finally over in a few months.. but still.. a painful few months..

Other Final Fantasy News:

• Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. This is a full length CG-animated movie follow-up to FFVII. DVD will hit the store on Sept 13,2005. Don’t miss it!
• Since people can’t get enough of FFVII, a sequel is due out in late 2005. Dirge of Cerberus it is! I am not usually optimistic about any FF sequels after the experiences of watching Yuna dancing with guns like a 12 year old in X-2. But, a third person action doesn’t sound too bad here..