Chan's Personal Blog

I've been busy moving all of my pictures out of Facebook and into Flickr, which has a far superior photo management app. I finally came across pictures of my cube at Yahoo which I've been meaning to put up, but hadn't had time.

So without further adieu, here's they are:


Mmmm ..... 24" LCD monitor.

And yes yes, the fashion police has already arrested me for having a really boring looking cube. If you have any suggestions on how to pimp it out, please inform me via comments. Wired Magazine has already given me a few ideas on how to pimp my cube.

I deeply apologize for not posting updates to the blog this week. It has been insanely busy at work as everyone's trying to finish projects before the year ends. I've been leading a large project that involves coordinating teams from around the world. Needless to say, its been interesting trying to communicate with everyone in so many different time zones. I regularly keep US office hours and Australian office hours these days. It's like working 1.5 shifts per day. Sometimes you just have to stay up in order to be able to talk to someone half way around the world.

This was my first instance of leading a global project, and it has been an interesting learning experience. Early on, I learned an important lesson from my division manager. He said, "to be a good manager, you have to put other people's needs ahead of your own." That means, helping other people with their programming problems before you solve your own, even if your deadline is looming. There have been days where I'm in meetings all morning, and then the entire afternoon is spent responding to people's questions and e-mails. That meant I didn't get around to programming until 5:30pm.

In the big picture, it does make sense solving everyone else's problems before your own (within reason). If I have three engineers stuck on a problem, I could spend maybe an hour or two to help them, and they can continue working. So for every hour of time I spend helping them, they can generate maybe four hours of work. That's a pretty good force multiplier right there. It's far better than them idling, or stumbling and wasting hours trying to figure out a solution.