The company shut down for a week to cut cost but it lost more than 1 week of productivity.? Today is the first day back to work after the shut down.? I end up spending the whole morning chatting with colleagues about? their vacations.?? All of us are still in the holiday mood, especially when we only have two more days before another weekend and half of the people are still on vacation.? Not only we talked what we had done in the past week, we also spent equal amount of time critizing the management.? Last year the CEO gave each employee a copy of Jack Welch’s Winning trying to get the message of change across the company.? The only message we get is the management is violating every single practice in the book.? The most fundamental partice is being candor,? the shut down week and recently layoff? shows the management violated the trust of employees.? I am not the only one have the feeling the company only retend the employees with golden handcuff.? It is wildly preceived by almost everyone I talked to working here.?? If Vancouver has as many high tech company as the silicoin valley, PMC will have a mass exodus in no time.? Tonight I have my first class in political philosophy.?? I found learning what is justice is much more interesting than trying to working some boring old product no one really cares about.

I read two innovative idea on the news today. The first one is an automatic side mirror. The side mirror will tilt inward to cover the blind spot when the driver put on the turning signal. It will tilt downward in reverse gear to check the side curb when parallel park. The second idea is a chopping board with integrated scale. These two innovation are relatively low-tech, just put together existing ideas. However it is the creativitly behind the innovation inspire me. I think invent some part useful, but not totally useless thing is not very hard. There are many inconvinience in daily life waiting to be overcome. I already thought about an idea, self fold sleeping bag. It is always very troublesome putting the sleeping back into its bag. Many people have flash of interesting idea, but most of them never bother to spend time to make it happens. Most of innovation doesn’t justify the cost of production nor even the cost of development. Only a few great ideas flourish and become the new big hit. The problem most of the time, you can’t tell which idea will fly, which one will bomb. I want to be an inventor too but too lazy to spend time in making invention.

Finally I start the migration to the new web server.? I have bought the new linux box for a few months and it has been sitting idle most of the time.? I only use it for the FTP server and backup data in my Windows machine.? I could have waited a couple more month and get a faster machine with a lower price.? The old linux box is slow but still usable.? I procastinate the migration for so long is because it is not broken, why fix it.? However, I fully awarely of continous improvement is the only way to greatness.? Now once I had kick started the web server, any incremental update would be more easier.? I hope to use it as a platform to learn some latest computer technology, especially in programming.? It is very unlikely I would use the hand on knowledge I learnt in setting up a web server at work.? But I have a feeling gain some real experience in server would help my carreer in a long run.

Just come back from the annual four days three nights church camp. As usually, I didn’t sleep well in the camp, from both snoring of roomates and the unwillingness to go to bed at night. Luckily I don’t have to go to work tomorrow, so I can stay home to recover my energy. I am really getting old, I used to stay up all night and chat in the camp. Now I have to go to bed latest at 2 a.m. I had the least the expectation this year but I end up getting something inspiring from the camp. I chose not connect to the internet in the camp, although there is a wireless connection and plenty of laptops I can borrow. It is not a retreat strictly speaking, but to me without the internet is already quite a retreat. I am very tried now but I decided to write my reflection article before going to bed. Before I start writing my reflection, I have to catch up with my emails, disscussion in the forums I go to and reading the news. Gota get going now.

This morning I took my car to service. It turn out the problem I had is software bug in the transmission control system. The service center download a new firmware to my energy and the problem is fixed. I am surprised an auto have bugs causing the system to hang just like computers. I thought those mission critical firmware is througthly tested before shipping to the customer, I guess I am wrong.

Since I have to go to the service center, the plan of playing golf with Chris in the afternoon is cancelled. PMC is on the way home driving back from the service center. Since I have nothing to do I decide go back to work and save up some bank time. The office is really quiet, only a few people come back. I found I am very productive in the afternoon. I only stayed for 4 hours and the amount of work I finish equals to the work I can done in a normal day. In a normal day, I constantly get distracted by other people, going to meetings, answering questions. Today I can really focus in my work and get a lot more done in much less time. The productivity factor of working alone double compares to working with other people, provided that you don’t need support from other team members. Team work is only more efficient if the synergy effect has more advertage over distaction. Productivity is mysteriously lost as you add more and more member to the team. That’s why a very large team, such as departments in the government, can have negative productivity.