2007年12月19日星期三

From heaven to hell

Our HR manager just announced holiday arrangement some days ago, which we will have a 4 days Christmas holiday and a 4 days New Year holiday. Many people in our project were quite excited about it and started to plan how to enjoy our holidays include me. Some even intended to ask for 3 days annual leave to bridge the two 4 days holiday so that it becomes 11 days. And we really want relax, even stay at home instead of going outside because we've been working hard for several months. Last month, I worked 13 hours every day averagely.

But we dropped from heaven down to hell after yesterday's meeting hold by out PM. She annouced overwork day arrangment for us.

"From today to 17th Jan, no holidays, 6 days a week". Said our PM.

At that time, I felt extremely quiet in the meetingroom. But a few minutes later, the air is less stressed; people accepted this decision.

I am not mad at this decision. If I was in her shoes, I probably did the same thing. The cause is we have to pass the integration test in Beijing before 17th Jan. But the problem is we don't have enough time,enough resource to do test here as they did in Beijing. We have 8 devs but only 4 tests. We are supposed to finish all the integration test before we ship the software to site. As a matter of fact, four integrators working for Beijing subway system can finish their integration test in Beijing before 17th Jan or even early except us.

It's shamed. One that always claims to be the No.1 in this field gets the last score.

So what is wrong? Why we can't catch the schedule? Why don't so many know what customers want yet?

Summing up my theoretical musings about the whole of Beijing project, I conclude that it is due to management of this project.

2007年12月11日星期二

Pugnacious Mouse

Mouse is small rodent known as scary and cautious. They live in burrow, cockloft and anywhere dark and safe. They walk out at night to search food. Grownups regard them as one of the source of some bad diseases such as plague, rat bite fever and other infections. However, children prefer regarding them as cute little creatures to bad ones because they've never suffered the dark age of plague. They get to know these animals from TV, movie and pets shop where selling harmless relatives to rat.

Mouse is endowed with smart, flexible, cute and humorous, all the good traits by cartoon makers. But they missed one trait which is hardly thought from such a little and scary rodent. That is pugnacious!

I had known it when I traveled to Manila Philippines for a subway project. One day, I went to one of the station intending to get some data. When I moved the mouse, the cursor was like frozen. I was not surprised at that time because it had occurred many times due to the lack of power of USB port. What I would do is simply switch to another USB port. But I suddenly found that there was not even a cable connected to the mouse. I had the mouse close to my eyes and was astonished to find there were some bite marks on the plastic shell of mouse. What on earth happened to this mouse?

My local partner, Jojo, seemed already used to this and told me it was bitten by a mouse. And obviously that mouse was in blue mood so it fought against this one without having had identified if it was a real one.

Yesterday, I sent a new version to Jojo and asked him to test in workshop. He replied that unfortunately, he couldn't do it because some problem happened with the cable between equipments and computer due to rodent bite!!

Well, believe or not, however small an animal is, pugnacity is its nature. Mouse is not able to fight with human or even a cat. But how about also a mouse or an ant?