iphoting's Sink

The effects of National Slavery is rearing its ugly head. My desperate attempts to produce beautiful code for an event planning system from scratch has been fraught with difficulties and mental blocks. Simple concepts such as creating a login system, and hooking it up with Facebook Connect has taken me close to a day, with no end in sight.

Oh well, looks like I need to wire my subconsciousness towards this area for some background processing.

I’ve finally come across a decent “GTD” kind of application, which is basically a very powerful ToDo list manager. It can finally hold back todo items till a certain date before it pops up, removing a lot of clutter from my todo list.

Check out this amazing application aptly named, Things. It has a Mac and iPhone edition, allowing Wifi sync between the two apps.

That aside, I love the design of the site. Clean and functional, blending syntax with schema.

Awesome, I love the look of this:-

Especially when the full 4GB is allocatable for usage, unlike 32-bit Windows which has a cap of 3.8 GB of allocatable RAM.

I have to admit that although my work place is close to ideal, even by my standards, I can’t help but be extremely tempted to write about the idiosyncrasies of my workplace. Forgive me if I may seem vague at times, but it’s all done for good reason – my poor command of English or secrets.

For the first detailed post on my work place, I shall attempt to describe the characters that make up my department.

The department is run in a pretty strange way, or so to speak, highly militarised. It’s something you will never see outside the context of the military due to efficiency and practical issues. You’ll know just by looking at the hierarchy of my office, more on that later. The thing about the military is that there is a very distinct (read: elitist) group of people known as officers, and ‘everyone else’. From my experience, whatever the officers say or think, it’s deemed to be right, regardless of logic nor reason. So basically, ‘everyone else’ becomes ‘yes men’ whether they like it or not. With the background of the military classes in place, I can begin with the hierarchy.

The department is headed by the ‘Head of Department’, a senior ranking officer. Working under him is the ‘Deputy Head of Department’, a mid-ranking officer who has probably gone through Command and Staff College. Further down, there is a vacant office, entitled ‘Assistant Department Officer 1’, staffed by a junior to mid-ranking officer (There’s ADO 2 too which is vacant).

Then, we have this ‘Department Middle-manager 1’ which is staffed by a Warrant Officer – Non-commissioned Officer who have at least 20 years of experience in the organisation (read: stagnation). The ‘Department Middle-manager 2’ is currently vacant as the person quit a few months ago, probably due to unhappiness with upper management. Then, there’s this ‘Department Lower-manager’, staffed by a senior Specialist – Specialists are generally NCOs (non-commissioned officers). Below him, are two ‘workers’, all NSFs, one of whom is yours truly (NSFs are generally victims of National Slavery).

We have at our assistant, a ‘Department Clerk’, an NSF who generally does mainly paper work and fight through red tape.

That in short is my working structure. My organisation has this obsession with ‘following the chain of command’ where by you’ll see message passing in action as mentioned in my previous post.

I have to disclaim once again that I’m extremely fortunate to be working there as I hardly have to hold any weapons and run around like headless chickens in the mosquito infested overgrowth known as Lim Chu Kang on a regular basis. This is just meant to be an amusing discourse about the organisation and the effect of the ‘lack of market pressures’ (read: virtually unlimited budget).

Case in point, we (meaning the NSFs) just managed to get our request to order S$1.6k worth of stationery approved. The figures are in my honest opinion higher than market rate as that’s how the suppliers rip the organisation off. Moreover, we don’t have a choice in choosing the supplier as there are limitations and restrictions on which supplier we can use to have our stationery supplied by, some of which, I’ll list below.

Before I get to it, I’ll need to go into more background. The organisation wants to be ‘paperless’ and thus, all purchases to be made must go through this procurement system. It’s basically a giant catalogue of products from all its compatible and recognised suppliers. The gigantic downside is that there’s no way around the system, it is extremely slow, and product names are quite technical, not something you see on product labels. This effectively negates the search functionality.

So, here are the rules:-

1) Find it from the catalogue if possible. Create a non-catalogue item as a last resort (more on that later).

2) Get everything from the same supplier, no mixing and matching, per request, regardless of the price.

Fulfilling the first rule is pretty hard if the search functionality is ineffective. Most of the time, we end up creating a non-catalogue item(s) request. This involving calling up one supplier found in the system, telling them what we need, and having them fax to us a copy of the quotation. Then, we have to go into the system to enter each item from the faxed quotation, its description, price, and all, and submit it with valid justification. Most of the time, our justification for the non-catalogue request is “item not in catalogue”.

So basically, that’s how that one supplier tends to rip the organisation off just because it has the widest range, not the most economical priced.

Here’s speeds of a good torrent with the settings based on my previous post.

Some weeks back, I suggested to one of my friends about conducting some consistent activities to train our brains, so that they don’t rot so fast while we’re in NS. Before long, fortnightly Floating Bridge sessions are started. All who can play float bridge is invited!

Generally, we began with quite some difficulties as we need exactly 4 players at the minimum for a meeting to be successful. After all, national slaves hardly have the time; even if they do, how many would be available for bridge games?

Thankfully, we still managed to get at least four people every time for a great game. Unfortunately, some of the people are here on a temporary basis and managing attendance is one of the hardest things to do given the strict limitations of the game.

That said, it’s mainly a social gathering. Let me know if you want to join us for some floating bridge games, all who can play, and are willing to contribute effort into playing, are invited. We’ve got at least 3 decks of cards.

On the first day of this new year, I finally overcame my procrastination and went for my first driving practical lesson. It was quite an interesting first lesson and taught me many new advances that put the theory handbooks used for theory tests fairly outdated. Modern manual vehicles no longer require the accelerator to be slightly depressed. Another amusing thing is that the vehicle that I’m learning in doesn’t stall easily. Even at 1000 rpm (with a 1-3 km/h coast) without the accelerator, brake, and the clutch being depressed, the engine doesn’t stall.

Generally the hardest part in getting a driving license is not the driving, but the practical test.

So basically, in a practical driving lesson, the instructor teaches you the skills that you need to pass the practical exam, not just to be able to drive safely. Those skills to pass the exam generally consists of elaborate and sequential steps in doing basic things, such as adjusting seat positions and mirrors, starting or restarting the stalled engine; exaggerated head movements to check blind spots, and gluing your hands to the steering wheel. More importantly, you are not to demonstrate aggressiveness while driving, and to exhibit your highest standard of courtesy to other more nifty (read: nasty) road users.

In all, it’s quite a fun and great experience.