Some time back then, I went into a discussion with a friend who is a kung-fu master. Martial arts is taught as an exercise, a spectator sport and self a defense skill. I was questioning the usefulness of martial arts in self defense among modern weapons, like guns. This is one of the reasons that leads me into learning shooting. How useful can martial art be under gun point?

Since then I have learned more about shooting and combating handgun skills, now I realize how wrong I was. Even when you are in a standing off situation with another gunner, martial art skills prove to be extremely useful in winning the gun fight. Most handgun fights happen within a few feet, that is within the range of martial art striking distance. If the bad guy reach for his gun, even your are skillful shooter, you can’t beat him in reaching you gun. The best you can do is draw and fire slightly before he fires at you. The reaction time delays you enough from stopping him before he pulls the trigger. Mutual death is not the best way to win a gun fight. In a gun fight, the goal is not to shoot the bad guy, the goal is not to get shot. Shooting the bad guy is just a mean to archive the goal by disarming him. If the fight is within martial art striking distance, it is actually faster to reach for his gun instead of drawing your own gun. Once you push his muzzle way from pointing at you, you gain the valuable split second to draw your gun and fire at him.

Yes, martial arts is no match of a gun in a distance. However in real life combat situation when both sides have guns, martial arts will give you a tactical advantage that can help you win the gun fight.

The rumor is true, there will be another round of layoff in my company. We saw managers packing their belongings after work today. The managers know their fate a day earlier than the grunts, so the big axe is already swinging up, waiting to chop down the head counts tomorrow. According to reliable source of water cooler talks, they are laying ten or so people off from my on-loan department and shut down a money losing division.

It is pure bad management decisions lead to the end of that division. The now defunct division is working on DSL product line. Somehow the executive think the VP of the PON product line should also manage the DSL products. DSL and PON are two competing technology for the next generation home access network. It is a clear conflict of interest asking the PON VP to manage the DSL products. The PON VP must secretly wish the DSL product die and fade away instead of gaining market share. Long story short, because the PON VP didn’t put enough resource into the DSL division, we lose some potential big accounts. If we had those account, the balance sheet of the DSL division would in black instead of red. The division should have survived this round of lay off.

Well, being lay off is not necessary a bad thing. Some people laid off in last round filed class law suite against the company for wrongful dismissal and they won the case. The court ordered the company to pay them one year of salary for the severance package. In other words, whoever get laid off in the future can use this case as precedence to sue the company if the severance package is less than one year of salary. I am sure if the company ask volunteers to be laid off with this generous severance package, there will be a long line up to take the money and run.

Vancouver is having its first snow fall of this winter.  The whole city is covered under snow.   The road condition is really bad with low visibility.  The street is empty, no one want to go outside since it is too dangerous to drive.  So I am trapped at home for the whole day due to the bad weather.  If the snow storm comes one day later, we will have a snow holiday.  Why can’t we have the snow storm on weekdays instead of weekend?

Since snow has start falling, my ski season officially begins.  Luckily I just took my ski to the ski shop for waxing yesterday.  I can pick it up on Friday, so I am ready to hit the mountain next weekend.  I am sure there will be a long line up in the ski shop next week.

Today I moved cubicle.  I moved back upstairs to the department I belongs to.  I ended my life living as an exile on loan to another department.  The physical environment is better.  The new cubicle is closer to the window, quieter and has more sunlight.  It is much better comparing to the old cubicle locating in the entrance of the aisle, which is noisy and dark.  The psychological environment is also better.  My department is much more organize and well managed than the on loan department.

It was like constantly fighting fire downstairs due to lack of planning.  The project is a disaster.  We are still finding bugs on the last day before tape out and push out the schedule.  It is very likely the manager will just say that’s enough and tape out the device once the last known bug fixed.  It is almost guarantee there will be more bugs hiding in the device if the device is in a constinous state of flux.  The device should reach a stable stage with no new bugs for a couple of weeks before tape out.  Not enough time to do testing earlier is not an excuse.  If the device is not properly tested, it is not ready to tape out.  They should either move out the tape out or put more resource in the planning phase.  Saying we will finish the tasks with best effort is just an excuse being too lazy to make a proper plan.

Once you heard the word “best effort”, you can pretty much write off quality in the work.  You can qualify the features, the scope, the priority, the schedule, but you can’t qualify what exactly is “best effort”.  At the end of day in the eye of the managers, the only measurement of “best effort” is long working hours.  It is a known fact that long working hours is not correlated to the quality of the finish product.  It is just a waste of time.  If time is tight, estimate how much work can be done, prioritize the work and do it right.  Sometimes we have to admit, we just don’t have enough time.  If we really can’t  move the schedule and we have to work over time, we should incorporate the over time into the schedule.  Be honest and say the project requires 60 hours a week to finish on time.  Don’t underestimate the work and try to sneak overtime into the schedule as a unpleasant surprise.