Category: Work

Posted on

Thursday/ baseline configuration

The foundation of the SAP ‘house’ – the system – we are building, is in.   We call it the baseline configuration.  It was a really big milestone and went with pulling of the hair and gnashing of the teeth this week, since some teams were very, very far behind compared to where they needed to be.    (Behind for so many reasons, some of their own making, some not!).

Meanwhile the days are getting shorter and I discovered my apartment building has a gaudy neon strip running along the top floors.   It has not been turned on before.  The picture shows the multi-color mode and the colors actually scroll from left to right in an animated fashion.   I think all of this would be too much to handle for the occupants of an American condo or apartment building ! 

Posted on

Monday/ waiting for the bus

6.30 am on the sidewalk in front of my apartment building.  The pink silhouette sign is a new fixture and has a street name on that it’s pointing to, indicating there are bands and live music to be found ‘that way’.  (On Friday nights and Saturday nights but not on Monday morning, of course!).  The black computer bag is mine (the bicycle is not), with laundry I have to take in tonight after work in the green and white bags.

On Monday mornings I feel the end of the year rushing up to us, and I don’t know how we will get all our work done – and it’s only the end of August.

Posted on

Thursday/ keep good company

Walking home after a bite at the ‘corner’ restaurant as we call it,  I noticed a new office front – for the Shenzhen Century Gamay Design Decoration Engineering Ltd company.

Quite a title and I couldn’t quite make out what the company really does.   But it reminded me of the song Good Company from A Night at the Opera (1975) by Queen.   What a great song!  It starts with Take good care of what you’ve got .. and ends with  I ponder on the lesson of my life’s insanity/ take care of those you call your own and keep good company.

Posted on

Tuesday/ what to wear

I woke up really early – so early that I even had time to take a snap of my outfit for the day.  The blue Burberry shirt is new and has just enough punch without being too flashy.  The knight in armor logo stitched in on the right is ready to kill an imaginary dragon.   Let’s go!

Posted on

Wednesday/ put your thinking cap on

Actually, your thinking hat – and pick a color.

The training course I attended at work today, meant to sharpen up our thinking, mentioned Edward de Bono’s six hats.  Six different ways to think about a problem, that is.   Which one is your favorite way of thinking?

White hat – Facts & Information
Red hat – Feelings & Emotions
Black hat – Negatives
Yellow hat – Positives
Green hat – New Ideas
Blue hat – The Big Picture .. P.S. and click the picture below to make it bigger !

Posted on

Friday/ a pause in the battle

I wanted to post a ‘happy’ picture, couldn’t find any in my picture library.  So I picked this one instead !  from a comic book I bought on a previous trip to Hong Kong.   Yes, printed comic books are still alive and well, and the artwork in them is beautiful.

I am very sure these horsemen are not getting ready to battle a snowstorm of e-mails,  wall-to-wall meetings and items that need attention ASAP, but hey – I feel I am one of them.   Now where’s my horse and my sword?  Giddyup!

Posted on

Friday! / fog

This morning a blanket of fog enveloped the whole area; it is amazing how warm and stuffy it got from just one week ago when we were sitting here in the office building shivering from the cold.    The marble floors and door thresholds – and even windows – in the building ‘sweat’ – all the moisture condensing on it.    It’s bad to have slippery marble floors, so the office management had to put non-slip mats in the lobbies and hallways.   Yesterday a few of us walked up to the reservoir close to the office building here where we work.

But hey! it’s Friday and I have a weekend in Hong Kong to look forward to.  The Marriott Courtyard hotel room waiting for me there will be a get away and a little lap of luxury, and I am going to snooze in that king-size bed with the six pillows.

A little reservoir on the hillside, near the Daya Bay nuclear power plant complex. The character behind me translates  to .. water, of course!   水 shui = water  / river /  liquid  / beverage /  additional charges  or  income  / (of clothes) classifier  for  number  of  washes.
The offices where I work are in the gray & black office building on the left. The Daya Bay nuclear power station is visible in the distance behind it.

 

Posted on

Thursday/ all-hands meeting

Directions at one of the T-junctions on the way to the office in our shuttle bus. We go left here, to Da Peng village.

Thursday – so, mercifully, the week is drawing to a close.    We have an all- hands meeting this afternoon which is a break for me: I get to just sit and listen, and not stand up front, trying to control a raucous discussion with a room full of 20 people.

I’m going to Hong Kong with three colleagues from work, so we will see how that works out. I suspect my way of exploring the city is very different from theirs.  I will join them for a big dinner at Ruth’s Chris steakhouse, but it’s good to explore the offerings from local restaurants, or just eat in the hotel where they also offer a good variety of Asian cuisine. Also, I tend to steer clear of the big touristy places, and just walk around on my own. I work with great people, but I already spent 12 hours every day this week with you. On the weekends, I need some ‘me’ time :).

Posted on

Tuesday/ more work sessions

Another day of work session facilitating for me – half of it in Chinese with me waiting patiently for the Daya Bay team animatedly discuss some design issue before them.  Then I get a translation from the team lead or my Chinese colleagues, and depending on my answer back they settle down or debate it a little further : ).

It’s tough for me, and tough for them : some are seeing SAP for the first time – in English – and they are not familiar with the terms or the processes.   It is packaged software, offering some setup choices, but not total freedom to redesign it. So sometimes I really have to shrug and say:  ‘We just cannot change it in such a fundamental way. That’s not the way the Germans designed it’.

Back at the apartments after a long day. The view from the shuttle bus. The sign says 小心行人 xiǎo xīn xíng rén which translates to ‘be careful for pedestrians‘ (watch out for pedestrians).
Posted on

Saturday/ coffee, with coconut

Saturday morning and hey! we saw the sun shine this morning on the way in to work with the bus. We got a little reprieve and left the apartments at 7 am instead of at 6.30 am.

The local Daya Bay team is mostly back on site – they were out all week, but work today and tomorrow.  One of them brought in coconut-flavored instant coffee for us (picture of bag that contains packets).    The US team has the day off tomorrow, thankfully.  A really busy schedule of system design workshops start on Monday.   I am facilitating the discussions for my team. We spent this week getting the all our ducks in a row, and I think we are ready.   I am sure we will find out !

Posted on

Thursday/ a giraffe on a bus

Our project manager ran out to Walmart yesterday and brought back a bunch of space heaters for the office.  Yay! and Thank You!  we said. There will be no gallivanting around Shenzhen or Hong Kong this weekend : we have to work !

This metro bus with the giant giraffe, advertising South African Airways flights out of Hong Kong, pulled up across from my hotel when I was there last weekend. The direct flight to Johannesburg is 13 hours.

 

Posted on

Monday blues

Monday and I’m posting more ‘happy’ pictures to take the blah out of Monday after such a nice weekend in Hong Kong.  The characters below were on a canvas poster on the street outside the hotel.  I just couldn’t tell what they were happy about!   And who wants some MeltyKiss with fruity strawberry chocolates?   Saw these in a candy store in a Hong Kong subway station and had to take a picture of the box : ).

Posted on

Friday/ 勿 擦 do not erase

So check this out .. I wrote ‘Do not Erase’ on the whiteboard, and then my Chinese colleague wrote it in Chinese next to it, for good measure.   That second one is a 17-stroke character! Wow.  So as the amateur very limited-time student of Chinese I had become, just had to go look up the characters on my translator .. and voila!

wù cā : do not erase!

勿 wù must not, do not; without, never

擦 cā to wipe / to erase / rubbing (brush stroke in painting) / to clean / to polish

 And this sign says ‘Good Luck’ ..  which I hope I will have a little of for my trip this weekend to Hong Kong.  I see the New Year’s Parade was back in January, so I missed that, but even so there should be an exciting vibe there this weekend.  I need it, since I am a little homesick, and that after just one week out here this trip.

Posted on

Monday/ apartment

Here are a few pictures of my apartment in Dameisha (it’s a three bedroom) that I share with my colleagues. One can walk down to the beach from here, but is a good 15 or 20 minutes, though.

It’s still chilly outside and in, and we don’t have central heating, hence the space heater. (Yes, we need to keep an eye on it, and be sure to turn it off when we leave).

 

 

Posted on

Thursday/ got the visa

I took the bus to downtown to go pick up my passport with the new visa in, at the office. I stayed there for a bit to catch up on my e-mails as well.

Waiting for the No 10 bus on 15th Avenue. The Newcastle Brown Ale beer truck must have replenished the supplies of the bars and restaurants close by : ).
The view of downtown from my desk in the offices on 5th Avenue, towards Elliott Bay in Puget Sound. (Ignore the mosquito in the window! Ha!). There’s Macy’s department store, and to its right the lower triangular one is Westlake Center. Look for the monorail train at the bottom, picking up passengers for the short run to the Space Needle.
Posted on

Tuesday/ at the office

My body clock is still somewhat shifted, so I got up really early to come into the office here in downtown Seattle.  I use the bus two blocks from my house with my Orca card (in Hong Kong it’s an Octopus card, which I already have and plan to use lots as well).

All the printers in the office were replaced just last week (of course) with different models, so it took 30 mins for me to install new printer drivers, and then when people started arriving at 8.00 am I still had to go ask for help to scan and send in my expense reports since the instructions by the printer had not been replaced.  Aargh.

Looks like a beautiful day here from where I’m sitting.  I wonder if February will be as mild as January.   Last month was the warmest January on record here in Seattle.

Posted on

Monday/ work & other stuff

It’s Monday and I already have to catch up with some work! (from home, giving myself one more day then I’ll go into the office tomorrow).   It also allows me to take care of very necessary little tasks, such as throwing my computer backpack into the washing machine to get rid of the smell from a chunk of banana that went unnoticed and bad inside of it!  Blech. My house is in decent shape, and the deck and yard at the back is finally free of leaves and twigs now that the neighbor’s maple tree has shed all it had for the season.

The 2007 versions of Microsoft Word and Excel that we upgraded to recently, seems buggy and glitchy and I’ll go and ask the tech support guy tomorrow if he had similar complaints from other users.   (Always a bad situation when you’re the only one with a problem that no one has ever seen before).

I have to get a light jacket and maybe a few more dress shirts so that I have some extra ones, out in China.  Isabella, the dry cleaner shop in the apartment complex, is on the pricey side at $2 a shirt and even more for pants, but the clothes come out of the cleaners looking like new.

Posted on

Wednesday/ last day

Let’s go! Let’s go! .. is what Gus is saying, telling us to get in our little bus so that we can leave. This bus only takes us into the little town of Da Peng, where a minibus driver with Hong Kong as well as China mainland registration plates will pick us up to take us to the airport hotel.

We are cramming in as much work as possible today before we leave. We plan to leave at 4pm today for Hong Kong, and stay over at the airport hotel.

I might have been able to have stuck around until Thursday morning, because my flight is only at noon on Thursday. It’s better to travel with the departing group, though. I plan to explore Hong Kong at night on my own a little – I hope there is time for that.

Posted on

Tuesday/ work, dinner

Hey, Tuesday is one day closer to Thursday.  By now the bus ride in to work offers few surprises, but I still see many more ‘out of place things’ than perhaps I would see in the USA on the way to work : a kid that seems way too young to be bicycling on his own on the busy road; an electrical control panel door left open on the side of a building, a driver doing a risky move.

Here’s a red bean milkshake that I had at the Silver Dragon restaurant in Hong Kong  on Saturday (very nice !).

We had dinner last night at a new (for us) little restaurant close to our apartments, and the food was excellent: pork on a bone with Szechuan spices (I’m still careful to bite too big into food with these), eggplant strips with garlic, noodles in a broth (got to have those!) and TsingTao beer.  The tab? A scant 43 yuan ($6) each.   I’m told the cleaning lady for our apartment gets $6 for two hours’ work.

On a Saturday morning we can walk down towards the beach and buy a delicious omelet-like breakfast on the sidewalk by the beach for 50 American cents.   The radiant heater-fan combination in our apartment was all of $12 at Walmart.   Of course, a cheap currency helps exports (as my dad told us many times at the dinner table when we were kids!), but it also makes the money in the Great Piggy Bank of China (by some estimates it was $4.3 trillion in 2009) worth a lot less.

Posted on

Monday/ back to work

I’ve borrowed one of the weekend in Hong Kong’s pictures to cheer me up, since it’s Monday – a working sap’s un-favorite day of the week.  These characters adorned a rack of jackets in the clothing floor of  the  Sogo department store which reminded me much of Macy’s in the USA.

I do have Wednesday to look forward to as the last day of this trip.  Most of us go back on Thursday.  (Yippee!). Some team members will ‘hold the fort’ and retain a presence here, and back in the USA we will have to finish up some documentation.