January 2005 zoomed by!

Events

Wow ! Time really flies ! The month of January has just zoomed by and I didn't even get a chance to update my blogs since the beginning of the month.

Most of my time this month was spent at Panasonic (see my blog entry entitled "Back From Sarawak" for a brief description of the Panasonic project), especially dealing with the second user acceptance test (UAT2) that started on 10 Jan and lasted till 20 Jan. Most of that time I was at the Panasonic Tuas office managing the engineering team, mainly clearing bugs (we had a long long list here), integration (the project required us to integrate our product with a huge number of external parties e.g. factories, customers, carriers, etc.) and EVA Connect (this was our product that provided the interface adaptors to connect to external parties through EDI, IBM MQ, FTP and so on).

Around 5 days of my time was also spent on supporting the sales of one of our partners, Elipva. Elipva is basically an internet software services company. It did projects like internet self-help software, HR systems and so on. Currently they are engaging one of their latest customers, Chubb Insurance. Now this was really out of Elipva's league because Chubb wanted a data warehouse for their regional office, hence I was dragged in to support them. Quite an interesting project, it had to do with AS/400 systems and building and Operational Data Store (ODS).

A couple of days was spent on another potential customer, Midas. Midas is owned by a branch of a very famous Malaysian business family, the Robert Kuok family. Midas is basically a large supermarket chain catering mainly to the lower-income family from the region of Johor in Southern Malaysia. Most of today's sales session was related more to the Mall Management and rental aspects of the project. We presented a software from Wincor Nixdoft that could help them manage their mall tenants. The people who attended the demo were Christine (the GM for Midas), Baylor (her husband and son of the owner) and Victoria (another relative of theirs!) from Prestico (their property management arm).

About People

Kutra is back and about already. It was good to have him back. At the same time, it is good to keep him busy so that he will keep his mind off his grief.

Today was the day we prepared to give salary increments to everyone. Some were deserving and therefore got more than 15% salary increments, whilst a number of others would not be getting increments for this year because they were either undeserving or were contract staff. Things were really made hard for small companies like us when the Singapore government announced that civil servants will get about 3 months bonus this year! How can the small enterprises match that!?

Concluding Remarks

Mainly a month of hard work and difficult project datelines.

Photo Blogging

Photo blogging is really fun!

I just discovered how to do this painlessly. Basically, just go to http://www.hello.com and download the very small application that will enable you to upload your photos into your blogs. If you use Blogger in conjunction with Hello, photo blogging is just so easy.

Just follow the instructions in Hello.com. By the way, Google bought Blogger in 2003. and just recently they also bought Picassa, the guys who created Hello.com and Picassa, the personal photo album management software.

First day of 2005!

Events for the day

What a nice day it was ! The first day of the year 2005 was spent mostly at home. The entire family had an easy day at home in Sunrise. We have a lot of games CDs and movie CDs at home, sometimes these get misplaced by the kids. I managed to tidy up all the kids' CDs and the movie CDs. Also had time to tidy up the garden. Lots of casualties from the two weeks away from home.

As this was a Saturday, we did our usual ritual which was to head out to McDonalds for breakfast. Took the opportunity to talk to Daniel about his time restrictions on computer games. During weekdays, he is restricted to 30 minutes on the computer at Sunrise. Also stated his objectives for this year; first, to do well in his studies; two, to improve on his self-control. (Daniel, if you are reading this blog years from now, remember this .... daddy and mummy really love you very much).

Irene had to go to church for carecell leaders meeting from 7pm to 8pm. After that, the kids and I picked her up and we went down to Thomson Plaza for dinner at Swensens. After that it was home again !

Closing Remarks

What a restful day it was ! May the Lord bless us in this new year.

Last day of 2004

Events for the day

Well, the last day of the year, 31 Dec 2004, was quite uneventful. I had to go to Panasonic Tuas to catch up on our defects management status. The weekly project meeting was also quite ok, not too tense. Ban Leong did not attend because he was helping Bernard on the JPB proposal.

We also received the PO from GLS for the WebSphere Application Server. It was quite a tough negotiation, nevertheless, we also PO'ed to Azure for fulfillment. Apparently Azure decided to give us only60 days credit with post-dated cheque. This was because their margins were too thin to give us 90 days credit.

Irene spent the day with the kids because Jacobs had a holiday. Unfortunately, Comex and Panasonic worked whole day today. Irene and kids went to attend the family communion at church at around 4pm.

As for me, the team had our long check point meeting from 5.30pm till 7pm. After that I took a cab and rushed to our carecell dinner at Cindy's and Richard's. Along the way, it was also work, work, work. Had to call Hasri and Amin about the scaling down of the hardware configuration for the JPB project. Basically I had to reduce the database servers from V880 to V440 but with faster CPU.

The evening with the carecell was also quite normal. Almost everyone turned up ... except Alice Yeap. We shared our testimonies for 2004, after which Patrick went through the carecell prayer book and gave thanks to God for all the answered prayers. While some people attended watch night service, the Yeos went home tired. We really needed a rest.

About People

Veera had a call from Kutra. Kutra has finally decided to send his son to US to live with his sister-in-law. I guess this was best for all because he wasn't sure his parents or in-laws were able to look after his son. The funeral rites will be performed on 9 Jan, so I guess he will return to office sometime after that.

Closing Remarks

Well, that was an uneventful close of 2004. God bless everyone.