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:

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the GVers asked on mailing list, “How do you say freedom on your language?”. She’s doing some bookmarks and stickers with “Freedom” written in different languages or something….So lots of GVers answered her back in their language. Here are a few I noted from the list.

Read the rest of this entry »

GV Summit 2008, day two live actions. Follow the live broadcast or live blogs for each session. I’ll be updating the live blog code as they start the new session. Check out all the video clips from yesterday here and live blogs notes here.

Follow GVSummit08 @: IRC | @gvsummit08 | Presentation Slides | Photos | #gvsummit08 | Summize | Alternate Coverage.

Read the rest of this entry »

The first day of Global Voices Summit 2008 has started a few hours ago over at Budapest, Hungary. Already some of our authors sent out updates, links and live broadcasts. It’s 8:20pm in Fiji and I’ll be following them longer than yesterday advocacy summit since it’s Friday night and I can stay up late. Alright, I’ll keep updating whatever links or info I received on GV attendees on in post as well as on Twitter.

Follow GVSummit08 @: IRC | @gvsummit08 | Presentation Slides | Photos | #gvsummit08 | Summize | Alternate Coverage.

Read the rest of this entry »

Dears dears, our very own author, Renata Avila, is covering GV summit 08 – GV ADVOCACY SUMMIT LIVE-BLOG, right at this very moment.

I’m posting her Live blog here and whoever interested can join in to post comments and questions there.

Thanks Renata. I’m following you.

These few months I’ve been busy running around arranging things for various visa applications. Here are my experiences, as a Myanmar passport holder, with different consular services in Fiji. Depending on the type of visa application, type of passport and your situation, the services might be different. This is entirely based on my personal application experiences.

Most visa application takes 3 days to 2 weeks of processing period and 0 to 210+ FJD visa fee. Most visa application requires you to show the followings:

Read the rest of this entry »