Engineers are rational being and their every decisions are made with practical and only practical considerations.  When the girlfriends of two engineers come together, somehow they always bash their engineer boyfriend being too practical.  Tonight I met up with a friend coming back to Vancouver with Pat.  She is an engineer herself but she also got an engineer boyfriend.  In the dinner, Pat start making comments about me with the typical mind set of engineer, somehow that rings a bell to my friend and they two start poking fun of engineers.  Pat complains I keep wearing the same model of Nike hiking boots for 10 years.

My friend nodded in agreement and complain her boyfriend has a full closet of black clothes.  My friend comments that the guys at work can wear company T-shirt everyday and everyone is doing so.  They said it is too boring, but I can’t see what’s wrong with this picture.  How often do you look down and see what clothes are you wearing today?  Rarely.  The primary function of clothings is to keep you warm and comfortable and the company T-shirt meets this requirement just fine.  The secondary function of clothings is to attract opposite sex, like the peacock’s tail.  Unless you are going after some girls at work, why bother to dress up?  It is unfortunate that there ain’t that many girls in engineering firm, so no one really cares what you wear as long as it doesn’t smell.  Isn’t having to pick which clothes to wear every morning is even more boring than simply wearing the company T-shirt?

Today Pat is having a garage sales, a real garage sales that the stuffs is displayed inside a garage. We have been preparing it for the whole week, unpacking the stuffs, cleaning the items and placing them neatly. There are two garages full of stuffs Pat has to get rid of after she moved. We placed classifies on the local newspaper. I am surprised by the number of people come and buy stuff today. We were busy for the whole morning. Some people even come as early as 8a.m., try to get some good deals so that they can resell the goodies later at flea market. You can never imagine what people will buy. Something that you think is a piece of junk can sold for a few bucks. There was a fat middle age man the scoop the old super Nintendo machine with all the games with joy. If he want to play good games, why don’t he go out and get a Wii instead? If he want to play the old games, he can download them for free from the internet and play it using an emulator.

Like in the supermarket, the placement of the items are very important in the garage sales. When people first came in, they will take a glance of everything. If they spot something they like, only then they will proceed to look a little bit closer. Things sitting at the back of the garage having no one interested for 2 hours and it is gone the moment I move it outside to be displayed under sun. There is also a different kind of buyers, there was a pair of old folks treasure hunt from the piles for almost an hour.

At the end they bought quite some stuff. I get bargain stuffs and chatting with people in garage sales enlightened their Saturday morning. We have sold over half of the stuffs today. Hopefully, the other half will go away tomorrow, so it saves me time from taking the junk to the dump. People come over and pay you money to take away the junks for you. Garage sales is truly wonderful.

Tonight I discuss the gun legislation with a friend during dinner.  He against the citizen are allow to own hand guns, and I take the default libertarian position to support citizen’s freedom to own guns.  He initial argument is hand gun has no practical use, is dangerous and induce damage to things.  I don’t want to use the self defense argument, so I try to counter his arguments one by one.  I use the example of Ferreira racing car to demonstrate no practical use is not a necessary condition to make something illegal.  Then I use archery to  demonstrate something is dangerous in the wrong hands cannot justify the take it away from law binding citizens.  Causing damage to things per se is nothing wrong, except when you start shooting irresponsibly.  However, my friend made a very good point, hand gun is has all these three properties combined, only katana or medieval swords falls in this category to a certain extend.  Then the discuss shifted to where to draw the line marking what’s legal and what’s not.  Fully automatic and high power amour piercing guns is already illegal.  Why should we extend the coverage to hand guns or even rifles but not katana?  Who has the authority to draw this line?  Should we simply use majority rules, so that the minority has to follow the majority regardless of their moral argument?  I don’t have a good answer other than the plain old libertarian argument to support allowing citizens to guns.  Maybe I will think a bit hard to justify the cause when I got my firearm license.

Outsourcing is nothing new to the high-tech industry.  My company is working on the feasibility for the next project and due to the high development cost, the executive wants to explore outsourcing to save some money.  In previous projects, we had good and bad experience with the folks in Indian, mostly bad experience though.  If cost cutting is the only reason for outsourcing, why don’t we outsource the executives instead of the engineers?  They are the biggest expenses and probably the most useless in running the company.  The company does not have any direction for almost a year, we are working on the same old slowly dying product lines, try to milk as much as possible before the reveue disappears.  That’s a no brainer’s job, even a MBA student can do it right.  I am sure the executives in India or China are as component as our executives, probably better.  Just look at the stock price of the Chinese or Indian firms comparing to the stock price of my company, we should know which executives have vision and know how to execute the plan well.  After outsourcing the workers, research and development, the latest trend in outsourcing is the executives.  Actually that make sense if we use Marxist view to analysis how a company runs.  Traditional view is the executives hire workers to work for him, but we can also flip the equation so that the executives are just management professionals hired by the workers collectively to run the company efficient.  Either way, they are the overhead feeding on the productivity of the workers.  If they can’t produce the strategy and vision to direct the company to the right direction, they are just waste the productivity of the workers and they should be replaced.

Today in Toastmasters, I gave a speech telling a moral of a story. It is about how a grumpy old man drive away children playing outside his house.

Mr. Smith is successful businessman. He is the boss of a small but profitable company in town. He has one strange habit. He couldn’t stand noise. He wants the place nice and quiet all the time. He is the boss of the company, so his employee has to lower their voice all the time. Everything is fine until the day he retire. In the first day of his retirement, he woke up by noise outside of his house. He looked through the window. He saw children form the neighborhood are playing outside his house. The children are riding bicycling, chasing each other around, yelling and screaming and making lots of noise. The noise is driving Mr. Smith crazy. He wants to go outside and tell the kids to shut up and leave him alone. As a business man, he knew it won’t work. The kids will simply ignore him and label him the grumpy old man in the block, and he will being a laugh stocks among the neighbors. So he came up with an idea.

He go outside of his house and gathering the children around. He says to them, “I love having children play outside of my house, your laughters really cheers up my day. Here is 25 cents for each of you to show my gratitudes. Please come and play for me more.” Receiving the money, the children are cheer in joy and continue their play. The next day, Mr Smith gather the children outside his house again and says, “Thank you so much for play for me. However, I am a retired old man, I cannot afford much money. Here is 15 cents for each of you showing my sincerity.” The children are a little dismay about the cut in the reward, but 15 cents is still go money, so they disband in joy and continue their play. On the third day, Mr. Smith gather the children again and says, “I am really broke today and I can only afford 5 cents to have you kids playing for me.” At the point, the children are really upset for receiving so little money and they tell Mr. Smith, “What! Only 5 cents. What a mean old man. We are not going to play for you anymore. Let move out play in the end of the street.” Finally, Mr. Smith can enjoy his relaxing, nice and quiet day.

The moral of this story: Sometimes the withdraw of positive reinforcement is as effective as negative reinforcement.  Another moral of this story: Don’t get conditioned for doing something that you like.  Remember why you do it in the first place, you do it for the fun of doing it, not other rewards.  The rewards are just bonus, don’t let it bother you.