I was being a sales last week and I became a waiter this week. Tonight is another fund raising event for the World Youth Day. It was an auction dinner. I don’t really like this idea when it first proposed because it takes too much work. Indeed there are lots of preparation work to get the sponsors and tonight is really tough. I had never been a waiter before in my life, and I’m sure I don’t want to be one ever. I am originally assigned to take care of the drinks counter, which is probably the most easy job, all I have to do is sit there and hand out pops. Some girls are assigned to serve coffee and tea, they have to walk around and refill the guests. It turn out that is much more demanding than expected as the pot are quite heavy and people drinks alot. In order to give a good service, I end up helping out the girls to bring water, coffee and tea to the tables. The guest even thought I am actually the one who is responsible for their cups. Walking back and forth on the floor, remembering who wants what kind of drink is not fun, and worse I have to wear a smile all the time even though I hate pouring drinks. Comparing to the clean up after the dinner to restock the dishes, stack the table, this brainless manual labor seems much easier, at least I can keep my brain activity to the minimum. The Bible said thou shalt serve others, I seriously doubt the practicality of that teaching. Serving others and pretend to be graceful is one thing, but serving others with a true heart is quite different. I can understand the professionalism in the exchange of service and rewards. But who would truly serve others and why would they want to do that? Other than having intangible rewards return spiritually, there really make no sense to serve others. Helping your friends or be kind to a stranger once a while with no commitment are honorable charities that give you a good feeling. However serving others full time are beyond all reasons. Even thought those are mostly harmless nice people, their actions don’t follow logic and are unpredictable. Thus they have the potential to become very dangerous lunatics.
Category Archives: Daily Scribble
My random thoughts of the day.
Walk the dog
I found taking care of Charlie, the golden retriever of Pat, is quite time consuming. I have to remember feed him every morning before I go to work and go home early to feed him dinner. Since he is very bored staying home all day, I try to walk him every night. Walk the dog is more time consuming that I had expected. Just want to the park close to Pat’s place and back takes over 15 minutes, and it would take more time if I let him run around in the park. For time when I’m around, Charlie is very lazy. He usually lays in front of the window or TV doing nothing, and very slow in responding to my commands. It is very easy to recognize dog’s facial expression to tell whether he is happy or sad. After this experience of living with a dog, I’ll definitely think twice before getting my own dog in the future.
Layoff
There is another round of layoff today in the company. We had already lost track of the number of layoff, it maybe the fifth or the sixth round. It is not affecting the Headquarter in Burnaby at all. Over 60 engineers are let go in the Santa Clara design center, which is over 2/3 of the design team down there. It’s mainly due to the company decided to exit the custom MIPS core business, therefore we no longer need their expertise. We can foresee the closure of that division when we use the licensed core from MIPS instead the custom core in our own product. Upon hearing the news around lunch time, our usual group have a concern on the fate about Suzanne. Lucky that later in the day, she sent an email to all of us saying she is safe. From my experience and what I heard from other companies, it’s always more secure to work in the corporate headquarter or at least the regional main office. Tiny remote sites often become the first victim of downsizing.
Reinstall
Today continues the painful process of installing software. I get most of the software installed, and I realized I forgot to copy two very important pieces of information from my old hard drive, they are my firefox bookmark and palm desktop contact list. I wonder why can’t all the software save their data in one centralized location, so I only have drag one directory every time I update my system.
Computer Crash
Fortunately, I am able to recover the data from my harddisk after running fixboot, fixmbr, chkdsk /p and fdisk /mbr on the recovery console from the Windows XP CD. However, unfortunately, the OS is beyond repair, I can’t even start file explorer or even go online. To reinstall my computer, I have to find some disk space to host my data while I reformat the harddisk. So I end up buying a 200GB harddisk for backup, and since I am going to open up the case, I got myself extra 1GB of RAM. Now my system has 1.5GB RAM and 440GB harddisk space in total. I’m planning to use the new harddrive and the 512MB RAM in the MS cheap computer though. I still haven’t decide whether should I take advantage of that deal, but will see how it goes.
To save time, I’m going to install the essential software. I found I had installed way too many software that I had not even used once. It’s a painful and unproductive process that I want to go through as soon as possible.
On a side node, when I was messing inside the case, I accidentally pressed the stand-by button of the cable modem and I’m not aware of it. I called the support line to make myself look like a fool for asking why the internet doesn’t work when the cable modem in stand-by mode. While I was waiting for the tech support, the system always play meaningless messages. I find a very stupid one telling the customer who has problem with their internet access to visit their support website. Duh! If I can visit the support website, I won’t be calling this number, go figure.