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?

I just found out flictr has a feature showing the most popular camera among its users.? It is surprise to see in the catagory of compact cameras, the top 5 positions all belongs to Canon.? To think a little bit more, actually this outcome is quite reasonable.? In the professional camera catagory, it is a even split between Canon and Nikon.? However the compact line of Nikon camera is just so and so.? So Canon is naturally recommanded when new buyers who don’t know much about cameras asking advices from their photographer friends.? Compact cameras from Sony and Panasonic seems quite popular, at least they runs lots of advertisement.? The problem for Sony is their camera is over priced and use their proprietary memory stick, which is quite inconvinient.? Panasonic is famous for their house hold electronics like rice cooker and microwave, customer won’t have much confidence in their digital camera yet.? The market of camera is perfect demotration of the power of prosumers, who are usually the early adopters or the hobbists.? They are usually the opinion leader among general consumers.? Winning their support can swing the market share to your advantage by a large margin.? Here is the link to flickr’s camera data.

In western culture, there are two topics your generally avoid with new friends.? They are religion and politics.? The reason not to talk about these two topics is to avoid unnecessary conflicts.? Religion and politics involves fundamental values of each person, which everyone may be different.? It is almost impossible to determine the objective right or wrong of those value without going through boring acedamic discussion span across all the spectrums in philosophy.? Instead, people choose to defense their value subjectively following their emotion.? If the party involved do not know when to stop the discussion before it gest too deep, most often the conflict between values will turns into flaming wars ended with personal insult.? The good thing about internet is you can talk about your religion and political viewpoint all you like with out fear jeopadizing any relationship.? Your opponent may hate you from the guts because you deny their value of existance, but they can’t do anything to harm you.? If the discussion turns into insults, you can just simpily ignore him.? You can’t ignore people you meet in real life.? The most thing you get from dicussion religion and politics on the internet is you get a sample of how people with different values will response.? If you can’t void those topics in real life, you know what is the best way to steer away from the hot spots that lead to conflicts.

Pat gave me a very cute CD of little kids singing classic love songs.? I was playing it in my car these days.? I drove a few friends at work to lunch today and they have some interesting response to the CD.? One guy first comment that it is church songs, which is not true.? After I pointed out those are classic love songs, he made an excuse by claiming he is too young to know those songs.? The fact is that he is the oldest person in the car and some younger one recongize the songs.? He just show his lack of knowledge in classic love songs.? Then another person criticize the singing and said that he like the original version better.? How can you compare the singing skill of a 10 years old kid with the super stars?? He just don’t know how to apprepiate the cuteness in the kids’ voice, which is the differentiating factor of the CD.? I guess someone really lack the cultural capacity to enjoy the CD.? He fled my car after lunch to get a ride from someone back to work.? I will play this CD whenever he get a ride with me.? I think with more listening training, he will learn to not scared by the cute classic love songs sang by kids.