Fast Company | Balance is Bunk!

A friend sent me this article and although its 7 pages, I found it was a good read.. the article basically says that the idea of a “balance” between work and home life is essentially dated and/or dead.. first the author, Keith H. Hammonds, describes what is known as the “happy workaholic”.. if a person is happy working all the time, with no time for a social life.. then who is to say that this person should have balance? Second, the author points out that the American and European idea of “balance” is going to be crushed by competition from developing countries.. basically, either you do it, or cheaper Indian or Chinese outsourced labor will. One thing I found interesting was that the author states that France is even reconsidering their 2000 law that made the work week only 35 hours. In the end, the author basically says that “balance” should not be a short term goal.. its basically intangible and so subjective that you’ll go crazy trying to acheive it.. instead, he says that a person should just see work and home life as one.. and in the end, things will balance out on their own..

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Man, its been about 3 weeks since I last wrote.. it hasnt been extremely busy here or anything, although there are days when we have never ending meetings and training sessions.. I’ve learned more in the past 2-3 weeks than I have in the past 9-10 months, I think.. after we got going on SAP, I was much more involved in the day to day activities.. I’ve also learned some more of the technical aspects of SAP, which is what I really wanted all along.. with the project wrapping up and things around here settling down into their daily routines, we’ve been begging to go home early.. although most of the time our begging is met with ambiguous and cryptic answers, things are looking a bit more positive.. last we heard, “no one can go home until after the Go Live Party at the end of August”.. so, even though our boss didnt say we could go home early, he basically said “dont think about going home before the end of August”.. which is at least encouraging.. so I’ve started thinking about going home in September.. of course, that may not be the case.. but thats what most of us are hoping..

I’ve started looking at cars again.. one car I kind of like is the 2004.5 Volvo S40 T5.. with the Sport Kit (body kit and 18″ wheels), it looks pretty good.. but I dunno.. its hard to get over the fact its a Volvo, you know? And you can tell Volvo understands this.. because when you go to their website and click on the S40, like its all animated with funky music.. you’d think you were at the Scion website or something.. and I’ve also been checking out the used car scene.. Autotrader.com mainly just to get an idea of where car prices are.. whats sad is, when I left for Taiwan, I pretty much “gave” my car to my dad (took over my payments, actually.. but left me with no equity or cash).. I bought my IS300 in May 2003 for $21,500 with 22k miles.. today, its hard to find a 2001 IS300 with comparable mileage for around the same price.. there are lower priced cars in the Autotrader, but they’re usually salvage titles..

Not much else going on.. I’ve gotten a video rental store membership at this wanna-be Blockbuster.. seems Taiwan gets movies a little later than the US because just a couple of weeks ago, Torque came out on DVD.. but I saw that on DVD when I was back home 2 months ago.. its a crappy movie, by the way.. “what is it about people who drive cars that make them suck assholes?”.. uh yeah, right bro.. totally lame script that tries to make real bikers relate to this movie.. my friend, an ex-biker (sport biker, I guess), said he and his other buddies watched the beginning of the movie and turned it off like 30 minutes later.. hahah.. I was atleast able to sit through all of Fast and Furious at a preview showing.. I thought it was quite entertaining.. mainly because we would all laugh when the “racer” in the movie said stupid things like “yeah, and how about that Motec exhaust?”.. we’d be like, “yeah, as if Motec made exhaust.. HA HA HA”.. or “dude, no way that Integra would hang with that Supra”.. crap like that .. I haven’t watched 2Fast2Furious yet.. not really looking forward to it though ..

I’ve also been thinking about school again.. I’m definitely not looking forward to 3 more quarters of school.. but I have to finish.. I contacted the student advisor and she said to give her a call to discuss my options.. if I enroll in this coming Fall quarter, I wont have to re-apply.. if I take more time off, I’ll have to re-apply.. which she assures me is not a big deal.. but it just sounds scary.. man, I’m going to have the oldest laptop at school.. the new “kids” are going to laugh at my P3-1GHz ..

General, Work | 3 Comments »

Yeah, we’re still not truly live yet.. we’re about 24 hours behind right now.. although we havent run into the fiasco that Winbond’s Abeam consultants had to deal with (since we were still able to ship product and Winbond couldnt for one month following their implementation), we’re not running into “show stopping” problems.. small problems, but problems that affect our ability to ship.. our boss (the one we all are willing to crown as “The Boss”) stayed at the office on 6/30 and 7/1, staying up a total of 40 hours before he decided to go back to his apartment to get some sleep. I ended up staying until 1:30am on the promise that the data conversion would be finished and I would be able to create some sales orders and ship some stuff. But that never happened. I got to work this morning around 11:30AM and we’re just been “putting out small fires” ever since then. Things are looking OK though.. once these little “bugs” are out of the way, we should be about 85% operational.. I know we’ll run into other problems and errors, but I dont think they’ll be anything we can’t deal with.. speaking of “bugs”.. when I was working with Siebel Professional Services.. one of the guys, Dave.. can’t remember his last name.. but Dave always used to stop people when they said “bugs”.. it’d be like:

Me: “Dave, there’s a problem with the address fields.. I think its a bug, but..”
Dave: “Ah ah ah ah.. wait a sec.. there’s no such thing as a bug..”
Me: “WTF are you talking about, Dave?”
Dave:”They’re undocumented features”

That got a laugh out of me back then.. Dave was a funny guy.. and Parag was cool too.. he was the first Indian guy that really taught me all those dirty Hindi words.. we’d keep a list on the white board in my office.. and all the other Indian Siebel consultants that came and went would contribute to the board.. I remember one of them meant like “toilet cleaner”.. but when I asked the Indian guys here, they didnt know what I was talking about..

The typhoon is here, I guess.. I say “I guess” because its weak.. its just raining, really.. and somewhat windy.. but nothing like I imagined it would be.. I heard the clouds are really low.. I’ll have to go check it out in a bit before it gets too dark.. I’ll report more later since I think we’ll be here late tonight again..

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