I’ve just got back in touch with my high school classmates - a bit late to catch the reunion fever but nevertheless did! I was ecstatic when I heard from one of my best friends out of blue after 9 years out of touch. God knows how she found me as I had been lying low and moved around all over the world. She told me that a 20 year reunion was planned in my home town, wondered if I could make it. Memory flooded back…I’m overwhelmed with all the excitement, curiosity… Is it really 20 years already?! What a shame I couldn’t make it. I haven’t got my passport back yet (that’s another story…). I wish I could.
Once the connection was made I was quickly given the pointer to the Chinese equivalent of facebook. Voila I was back in the same class after 20 years! Having spent endless hours to go through the whole class message board, the photos, the videos, the shared documents, I was on a high. 20 years flashed in front of my eyes just like that. I’m lost for words.
The high school friends are most special to me. They knew me as I was still real, still raw, still full of hope and innocence. They knew me as what I was, rather than what I aspired to be. They knew my hopes and dreams. They knew my failings and my faults. They knew me when everything was still unknown and possible. They are my concience. How I wish I could go back to those innocent years!
sarah Sarah friends, life
Three big IT companies come to mind, one I know relatively well :
Oracle : around 50 since 2005, and apparently the rule is 60 days to integrate. Impressive.
Red Hat (*) : 15 in total currently, though I think that is short at least two: Ars Digita and Sistina
Cisco : lots, 16 of them beginning just with the letter “A”
Am interested what metrics there are to measure the relative success of A&Ms. Heard it said more than once that Cisco is particularly good at buying other companies.
(*) Unlike Cisco and Oracle, Red Hat does not list its acquisitions on its site, so used wikipedia instead which looks about right
kiat Uncategorized
| It’s been a great 17 months for me as IT Manager and things just worked out for me to take on a role focused on development rather than support. My team gave me a book as a “leaving” present, Nudge, which Sarah picked up when I brought it home and loved it. Have had it back for a few weeks now and its one of the books I’m reading (I’ve realised it’s more entertaining and easier for me to read multiple books overlapping - i.e. not all started at the same time). |
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kiat Uncategorized change, development, role, work
If you are interested in working for company X, my suggestion is to quickly research and assemble a résumé for the company. A kind of “Things I know about X“. Here is the kind of data that I would look for basically in 3 categories: financials, people, operations.
Financials
I’m about half way through the book Practices of an Agile Developer: Working in the Real World. What a great read! Lots of real world experience, pratical stuff that can be used outside software engineering too. One standout quote is attributed to Darwin: “It is not the strongest of the species that will survive, or the most intelligent. It is the most adaptable to change.” I should get to the end of it by Friday. Note to self: recommend to SupportEng guys.
kiat Ideas, Kiat
The other day, Kiat and I had a long conversation about acquisitions and mergers. He was of the opinion that M&As were rarely successful. The more profitable way for a company is to build partnerships instead of buying up competitions. In fact, he was even suggesting companies should do the opposite of M&A, apply the 4HWW principles, shed off functions or product lines, become smaller instead of larger. I was intrigued but not totally convinced. Seemed to me the economy of scale achieved through M&A was hard to ignore. Doing things in a bigger scale leads to more efficiency, less duplication, right? Read more…
sarah Sarah divorce, economy, thoughts
Lots of snow and cold weather in the past week, which initially seemed to catch everyone off guard with its relative severity. Getting about was hard, most people in my office stayed home on Monday, snow was thick all around.
| Romeo, our Australian Silky Terrier, took a while to get used to the snow and over the week can now walk ok on it slowly - not so well compared to the dogs out today who were running about without any problem. The most noticeable human induced problems were with the trains. Forget arguing over snowplows. What really mattered to people (once classic English patience ran out) was information, given the disruption, so they could determine what best to do for themselves.
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kiat Kiat Romeo, snow, trains
I was an innocent kid growing up and the film I remember that first really made a major impact on me was about childhood love and friendship “S.W.A.L.K.“. It’s a beautiful film, that particularly resonates if you were lucky enough to be around the same age as the kids in the film when you first saw it.
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kiat Kiat, Our Favorite Stuff melody, s.w.a.l.k, tracey
Was doing some artwork recently and needed some shades based on Ubuntu’s colours. Stumbled across the cool colourlovers.com website, couldn’t find exactly what I was looking for, so I signed up and created a couple of palettes 
and 
based on Ubuntu orange and red.
kiat Innovation & Design, Kiat colour, palette, ubuntu
 Tim Ferriss' FHWW blog |
Sarah and I are both a big fan of Tim Ferriss and his blog and check out what he’s writing at from time to time. He has fascinating views on language learning and I found the great article linked above, which produces two, “top 100″ English word lists, written and spoken - which I saved. I’d been thinking about making a script to translate single English words into Pinyin to save me time going to a website and looking it up.
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Read more…
kiat Kiat, Linux, Free Software and Open Source automation, blog, chinese, firefox, headers, language, mandarin, pinyin, plugin, scripts, Tim Ferriss, translate
