Category Archives: Daily Scribble

My random thoughts of the day.

Daily Scribble

Indian and beef

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When I worked in India, I made friends to a few colleagues in the Bangalore office.  They shown me show me around town on weekends and we had lots of fun together.  One of them is visiting Vancouver for work, so it is my turn to be the host and show him the city.  We had a welcome lunch with other team member at Cactus Club today.  This friend of mine is a rare Indian because he eat beef.  He is the one brought me to try the illegal off-menu Indian deep fry beef in Bangalore.  We recommended him to have steak for lunch.  At first he wanted have the steak well done, luckily we stopped him or his steak would be like shoe leather.  It would taste best with medium-rare, but we afraid he may not like the blood juice, so we ordered him a medium instead.  This is his first time travel outside of India, so this is his first time to have a real steak.  He like the steak a lot and complain that he could not find  such a good steak in India.

When I was in India, I told him about my guns and I promise to bring him shooting when he come over.  So tonight we went to shooting range after work.  Due to various delay, we had dinner at McDonald to save time.  It turns out having a hamburger in McDonald is a new experience to him.  The McDonald in India don’t serve hamburger, they only have chicken, fish or veggie burger.  The funny thing is somehow he think hamburger is made of ham instead of beef.  I have to explain to him hamburger is not made of ham.  The name comes form where it is invented, which is Hamburg, Germany.  Other than serving hamburger, our McDonald is pretty much the same as the Indian McDonald.  The next food I will get him to try is sushi.  He still haven’t overcome the idea of eating raw fish.  I guess we should start with California roll then slowly work the way up to sashimi.  It is always fun introducing new cuisine to people from different culture, whether he like the food or not.

Daily Scribble

Ineffective incentive

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Today we have our department quarterly update.  The director flew in town to give us overview of how the department is doing.  My project is the only project in the department, so it has very high profile and no room to fail.  Thanks to the stupid decision of close down two design centers in Canada, lay off many experienced engineers and outsource the work to India, the project is quite behind schedule.  Now the management finally wake up and realize the problem, they are all scrambling and try all means to pull the schedule in.  They try to add more resource in India, but they simply could not find any qualified engineer.

They try to hire back ex-employees from the closed design center as contractors.  It is pretty much admitting last year’s decision to close down the site is stupid.  One desperate measure to they try is by making us work hard and longer hours.  This idea won’t work if they use the stick because it would only demotivate us and further lower our productivity.  They try to use carots and lure us to work overtime.  The director said if the project is finish on time, the whole team will have a special bonus as incentive.

This idea sounds great, the only question is how much is the bonus.  The director did not give us any number or percentage, so the incentive won’t work.  No one would work harder if they don’t know roughtly how much we will get in return.  After the meeting, some of us did a rought calculation, we all agree that the bonus has to be at least $10k to be attractive.  Judging from previous record of the company, the so call special incentive bonus could be merely a few thousand dollars, which won’t worth working your ass off.

Daily Scribble

Yakisoba Sandwich

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Yakisoba Sandwich

Today I tried a very unusual sandwich, yakisoba sandwich.  I have heard of this sandwich from a childhood cartoon.  The characters love having the Yakisoba sandwich all the time.  I thought it must be a joke in the cartoon, who would want to eat sandwich with no meat or veggie, but it turns out yakisoba sandwich is real!  Yakisoba is Japanese fried noodle, so Yakisoba sandwich is Japanese fried noodle inside a bun.

The taste is OK.  It taste like yakisoba and bread.  However having double dose of cabrohydrine seems a very weird combination.  I have no idea why Japanese would come up with this silly sandwich.  Apparently, it’s quite popular in Japan.  If people are stupid enough to believe having the no-carbo Atkin diet will lose weight, maybe I can start a new all-carbo diet fad.  I can create a series of double carbo sandwich such as  fried rice sandwich, french fries sandwich, toast sandwich, cereal sandwich and ultimate sandwich sandwich, which is a sandwich bun inside another sandwich bun.

Daily Scribble

Royal Caribean

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Royal Caribbean

I just got the package from Royal Caribean for my Mediterranean cruise.  I have to check-in online to register my passport and credit card.  There are some information of onshore excursion tours come with the package.  On each port the cruise ship stop over, we can get off the ship to visit the place.  You don’t want to travel around on your own, if you are lost or get into trouble, the ship won’t wait for you.  It is better to join the day tour package run by the cruise.  At least they gaurantee the ship will wait for you.  On average the tour cost about $50 for half day trip and $100 for full day trip.  Two people stopping 5 ports easily add another thousand dollar to your cruise bill.  That add almost a quater of the cost of the cruise.

Paying that much for the day trip, I would expect I get some decent information help me to decision which trip to join.  All I got in the booklet is a few wordy paragraph for each trip on each port.  I would expect the online version is more helpful, but it is even worst!  The online version is the same as wordy paragraph from the paper copy, but the list is sorted according to type of activities.  Please list all the tours of a port in the same.  I can only do one or two things at each port, it is important to see see all my options is one place?  I have a hard time deciding which tour to join.  All the tour description looks quite similar, there are only a few famous places at each port after all.  What I really need is a matrix highlight the difference between each tour.

Daily Scribble

Travel story

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Tonight I had dinner with an old friend.  I haven’t seen her since I came back form India, so naturally our conversation is about my Indian adventure.  Unfortunately, I forgot the memory card of my phone at home.  I could not show her my Indian pictures.  I can only share my experience in the fashion way but telling stories. We had a great night with lots of laughters.  This incident make me wonder, which way is the better to share your travel with your friends, telling them stories of simply show them pictures.

Showing picture seems more efficient, a picture worthy a thousand words.  However from my observation, it seems people like to flip through the pictures quickly.  They rarely stop and ask question unless something catch their eyes.  I don’t think just seeing the picture will have a glimsy of the context of the travel experience.  They may only get shallow comments like this is beautiful and that is funny.  Take over the control and flip the pictures according to your pace seems not working too well.  Since in an album, you have a lot of photos between the few photos you have story to tell, the next pictures will draw attention away.  Having some physical albums also has an disadvantage of being interrupted easily.   If you put away your album or photo, you might very well leave the second half of your story never told.

Telling a story is more entertaining.  You can extraggerate the real experience, spice it up a little bit.  You can build up the climax to conclude the fun part of a picture instead of giving it out right away when you flip to the next page.  However, some times you want to have the photos handy to show them something that is hard to believe.  For example, I wish I have the photo of two Indian police patrolling the street holding hands together.  That is something really hard to believe.