A new place with a better view (only if they knew it!)

I got back to the office this morning to find out that the whole of my department have moved to a new place at the other end of the block. I thought I was the earliest bird until I turned on the lights - all desks were empty, except mine and other lady who'd also been travelling!

It didn't take long for me to move all my things to join the others.

My new workstation is a lot less spacious that the old place. I used to have an L shaped desk and now they've given me a much smaller, normal shape desk. Somehow, I kind of feel more comfort here than there. It's a downgrade in many sense, but a comfort somehow to me.

When most were hoping a seat next to windows, I was happy to choose where I sit now. Only to discover late today what I've missed! We are actually facing a changing room of a small gymnasium. Where we are gives us a perfect view into the female area, and some views of the men as well - our secretary saw a naked man waking across the hall. ha ha ha ha

Dinner in Wuhan

After a hard day with interviews, we celebrated it with a dinner at a local "hot pot" restaurant which also serve among others big green frogs.

Missing flight! And finally in Wuhan

It was a long journey to Wuhan since yesterday, started with a missing flight (Can you believe it, I missed the first leg to Frankfurt! I was in the dreamland ...). After an hour delay in Shanghai, I finally arrived in Wuhan at around 4.10 PM local time. I was totally knackered, first due to the long haul flight with 2 transits and second because a Chinese tot kept shrieking and crying all the time on the plane, and I couldn't sleep.

Don't be surprised if the Swiss think they are the clever ones and we are just the stupid apes

In August 2006, having just arrived in Switzerland, we were in the process of getting to know the long list of social rules in Switzerland. One of these many rules is about waste management - i.e. what kind of garbage bags you should use, where to send your empty bottles for recycle, how to separate them into different types, when they collect used papers, what you need to do with compost and the list continues.

On one Thursday evening I received a visit from an old man with a bag of garbage. He goes "Is this your garbage?". "Possibly so. I will have to check the content. But, it doesn't matter. Give it to me.", I said, thinking that even if it was not mine, I could just throw it back afterwards. "OK. But you've used the wrong bag. This black bag is cheap. You must use the blue one which is more expensive. Get them from Migro or Coop. Also, you've thrown this garbage in the bin that belongs to the apartment next door. Yours is at the other end of this building.", he continued. "Sure. I will go and get myself the blue bags. Thanks for the info.", I said. After he left, I opened the bag, and it was in fact my garbage. Initially I wondered how the hell that he knew it. Then I realised he had searched the garbage and found envelopes with my name. So damn Swiss!

The next day, Friday, I went to look for the blue garbage bag the man had told me about from the local supermarkets; Coop and Migro. I could not find it, and no one who worked there knew about it. This is not right I thought. A colleague later in the day told me it is only available at the Coop and Migro in the area I live which is ONLY about 8 minutes away by bus! This is madness. So, off I went and they indeed sold the bags there, and they are f*cking expensive! Each bag costs 2 Swiss Francs.

Having got the right garbage bag and used it, I thought that was the end of the story. Not!! Not with the Swiss. I don't know if they think they are smarter that the rest of the world, have bigger dick and tighter pussy or just pure racism. On Monday, I received a call from my wife informing me that I had received a written notice from the police, possibly a summon, and it had something to do with waste management. What else are they not happy with??? Straight away I went home and took the notice. With the help my department secretary, I learned that someone had reported about the mistake I made, and now the police wanted me to go down to the station for some kind of stupid briefing session related to ... how I should handle my waste I guess. She called the police station and had a chat with the responsible officer for about 15 minutes and in the end, they agreed I didn't have to be present at the station, however, should it happen again, I would be blacklisted and fined 200 Swiss Francs. And what pissed me off the most was that I had been reported to have been using the wrong garbage bag many times. That is total bollocks! When that old garbage inspector or whatever his job was, came to my home, it was only the second time I had used the black bag, and pure unintentional. Now that we understood where we went wrong and corrected the mistake, what else were they not happy with. I just don't understand. I will never do.

digitec.ch

Finally, digitec.ch finally sent me the three 516MB SIMMs I'd ordered a few days ago. It's time for 4 year old PC to get its RAM upgraded.

Installing RAM is normally a piece of cake. As long as you get the right type of SIMMs compatible with your motherboard there should not be any problem. So, having installed all the three alongside an existing 516MB, things seemed OK. The machine booted up fine and Windows started to show up and .. damn! .. all of sudden the whole thing just hung. Normally this is caused by loose SIMM, but unfortunately it was not the case this time. I tried swapping the positions of the SIMMS, pressing them in harder etc., but the problem didn't want to go away. For some reason something was not right. I wasted almost two hours pissing around with the tightness of the SIMMs and their positions only to discover later the network card was the culprit. Apparently it came off the socket slightly when I pushed the SIMMs in. 2 hours just got wasted for something stupid like this.

Coming back to digitec.ch, it's probably one of the best business models I have seen in recent years. They sell mostly electronic stuff and some clothings. And the due to the simple setup their prices are very competitive. A few months ago, I got myself a Nikon D40X with two lenses at 500 CHF cheaper then any other places in Switzerland. The way it works is that you order what you want online and then you can either go and collect the items from their collection point in Zurich or a few other ones in Switzerland or they send to you at a minimum extra charge. If you decide to fetch the ordered items, just pop by to one of the collection points, key in your order number on the registration kiosk, wait for your number, collect, pay and go. Easy, fast and efficient. The drawback, you can't open and check the items when you collect them. Take as they are and should there by any problem then only you return them. The SIMMs are my second order from digitec.ch, and they are definitely not the last.

Who says pregnant isn't sexy

Check out Daphne Iking in her best bunny pregnancy outfit:

... and more ...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/12852587@N03/1812088059/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/12852587@N03/1812087795/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/12852587@N03/1812929552/

First spam email in Facebook

This is the kind of emails that need to be blocked totally from entering Facebook. So far this is the only one I've received. Hopefully the last.

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The Wonderful Facebook

The invention of the year! Yes, it's got to be Facebook.

All these while I have always hated MySpace, Friendster and the likes because they are just full of rubbish. Young kids and adults who like to be kids continuously dumping shit into them creating a garbage bin rather than social networking web sites. Then came Facebook, with much neater, uniformed and more grown up, controlled look and feel. I just fell in love with it immediately, and could not stop being online even early in the morning in the toilet - thanks also to my ugly P990i.

What amazes me the most is the fact that since I signed up I have managed to touch base with some many of old friends from schools, university and previous companies where I worked. After a while, even my boss got on board and one or two other key persons of the company. There was this idea from my financial controller to get everyone in our department to be on Facebook which I think is brilliant!

Having said that, Facebook does have the potential of becoming a rubbish dump too with increasing numbers of so called "applications" are being developed by some and getting added every single second, and distributed to thousands of people, creating in way a new family of spams to members of the network. I'm getting like 20 invitations to add these applications daily and they only way to wipe them clean is by deleting each one of the applications individually. Such a pain in the arse! Bear in mind I only have around 160 friends and only a handful are really active, and excited (sometimes too excited) about these applications and cannot stop inviting the rest of the world to join them. There needs to be some mechanism to better, more easily control this craze over the applications.

Other that, Facebook is indeed a masterpiece of social networking web sites.

The Super-Extreme Swiss

Before I moved to Switzerland, a friend told me about a friend of his who had decided to leave the country not able to stand the complaints he got from his neighbours about flushing toilet after 10 PM. Both of us laughed thinking it was probably an exaggeration. Even if it was indeed true, I thought it was a one-off case and would never happen to me.

Came August 2006, the first month in our rented apartment in Switzerland, the nightmare began. A female, unemployed, 40+, single neighbour who lived above us started complaining about our baby crying at 3, 4 o'clock in the morning. Although she was not direct with the complaints, and pretending to be nice, it was obvious that she was not happy with it. She thought we had been feeding our daughter wrong food and tried to be clever by suggesting us to change her diet to eggs (eggs??? what the hell was she thinking?) instead of porridge. Tired of hearing her so called "concerns", I told her to talk to the paediatrician. If he is OK with the food, who is she to argue? Since then she stopped mentioning about the cries.

Later, she started complaining about us thumping our feet when we walked. What? It puzzled me for a while. She lived ABOVE and not below us. How the hell that she could hear it? It is even more puzzling when we don't use shoes indoor - how much noise could we make from walking? We are not kangaroos that hops around. Then her nuisance got worse when she also complained about us flushing toilet late at night or very early in the morning and making noise from pulling toilet paper from it's metal holder. What the hell is wrong with this woman. From this point onwards I just got used to her complaints started ignoring her.

Not long after that, along came the saviours. An Indian family moved to the unit above her and a young Italian opposite her. After a while I heard the same story from the new Indian neighbour about the complaints. She also complained that he Italian couple have been arguing all the time - nobody else heard this but her .. strange. Tired on all the complaints, the Indian neighbour called up the landlady, and the response from landlady was "Just ignore her. She's has a bit a problem, and has always been complaining about everyone". Ha! ha! ha! Even another Swiss finds her a bit weird. Perhaps she's the extreme one.

No long after that she moved out not being able to live among the Indians, Malaysians and Italians. LOL!!!

Tits'n'ass

This is another good one from Urban Dictionary:

1.	Tits'n'Ass
	First born in Scarborough, Ontario. A form of a traditional clinking of beer bottles as one would say "Cheers". First the involved parties clink together the tops of their beer bottles and announce "Tits!", following closely is the clinking of the bottom of the bottles together announced "and Ass!".

titsex

Guess what's missing in the following definition found at Urban Dictionary ???:

1.	titsex
	A form of sexual intercourse involving the application of the penis in between the tits of a voluptuous woman. This procedure is most effectively performed with the addition of some form of lubricated substance which is used to facilitate the sliding friction between the respective sexual organs. It is advised to proceed with caution in the performance of the maneuver as there can be significant irritation to the head of the penis as well as a potential for the busting of a nut.

The complete definition should have been:

1.	titsex
	A form of sexual intercourse involving the application of an at least 15 cm penis in between the tits of a voluptuous woman. This procedure is most effectively performed with the addition of some form of lubricated substance which is used to facilitate the sliding friction between the respective sexual organs. It is advised to proceed with caution in the performance of the maneuver as there can be significant irritation to the head of the penis as well as a potential for the busting of a nut.

It won't work with 5 cm for sure.

And "Potential for the busting of a nut"?? Really? What a joke! What kind of tits are those? ha! ha! ha!

Ciao 2007, Welcome 2008

After been talking on the phone, an old friend my University days in UK finally drove down from Luxemburg on the new year eve. At least we would not be alone at home celebrating the beginning of 2008 and the end of 2007.

It's ironic that we were sitting together after almost 10 years since we left Uni and watching a program on Spice Girls reunion ... sad lol. It brought back the old memories the younger days in England and Spice Girls at the start of their stardom. How time flies.

Compared to last year, it's a quieter celebration here in the town I live. Except for some small personal fireworks, there was nothing else on stage. Perhaps in Zurich there were some fireworks in display. I would be surprise if there was also nothing.

With some cheers, and a few drinks of champaigne and icea tea, we welcomed the new year. And we welcomed it again for the second time at the strike of midnight in London which was one hour behind us, ha ha ha.

Just after one AM, we all slowly retired to bed, ready to face new challenges in 2008.