Today is my first snowday in Vancouver.? The HR sent out an email early in the morning encourage employees work from home instead of coming into the office.? Half of the team is not in today.? I found working at home is not very productive.? I end up have a really long lunch and drove my mom to supermarket.? There are just so many distractions and worst of all the network connection is quite slow.? It is impossible to debug any waveform at home.? I can only do some maintance of the testbench involves only text editing.? It is nice to stay home and relax for an extra day.? In order to leave the impression I am actually working hard at home, I keep sending emails every couple of hours.? Even I finish the work, I would send out the emails slowly and seperated by some time interval.? I don’t think working from home is feasible.? Unless you live alone and have a home office, so no one will borther you.

Today, after many procastination, I finally take out my skis and bring them to ski shop for waxing. I was lazy at the end of last season, I didn’t wax it before putting it back into storage, so I have to do it before this season begins. I went to the ski shop I used to go to and there is back logged until next sunday for waxing. The technician only comes in once a week in the ski shop. I guess the volume of waxing in one shop is not enough to support a full time staff. The suddenly fall early snow in november makes people take out their ski and snowboard much earlier than last year. I went to another ski shop to wax my skis. Luckily their technician is in today and clear up most of the back log. So I can pick up the skis by wednesday. I can’t wait to go skiing next week. Too bad that the project havn’t tape out yet. It will look back skipping work to go to ski. If the project stick with its original schedule, it would be finished by now and I can just take some free days off to Whistler.

This year snow falls on Vancouver much earlier than usual.? It is only november and we have our first snow fall.? I used to live in Toronto and I am used to having everywhere covers in white during the winter.? People here in Vancouver are not used to snow, so they think having a snow day is a big deal.? The street is empty, many people stay at home avoid going out and the few cars on the road are driving much slower than usual.? Other than the inconvinience having to shovel snow, I actually like snow.? Sunshine is good only if I want to have outdoor activities on that day.? Raining is quite annoying since the noise of the rain is quite and make everywhere wet.? Snow is quite and dry.? You feel so peaceful by looking out to the street from inside a comfort warm place.? You feel contented.? No need to mention I loves skiing more than any summer sports.? The first snow fall marks the beginning of the skiing season.? I will take out my skis tomorrow and take them to waxing.? I already planned going to Whistler next saturday.

Some of my friends at work received an email from the facility group asking them are they willing to change their phone extension.? The Japanese office has moved to a new office, they want to be reached by dailing internal number.? The computer service would to forward the calls from a block of continous extension to Japan to minimize their work in setting up the VoIP server.? I think the sloppiness of the computer service department is no excuse causing trouble to other employees.? It is not technically impossible to leave the extensions backward compabtable.? They just want to save a few hours of work setting up the VoIP server.? Changing your extension at work is quite disruptive.? You have to tell all your friends you have a new extensions and print new business cards.? Not to mention that printing new business card require a few level of management approval for those of us who don’t have to see any cilents.? Time wasted by all the affacted employees would combined is more than the time saved by not setting up the VoIP server properly.? Never mind that the time cost is higher in engineering department than in the CS department.? They could probably get the co-op to simple jobs like configuring the VoIP server.

Today my philosophy class is cancelled and I only found out seeing the notes in front of the class room.? I wasted almost an hour went to downtown campus and came back.? There is no easy way to notify the students not to come when a class is cancelled.? Email is not very reliable since people rarely check their emails before get on the sky train.? Online bulletin is equally useless since most people won’t check it regularly.? Phone call can ganruntee the students will get the message but it may not be feasible to call the students one by one.? Maybe the university should have a voice machine like the one used by telemarketer.? You just have to register your phone number and the classes you are taking.? The system will notify you when the class is cancelled.? Students won’t mind machine voice as long as they are informed so their time is not wasted.? There ain’t many class cancel every day and each messge is short, so a small machine can probably handle the work load of the whole university.? Now the professor has skipped a class which I have paid for.? Should the school refund 1/12 of my $500 tuition?