New HR Folks

"Where do you live?"
-"Sungai Long"
"With your parents?"
-"No, I bought a place."
"I see, what about your parents?"
-"They're somewhere else."
"Where are they?"
-"I don't think that's within the purview of this interview."
"Excuse me?"
-"This is about work, let's talk about work."
"The hiring manager will talk about work. I'm here to talk to you about HR stuff"
-"That has nothing to do with the job. Let's try to stay focused here."
"OK."

/nosebleed
Omg that was better than the queerest things I've seen on OKC... Bwahahaha.

Coffee in Malaysia: Ideal Employer

Posted in a forum:

Anyone looking for a barman in August? I could be free. Based in Sungai Long myself, so Cheras/Kajang would be ideal, or nearer by.

The ideal business owner would be someone that looks like this:

- you're interested in specialty coffee (at least you think it's profitable)

- you think F&B is a no brainer, cash cow business (it could be otherwise, but you're very much aware how it is potentially like this)

- you like running businesses that are fully compliant with regulatory requirements

- you've got an appetite for fast business growth (doubling your headcount every 3 months - looking for ~200% quarter on quarter growth in revenue for 2-5 years, not averse to external investors, willing to expand regionally, willing to vertically integrate your value chain)

- you need a technologist who can help you execute this sort of growth plan (I've got a little experience in specialty coffee, process automation, venture funding cycles, and organisational development)

#dotNET

A tip I got from a hacker.

"Hi, read about your post in wckl jobs, i am not interested to apply but would like to give you some more info.

when you mentioned vbscript and asp, i guess many people will assume it is classic asp with vbscript which is in use around more than 10 years ago.

since you mentioned .net framework, i guess you don't want classic asp, but asp.net. But one thing, no one use vbscript for asp.net now, vbscript is not the same as vb.net.

The current programming languages for asp.net are vb.net and c#. c# is much more popular than vb.net though, so you need to decide which one to use.

besides, there are webforms and mvc for asp.net. however, please aware that microsoft just annouced asp.net vnext which don't seem to have plan for next webforms release. in my opinion, they favour mvc although their official response won't said so. you may need to decide which one to use and even mixing both(example: for the reporting purpose).

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/webdev/archive/2014/05/13/asp-net-vnext-the-future-of-net-on-the-server.aspx

but there is one thing missing from mvc, the microsoft ssrs rdl/rdlc report viewer(which is only supported in webforms, there are some tricks to use it in mvc but not a single one provides complete solution). unless you use third party library like devexpress or telerik and use their reporting tools. crystal report don't have report viewer for mvc too. so, if you use mvc and need reporting, you may need applicants to have knowledge of devexpress or telerik(these two libraries need license fee). devexpress and telerik also have many other functionalities/controls for asp.net webforms and mvc.

and you may also require applicants to have knowledge of entity framework for orm, web api or wcf for api/webservice, signalr for real-time functionalities, and/or azure api.

http://www.asp.net/"

#generalistForHire #tisTheSeason

Thanks for the opportunity to interview. I'm not sure I have your email, so I'll briefly follow up here.

1) Do feel free to consider the company's major pain points, and to throw me where there is greatest need.

2) High cash compensation is much appreciated, but not necessary. I don't mind learning certain tech skills instead, like the dev-ops stuff.

3) Perhaps there is a whitelist of things your company wants to do, or a blacklist of things to fix, which no one has time for. I can work on managing those hands-on. The things on this list might involve ops efficiencies, growth opportunities, or gooey ephemeral stuff like "each employee's role 6 months from now". I'm comfy with all that.

Cheers. Happy to meet other folks and talk more if there's interest.

Lux et Vulgaris

"I'd like to align the dream before we do a skills test."

"I think you've got the wrong guy. I work for money, and the pleasure of the kill."

Time to brush off the old bullshit detector. Haven't used it much since college.

I think a lot of business people have it backwards. The first thing in being happy is to not require a great deal of money, ever. The second thing is to not discount the fact that money is a fine game (or art), and you can enjoy it more if you need it less.

The opposite of luxury is vulgarity, and so it stands to reason that you can enjoy both vulgarity and wealth as they aren't mutually exclusive. :)

Traffic jams again, of course.

Syntax Studies

The subject-predicate-object approach to ontology is a fallacy. Once you admit two associations upon an object, you're on the slippery slope to admitting an infinite number of meandering descriptors. And so there were adjectives.

Facebook Faceplants; Again

Facebook recently tested the feeds of some 700,000 users without explicit consent, to see if it could or could not influence their moods - result: it was proven that you can make people sad if you put sad things in front of them.

It wasn't even remotely groundbreaking work.

So since the outcome was fairly predictable and they just wanted to see if they had sufficient power to do it, it would be what we call mean psychopathic behaviour.

I definitely do things like that every now and then. That's what bad boys do. :(

All that being, this is a great case study for mass-communication scholars. :)

On Work (again)

On work.

It's always so tempting to retire into the pleasures of little minds, but... ffs...  that is even more boring than suicide. I try to stay calm and look for greater entertainment, while I can stomach it.

I really feel bad for telling familiar women that I would value their time as lovers, but not much as friends. But it's the truth. I have categories of value in business, food, sex, and study, but none for mere conversation. Even Facebook's concept of friendship is ludicruous to me, as I use it mostly to keep track of business acquaintances. Hence the URL.

What does one do in the absence of interesting categories? One makes the present categories more interesting. Therefore as some people say, the work, the work...

(Having slept on that, I am reminded that "casual conversation" is a tool for pleasure, when conversants are learning something about something that they are already interested in.)