Last night was my company’s annual christmas party. Even though it said annual, it’s the first time since 5 years. During the downturn, the company simply cut all the unncessary expense, and the party is one of them. The official name is called winter party, to be politically correct and not offending other religion. I think that is totally fart with pants down. I doubt anyone will be offended by using the word christmas. Just turn christmas into a secular festival like halloween, make Santa Claus and Rudolph the red nose raindeer rather than Jesus as the center character of hristmas should be sufficient, no need to replace the word christmas with something else.

I always the like the idea about beating the system, finding clever ways to exploit the loopholes to your favour. Today, I find a very inspiring story on the news. There is a Canadian guy spent $7000 on a North America unlimited pass with Air Canada, then continuously fly for two months and end up earning $70000 worth of airmiles. His daily routine starting at 10a.m., flying back and forth between Vancouver and Victoria 6 times, then before the airport is closed, board an over night flight to Toronto and come back right away. He basically earned ten times of return in two month and they are all tax free! I think Air Canada will soon fix the airmile system. I just wonder, what he does on the plane to pass time?

Since I have started writting my thesis, or merely the M.Eng project, I have to think about my defense. The faculty has just imposed a 2+2 weeks rule, that is the paper has to ciruculate two weeks before the defense and the defense has to be at least two weeks before the submission. That implies even I can finish writting my paper before the end of this term, my defense will be schedule in january. One of my colleague, Ivy, has started the program about same time as me and she is having her defense tomorrow. At first I would like to tag along and check out how the format of the defense. But she refused let people see her defense to avoid having unncessary pressure. Althought I can still find out the room and time and just sit in, but I don’t want to be rude. Since I objective is to check out a defence, which can be any defense. I tagged along with Ivy to check out someone else’s defense today. The defense is pretty straight forward, 30 minutes of presentation followed by Q&A session. The professors and your own supervisor will usually go easy on you, not asking tough questions. The audience can also ask questions, but most of them are like us, sitting in just to prepare for their own defense, they usually are polite enough not to give the defender a hard time. However in today’s session, a guy from Mainland China is being rude, he tried to drill the defender with hard questions. This act really shows his lack of proper manner. I hope I won’t encounter one of those guys in my own defense.

In my department, we used to have a quarter status update hosted by the VP. We found that session is very useful, keep us posted with the lastest project related news in department. When the VP was transfered to another department, the acting VP stopped the quaterly meeting. We kinda miss it. Now, we just have a new VP for the department. Instead of quaterly meeting, he hosts monthly meeting, and this month I just had one. Sometimes it is not always more the better. This materials in this meeting is 80% recycled from last month, there is not enough new stuff to keep us interested. In another word, our time is basically wasted for the meeting. My colleague in the next cube calculated how much this meeting has cost the company. There is over 100 engineers idling in the meeting for an hour, the is more than 100 man-hours lost in productivity. Take the man-hours times our averaged hourly wage, the company lost tens of thousands over this meeting. The cost saved by having a quaterly meeting instead of monthly culmulated over a year could buy every engineer a second LCD monitor.

Vancouver doesn’t snow much, usually it just rain all winter long. This year, the first snow fall comes quite early. I don’t mind snow at all, since I am already used to it back east. The problem here in Vancouver other people who don’t used to live in the white world. Before the snow melts away, the traffic is jammed thanks to all the clueless drivers. I think this skiing season will be excellent, provided that the snow will keep dumpping down.