I haven’t written about office muses for a while and thought I’ll write something about last week muses from our department. Here is the story.

You see, we have this disc stakka where we stored all our department softwares. It’s attached to a spare box sitting on my desk and I kind of become an unofficial librarian. Whoever ask to borrow software from me, I’ll just eject the discs from the stakka and hand it to them. There is no record of how many discs we have and who borrowed them. The stakka itself is installed for everyone hence anybody can login to the box and eject any disc as they like. The result is we lost a few important discs over the months. I have no idea who took them but discs are obviously keep missing from the disc stakka. We sent a few notification emails to everyone in the office asking about the missing discs but nobody responded.

I kind of feel responsible about it since it was sitting on my desk and I am the one who is giving out the discs most of the time (unless ofcos they login to the box and eject the discs themselves when I’m away). The problem with me is that whenever I am into something or concentrating on a task at hand, I seriously don’t care about things happening around. I don’t see or hear anything unless someone pokes at me or waves in front of face. Even so, I don’t hear half of the thing they are saying. So when someone asks a disc from me while I am busy, I just remove the disc and give it to them without looking at their faces or noting their names. That must be one of the reasons people take advantage of my ignorance to snatch some discs from me.

Anyways, last week we had a very loud and noisy discussing about how to maintain our softwares. Most of my colleagues say not to borrow software to anybody outside our department. Our HR manager disagrees and wants everyone to share the software the company owns. (Ok, I wasn’t in the discussion/arguments as it was happening at one of our colleagues’ desk and I just over heard bits and pieces.) Finally we agree to properly keep track of the disc movement in some way. Boss made up a software borrowing register spreadsheet and mail it to everyone saying, unless and otherwise people fill in the register prior to picking up a disc, we are not to give it to them. But the spreadsheet was editable by everyone which is not a good idea so I created a form out of it and pass around the form. After checking the form, one of our colleagues argues that the form is very easy to fill and we like to make thing difficult for whoever comes to borrow our discs. So he suggested a few adjustments to the form.

Here are some of his suggestions:

Way too easy, we need some pain here. Can we add some more fields :
Put this under “Borrower Details“

• Weight (kg)
• Height (cm)
• Eye colour (offer Green, Blue, Grey, Brown)
• Blood Type (offer A, B, AB, O) (suggestion to add negative, positive as well)
• Hair Colour (offer Black, Grey, Brown, Red, Blond)
• Random Question from http://www.survey-machine.com/take_survey/627331 that we’ll change every week or so, we’ll start with no. 1 “Have you ever peed your pants after age 8?”

Make all fields required.

There is a few more input from other colleagues as well such as “Do you have any recent health problem say in last 6 months?”, “Provide the medical certificate to prove your blood type”, etc…

How about that!? Is the form painful enough yet? Haha, I’m not sure how many borrowers will be able to fill in that form and surely throw some serious curses at us.

Anyways, I felt sorry for whoever have to fill in the form, and I did not implement those “Borrower Details” but left the simple form as below and see how things turn out. We had a few beta tests with our gang and now it is released to suva_everyone. One serious flaw we try to ignore is that anyone can login to the machine and remove the disc while I’m away from my desk. But for the time being, it’s doing quite well without complaint, a few minute ago, someone filled in the form and took 3 discs from me. I wonder how long this system will last though.

So how do you keep track of the softwares in your organization? Do share with us some of the cool systems you use in your company. And ofcos’ you are most welcome to make suggestion to our system above as well.

I’m not sure it’s a spam mail or a proper mail. I did not write anything about salt on my site but posted a short link on GV the other day. Is that why this person email me or am I thinking too much out of spam mail? Well who cares, if it is a spam mail then it’s pretty good one. If it’s a proper mail then I’m sure whoever see this post and interested might contact him?

Feed Back Message from Mayvelous.com
Shahidul Haq Sikder wrote:

(more…)

I was reading this post, “Endless Conversation: The Unfolding Saga of Blogs, Twitter, Friendfeed, and Social Sites” from Web 2.0 Blog and checked out a few twitter applications mentioned in there.

I LOVE Summize and Twitterfeed; I use them the most. I find this two, Tweetwheel and Twitter Charts, pretty interesting especially the Tweetwheel.

The result wheel is just amazing and you can hover over to see all those links in your connections.

Beautiful isn’t it? Well, if you have time, try play around with those. I bet you’ll love a few.

Just pop in to say, I’m back in Fiji and will be posting about Bali trip soon. For now I’m just resizing the photos and uploading a few on Flickr. Flickr keeps screwing up my uploads, it’s just not uploading well at all. Tried direct upload from the web as well as using the Flickr Uploadr but still not working as it should be. May be their server’s over heated, I’ll try again later.

It was very tiring yet very informational trip for me. Met lots of new faces and enjoyed talking with a few. Some of the discussions in the conference were very heated and too advance for me to understand but it was a good listening and enjoyed taking notes. I took a few videos of the parallel sessions but not sure whether to upload them online or not. May be not.

The conference was not really for me (actually almost none at all) but I’m glad to have attended such event and enjoyed my new found experiences. We couldn’t get to visit anywhere, not even to Bali town, except a day trip to Yogakarta. No shopping nor swimming for me. There are lots of beautiful swimming pools in the resort and the lovely beach in front but I couldn’t even dip my feet in there due to very short stay and very tight/packed schedules. So sad.

Anyhow, now I’m back and catching up news and feeds on my GReader and twitter; a lot happened while I was a way for a week. Gosh I couldn’t even leave my eyes away from you for a bit and now see what happen! There goes Nargis, Nargis, Nargis and Myanmar, Myanmar, Myanmar almost every news feeds (I see Mong done a GREAT job covering the news on GV, many thanks) and now it’s China earthquake, earthquake. Geez the world is such a mess! Alright stay calm, don’t worry, I’m back so everything will be alright and stay tune with mayvelous. (Yah right! hehe) My bad, I shouldn’t be making jokes as serious things happening all over the world, but then laughter is the best medicine sometimes right?

I was having lunch and having some random thoughts. I don’t know how exactly but I was thinking about the word “fauna” from “flora fauna”. I forgot what I was thinking but when I realised, I was googling the word “floral fauna”. The first hit I got was this “Floral/Fauna” photoset by sigth on flickr.

It’s floral alright; I’m seeing lots of flower in the set. Everything seems pretty much the usual flower photos should be, but then there is it; this one photo really (…) me that I just have to click and view in detail.

It’s titled “Aroma“, a photo of seven year old girl embracing the roses. It’s so…ok, what’s the word I’m looking for? It’s the way she closed her eyes, her hand posture, the angle of her tilting head, the three roses. Everything about it is so… Captivating, enchanting…no, no I’m looking for the word starts with “Mes” …I keep saying like messimize, maximiz, mezzame and couldn’t get the right word out of it.

So, I asked my bro for help and he goes – immerse?, engrossed?, magnetized? No, not those but it has to start with “Mes”, then he finally said, “Mesmerised“. Yep, that’s the word! Then one of my colleagues asked who’s been mesmerised and he told me that the word is after Dr. Mesmer who specialised in hypnotism. Well, I didn’t know about that, so I quickly look through wiki and there he is – Franz Anton Mesmer.

Franz Anton Mesmer (born Friedrich Anton Mesmer May 23, 1734 – March 5, 1815) discovered what he called magnétisme animal (hypnosis in 1842, his name being the root of the English verb ‘mesmerize’.

Arh like that!, I learn something new. Anyways where was I? Oh yes, the photos; I also checked out the other three photos of the same girl. For some reason, I cannot grab the direct url or save the images. I guess it must be to do with sharing privileges on the photos. Respecting the photographer’s rights, I don’t want to do a screen grab hence just get a small thumbnail of each photos and linked them to the proper page.

The 2nd one “Flower profile“, things that attracted me is her smooth, silky skin – her cheek and neck line and the way she’s looking at the roses.

The 3rd one “Roses” is … ohh soo cute! How so very lovely her face and action on trying to kiss/smell the roses.

The pose in “Brita” is interesting too, but it’s too monochrome compare to other three. Still, it’s very pretty. It says “actress” in the description. Indeed the little actress.

Well, what do you think? Very mesmerising aren’t they?

Alright, I shall continue with my lunch since I’m satisfied, contented, pleased, delighted, thrilled DONE with … what was I searching again? Oh yah, the floral-fauna search, which I somehow ended with mesmerizing the “Aroma”. And why am I posting this bullcraps? Cos’ I WANT TO! Hump!

So I slept at 5:30am last night and come to work at 9am this morning.

I was reading 5th out of 9 volumes of very captivating Manhwa, “Operation Liberated Men”, until my dad woke up and started yelling at me to go to sleep. Ok I will post about Hwang Mi Ri and Lee Mi Ra (sisters?) later. Their Manhwa are so damn good. “Hot Blooded Woman” by Hwang Mi Ri is definitely a must read. It’s so funny and listed as one of the best Manhwa around. Anyways, back to the subject – the annoyances.

The annoyances started due to lack of sleep but more because I couldn’t finish the Manga in one go. I can’t wait to go home this evening and continue with the reading. So annoying! Why do I have to wait till I get home, while it sits on my laptop!

There are lots of ants in the office. The tiny, very fast moving red ants, they annoy the hell out of me. They’re running around on my coffee cup, going inside laptop, taking a walk on the screen and doing all sort of things to annoy me. I couldn’t find the spray, Mortein, either. The cleaning lady must have hidden it somewhere. So annoying!

Whenever I open Macromedia Fireworks 8 my display color scheme changes to basic scheme. I got reddish pink but it always change back into the annoying pale blue scheme. It doesn’t happen with Macromedia Dreamweaver program but only problem with Fireworks. Such an annoyance!

I always use Dual Monitors at work. My laptop highest resolution is 1680 x 1050px and the duel LCD is 1280 x 1024. Every time I change to dual mode, I have to go change their resolutions as well; otherwise the laptop screen takes the same resolution as the LCD and the display gone stretched out and weird. Why do I have to click many steps to change the simple setting, why can’t we do that by one click and it changes automatically? Arrgh annoying!

I have this problem most of the time with new folder column settings. They display unnecessary columns like ‘Date Taken’, ‘Tags’, ‘Rating’ etc. I only want ‘Size’ and ‘Date modified’. So I have to uncheck the options from column header but the stupid thing keep coming back every once in a while for the same folder. Why can’t it just save the same setting forever! May be I’ll have to set that in the option list. But still…remember it for god sake, so annoying!

Lately, I’m not sure when it started, my Firefox or the Download Helper extension must have screwed up. Whenever I try to download using download helper FF extension, the download dialog box doesn’t function well. I click “Save” button but the file is not saving. I have to do save at least 2 times for the file to pick up in the download box and starting downloading. Before I can just press “Enter” key and it saves just fine. Now even direct click to the button doesn’t work well and have to do it twice. It just annoy the hell out of me!

I can’t use my twhirl at home. I can’t login at all from home. It works just fine from office. What’s the meaning of this? Is it cos’ twhirl stores some sort of network settings during installation? Then how come the twhirl on my bro’s laptop is working fine both at home and work? Must be stupid vista security settings again? Arrghh So damn annoying!

I use to login to my Gmail account first, from there I click on “more” dropdown list then choose to go “Reader” link, but occasionally the dropdown got shorten and does not list all the other apps anymore, so I have to type in the direct URL to go to GoogleReader or GoogleGroup. So annoying!

The MS Word 2007 is so confusing! Annoying big tool bar on top is taking too much space, it’s no good if you have small screen resolution. I can’t find page browsing arrows which I use to find at the bottom of the document in previous versions. To move to the next page, I have to either scroll down or press page down, but I want “Next” and “Previous” controls at the bottom as the way it should be. I also can’t find the “Print” control when I start using it. Can you believe none of those big tabs list the damn “Print” icon in there? Then I finally found it when I click the stupid icon at the top-left corner of the document. Print is an important function and should sit at the obvious place; at lease have it in the context-menu. But noooooo, it just has to go play hide and seek with me. So annoying!

I still got lot of annoyances but the post gone too long so leaving it for next time. Don’t read other people annoying post if you don’t want to get annoyed!

Recently I’ve been following “The Trump Blog” after I read about it from “A Guide to Billionaire Bloggers” on ReadWriteWeb. I’m sure most of us from Fiji are familiar about him from “The Apprentice” show on FijiOne hence need no introduction.

Anyways, just now I was browsing my feeds and this post, “Japanese Firm Offers Heartache Leave“, from Mr Trump really cracked me up. Well it’s not funny but somewhat makes me laugh, and think for sometimes.

I wasn’t surprised when I found out that all the employees at this company are women. I don’t mean to be sexist, but I don’t know many men who would call in sick to work because they broke up with their girlfriend.

Are you sure about that? What do you, guys, think? Don’t give me those man’s pride excuses and bluff about it.

But then I don’t know many women who would do it either. If you’re serious about your job, you don’t let heartbreak or store bargains keep you from doing your work.

I wonder our lives only exist around our jobs. He must be talking about those workaholics who got no life of their own and think only about work. It’s understandable since the billionaire such as Mr. Trump, who always think of how to increase his enterprise and who can get(or ditch) any women anytime without much effort would think work more important than other matters.

For me, I think if I ever get a serious heartbreak (I wish not), I wouldn’t want to do anything for sometimes. But then that’s all depends on individuality and how serious you take your relationships as. But I bet most Asian tends to take relationships matter more serious than those of the westenners. I’m just speaking in general but then hey what do I know; so may be not.

But I must say, that Japanese company is very considerate about their staffs well being. I’m sure the staffs appreciate about it and would boost their motivation to work harder for the company.

It’s a nice read for my morning tea break. Makes me think.