A collection of random thoughts and materials that might prove enlightening to me and my friends.
MathJax
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
Sunday, October 15, 2006
Restaurants in Waterloo region
- Sole, Waterloo (pronounced soliel, french) - pretty good, decent price
- Thai Coconut Island, Cambridge - cheap, but shabby place and food.
- Verses, Kitchener - best restaurant in town, pricey
- Charcoal Steak House, Kitchener
- Chefs on King, Kitchener
- King Crab, Kitchener
- Modern India, Kitchener
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
Gvim custom settings
colors blue
set guifont=Lucida_Console:h10:cANSI
set lines=50
" RIM coding style - 4 characters indents, no tabs
set tabstop=4
set shiftwidth=4
set expandtab
" tags file search
set tags=tags;/
" smart search
set ignorecase
set smartcase
" taglist hotkey - needs taglist.vim installed
" - which needs ctags installed
" - see www.vim.org for details
map
" syntax fold
set foldmethod=syntax
set nofoldenable
" End of Custom settings
Saturday, September 23, 2006
Hitting the 100,000 milestone
Monday, September 18, 2006
In this together
- If you arrive at work in a bad mood, leave it at the door.
- When offered a juicy bit 0f gossip at work, refuse to hear it.
- Always do what you say you will do. Promise management.
- Avoid and stop potential offensive dialog regarding sex, politics, religions.
- The rule when it comes to sexual atttraction at work - Don't look, don't touch.
- Keep private about your opinions.
- "Please and thank you" at work is commom courtesy.
Sunday, September 10, 2006
Air Canada
Date: Sept 10, 2006 7:15am
Location: Ottawa International Airport
Boarded flight:
AC 443 departing Ottawa 8am
Employee badge number:
Air Canada counter clerk
05/2009
1/UC
YOW/100597
Employee physical appearance:
Appeared to be in senior role
White male, grey hair - in his 50s
- Client Checks bag in. Small carry on lugguge, weighs approx. 2 pounds
- Placed bag next to counter clerk within clerk's arm reach
- Bag oriented in inconevient position
- Clerk asked client to have bag flipped
- Client responded with "The bag weighs 2 pounds", and obliged to flip bag
- Clerk obviously offended by the tongue-in-cheek comment, and acted in retaliation
- Clerk refused to process e-ticket and boarding pass - his commited duty as he offered to serve client
- Clerk intentionally made client wait in another line, without giving reason
- Client asked for name/identification from Clerk, Clerk refused to provide identification voluntorily
- Boarding pass smoothly processed by another counter clerk after waiting in another line.
- Client had to note down badge number when the contents of clerk's badge was desernible.
- Client was greeted by RCMPs at the security line, apparently clerk persisted in his retaliatory actions by reporting this as an "incident" to the RCMPs. He further distorted the situation and made the RCMP believe client is an "eratic" individual that may cause harm to the public.
- Besides the agitated clerk, all other individuals that had dealt with client find client to be behaving in good manner. This includes the second client that processed the boarding pass, the RCMPs, the security station staff, the attendent at the boarding gate, the attendents on the plane.
- This leads to the only conclusion that clerk is acting inappropriately and with intent to cause harm to others and refusing to fulfill his duty.
- This behaviour is dangerous, counter productive and damages the reputation of the company the clerk represents. The clerk is in no way fit for client serving duties.
- Client demands 1) the clerk be disciplined appropriately 2) Clerk be removed from active client serving duties 3) a formal apology be given by Air Canada to permit this behaviour in crucial client interaction roles.
Tuesday, August 15, 2006
Ability model of emotional intelligence
- Read People-Identify Emotions: This refers to the ability to identify accurately how you, and those around you, are feeling and your ability to express these feelings. More than awareness, this ability stresses accuracy of awareness.
- Get in the Modd-Use Emotions: This special ability helps you determine how emotions help you and how they work in harmony with thinking. Your ability to use emotions changes your perspective, allowing you to see the world in different ways and to fell what others feel.
- Predict the Emotional Future-Understand Emotions: Emotions have their own language, and they have their own logical moves. The ability to understand emotion means that y ou can determine why you feel the way you do and what will happen next.
- Do It with Feeling-Manage Emotions: Emotinos convey important information, so it is valuable to be open to our emotions and to use this information to make informed decisions.
Monday, July 24, 2006
Sunday, July 16, 2006
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Bond prices
The central tenet of Bond Market investing is that prices and yields move in opposite directions. Bond prices go up when Bond yields go down, and vice-versa.
Pursuant to this relationship, Bonds are often considered "counter-cyclical" securities, meaning that Bond prices tend to be high and yields tend to be low when the economy's performance is poor. This factor is probably the single most important reason for having some Bonds in your portfolio.
Though there is a great deal of overlap, distinction needs to be made between factors affecting interest rates and factors affecting the price of an individual bond. Interest rates shift in response to a number of factors including: the demand and supply for credit, Federal Reserve policy (monetary policy), fiscal policy (government budgeting and expenditures), tax policy, exchange rates, general economic conditions, price inflation, perceptions and forecasts for future inflation and a host of lesser factors.
Individual Bond prices are not only affected by all of these factors, but additional ones as well. These factors include: supply and demand for the specific issue, liquidity of the issue, special characteristics of the issue, credit quality, perceptions and forecasts for changes in credit quality and a host of lesser factors.
Sunday, July 09, 2006
Soccer balls
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
Tuesday, July 04, 2006
Debt free!
Monday, June 26, 2006
Software manager's checklist
- Do you have your customer's requirements?
- Do you have a n approved budget?
- Do you have an approved roadmap?
- Do you avhe an approved schedule?
- Are you delivering the product on time?
- Do you hire developers in a timely fashion?
- Is your team capable of dealing wiht change?
- Are you capable of keeping your team focused and resisting change?
- Do your customers encounter a lot of quality issues with released products?
- Do you and your team measure how well you do your work on a regular basis to find ways to improve?
- Does your team understand your company's strategy?
- Does your team understand engineering's roadmap?
- Does your team understand why the roadmap meets the goals of the strategy?
- Do you have regular communication meetings and e-mail with your team?
- Are people on y our team willing to tell you bad news?
- Do you hear information about your team from your team before you hear it from others?
- Do members of your team communicate with each other and the rest of the company in a respectful manner?
- Do you provide information to your boss before he or she has to ask for it?
- Do other people in the company know what your team is doing and accomplishing?
- Do you communicate in a positive fashion?
- Does your team develop and buy into their schedules?
- Do you avoid micromanagement?
- Do you delagate tasks and let your reports proceed without interference?
- Do you make it clear what your employees are accountable for?
- Do you provide leadership opportunities for your employees?
- Does your team have a sense of urgency in addressing issues?
- Do you set cleawr roles and responsibilities for your employees?
- Do all the members in your team know what they need to accomplish each week before they can go home fo the weekend?
- Do your developers consider your organization a positive work environment?
- Resources
- features
- Dates
- Quality
- If you remove too many features, you won't have a competitive product.
- If you add too many features, you won't make your dates.
- If you scrimp on quality, you'll get a bad reputation.
- If you wait until the product is prefect, you'll miss the market window.
- If you make your engineers work extra hours all the time, they'll burn out.
- If you add too many resources , you can run out of money.
- If you slip the schedule, you make it hard for the sales team to sell and you might miss a market window.
Thursday, May 11, 2006
Core Competencies of Web 2.0 Companies
- Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
- Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
- Trusting users as co-developers
- Harnessing collective intelligence
- Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
- Software above the level of a single device
- Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models
Web 2.0 Design Patterns
- The Long Tail
Small sites make up the bulk of the internet's content; narrow niches make up the bulk of internet's the possible applications. Therefore: Leverage customer-self service and algorithmic data management to reach out to the entire web, to the edges and not just the center, to the long tail and not just the head. - Data is the Next Intel Inside
Applications are increasingly data-driven. Therefore: For competitive advantage, seek to own a unique, hard-to-recreate source of data. - Users Add Value
The key to competitive advantage in internet applications is the extent to which users add their own data to that which you provide. Therefore: Don't restrict your "architecture of participation" to software development. Involve your users both implicitly and explicitly in adding value to your application. - Network Effects by Default
Only a small percentage of users will go to the trouble of adding value to your application. Therefore: Set inclusive defaults for aggregating user data as a side-effect of their use of the application. - Some Rights Reserved. Intellectual property protection limits re-use and prevents experimentation. Therefore: When benefits come from collective adoption, not private restriction, make sure that barriers to adoption are low. Follow existing standards, and use licenses with as few restrictions as possible. Design for "hackability" and "remixability."
- The Perpetual Beta
When devices and programs are connected to the internet, applications are no longer software artifacts, they are ongoing services. Therefore: Don't package up new features into monolithic releases, but instead add them on a regular basis as part of the normal user experience. Engage your users as real-time testers, and instrument the service so that you know how people use the new features. - Cooperate, Don't Control
Web 2.0 applications are built of a network of cooperating data services. Therefore: Offer web services interfaces and content syndication, and re-use the data services of others. Support lightweight programming models that allow for loosely-coupled systems. - Software Above the Level of a Single Device
The PC is no longer the only access device for internet applications, and applications that are limited to a single device are less valuable than those that are connected. Therefore: Design your application from the get-go to integrate services across handheld devices, PCs, and internet servers.
Tuesday, May 02, 2006
Monday, April 24, 2006
Friday, April 07, 2006
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
Monday, March 20, 2006
Tuesday, March 14, 2006
Thursday, February 23, 2006
My japanese name...
My japanese name is 浜野 Hamano (seaside field) 明 Akira (bright).
Take your real japanese name generator! today!
Created with Rum and Monkey's Name Generator Generator.