Every four moths, new co-op shows up in our company. I don’t know whether is that I am getting old or it is really a fact. I found that the standard of engineering students are getting worse and worse.
The first clue is the minimum grade in school to get a engineering school admission. In the old days, you have to get over 90% in order to getting into the engineering school. I heard that the admission average of engineering school is drop to 70% in the past few years. It seems all the bright kids are flocked to study fiance and accounting.
The second clue comes in the computer knowledge of our co-ops students. Newspaper says computer literancy is improving in Canada, but more people know how to use computer does mean they don’t how to use the computer better. Many student only know how to use computer to surf the net, basic word processing and merely as a mean of communication and entertainment. The general grow up with GUI seems totally clueless about the command prompt. In the past, only those who loves into computer study computer, we know everything about the computer inside out. Back then we don’t have computer classes, we just learn on our own by reading the manual. Kids today are so used to spoon-fed computer knowledge, it seems reading the manual to learn has became a lost art.
Last week I attend a training on conflict resolution at work. The instructor teach us a systematic way to resolve conflicts. In a conflict, there are two dimensions: relationship and personal goal. A successful conflict resolution should pay should build up relationship and achieve personal goal at the same time. Depending on different situations, there are five approaches to resolve conflicts:
Avoidance: This approach is best for trivial conflict. However for bigger conflicts, simply avoiding the conflict won’t make it goes away.
Accommodation: This approach sacrifice personal goal for relationship, trying to please everyone except yourself. In some situation asymmetric power balance, that is the one resolution. However, people always accommodate will eventually blow up.
Competition: I think this is my default approach. The good thing is competition get things done, but it may hurt relationship. It is best use in the situation when you don’t care about the other person or the bonding of relationship is so strong that can withhold the competition.
Compromise: Everyone give some and take some. It works on both relationship and personal goal at the same time, but it may end up everyone not getting what they really want.
Collaboration: This suppose to be the best approach, everyone become a team, treat others goal as your own goal and find the win-win solution. Obviously, it is easier to say than done and it won’t work if there are mutually exclusive personal goal. On the other hand, if everyone is open and honest about his goal, it may turn out the goals are not so conflicting after all.
My Lasallian bought me a Seagate 1TG external hard drive as a wedding gift. It is a prefect gift for me because I can consume any amount of hard drive space I lay my hand on with all my downloaded mp3, anime and movies. I already have many hard drives at home. My main computer has a 300GB drive for Windows and Applications, two RAID-1 500GB drive to store backup data, two RAID-0 120GB (240GB) for download and nobackup data. I have two 300GB eSATA and 200GB IDE external hard drive for data backup. On top of it, my secondary computer has a 300GB drive. In total, I have almost 3.5TB raw hard drive space in total!
It is time to consolidate my hard drive space and use them more effeciently. I plan to donate my secondary computer away, since Pat’s place has last space. It is a waste give away the good 300GB drive, so I will swap it with the old 200GB IDE. That leaves me with two 300GB drive. I will replace the RAID-0 stack with the two 300GB drive, then swap a 120GB to the external drive for mobile use. I am still thinking should I re-image the two 500 GB drive into a 1TB drive. Maybe I should keep it this way to provide extra redundency for my most important data, namely my documents, my photos and my mp3s. This will leave me with a 120GB SATA drive without a host. Anyone wants a old 120GB hard drive?
London Heathrow Airport is probably the worst airport in the world. I read from the news that on average 6% of luggage is lost every year and 20% of flights are delayed in Heathrow. A few years ago, Heathrow lost my luggage and it took almost a month for airline to locate it. I am taking BA for my honey moon to Rome, so I have to take a transfer at London. I thought the new T-5 terminal would have some improvement to the airport, it turns out to be worse.
On my way there, I have the most horrable airport experience. The plumbing system of T-5 is broken, there is no flushing tiolet. The airport is really stinky and janitors has to carry bucket of water to flush the toilet after each use. It is even worse than Indian’s airport, at least airport in India has running water. (no tiolet paper though). On my way back, the tiolet is working, but I was stucked in the plane for two hours waiting to take off. The pilot claim because of bad weather, 85 flights is queueing up for the runway. Luckily my luggage is not lost this time.
Even if the broken toilets and flight delays are just accidents, there are fundamental problems with Heathrow’s operation and design. Passangers have to walk a long way and queue up for the custom just merely staying in the airport for the transfer. One thing I don’t quite understand is the gate number assignment in Heathrow. Airport around the world assign gate number for each flight far ahead of time. Usually when you print your boarding pass, you already know which gate to board. In Heathrow, they keep the gate secret until the very minute. The moment you see the gate number show up in the display, you should get moving to the gate so that you won’t miss the flight. Everyone ends up waiting in the common area and create a huge crowd. One thing that is even more stupid is the new T-5 has 3 buildings connected by an underground light rail. Going from A gates to B gates is a one way street. Once you arrive in the B gates building, there is no way for you to go back to the A gates building. Passenagers can only go to the B gates once their gate number shows up in the display, which is almost time to board. As a result, passenagers won’t able to spent anything in the B gates shops. Then why the airport have shops and even a resturant in the B gates building. I feel sorry for those who open a shop in the B gates building, I don’t see a single customer in those shops, everyone is lining up to board.
I am officially a married man. Horace and Patricia has become one under the witness of over 200 families and friends. The wedding is very successful, thanks to the helps from our good friends. I don’t want to repeat my wedding speech again in the blog, but I must say thank you to those who have helped us one more time. It is great to see all of my good friends to celebrate my biggest day in life with me. Many of them come from far away, some even just stay for a few days. We had good time and able to catch up with each other before the wedding.
The wedding is very well planned, down to time resolution in 15 minutes. However, Murphy’s Law always rules. Thing is working pretty well in the morning. Except no one knows I had a stomachache due to too nervous. I have to ask my best man drove me to McDonald’s for a washroom break before the the door opening game begins. I don’t think asking to use the washroom in Pat’s house would work. The morning photo session is pretty fun, we have lots of group pictures with the groomsmen and bridesmaids. Everyting seems running so smooth that we were able to arrive early in the church.
Probably none of the guests notice, the church ceremony is really off schedule and liturgically wrong in a few places. Too bad that there is another wedding right after ours, so we were literally kicked out from the church. We did not get enough time to have group photos. Luckily, we were able to make it up in the banquet. Those group photo are most boring photo in a wedding anyways. It is more like a record of who has shown up. So consolidate group photos into bigger groups to speed things up wasn’t really a big lost. We planned another photo session in Stanley Park between church and banquet. In the original plan, the wedding party will tag along too. We are running short of time, so we decide to take more couple pictures instead of group shots. The groomsmen and bridesmaids went straight to the restaurant to setup. They got some rest and with just us and the photographers, we were able to take photos quite efficiently. It is important to have take engagement photo with the same photographers, so that we know how to work with each other on the wedding day.
I am really tired at the banquet. We have good MC and wedding planner, so the banquet runs pretty well. I just have to follow the instruction. I don’t have to think too much. It seems my brain has shut down and I am just react with subconscious reflections. We have some silly games in the wedding. One of the game is hiding the groom. It is the first break I have since the morning. I was hiding quite relaxingly at the table in the far corner. That table is full of Pat’s high school friends, the girls could not finish the dishes, so I can share some food. I was enjoying a chicken leg when Pat finally found me. After the banquet, we have another challenge. We received lots of gifts, some of the gifts are in huge boxes. I love gifts in general, but some gifts I got simply shows the giver has no common sense. For example, I got a huge fancy garbage bin. It is nice, but it is inconvenient to bring to the restaurant in the first place. Did the giver ever think about how could I possible move it home? Luckily my groomsmen are really good friends, although it’s pretty late after the banquet, they still helped me to bring the gifts home. It takes three cars to load all the gifts.
I will write a more detail blog entry about my wedding experience when I have more time to digest it. There are so many things happening in the wedding day. I could use some quiet time in my honey moon trip to think over it when I am sun bathing on the deck of a cruise ship.