Tree Hugging Lecherous Bear

I QUIT!

2007-11-30T18:38:00.001+08:00

I'm out of the place I go to work every day for the last 4 years. I'm done with the nonsense. This event requires a post here, even though I have been neglecting it too much.

A Gem By a Person So Young

2007-01-17T20:32:00.000+08:00

I found a blog supposedly (that's what it says) written by a 16 year old:

http://www.infernalramblings.uni.cc/

The things he blogs about, his writing and his clarity of thinking astonishes me. If he keeps this up, he'll achieve great things in the future.

Bravo!

Log Deficiency

2007-01-11T20:18:00.000+08:00

Today a colleague of ours forwarded an email to us. Another engineer asked him in the email for the algorithm to convert dBm to Watts and Watts to dBm. This is the third or fourth time my friend has been asked about dBm.

I admire his tolerance for idiots. I would've gone ballistic at the idiot the second time he/she asked me the same simple question. If you Google for the keywords "dBm", "Watt" and "conversion", you'd get PLENTY of resources about this well known conversion.

A bunch of us were laughing at how stupid this person is. The friend who is dead (see eulogy written last month in this blog), commented that "Damn, this is just log conversion! They teach that in high school. Don't everyone know how to do log?"

Ah hah, so I challenged him. I said, "If I gave you a calculator that only has log10 and ln, and I want you to calculate log2(5) (read: log base 2 of 5), how would you do it?"

He went..."Uh....I don't remember."

That's why he's dead. That's why the eulogy was written.

F*CKING IDIOT!

2006-12-21T20:25:00.000+08:00

Something happened in the office today that has agitated me enough to blog. I was busy for a while and then lost my focus. I'm back. Apologies to my loyal readers.

There is this applications engineer who is supposed to do a competitive analysis of our product against a competitor. He was supposed to compare the measurement rate the two products. Ok, I will now disclose some information related to my company. Yes, I'm pissed off enough to lose some anonymity. I'm a designer of measurement instruments.

He collected a bunch of data from an experiment he designed, and placed the data into a table and slide-set, and presented it to us. His data was bloody meaningless. His method was all wrong. He didn't know what he was doing and just collected a bunch of useless data.

The data he collected was in log-scale. Electrical Engineers like to convert many things into log-scale. dBm, dBc, dBW, dBV and etc. He took the average and standard deviation of all his data in log-scale! I mean, WTF! I told him the first time he showed me the data that that means nothing. It has no units, no physical meaning. And he did it a SECOND TIME!

I also explained it to him the first time that the measurement rate (the time it takes to take 1 reading) is a function of the number of averages you tell the instrument to do. A simple example will be, if it takes 1 second to take 1 reading for a measurement average of 1, then it will take 5 seconds to take 1 reading for a measurement average of 5. He failed to understand this SIMPLE fact and got his data all wrong. He got a bunch of time measurements which does not follow this trend.

I've screwed him twice in two meetings. If he does it the third time, I'm no longer giving him face. Tell me what I should do.

An Eulogy To A Lost Friend...

2006-11-27T19:03:00.000+08:00

Recently, we lost a good friend to the dark side. The following is a touching eulogy written by another friend, who is still struggling with the rest of us on the path of the light.

My Brothers,

Just recently, on the first of November, we lost a friend and colleague. The Rager succumbed to the dark side after an intense struggle lasting only six months. He was twenty-six years old.

I trust that all of you are aware that he forewent a promising career in the United Kingdom and his pastime of freestyle rock climbing in a grand gesture of patriotism and idealism, returning to his motherland so that he could cultivate the next generation of technical people.

The Rager showed extraordinary focus when he rejected favors from several large multinationals to join instead, our company. This is something all of us feel a great sense of gratitude towards, for following his tumultuous arrival he was instrumental in growing some legs for our department, without which, we surely would have outsourced the design of FPGAs.

He was a pillar, nay, a bastion of technical knowledge in these troubled times, a shining LED in the darkness of the FPGA world. It was no mystery that he rose to the exalted position of God and gained the respectful worship of many peers.

But of course, being a man of many talents, he is not only remembered for his technical prowess, but also for his colourful antics that have brightened many a working day. One cannot deny that The Rager was a man full of zest and life.

His lunch buddies will no doubt take with them vivid memories of wild but honest rages on the asphalt: The destruction of the pink car, the frequent visits to the knocker's yard, his incessant raving about Michelin tires and the various aggressive confrontations with the arrogant traffickers. He certainly understood, that feeling of heart in the mouth and sweaty palms, telling us that we are alive.

His sexual preferences, while not common, show a startling predilection for variety. From his hip shaking body swaying performances on the public stage, his wicked references to the sodomy of men, masturbating to the voice of male colleagues, to his penchant for soft, flowery white skirts and skinny women, and the activity of cock sucking... he was someone who enjoyed life to the fullest.

Male colleagues who have spent time with him will fondly remember his smelling of powder at night, and of his playfulness in the washrooms.

But most importantly, he was one of the brotherhood, that secret covenant of wise and powerful men who fought daily to stamp out the corruption and depravity that threaten the fabric of the universe.

In this, he was a stalwart defender of the Truth, a vocal member of the drive against cronyism and idiocy. Everyone here will surely attest to his hatred of the common ignorance of metastability and XOR gates, and his constant swearing even in meetings where his reporting superiors are present. The open, no-holds barred, to-hell–with-the-management mentality was one of his key signatures, and certainly one of his most memorable ones. His passionate and unwavering drive still serves today as an exemplary model of the dedicated brotherhood member.

While his passing has left a gaping hole in our ranks, we shall always remember and honour him by finishing the crusade he started. As a final parting salute, allow me to shout his favourite battle cry, the one that sends shivers down the spines of every idiot, ass kisser, lying bastard and SOB:

TIU!!!

The Rager, we will miss you.

First Visit to "The Curve"

2006-11-26T13:31:00.000+08:00

I went down to KL this weekend. A good pal of mine, limy, brought me out to The Curve. It's a new hot night spot near 1 Utama.

The two of us guys ordered a jug of beer and started babe watching. It wasn't as good as last weekend's babe watching (Yeah, I went to KL also). Our perch wasn't at a major junction or pathway. It wasn't bad. Saw a lot of short skirts.

We also talked about the usual stuff, from politics to work to the elegence of exp(i*pi) = 1.

Later when I told my wife about the babe watching part, she asked if I saw any cleavages, or "Curves". I'd mention that we were disappointed in that department, as the girls we saw try hard to show their cleavages, but just aren't equipped.

Who is Wind River?

2006-11-21T19:15:00.000+08:00

I like these little stories. It makes my time in office much more amusing and easy to pass. Of course, all these are true accounts.

There is this FW manager in our department. He's not the same as I previously blogged about a week ago. He came to speak to my team's FW engineers.

FW Manager (FWM) : Do you use an OS in your product.
FW Engineer (FWE) : Yep.
FWM : Who wrote the OS?
FWE : Umm...Wind River.
FWM : Is that a group here in [our company]?
FWE : Uh...no...They're another company.
FWM : How do you download your program into your CPU?

At this point, a lot of mental forehead slapping was going on with the engineers. Disbelief was abound with the engineers that this guy actually made it to manager. A manager in charge of a FW group no less...

Software Engineers Who Dunno Nuthin

2006-11-21T13:56:00.000+08:00

As most of you who read this blog, you know me. As for a stranger who just happens to drop in, he might not understand the background of my content. So some of it will be provided here.

I'm a designer of a product made by my company. (vague :)) This product is sold to our customers as a stand-alone product. Sort of like your off the shelf electronics goods like cellphones or TVs. But our customers aren't the usual consumers.

The product also allows quite a lot of automation that can be done with it. So our management decided to kick off a project to create a software application to sell customers, that interfaces with my product so that users can do things they normaly do with the product from a PC environment, as well as do further value added things using the application.

The SW project has been running for quite awhile. So far, nobody from that SW project team has engaged me and asked me about my product and how to use it. I naturally assume that they're a bunch of great engineers and can figure things out themselves...

But...yes, there's always a but, or else it wouldn't be in this blog, the situation was not so. Two situations has caused me to view the team in a completely different light. I hope they don't screw up their project royally.

I was told by a colleague in my team that he was approached by a couple of guys on the SW project team to solve a problem they had. To his horror, he found out that they didn't know the difference between Watts and dBm! They also didn't know the conversion between these two units. They were doing stuff in one unit while it should be done in the other!

Then yesterday, I walked by their cubes and heard them discussing loudly about a certain operation of my product. I got curious and walked up to ask them about it. I also had to know whether they really were a bunch of idiots or not. Turns out they are. They didn't know the most basic functions of my product. All these while, they were hacking around in their code to get their SW to work with my product without understanding what is going on...When I explained it to them, it seems like they need a major architectural change to their code.

Sigh...that's just one of the many problems we have here. Technical people who don't know technical things, or not willing to learn. I'll talk about the Kirchoff's Law one next time. That's an interesting one.

A Shift of Focus...

2006-11-17T09:39:00.000+08:00

Damn...it's still early in the morning and I'm feeling depressed already, mainly from reading these:

And quite a few Putra lines are closed at 12:00PM
http://www.putralrt.com.my/last_train.htm

Great. This reaffirms my belief that my long term plan to leave is still valid.

The Golden Ratio of Corporate Pay...

2006-11-16T13:09:00.000+08:00

Everyone has heard of the golden ratio used by artists and architects, even in math and science, but have you ever heard of the "Golden Ratio of Corporate Pay"?

Today over lunch, my colleagues and I stumbled across this crucial ratio. It was a mind bending and life altering epiphany. I will describe it next:

First, find out how many people are in between you and your CEO. Mine looks like this:

L.Bear ...> DottedBoss -> Boss -> BigBoss -> VP -> Senior VP -> Super Senior VP -> CEO

Then next, our conjecture:

Everytime you go up a level, the pay is doubled. Or if you go the other direction, every step away from the CEO, the pay halved. This is also a classic case of geometric progression.

So our CEO's pay and compensation is 1.3 million USD. This is found in Forbes.com. CEOs are given a LOT of bonus and the pay usually doesn't reflect how much he really gets in compensation. There are also disputes on why badly performing companies still pay their CEOs loads of money. If you're interested in that, Google it. Plenty of articles online on that.

1.3 million USD is roughly RM 400k per month. Using the conjecture, my monthly pay calculated is:

400k * (1/2)^7 = 3125.

With this number, my dotted line manager is 6.25k and his manager is 12.5k. That's not quite close to reality. My pay and the two people above me. So let's instead, solve for the ratio itself. A slight error in ratio can cause a big error on my pay because of the ^7 in the equation.

My company's minimum pay for a senior engineer is RM4.4k. So using this number, we solve for the ratio, R.

400k * (R)^7 = 4.4k

R = 0.525

Wow! Quite close to half. Not bad. So now my dotted line manager is 8.38k and his boss is 16k. That's much closer to reality.

There we go, I've found the Golden Ratio for my company. Why don't you look for yours?

Story of Candidate Interview

2006-11-15T10:50:00.000+08:00

Today, a hiring manager in my company told us a story. This manager is one of the only managers I respect in my company locally. He has a technical track record and knows what he's saying. His story is about one of the interviews he had.

Manager says: Earlier this week I interviewed one FW candidate from [an MNC in Penang]. He is the classic case of engineer with shaky FW foundation but good talker.
Manager says: He claimed to be a USB expert, so I ask him what he does ?He said he did everything USB, from USB firmware to USB WDM driver and SW application.
Manager : OK, describe what you did in USB firmware, what device classes you implemented ?
Candidate : Oh, I wrote the USB endpoints, bulk in/out, transfers.
Manager : How about device class ?
Candidate : I am the key person in USB, the USB communicate through bulk-in/out.

Manager says: It seems that he doesn't know much about device classes.
Manager: What end products are you making ?
Candidate: some multimedia streaming products.
Manager: So to make the multimedia product work with PC, both must agree on a set of protocol & FSM behaviour, what is it that you implemented ?

Manager says: When pressed, he told me the truth.
Candidate: Actually once we signed the NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement), the semiconductor company gives us very good & working USB drivers.

Manager says: I guess he is more like a coordinator.
Manager : In our case, doing USB drivers is not a simple matter of signing NDA.
Manager : What did you do in WDM driver ?
Candidate : I have to modify/enhance Microsoft drivers, there are a lot of bugs in MS drivers.
Manager : So how many team members do you have in your USB project ?
Candidate: 3.
Manager : What are these 3 doing ?
Candidate: 1 HW, 1 SW app, 1 driver.
Manager : You claimed to be the key person doing all thing USB, but now you tell me there are 2 other persons doing SW app & driver ?

Manager says: This guy is not even a good liar.
Candidate: Oh, they do it, I do follow up and fix some bugs.

Manager says: Maybe he is a Project Manager pretend to be a technical expert too ?
Manager says: His good attribute is that he can laugh even when I placed him in awkward situation.

There we go. The helpless situation of local talent. This guy is employed! The unemployable ones are even worse. They probably don't even know what USB is.

Review of Our Product User Guide

2006-11-15T09:58:00.000+08:00

Ah, so part of R&D's responsibilities is to make sure that the guy who writes the user manual does not screw up royally with the manual. This guy/girl is usually part of the marketing kind of organization. Supposedly, they do not need to be engineers, and do not need to have good technical skills. Fair enough, some R&D engineers in my department don't even have *any* technical skills in my opinion. But the least we can expect is that they have a good command of English and have proper understanding of how documents should be written. Right?

So here's the email from the guy who wrote the user guide (UserGuideGuy (UGG)).

Hi All,

I attached the draft version of the [product] User’s Guide. It’s the revised user’s guide with the additional eight features.

Please take note that we added in the new [feature] chapter. The additional features are written in RED (mostly done in Chapter 2 and 3).

Appreciate if you could review the document and provide any kind of feedback by 12.00pm this Friday (17 Nov).

I would consider you agree with the content if I do not receive any reply by then.

Thanks.

Rgds,
UGG

Ok, so far so good. Minor mistakes in the email, but a different expectation should be placed on the guide.

So, I flipped open the guide, and went straight for the RED section which supposedly he changed. Lo and behold! I saw this picture:

OMFG, even a 5 year old can see that this picture is majorly f*cked. He has the nerve to send that document to us for review!

I got agitated and decided to read the rest of the manual. No easy task as it is over 170 pages. I'm not done yet, but I've also sent an email to UGG to ask him if he has properly checked the non-RED section. I've found tons of mistakes in the non-RED sections too, and I plan to entrap him.

We Must be Pressured!

2006-11-14T09:22:00.002+08:00

Today, I received an email being forwarded numerous times from big boss to big boss congratulating their subordinates and patting each other's back. That's just normal in my company. However, what caught my colleague's and my eye is part of a sentence in the email sent out by one of the senior idiots in marketing.

[The email was sent to a bunch of people, cc'ed a bunch of bosses]

Hi [some product] team,
Thanks for great training that you have conducted during 1st week of [removed], I am sure your performance in 2nd week will be equally excellent too.

Besides, I heard from [Bigger Idiot] that a lot of people are interested about our [a product], and pls collect more feedback from the [other people], to share with those not able to attend the meeting. Especially to the R&D team, to let them know that their design received a lot of attention, so that they can be proud of it, and have pressure to complete the project as earlier as possible.

Yep, that sums it up. R&D has to be pressured to complete projects as earl"ier" as possible. This guy either does not have a good command of English, or he really thinks that way.The key to working in my company's R&D is to resist all pressure from all sources to speed up the completion date of your project so that you can do a proper job. These people don't know or don't care that proper engineering work needs time. All they want is doing things faster and cheaper.

Key to all this is, and I quote a person I respect who works in my company but in an environment not as screwed up as mine...

9 women can't make a baby in a month

These Bears Ain't Lecherous

2006-11-12T22:44:00.000+08:00

They need a lesson in Lechery!

Are You Having an Orgasm...

2006-11-12T20:23:00.000+08:00

on December the 22nd?

http://www.globalorgasm.org/

My wife sent me this link. I wonder what message she's trying to send me, since she won't be with me on that day. *wink*

Some guys decided to throw a campaign to get the everyone in the world to have an orgasm during Winter Solstice. This is all to create a large amount of "positive energy" for our mother earth. Check out the event details:

The Event
WHO? All Men and Women, you and everyone you know.
WHERE? Everywhere in the world, but especially in countries with weapons of mass destruction.
WHEN? Winter Solstice Day - Friday, December 22nd, at the time of your choosing, in the place of your choosing and with as much privacy as you choose.
WHY? To effect positive change in the energy field of the Earth through input of the largest possible surge of human energy a Synchronized Global Orgasm. There are two more US fleets heading for the Persian Gulf with anti-submarine equipment that can only be for use against Iran, so the time to change Earth’s energy is NOW!

I'm all for the "make love, not war" kind of thinking. I ain't got no problems with that. The more the better!

What I'm skeptical about is the science behind it. They even reference a research group in Princeton who studies the effect of human conciousness on random events! I mean, those guys at Princeton must be really smart guys, but aren't we into the realm of pseudoscience as what Carl or Richard would call it?

Some people argue that if you're looking for something hard enough in random data, you'll see it. Apparently, many people are also skeptical about this. The jury is out on this one. I'll stay skeptical and hope that this non-conclusive study doesn't create new cults out there.

Oh, that reminds me of a time when a colleague of mine lent me a video called "What the Bleep Do We Know?" I was surprised that he actually believed in it. *sigh*

But...if you're reading this, make sure you make a date with yourself, or your partner on December 22nd to get yourself some good positive energies! I fully support that!

The Bear vs The Snake

2006-11-12T09:50:00.000+08:00

Now, to the real reason I have this blog. To post all rants about the stupid stuff that happens in my workplace. Mainly bashing of management :)

All specific identifiers have been replaced by generic terms.

Boss 1: Why rank 1 for The Snake?
Boss 2 : because he worked in Proj1 and Proj2.
Boss 1: In the previous round, with less than 1 year in R&D, you mentioned that you gave The Snake rank 1 because he was rank 1 when in manufacturing.
Boss 2: Yes. The Snake is very dedicated in his job, spend a lot of time in with [project manager], fixed a few problems. He knows a lot about [a product] design, knows a lot of [US] people.
Boss 1: I know he works hard, but my perception is his technical skill is very weak. Not only me, another highly experienced HW engineer think so too.
Boss 2: Well, he was not a design engineer before this job, so it is normal that his technical skill is not the best in my team.
Boss 3: I worked with The Snake, he is a very good engineer.
Boss 2: Ya, very flexible. Can switch between projects without problem. I have plan to promote him to be expert.
BigBoss 1: Ya, I agree with Boss 2. For example, let's compare The Snake vs The Bear. Everyone knows The Bear’s technical knowledge is good, but attitude wise ..... (keep shaking head, flopping hands).
BigBoss 1: The Snake on the other hand, attitude is very good. Although his technical knowledge can be less than The Bear. When you move to expert level, you need to be able to work with others, cannot step on others toe all the time.

Lesson Learnt:

To be a technical expert (a job level), you don't need good technical knowledge, just be able to work with others.
It does not matter how good you are technically (which can be proven and tested), bosses can put you down by using subjective innuendoes.
Sucking up to bosses work.

BOINC!

2006-11-12T09:27:00.000+08:00

Long ago, in a previous lifetime when I was in university, I was a fervent supporter of SETI(at)HOME . It was great, donating my idle CPU time to a greater good of the search for aliens. It was also cool to see the program running FFTs on the screen saver and scratch your head wondering what the heck it was doing, even though I had a minute idea of what FFTs are at that time.

I've even seen people running the program on the university's computing center's work stations just to chalk up credits for themselves.

Fast forward to today...well...my friend passed me a Carl Sagan book a few months back, and while reading it, reminded me of my university days when I ran the SETI(at)HOME program. (Carl was intimately involved in the SETI program).

Yesterday, I went looking for the program again. It'd be cool to run those FFTs on my super fast Sempron 64 now (not sure if the program is optimized to use 64-bit processors). Back in those days, running on an Athlon 700MHz was...umm...slow.

They're now part of BOINC. Which is really cool! Not only can you help out in the SETI program, you can also help to find pulsars, predict climate, control malaria and numerically solve number theories.

I've signed on again to help. Makes me feel a bit better to contribute what little I have to the greater good of mankind.

Why Lecherous Bear?

2006-11-12T09:15:00.000+08:00

Once upon a time, I was called a "leacherous" bear. Actually, I was described as a cross between a "leacherous" bear and an obnoxious scottish rabbit. Why? Perhaps it was an in thing at that time to have oneself's personality projected onto animals. No, not the sexually depraved way...

It was just amusing that a person that I called a pedagogue, who was a well known english guru amongst friends, would spell lecherous wrong.

So as a constant reminder to myself that even the best pedagogues can make mistakes, I've chosen this name in honor of my friend...who screwed up once. (There was this other incident with a stub, but that's another story...)