Jason Wong, HKG, YVR, HNL

Counting yesterday till today, 31 resumes are at my door.  I don’t pay much attention to tabloid media, but a job applicant cover letter does tell more stories than anything.  This year, I have received more insightful cover letter.  Applicants spent more time to describe their character, personal side.  Believe it or not, it was like reading someone’s personal profile/diary than someone’s cover letter.  Throughout my HR career, I have never seen anything like this.  I usually encountered unprofessional, ill-prepared resume+cover letter package or cookie-cutter type of introduction.  On resume+New Year Day, I drove to Hawaii Kai and had lunch at Panda Express.  The business was slow given it was holiday and a staff there was chatting with me and through her, I learned the stories about different relatives of hers are still out of work.  Some have college degrees and some have 10+ years working experience and they are still out of work for more than 18 months now.  Yesterday like the usual me, I had lunch at McDonald’s.  A lady (40ish or so) sat next to my table who was talking to her mom about she was going to the church later.  She also told her mom everything was fine about the morning job interview by saying how much the potential employer liked her credentials and experience.  When she hung up the phone and left the table, I saw couple pages of newspaper  left behind with circled recruitment ads plus notes .  Invisible SOS messages are written everywhere.  Are the recession and depression really well over?  In bail-out sectors, yes but no for the rest.

Due to some tedious and repetitive work routine, I am massaging my brain to build a relational database to increase my productivity in my department. Tables, queries, forms, etc. all brought back my ’sweet’ memory of design/implement a database back in university time. I actually enjoy doing database design more than language programming. I remember, how cool to work with record and create a query that beat the in-class challenge. Now the sweet old memory is back and I am sitting here and databasing.

Unbelievable! Today is my B-Day and I have received many people’s warm greetings over last 2 hours. I met a lady from my building and she asked me, did I come up a New Year Resolution? As a matter of fact, I always do. This year, I have couple big projects planning out in my grid and my teams will be working on them in Q2 and push to the market in Q3 + Q4. Let’s see what may happen by the year end.

When I was little, the colour/color that I hated the most was GREEN and liked the most was BLUE.  Almost everything that I drew in Art class was about BLUE colour/color this and that.  My second favorite was YELLOW.  (People who know Chinese, they should know my last name represents the colour/color of YELLOW).  In my early 20s, my taste changed.  I started to like RED more than many things and the unbelievably thing was happening, I actually liked GREEN colour/color alot.  The condo that I was living in Vancouver, all millworks were in deep red Cherry stained with Hemlock grain pattern.  Right now, GREEN is my current favorite.  My best friends all know about this and I aniticpate to receive many GREEN/RED gifts for this Christmas.

Since kindergarten, we always heard the phrase, who’s hitting on whom.  This kind of petty drama has not been evolved much even someone is reaching 30.  Co-workers may come to your desk and share intimate message about who is with whom or who is having solo feeling to whom.  Human nature loves to gossip and I won’t pretend I am a Saint or something.  Message like this always provides some light entertainment over a dull course of life.  As long as the gossip arrow does not shoot at oneself, everybody laughs at someone’s pain.  Men are mean, I wonder whether dogs and cats have the same trouble that human beings do.

How many people have been depressed or lost self-confidence over some upsetting events?  I certainly do!  The old me, I would stay at home and play video games to forget everything.  The new me, I provide what modern day people called, affirmation, to myself.  During those depressing/emotional time, you have to look at yourself through the mirror and tell yourself (I usually don’t say it out loud) that “you can manage it”, once per day.  Gradually, your confidence will be picked by your affirming behavior.  I have learned a phrase from a former co-worker, “it takes a lot more to hurt my feeling.”  I did not really understand how to achieve that until now.  In business world, you can’t look defeated - life goes on with or without you feeling down and saggy, then why hurt yourself more by feeling negative?  Be smart, be positive and be confident, be affirmative!

People who write blogs, they do it once per day like diary.  I am different.  I write whenever I want.  Usually I do multiple posts in a session.  That’s just me - my brain offers wide spectrum of thoughts when my fingers touch the keyboard - it’s my own version of auto-pilot, my brain and fingers are talking, not me!

I remember, I was one of those pioneers who played ICQ back in the mid-90’s.  My ICQ account has only 6 or 7 digits (can’t remember, too long ago, the login probably won’t work anymore).  Oh wait, I actually had a Geocities website featuring a lot of blinking html tags and frame-within-frame with scrollbars everywhere for the sake of “cool effects”.  I think I really got a lot of time before I hit 20.  After university graduation, I have minimized my online footprint and started working my way up.  A few years later, I got my Classmate.com account - again, I forgot my login, so if there is anybody who wants to contact me, good luck, I don’t know which email account I registered that for.  I got my facebook account 2 years ago and sorry to say, my page probably gathers the most cyber-nano-dust.  I hardly touch it after getting one for my friends’ sake.  I tried Twitter.  Oh boy, how exhausting to tell people, I am cooking, I am reading, I am working, I am buying grocery, I saw a red bird, I played with my cats, I…I…I…  This web 2.0 or social media thing is really taking a new level of annoyance, especially your friend got an account from a new media site and he shot an invite to you and I have to act polite to honor that invite by creating my own account/profile.  If there is a cyber junk yard for these “texting” and “accounts”, I think the size won’t be smaller than the orbit of the outer space.  But one thing I can quantify this cyber junk yard phenomenon, we really did burn a lot of coal to power our computer/PDA to write those self-absorbed pages.  People are talking about conserving energy, why don’t they start looking at how many people can’t live without computer nowadays and computer is still plugged into an electrical outlet.  Scientists have not invented a PC powered by salt water and produce oxygen as by-product, if we do, world crisis is over.  (I made a promise to my friend that I will “renovate” my facebook page before Xmas coming - a promise is a promise, I will do that for his sake.)

Writing blog is like working out - if you stop for a week, you may end up not doing it at all.  I can’t believe it’s mid-November now and my very last post was about Transformers 2 - a movie that I could watch in my outbound flight from Seoul.  For those readers who patiently want for new materials, I am going to pump out more from my brain factory tonight.

This movie truly deserves a solid “F”.  Dreamworks loves to destroy every precious memorable franchises.  Creative Department from South Park is really right, Steven Spielberg keeps raping all good characters in his own way.  From Indiana Jones to Transformers, disappointment and frustration all add up.  There is no story or whatsoever.  They made Giza and Petra are next door neighbours!  Just get a freaking map and look at the distance - you need 2 days or more to get from one destination to the next - but to mention, you need to “HIKE” to get in and out of Petra with heavy security guards in both world ruins.

I have looked at other people’s reviews and the following excerpt is the true spirit of the vulgarity of the movie:

“Why do they have to exploit that in a movie based on childrens toys? Since when do robots have balls that hang down? What was the point in having a little robot hump Fox’s leg? What was the point in showing Sam’s two dogs humping several times? What is the point in having Sam’s mom running around campus being high after eating “special” brownies? What is the point of the twins and why are they so vulgar? Since when do Autobots cuss? I can understand letting Decepticons cuss to make them seem more mean, but Autobots, come on. Oh and Michael Bay, Megatron is the leader of the Decepticons he is not an apprentice like Vader. It used to take Omega Supreme to defeat Devastator. That was before Bay got ahold of him though. Why was Jetfire a kooky old man robot? Why was Sideswipe silver and not even mentioned as being Sideswipe? What was the point in showing John T’s butt in a jock strap? Why was Soundwave a satellite? What was those things that came out of Ravage’s mouth and what did they transform in to?”