Today I am stucked in all day long meeting again. The first meeting is really boring and useless, I go only for the free lunch. The speech is given from a remote site thru teleconference. Toastmaster said 60% of communicaiton comes from gesture and facial expression, no wonder one is interested in whatever he talks about. To make it worse, the slides are pages after pages of block diagrams. Who would care all those look alike boxes. I bet if there is no free lunch, no one will show up in that meeting. The afternoon meeting is a marathon meeting from 1:30p.m. to 5:00p.m. It is a training on one of the software tool that I went through a couple of years ago. I only need to be there to refresh my memory and join the discuss on making decisions. I brought some other work into the meeting room to better utilize my time. I found when I am locked up in a meeting room, I can actually concentrate better. I able to accomplish the schedule planning and task assignment for my part of the testbench. I suggested that we should all a laptop at work so we can bring it into the meetings. Using pen and paper to calculate time in the schedule is not fun. However that raise another question if everyone has a laptop and no one will pay attention to the meeting. I proposed we can block internet access inside meeting room. So people can only access the intranet and do actual work or listen to the meeting, both are equally boring I presume. The guy sit next to me said blocking internet is useless cause he will probably setup ssh session in his Linux box for turnelling to the internet. I guess it is in the blood of engineers eager to find ways to work around any obstacles.