Daily Life: The one thing bad of me....

July is my company performance appraisal and as per year, we write down our objective for the new year and what we intend to achieve.

Though this two years has been recession years, I must admit the company has not been too bad, at least I have a job, a objective to fulfill each day so each day is a challenging day for me. Knowledge wise and working ethics, I do not have much problem. But as the days, months and years go by, there is one problem which i have yet to overcome, that is my anger. I actually wrote it down as one of my many objectives to fulfill this year round.

Everyone will have temper and a pressure point where we can take before exploding into anger. But I have a rather low pressure point or rather, when i get angry, I can get very fierce and this has become a sore point to some of my fellow colleagues, whom feel I am too fierce for comfort. As I am a very committed person, things can easily get out of hand when the pressure to perform and get things working can play tricks on people's minds.

But strangely, I realize as fast as I get angry, I also cool down fast. As senior, I have fellow team members to guide and seek guide from so sometimes I do behave objective but other times, I get high on emotion and creates problems for both myself and others.

Looks like I still have a long way to curb my inner demons before they consume me. i always think one of reasons I still is single could be due to my temper which at times may prove too much for some to stomach.......

IT: Review on Dell 1310 Notebook

Dell recently has recognized that the SME market is still a growing market and many vendors have yet provide good value for money machines to handle this market. There are many challenges facing SMEs, and the lack of large budget for purchase of laptops and desktop is one of the many.

With the introduction of 3G mobile broadband, the adoption rate of Laptops vs desktop is increasing and with laptops getting cheaper each day and the introduction of netbooks, it is little worth for users to purchase desktop except for specific reasons like gaming or workstation CAM/CAD design.

Dell SME range of laptop is the Vostro class and unlike its more costly cousin the latitude class, does not have 3 years warranty and magnesium alloy design. It does have the same Dell world class support and comes clean with no trialware. For this review, we will look at the Vostro 1310. Below are its specs

Intel Core2 Duo T5870 2.0Ghz
2GB Ram
250GB hard Disk
Slot-based DVD-RW
Bluetooth
Intel 3945ABG wireless adapter
Gigabit Ethernet adapter
4Cell battery with 65W adapter
1 Year standard limited warranty

The weight of the notebook is at 2 to 2.1kg, not too heavy for affordable daily usage. Its built-in graphics provide enough juice to run CAD drawings viewing with min effort. The keyboard felt fine for long term usage. The only bad i can think of its is thickness. It looks like a brick.

Daily Life: KL trip over the weekends

My youngest brother and I went to KL over the weekend to see my second brother who is posted there as a technical finance consultant since Middle of May 2009. We arrived at KL around 4.30am Sat time. After a RM15 taxi ride, we arrive at the hotel tired and sleepy.

Later in the day, we went to change money. The rates is S$1: RM2.40. We then went for a shopping spree buying what is required and some. Dinner was A&W. Singapore's A&W close down as least 4 years ago and boy do we miss it, especially the root bear float... Pity those youngsters, I doubt they really understand how the taste be like.I was proposing a movie, which is Terminator 4: Salvation. for 3 person, I paid RM33, that is only about S$5 per ticket, paying weekday price for a weekend movie. Very worth. The movie was nice and I will give a blog review later on it.
After movie, we stayed around KLCC park to see the twin tower switch off its lights before going home. I was dead tired and went straight to bed after a hot shower.

Sunday, my second brother gave us a tour of the service apartment we are living at. There is gym, in-door swimming pool, squash court, tennis court, laundry service etc. This is the life of an expatiates in KL. Breakfast was at the high class cafe where we are eating better food than Sat morning. My younger brothers after breakfast went to KLCC park while I go to the gym for some fat burning exercise. Lunch was supposed to be at a Japanese restaurant but its close on sunday. Our coach back to Singapore was at 4pm so my youngest brother and I had lunch at chinatown. The place has not really change much except the crowd is smaller and things are getting more ex....

We arrive back in Singapore around 11.30pm using the second link. The coach is really cheap, only RM45 per person.

Daily Life: busy busy....

Time really fly. Its been nearly a month since I last updated my blog!

What was i busy about? That is a good question. Actually I am busy doing the windows update for the conflicker virus and cleaning up those unfortunate machines that are infected. Lucky our patching are up-to-date for most machines so I do not need to spend too much time on all the 100 odd machines exclude servers

Then after the windows update came the customer project. For business sense, I will note disclose the customer publicly; But since I am in charge of network and infrastructure, I am entrusted to ensure the customer is able to go to the internet and is kind enough to give us two workstation. We need to go to their HQ to get their standards. So was busy getting quote and working out the details.

Then singtel decided to kill my weekends and brain cells. We change our plan from a 2MB/512KB line to a 3MB/768kb line. Right after the change our line went down every 5 hours. At first we thought it is our configuration or old equipment (our cisco 837 is in use since 2002) Then we tried all the methods include cleaning up the configuration but to no avail. Finally we got singtel since they are providing the infrastructure. The singtel contractor was kind enough to see that our line is giving us problem backend so we did a change in our circuit on May 19. Then all back to normal.

After the above, we thought everything back to normal. Then singtel for no reasons, moved my another 512kb/256kb line to a new circuit. Problem is the new circuit will only be activated on May 26. So I was unable to do site to site VPN with my parent company for a mission critical application. After I screamed at Qala which is caught between singtel and us since we got the line from them, agree to a Joint test on may 23 morning. We only get the line back up on May 23 2.45pm. Reason: They change the circuit and ask the contractor to do a test on the DP which is working fine all these while. So the contractor was 'screwed' by the singtel backend to do troubleshooting for a problem that belongs to the backend, back at the exchange. With the incident concluded, I shoot a mail to Qala demanding a incident report and prepared to take with my boss for legal advice to make Singtel pay for its reckless mistake.

Daily Life: Finally someone admit we are in Recession

Today the S'pore Govt announced that this year Singapore Gross domostic product (GDP) is predicated to drop 6% to 9% instead of the earlier decline estimate of 2% to 2.5%. This reflect the continuing challenging environment business is operating and puts a lot of pressure on all to reduce cost or think out of the box to get revenue.

Manufacturing shrink 29% on year on year led by electronics, chemical and biomedical. Just earlier last year we are expected to go through 2009 with some hope. Looks like the hope is getting no-where as we enter the second quarter of 2009. And this is no longer a technical recession but a full recession (personal opinion)

Being the key purchaser/key decision influence of IT items be it equipment or maintenance of licenses to new IT projects, I will have to negotiate harder and smarter to ensure the budget if any, will be well spend on projects that will make the company stronger and in a better position to move ahead of its peers when the good times are here. Thankfully this cost reduction exercise has been ongoing since 2002 so there is nothing out of the ordinary. Just the intensity displayed.

Daily Life: Ground Zero for malware

Today is april fools day... and no jokes are moving around in each companies IT dept. All of us are hard pressed to prepare for the conficker malware virus which is stated to attack all unpatched system on April 1 2009.

Granted that we have step up efforts to get all machines patched but it is next to impossible. The lucky thing is all these while we have have patching our system especially those that are new. Our current process required us to patched all new machines to the latest patches of that day. plus we also locked down machines to Univac standards.

But on the whole, users need to 1) have a updated anti-virus system, 2)a updated anti-spyware software like spybot or windows defender, 3) a updated fully patched windows system (since windows is used by most homes and companies) and lastly if the user is tech savvy enough, a firewall like comodo firewall which provides some additional level of security. That handles the technology items. While we can have the latest systems, all is useless if users ourselves do not practice safe computing habits, like opening of all email attachments even those whom we do not know, downloading unknown software with the false promise of speeding up our machines etc.

Daily Life: Back to Office

After 18 days of in-camp training, i am back to my office; back to the real world where deals are made or broken.

Time for me to work on the projects and tasks left behind in Feb and play catch-up.