Christopher Leadership Course
I know I haven't touched this blog in the longest time, so I thought maybe it's time I renew it before I abandon it. Kelvin and I started attending the Christopher Leadership Course in Effective Speaking last week. It's a 12-week course and it teaches you about speaking techniques, such as reading out loud, talking about an object, introducing other people, preparing a speech. Tonight was the 2nd class and I can already tell that I is wonderful.
The teachers are all volunteers and were all past students of the course. You can tell that they are very enthuasiastic about teaching the course. They make the class so fun!
I always thought that speaking in front of people is a natural gift. Sure, some people are not shy to speak out. But giving a talk is different from just rambling on and talking to people, and after a couple of classes, I realize that there are techniques to be an effective speaker. It is not a natural born ability and can be learned and mastered. At the end of each class, one of the instructors gives a "Christopher talk." I really hope that at the end of the 12 weeks, I can stand in front of an audience and show such calm and confidence without any cue cards!
I highly recommend this course to anyone who wants to improve their public speaking. Check out the website for the next session in September or January!
Scrambling for the new chairs
Something hilarious happened at work today. Some time in the morning, some people started grabbing these boxes of new office chairs that were stashed in the corner (I'm not sure when they came in). My co-worker said to me, "There are new chairs. You want one? I'll grab one for you cuz it's quite heavy." Well, I really don't find my existing desk chair comfortable so of course I want a new one. Then we spent 15 min or so opening the box and assembling the chair.
About an hour later, we found out that those new chairs are not for us (not for replacing our existing chairs), but they are for the meeting rooms, so that all the meeting rooms would have nice, uniform chairs. Well, I suppose that's important when we have clients and outside people come. The I.T. guy sits in our quadrant, and I saw the VP and another senior person come by and ask "Who gave them the permission to take the chairs?" The I.T. guy (he also does every miscellaneous stuff in the office) had to send a "nice" sounding e-mail telling everyone that the chairs are for the meeting rooms, and if you have a chair, please bring it to a meeting room. Also, if you don't like your chair, you can exchange for one of the existing chairs in the meeting rooms. Another thing, if you helped to assemble the chairs, please also be responsible for taking the garbage outside the office.
Well, I was a little disappointed for not getting a new chair, b/c the new chair is more comfortable and supports better posture. But the whole situation is just very funny. A mad scramble for new chairs and a whole bunch of people assmebling them only to find that the chairs are not for them! I bet the I.T. guy just didn't say anything b/c he's getting a bunch of people assembling 30 chairs for him! Also, it also shows that there are too many Chinese people working at my company. You know, the whole greediness and "I don't wannna miss out" attitude. Yes, I admit, that I'm like that too!
Children's bedtimes
I read an article in the
Globe and Mail today about how kid's bedtimes are getting later and later, and this in turn is affecting the kid's attention, behaviour, and emotional/psychological growth. In the example in the article, the 6-year old was playing video games after dinner in HIS ROOM and the parents had to struggle with the kid to get to bed for 1.5 hours. By the time he has fallen asleep, it is 9:30pm.
Apparently, perhaps more than 20 years ago, most 5-6 year old kids sleep at 7pm-8pm. The biggest problems are with the parents. They let their kids be in control over them. Imagine, having a TV and video game console inside a 6-year old bedroom! How ridiculous! No wonder the kid doesn't wanna go to bed!
Hmm...somehow I don't have any recollection of sleeping that early, but I could be wrong. In the busy busy school work life of a typical HK primary school student, there is so much homework after school, I don't think I went to be until at least 9:30pm-10pm. But then I went to afternoon session of school, so that's a different story.
Come to think of it. I don't even get off work until at least 7pm right now. Woww...and a 5-year old kid
should sleep around that time. Haha..no wonder there are so few married women with kids at my company!
If you are interested in reading the article
here it is.
All set for HK
Yea! Finally go my ticket to HK. I'll be going for 2 weeks (17 days) to HK and hopefully join a tour to Beijing! It was not easy for me to get my manager to sign the vacation form. I've had to asked him more than a few times and he keeps saying "I still need to think about it." Well, me going away for 2 weeks isn't going to affect the schedule that significantly! I'm just glad that he finally signed that form! My co-worker just came back from a trip to HK and Japan and boy, is she making me excited! I haven't been back to HK in 7 years and lots of things have changed. I'm really looking forward to all the shopping, the street markets, and the good food!!
Le Select Bistro
Kelvin and I went to Le Select Bistro with another friend a couple of weeks ago. Yummmm
Very good French food. Delicieux! Man..do I relish the excellent French dining in Paris...
Confit de Canard (duck leg)
Poor customer service cont'd
The poor customer service at Staples Business Depot was resolved. I called the manager of the store on Monday and guess what? They're gonna refund me the difference in price when I just present them with my Kinkos receipt! It's not small amount of money either! $50!
This teaches me that some things you have to fight for. Well, even though I called not even expecting any monetary compensation. I just wanted them to know of the issue and to let that employee know that this is not proper customer service. I let the manager know that I was not calling to have that guy fired.
Poor customer service and listening to my intuition
Yesterday was a bad bad day. It was a day of where I learned the important lesson to trust myself more than to trust others.
Kelvin and I wanted to get our flight tickets yesterday morning. Kelvin said that his brother asked for him whether the travel agent will be at work today. But we went there and she wasn't there. For some weird reason I already had a gut feeling that she wouldn't be there. We got "lo dim" by his bro man!!
In the afternoon, we went to Staples Business Depot at 1st Markham to get his design fair poster printed. The guy at the copy centre took down the dimensions and calculated the cost for us. But then he said that the machine is broken right now and someone will be here to fix it on Monday. He couldn't guarantee us that it'll be printed by Monday. You know how some people are the "kick him once and he moves 1 step?" He's exactly the type. As we were leaving, I thought that maybe I'll ask him whether another Staples would be able to print it for us. He says maybe the one at Markham Rd. and 14th. We asked him if he could ask for us and we saw that he went inside and called the other location. Fine fine. He told us that they could print it too and directed us to go there. Then I remembered 1 more thing: when does it close. Geez, he won't even tell me if I don't ask him. He says, that store is not open 24hours. "So when does it close?" We asked. He said, "Uh...the normal Sunday closing time...at 6 I think." It was 5pm then.
So we went to the store at Markham/14th. Well, guess what, they couldn't print it there because their machine is not big enough. Only the one at 1st Markham (which is the Staples head copy store) could print it. We got really pissed. Stupid staff at the 1st Markham store that was on training. Dammit...we gave him the dimensions 1m x 0.8m. If he was responsible enough, he would have asked if other stores could also print posters as big as that. He obviously didn't know anything and just told us to go there. Never listen to some part-time dude again and listen more to my intuition.
So we drove all the way back to Kinkos at woodbine/hwy 7 to get the stupid poster printed. Well, it's almost $60 more expensive at Kinkos but what you get is reliable and professional service. Not some stupid part-time on-training dude who was too irresponsible to ask someone else. Your job is to provide customer service and he failed miserably.
It's not like I want that guy to lose his job. But I'm gonna call the store tomorrow and speak to the manager. Because I want him to learn the lesson that it's irresponsible to provide that kind of service to customers, and he better learn how to be more reliable and responsible or he'll definitely suffer in future jobs.
Lazy waitresses
Gosh...were the waitresses at this Japanese restaurant that Kelvin and I went to on Friday LAZY! For some reason, we couldn't find Sushi Time on Bloor b/c it moved across the street, so we just walked into another Jap restaurant on Bloor near Bathurst. We saw that there were a lot of people and even some are waiting so we thought it must be decent cuz it is so busy.
Well, were we ever wrong! Even though a table has freed up, nobody served us to lead us to our seats until we asked them. We were not given tea until we asked. And the food took half and hour and was pretty bad. I mean, I can wrap better sushi than that!!
But the bad food and bad service brought us some interesting observations. There were 3 waitresses there: 2 were younger and 1 was older who was probably the lady owner. Not long after we sat down, the table of 6 behind us left. Believe it or not, almost half an hour after the table left, the table was still not cleared!!! Those 2 younger waitresses don't do anything except take orders, bring food to customers and bring them the bill. They're always at the back of the restaurant and kept walking around. Amazingly, they'll walk past a dirty, uncleaned table without a second look. Worst off, I even saw them dump some garbage from another table onto the uncleaned table. They were unbelievably lazy! They just don't like to clean dishes b/c "Oh, I'll get my hands dirty!!!" Geeeez
It was around 9-something at night and there weren't any more people waiting for tables. At that time, 3 dirty and uncleaned tables with dishes have already accumulated. Finally, the poor older lady ownder took a large tray and cleaned all three tables! We were wondering why she doesn't just fire the other 2 waitresses! She just seems too nice!
Now we knew why the restaurant was so busy! It's because the turnaround of tables is slow due to the long wait of serving and making the food. What Kelvin and I couldn't figure out is why still so many people go there, including many non-Asian people. I figured it's only because it's a good location.
Bad food and bad service plus lazy-ass waitresses. We ended only giving them a $2 tip. The restaurant is Mariko Japanese Restaurant on 551 Bloor St. West. Yeah, I'm bad-mouthing them!
I should go buy the lottery!
The most ridiculous thing happened at work today. One of our design databases came back from a metal spin and strangely, the part we fixed worked, but another part of the chip that was not touched did not work at all for all the chips. We finally figured that there was a short in the database. How did that happen and still manage to pass DRC and LVS??? VERY strangely, something went wrong during the compression using gzip. For some reason, either there is something wrong with the machine, memory, or OS, the compression corrupts the file. But still, what are the chances that the corruption happened on the same metal layer that we changed (out of like 20-something layers)??? The corruption of a few bits resulted in a very nice and proper looking short in the metal! That's why I say I should go buy the lottery.
Gosh...made me so nervous today. I HATE when something likes this happens b/c I always fear that I did something careless. But thankfully it wasn't. Come on, for super important stuff like this I always double check, triple check everything. I would have never thought that some errors in the stupid linux machine would have caused gzip to corrupt the file.
Haha...the VP half-jokingly said that the extra few K's $$$ re-tapeout is gonna cost is coming out of somebody's pay-cheque!
