The story begins a few months ago when Uncle Bob, our CEO, sit at our table during lunch time. We ran out of topics to entertain him and I brought up the idea of having dual monitors will increase productive. I have been trying to get two monitors for a long time but due to the rigid IT policy, I have no luck so far. After the conversation, I forwarded him the research paper on larger screen and productivity, done by ATI, NEC and Micrsoft (the motivation is quite obvious) I don’t expect it will bear any fruit, but no harm try anyways. Then a month later two LCD monitors shows up in my cube one morning. I got an email from the IT department saying I am participate in the dual montors trial program, which it seems I am the only participant. Since then I heard nothing from the IT about this issue, I figured out they just give me two monitors to shut me up.

Last week after the stuff update, I saw another team member talking to Bob about the disappearing of the word Christmas in the company. Somehow I feel I should talk to Bob again about dual monitors. He is surprise to hear that nothing is happening, and he assure me he will follow up on this since it will definitely increase productivity and moral. The result is I have an meeting with the VP of the IT department this morning. He asked me to give feedback about the benefits on dual monitors. Of course I highly praise the use of dual monitor. Since the VP himself is an engineer, he totally understand my concern. However he said that he need some numbers to justify the cost of getting a second monitor to the CFO to get his approval. Getting a second monitor for every engineer cost 300k, quite a large amount. I thinked for a while, then I proposed to calculate the cost of a second monitor in reverse. Here is the equation:

350 (cost of the monitor) / 3 (years to depreciation) / 200 (work days per year) / 50 (average hourly wage of an engineer) = ~1 minute (the time need to be save per day to justify the cost of the 2nd monitor)

Having a second monitor definitely save more than 1 minute per day, and therefore it is justified. The VP told me that once he get the approval from CFO, he can start company wide deployment next month. I feel I had done something really good for all my fellow colleagues.

Horlick is one of my favourate drinks since I was a little kid. Everytime when I have to choose the drink that comes with the lunch combo at Mui Garden, I always pick Horlicks. Horlick is made form malt, and usually come in powder form. According to the nutrition label, Horlick is a health drink with lots of vitamin and minerals. You just have to add several spoonful of Horlick powder sugar and milk to hot water to make a cup of Horlick. Pat recently bought me a box of 3-in-1 Horlick, which also include milk power and sugar in the same package. The first thing to do every morning, is make myself a cup of Horlick. Now, after the box is finished, I think I will bring a bottle of Horlick to work. The 3-in-1 is quite expensive, about 50 cents a bag, where a big bottle of Horlick powder only cost several bucks and I can get milk and sugar in the caferteria. Mm… so yummy.

I can’t believe me and Anson got into playoff round of the foosball tournament. We joined the novice league and to our surprise, we ranked number 4 out fo 12 teams. I had never play foosball until PMC has installed one in the game room. For the past few months, I have became quite skillful by playing a game or two almost every day. Although my level is still far behind those experts, but I had made significant improvement. My weakness area is the ball handling skill, I still can’t stop and gain control of the ball. My shooting and aiming is average, I can do a push shot pretty well, but need to work on the pull shot. My most pround skill is the 5-bar shots. Actually I think I am the first one who start using it regularly in PMC. I got the idea from the debate whether or not make the 5-bar goals illegal. If it is something almost illegal, it is something worth to look into. Since I piloted the use of 5-bar, people start copying this technique. Someone even develope strategy to block 5-bar shots and make it less effective. I have to think about how to put a new twist in the 5-bar shots.

The morale of the day is never act stupid at work, or within a day the whole company will know about you. Today there is only one topic among my friends at work, both the cantonese group and the CBC group I hang out with. I will not mention the incident here and removed any trace of it in my blog upon the request of those who are involved. For those who already known what I talk about, it is really funny indeed. I have always keep a very simple rule about my secrets. If it is something I truly don’t want anyone to know about, I simply won’t telling anyone about it. As described in the 2nd law of thermal dynamics, energy tends to spread out naturally. The larger the surface area, the faster the heat dissipate. We all know information is a form of energy and energy can be expressed as heat. On a second thought, maybe this incident is not meant to be a secret, maybe it is a story that should goes around and give people some enlightenment. I even post the story as an example of how to ruin a date on the internet forum I go to.

When I wake up this morning, it was snowing heavly outside. Since I have to work on my thesis, I didn’t plan to go outside at all today, the snow doesn’t affect me. However I do feel better that I know many people will also trapped at home due to the snow fall. Pat had planned to come over to have dinner together. But due to it is very dangerous to drive in this road condition, she better stay home. I am not very productive today, just managed to write another 4 pages. I still have one more week to finish my thesis and hand it in to be reviewed by Dr. Hardy. I found writing thesis is quite painful especially on how to condense 20+ papers into 4 pages in a meaningful way. Anyways, let’s pray I can finish the thesis and graduate early to end this painful process of writing thesis.