Category Archives: Daily Scribble

My random thoughts of the day.

Daily Scribble

Workload before vacation

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It always seems work is extra busy right before you are about to take a long vacation.  I will be away 3 weeks for my wedding and honey moon.  There is only 1 week of work time left before I take off.  Although I have planned the vacation many months ago and schedule all my tasks around my vacation, according to Murphy’s Law things usually won’t line up nicely as expected.  In a team work, you depends on other people’s work and other people depend on your work.  I planned my deliverable to other team members around my vacation so I won’t be the bottle neck when I am away.  Somehow everything I depends comes in late, my time ended up squeezed significantly.  If I am not going away, I could just finish my work a bit later.  However when I am going away for 3 weeks, delay is not an option.  Other people are depending on my work, if I don’t deliver, they will be sitting idle.  Luckily I take a week off before my wedding to recover form the pre-vacation work stress.

I am reading an article on business week about the ethics of taking vacations.  In the article it says some people will feel guilty for taking vacation.  They think they are stealing from the company and should work non-stop everyday.  Are they nuts?  Vacation is part of the compensation of your hard work.  Why would you feel guilty for exercising their hard earned vacation.  In a modern cooperation, any employee is replaceable.  If the work load is structured right, absents form work a few weeks should not have much impact to the company.  If you are so important that you can’t leave work for a few weeks, it implies the company will be in deep trouble without you, then why don’t you get the hefty pay raise you asked for?  Taking vacation is not only good to your mental health, it also good for you career.  The company will not know how important you are and appreciate your work until you disappear form the office.  The ideal scenario is that company can feel the pain and inconvenient of your absence, but not bad enough it things start falling apart.

Daily Scribble

Interviews

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I have been doing lots of interviews recently.  My project is half way and it is very behind in the schedule.  How do we get into this mess in the first place?  As usual it is bad management decision.  Somehow we underestimate the complexity of the chip and largely overestimate the productivity of Indian contractors.  The only way to stop the project from slipping further is adding more resource.  When we first move our operation to Indian, one of the promised advantage is we will be able to get as many engineers as we need.  Never believe any sales pitch, especially the sales pitch of Indian contracting firms.  Wipro basically runs out of qualified engineers that meets our requirement.  Indian contractors is the casue of the mess, it would be repeating the same mistake to hire more of them.  This time we are hiring N. America contractors.

The project is in pretty bad shape, so we are approved to hire 10 engineers.  To fill those positions, we have to do lots of interviews.  I guess my boss is too busy to interview all of them, so I am helping him to interview the candidates.  I did mostly phone interviews since most of the candidates are from the East Coast.  I even have an interview with someone from Israel.  I kinda act like the first line of defense, screening the qualification of the interviewees before pasting them to my boss for 2nd round interview.  My role is to preform technical interview, trying to determine whether the guy knows enough to be productive.  Since I am doing phone interview, I can’t ask very detail technical question because it may require some writing and drawing.  I found asking what challenges the candidate had in his previous project is very effectively in judging his level of expertise.  The more experience the person has, the challenge is usually more complicate.  Sitting in the other side of the table gives me new insights.  The questions asked by the Interviewer always have a certain purpose.  A successful interviewee should look beyond the factual question and try to give answer in a way that satisfies what the interviewer is looking for.

Daily Scribble

Bangalore bombing

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Last Friday, 9 bombs set off in Bangalore, killed two people and wounded over twenty people.  I never feel so close to terrorist attack.  I worked in Bangalore for two months.  My colleagues took over my tasks are still working in Bangalore.  According to the news, one of the bomb went off just outside the Forum Mall, which is right next to where I live.  When you have been to places so close to bombing, it seems quite scary.  Everyone I know in Bangalore is safe.  The unlucky souls drafted to serve the Bangalore tour of duty is now getting cold feet.  I guess they have every right to concern about their own safety.

According to the news, the bombing is carried out by a Islamic terrorist group called Indian Mujahideen.  It is a small outfit of the worldwide Muslim jihad terrorist.  It seems no one knows the political agenda of this little known terrorist group.  They are not making any request according to the news.  I don’t see any reason Indian Mujahideen to fight.  India has freedom of religion, Muslim are allow to practice their faith freely.  The Indian government is not oppressing Muslim in any mean.  On the other hand the Muslim are oppressing those who live next to their Mosque by their 5a.m. morning prayer with loudspeaker.

When Indian independent from the British Empire, the Muslim had their own country in Pakistan.  If the Indian Muslim don’t like living among the Hindu majority, they can simply move to Pakistan.  They have no right to ask for more than they deserved by threatening others who don’t share their religion.  If the Indian Muslims think they are oppressed because they are poor.  They are fighting for the wrong cause.  Believing in Muslim is probably why they are poor in the first place.  Think about how much productivity is lost in time wasted for daily prayers.  If they want to leave poverty behind, maybe they should stop reading Koran and start learning marketable skills.

Daily Scribble

Biofuel

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Fossil fuel will eventually runs out, one of the solutions to the environment problem is switch to biofuel.  Biofuel is produced by convernting plants into ethonal.  Plants is 100% renewable energy.  As long as there is land, water and sunlight, plants will grow every year.  Although biofuel is a clean energy, there are controversials about biofuel will disrupt food production.  I believed in this myth in the past and have doubt about the use of biofuel.  It turns out that is only true for 1st generation biofuel made from grains or corns.  The 2nd generation biofuel made from cellulor plants like grass or algae will have a 100 fold increase in efficiency.  We can produce enough biofuel to fill up all our gas tanks without affecting food production.  According to a news report, the effect of biofuel on food production is less than 1%.  Developed countries already waste more than 1% of food, so making biofuel should have virtually no impact on the food price.

I quoted the news in an online discussion about renewal energy and environmental problem. My view point is the Earth have more than enough energy for our consumption, only that we don’t have the technology to harvest the energy.  It contradicts with the view point of most environment people that we should simply use less energy.  I think the best way to solve the energy problem is through technology.  You can never solve the problem by conservation, it can only buy you some more time until the technology is ready.  Some people challenge the 1% number and accuse me posting misleading information.  I don’t know how the number is arrived, so I decide to work out the math myself to prove I am right.  After some research, here is the math:

US has 938 million acres of farmland (from US Dept of Agriculture website)
US use 138 billion gallon gas per year (from US Energy Statistic)
The highest efficiency of biofuel production is 15000 gallon per acre (from Wiki entry on Biofuel )
938m * 1 % * 15000 = 140.7B > 138B

Therefore, if we can produce biofuel with the most efficiency future technology, we will only need 1% of US farmland to produce enough gas for all the cars in US.  With the best technology today, we can only produce 1000 gallon per acre.  (BTW, grains, corn or soybean’s efficient is less than 200 gallon per acre.)  Biofuel is a pretty new technology, there are lots of room for improvement.  If it can follow the pattern of the Moore’s Law, 15 fold increase in a few decades is totaly feasible, at least according to the theory.

Daily Scribble

Plane Crazy

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Recently, I am addicted to this silly facebook application, which is quite not myself.  In general I keep my distance from uselss facebook applications.  I naturally ignore most of the application request and actually spent time delete all the useless applications from my profile.  Somehow this application had a click on me and turn me into a patient of compulsive disoder.  I log on facebook loyally and play this little application every day.

The idea of plane crazy is pretty simply.  You got a photograph of an airplane on your profile.  You start off with crappy hang glider and work you way up to A380 or Air Force One.  Each day, you have a quota of 10 races with other players.  If you win, you get points.  You can use the points to upgrade your airplane.  I like airplanes since I was a little kid, so I spent my 2 minutes with this silly application, then wait for my turns until the next day.  I am working my way up slowly.  I just got to the level of business jet.  My goal is to get reach some decent fighters, like a F-14 or F-22.

I wonder why I am so addicted to this silly game.  I guess it probably the same reason why people are addicted to fluff friends.  It is just a mystery.