Cow’s Life - Thinking Outside Of The Barn

I have been writing blogs on www.heavywinter.com for a few weeks now and it is SO MUCH FUN! I just had to set one up and check out the blogging experience as an administrator… Not bad.. took me just 2 hours to set it up…. and with unlimited authors… pretty cool!

For those of you who have known me for a long time, I had always been an indoor person who thinks those mountain people who sleep on the rock and cook like barbarians are out of their minds. And I never understood those guys who risked their lives trying to conquer some top peaks. What’s for?

A few years ago when I was living in Toronto, I got all interested in rollerblading. I had never tried it but I went ahead and bought myself a pair of nice rollerblades. The next thing I knew, BANG! I fell on my butt and took me forever to get back on my feet. So the rollerblades went into the storage room and haven’t seen the daylight since…

I had my mind set that I was not good at any sports that require body balancing. And I will never give up my comfortable mattress to sleep in the wild… Oh… and rock climbing? Gee… I am afraid of the height.. so.. hell with that!

Today is June 27, 2005. I am 32 years old, I rock climb on 100 feet cliffs; I snowboard on blue; I hike and I camp. I see why these people are up there fighting the storms to climb to the peaks; I appreciate the nature like never before. Wow, what a change! All it took was just a little change of mind… to tell myself.. “Go ahead and try it… and don’t give it up so easily…”

I have been an engineer all my life and I only took 2 formal college level English classes in my entire life. I always told myself that the only thing I could write was technical manual and I don’t have the word “artistic” written in my DNA. Ever since I started writing for my friend’s blog, I surprised myself by seeing the creative side of me. Again, all it took was a little change of my mind.

What I’ve learned from living in Colorado and the people who have helped me in the past year is that the sky is the limit when it comes to what you can do and what you are good at.. You never know until you give it a try…

It’s been quite rough lately…work… friendship… family… personal issues… So I figured I’d write a few words to collect some positive thoughts and keep myself going…

About Happiness
Nobody is responsible for our own happiness but us. Our loved ones bring us joy, but our true happiness lies within. So, if you think you are not happy or feeling negative, search that internal sunshine rather than seeking it from other people. (i.e. expect other people to talk to you about your issues and make you feel better. That’s good, but only solve problems temporarily). Not until you start to think positively, appreciate yourself and be happy with what you have that you can share your happiness with others.

About Overcoming Obstacles
We all have our ups and downs. Sometimes everything seems to fall apart and it sends you right into the bottom of the valley. Try to believe that everything will always work out no matter how hopeless it seems to be at that time. Focus on what you have, such as families, friends, health and most importantly, the determination that you WILL make the situation better everyday.

About Love
There is kind of love called Unconditional Love. You love someone and you don’t seek anything in return. Sometimes, you may have to sacrifice your own interests in exchange for other people’s well-being. Most of us believe that only the parents can offer that kind of love to their kids. But I think we can all offer our unconditional love to a much bigger crowd. When you don’t seek anything back and when you know that because of your sacrifice, somebody else is in a much better situation, that kind of joy is priceless. So give a little, help a little and share your love.

Why can I also write on Yuna’s Village?
As I mentioned in the “about” page, I set up the site with the intention to share something positive, fun and inspiring with everybody. I also realize the limitation of being the single author that it is not possible for me to capture every little fun detail in our daily lives. Therefore, I encourge you to submit an entry if you have something worth sharing.

What kind of contents can I submit?
I would strongly recommend you to take a look at the existing posts on Yuna’s Village to get a feel of the type of contents.

Anyway, here is the general guildline:

1. If you are submitting an article, it has to be original and written by yourself. I can’t take anything that is copied and pasted from somewhere else.
2. The article you write needs to spark a few thoughts and give other people some positive impacts and help other people to grow. I am looking for some contents that are original, inspiring, positive and fun
3. You can also send me a link of some odd news you have spotted on the web that is funny and entertaining. However, since there are too many big boys who do collaboration blogging already(such as Fark.com), I am not going to duplicate what they are hosting. So go out and find the hidden treasures that the big boys haven’t spotted yet.
4. You can also submit some funny photos to be featured in the Photoblog section. I am looking for something hilarious or inspiring.
5. Please be aware that I can not accept everything submitted as Yuna’s Village is a “One and Half Man” shop (Thanks to Paco and Cyco Miko’s part-time help). If your entry will be featured on the site, you will be informed via email.
6. By submitting your entry, you are giving Yuna’s Village the right to publish your contents on the site. However, you are still the owner of your content so you can take it to anywhere you want. After all, I don’t own your entry and I am only going to host it on my site.

How to submit your entry
Shoot me an email (admin@yunasville.com) with the following four pieces of information and I will be glad to set you up:

• Alias/Nickname (this will be your logon name and also the name appears on the site)
• Your full name (Your full name will not appear on the site. I only need it to register you. But you don’t have to if you are not comfortable to tell me who you are. I will just call you Bob Dole or Jane Smith or whatever)
• Your email address
• The contents of your entry

Once your submission is accepted, I will post the entry under your alias on the site.

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..

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?!

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.

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.

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.

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.