Squid

No... I still have not made up my mind... but I'm close to making a move. I feel like a soccer star caught in a transfer sage.

I spoke to the CEO of the new company yesterday. I'm quite happy with discussions. There are a few documents that I'm waiting for them to send over, to partly appease the logical side of me. Those documents will describe the business viability of the company - a 3rd party due diligence done. If it's positive, I will be on the move.

Today, I spent my time perfecting my Excel and Powerpointing skills working out the release plan. I find it frustrating because I'm trying to work out something which a previous team worked out in May, in which the previous team said "we can roll out to 11 countries by 2008". Crazy! As I work out the details, it seems that by 2008, perhaps only 5 countries can be done. There are complications because of the fact that we don't want to have too many concurrent streams of work and too many concurrent production releases as that increases the retrofit complexities. Obviously, all these were not thought thru by the previous team. Damn frustrating. Now I have to clean the shit up.

Zone

In between meetings, mind a blank, still thinking, and my yahoo messenger pops up with:
http://www.imahal.com/mentor/archives/d001/q000025.htm

Dammit you guys! This is hard!

Tonite, I have a call with the CEO, so, we'll see what happens.

Right now, damn sien working on release planning. 11 country rollout. Big headache.

BTW, found a cheaper place to eat. Food court next to the Shell building. Charp farn with 1 meat, 2 veggie RM4.50. Ya ya... KL, or Malacca can find cheaper food, but we're talking about Ulusville here... so, i'm not complaining.. yet.

Dilemma

Back at Cyberjaya today. Ho hum.

More shit from the client. Racial tolerance required.

Last week, ultimate hairball from the client. They wanted one of our managers out of the project. Yes.. it gets that bad. The problem with this client is because if you are of the wrong sex or of the wrong pigmentation, you're in trouble.

We have a theory. The theory is that from a certain continent, there is a particular "segmentation" of the population and if you are of a lower segmentation, the higher segmentation don't take no shit from the lower segmentation. Worst, they also don't take no shit from a woman.

So my colleague, a woman, gets the short end of the stick (no pun intended) when she's partnered with this client who thinks he is of a higher segmentation. That's when all the trouble starts.

I'm also in a bit of a dilemma. You know that CTO position I told you before in an early blog. Yup, like a boomerang, it has come back to hit me square between the eyes. I'm now thinking, do I leave a good consulting career for the risks of a start up? Now, if I stay in the firm I current am in, there's a smaaaaaaaalll chance of making partner. Small not because I don't suck up to anyone (well... I don't).. but small because there's 5 partners up there and unless one dies or something, moving up is pretty slim. But it's a good firm. Sometimes you get onto crappy projects like the one I'm on.. but on the whole, pretty good.

On the other hand, I'm a true blue techie. Moving to this start up is a techies dream. Staying where I am, I sometimes have to do, gasp, project management stuff! (which I did the whole of yesterday! MS Project, reviewing workplans, yucks!). But moving has risks. The company could fold. It's a small team. We have limited budget. But if I can mould the CRM product and the unique application development platform properly, there are exciting opportunities. In addition, the board member is Li Kah Shing's right hand man.. so you can be sure he has tons of opportunities in China...

So I'm going to bed now, and I'll be wondering if this is truly IT.. or it is yet another failed attempt at leaving the firm...

Drop me a note...

Wedgie

Someone asked me if the title of my blogs have anything to do with what I write. No. Zip. Nada. I just whack in whatever comes to my cranium.

I just checked my mailslot and I found this one ruler with an integrated calculator. There was a note "Thanks for making the XXXX project a success". Tiew Niama. I squeezed blood from a stone for that project to go live on time, ahead of budget (i still had RM500K left as a buffer) and all I get is some cheap RM5 ruler (or as the vendor would say "lulel")? Nahia man!

Anyway, back to that vendor... I met them at KL Hilton for lunch. Wah.. all tokok and sing song and completely zero substance man. They had one guy who had this name card "Solution Architect". I spar with the fellow...
Me: "Eh... your solution, how do I integrate with it"
Soln Arch: "err.. dono.. can I get back to you?"
Me: "Well, surely you know, ya? Izit via some SOAP call, JAAS, some encrypted cookie, via certificates or what?"
Soln Arch: "J-A-A what har?"
Me: "Never mind.. does your solution do provisioning"
Soln Arch: "Kong Simi ha? What dat provizioning har?"

At least I got a free lunch.

Better still, it was at the Chinese restaurant, and I got to oogle at the waitresses who had cheongsams with slits right up to their arm pits.

Talking abt girls.. one thing that puzzles me is in KL, you see damn a lot of women, who, from behind, look damn solid molid. Shapely, curvy, nice ass. But the moment they turn around, alamak, you feel your stomach turn. I call them Decepticons. Why har?

In Singapore, you get a lot less of that. Nice ass means nice front. But in KL, nice ass not necessarily equates to a nice front. Puzzling eh?

Agree? Drop me a comment

Hailstorm

I'm back in KLCC for a while today. I got a call from Bank X yesterday and they wanted to expand our scope of the proposal so I got to head back for some meetings internally and a vendor. The call came as a nice surprise. Hopefully it means we stand a better chance at winning this.

I called the vendor whom Bank X asked us to contact. This vendor is a local distributor of an Identity and Access Mgmt solution. Here's the conversation

Me: "Hallo, i'm calling because... blah blah'
Vendor: "Ah... I expekting your call. Bank X oso ask me to call u"
Me: "Can we sit down and get an understanding of your technical solution?"
Vendor: "Achelly, we got no tecknikel peepel wan. Next month, I sending my one teknical staff to US for trenning"
Me: "Wow.. with no technical person, how the hell did u manage to present to Bank X?"
Vendor "ah.. we use our US partner lor.. we ask dem to confelence call with Bank X. Next week we got one POC we kena do. So the US person carming"
Me: "But surely after spending so long with the bank, you must know something"
Vendor "Libbit we know lor. If u wan, we show u all what we show bank X lah."

Felt like I was talking to Phua Chu Kang.

Tulan

Back at Cyberjaya today. For today's lunch, we decided to go over to Erricson. And I'm so pissed off!

Well, I took a plate of rice, curry chicken, and a stack of tau geh. RM5. My colleague (girl, and wearing a plunging neckline today) took the same shit PLUS one sambal egg. RM4!

I asked the ang moh fella manning the counter "why?". He said "I don't wanna get into an argument with you".

I'm like " But I DO!"

Flip! I ain't going back there man!

Bandung

I am back from Bandung.

It was a nice 3 day, 2 nites away at that place, which has a nice cool weather and tons of factory outlet stores. Can u imagine paying 55,000 rupiah (ie. RM25 or less) for Tommy Hilfiger shirts, 590,000 rupiah (RM250) for a full Dunhill suit? Just great.

The meetings went well. I was there for an ISAC-M planning meeting and we discussed items like events, PR, membership, certification etc. I call this national service ie. contributing to the improvements of ICT wellfare of the country. When I said that, one of the ISAC-M council members said "wah.. damn canggih man your sentence. You must be a consultant!"

But the trip was shrouded with "bad chi". One of the ISAC-M members brought along her 74 year old mother. Before the trip, firstly, she lost her mobile phone. Next, at nite, her mom missed a step and fell 4 feet down from the chalet and broke her hip bone and 3 other vertebraes. And the private hospital we sent her to was so shockingly lacking of nurses (on the other hand, each of the factory outlet malls had tons of "folders" ie people who would fold the clothes back once u have messed it around. Folders outnumber shoppers by 4 to 1!

Back to the mishap... until now, the woman is still in Bandung. It's tricky trying to jet her back to KL. Firstly, you cannot move this person so easily. Next, you must find an airlines willing enough to allow jetting this person... and SIA charges SGD20K for this airlift because they will remove 6 economy class seats just for this. It's either SGD20K or USD50K for International SOS.

Truly not a good trip for some. She has my prayers.

Iceberg

It's 4am. I have a 730 am Air Asia flight to Bandung for an offsite ISAC-M planning meet. It's great to be part of this group. But this flight is gonna kill me. My eyeballs are bigger than those Japanese cartoon girls. Worst, yesterday, my home had a water cut so I smell. It's times like this it's better to blogg now when you're in a foul mood, the things i say seem tastier...

Yesterday was a pretty ok day. I was in Bank X to present on a particular solution. They were quite impressed. They asked us to look at some other things. I got good vibes on this.

Bank X was quite cool. They have a posh makan area where it was WiFi enabled. Allowed me to check latest soccer news whilst waiting for the presentation to start.

Towards the end of the day, I got quite a few frantic calls from my colleagues at that Cyberjaya project I'm on. Some shit has happened. The racism issue apparently spilled over big time and the client apparently told our management that "if you want more work, you need to get rid of so and so".

So I get frantic calls to start moving in and taking over. Damn... and my original role was just to review their architecture. Shit happens.

Not the first time I get called on to save the world. The last time I put my underwear on the outside was during the dot com ages. Some partner promised a client that "we can launch a full click and mortar bank in 100 days". The project manager on day 40 got fired because he kept telling this partner that it could not be done. So I donned my cape and flew in.

Another world saving occassion was when I was put on this project where we built this trade finance application and it was just spitting out too many bugs, client not happy, threated to sue. I came on board, cleaned it up (as much as i could lah), rolled it out to the client in Paris. OK.. so I got a free trip. But man it was tense. Lawsuit was ever present if we did not roll out. Our bug count after we rolled out? 7000.

There are just too many of these disaster situations to relate. I just wished I had Jessica Alba with me on this project. At least she can put up that force field when shit comes my way. Of course, she also has nice curves.

Coolness

I'm sitting here at the patio of Bank X's makan area. Impressive. Even has wireless. Waiting for our demo at 2.30pm. I must say the facilities here are impressive. I wished other banks had such cool facilities.

Taking about cool. My son now has all Power Rangers Ninja Storm Zords. Yesterday was the start of the Metrojaya Mega sale and my son was pestering me for the final megazord to make his collection compete. All the 3 zords now cost me more than RM500! I was telling my son that I don't have a single shirt or business pants worth more than RM50.

Isn't he lucky.

Comparisons

Someone asked me..."are all your clients tough?"

Honestly, no. I find that clients are like wine.. it depends on the country they are from.

Singapore clients are one kind. Even though they could be a Malaysian, but the fact that they are working in Singapore causes some kinda transformation... all my meetings I have had with Singaporean clients have always been tough. They always want to challenge you, they always want to come out of the meeting "winning". It's like they wanna walk out with the impression that they have beaten the poor consultant into submission. Damn tough.

Australian clients quite lepak. Damn cool. Sat/ Sun always wanna "throw another shrimp on the barbie".

Parisians and Germans, their techies are damn techie man. I've worked with some Germans before who worked on the Deutche Bourse system and they apparently built their own operating system to handle the high volume trading transactions. YES. They are your true geeks!

Malaysians? It depends. Not as tough as Singaporeans. Not as lepak as Australians. But always want things for free!

Racism

I took the LRT to Menara Tan & Tan today to work with the vendor on our proposal presentation and demo. I met one of my colleagues (you know who you are) who said "So, yesterday any head hunter call you ar?"

The whole of yesterday I was at Menara Tan & Tan. Sigh.. working with vendors are like sliding down a ramp with your legs open .. with the ramp being full of pineapples and durians. Painful. I'm getting worried.. the demo system seems like it was being hosted in Iraq, the functionality leaks more water than a cheap whore... quite ominous.

But it's a lot better being at Cyberjaya.

That client of mine in Cyber... is like May 13 about to erupt. The client head of this organisation is of a certain race. Let's say Xise. The environment there is full of Xise, Yise and some Zise. We bunch of consultants are primarily Yise. Since this client head is an Xise, he brought a lot of his fellow Xise from Country X. (Man.. I must be confusing you). There are a lot of systems being built here.. some are done by vendors from Country X. So, you can imagine the population is about 50% X, 49%Y, 1% Z.

This client and his team leads (all X fellas) seem to defend this particular vendor (who obviously consist of X from Country X). This vendor builds this product which is so buggy you'd just laugh at it. But blood is thicker than water.

Then, because the teams there are primarily X and Y, the X team leads tend to hantam the Y fellas. This X team lead has a co lead who is unfortunately a woman, and unfortunately race Y. But this Y woman is damn smart, however, any of the team members who go to her for advise get whacked by this X fella.

So now we have this situation where the Y fellas are so afraid of speaking their mind, the X fellas are walking all over the shop and just talking cock like there's no tomorrow but don't really do much work. It's damn tense.

It's such a great place to work...

Fake

After work, I was at Petaling Street last nite.

My son, the destroyer, over the weekend, decided to wear my sunglasses and he left it on the counter when I was at the Empat Nombor Ekor shop. Niama!

Thank god my "Oakley" glasses were fake. I learnt my lesson when a few years back, I had one of those vintage Ray Ban foldable wayfarers and my son decided to test his strength on it and broke it. Those glasses were a family wedding gift, before the Asian currency crisis. Which means it cost RM125 back then, now, because of our ringgit peg, it costs close to RM400. From that day onwards, I have decided not to buy genuine sun glasses.

So there I was, haggling over some lady with a gold tooth, in my pathetic Cantonese. Settled for RM15 for some out of this world Oakleys (http://oakley.com/o/o1147d). What the heck! I bought two. 1 for each car!

And there I was also, drooling over watches. Apparently in Petaling Street, there are a few grade of watches
- lowest grade - costs RM10, the Tag Heuer logo looks a bit senget, you drop the watch sure koyak one
- middle grade - these are behind the counter, maybe in a glass cabinet. Roughly RM120++. Good quality. Scratch proof. Drop proof
- the best grade - these are housed in steel suit cases. Perhaps in the range of RM300 and above. Some come with Sapphire glass. One of the guys showed me this Sapphire glass watch and he took out his lighter to burn it, took out a screw driver to scratch it... damn good man..

I know.. I have a middle grade one. Audemar Piguet. I bought it around RM150. I saw it in Singapore for SGD13,500.

Stealth

Is it hunting season?

Just today, I got 2 calls from head hunters. Not 1, but 2! Niama!

And both were for Solution Architect roles.

These head hunters, they are a smart breed. I asked one of the head hunters how she got my number. She said " I went to the www.isac-m.org website, saw your profile, then I dialled your companies general line" Damn smart. I think I want to hire this girl. She also had a sexy voice. Nice.

Back to this Solution Architect role.. one was for a 3 letter acronym outsourcing company based in Cyberjaya. The moment I heard Cyberjaya, all erections went flacid.

The other Solution Architect role the girl with the sexy voice did not want to reveal. But it was also an outsourcing company so I have a good hunch. It was based in Singapore, so it pays SGD, thus it is at least 2.3 X my salary. But I love this country, the smells, the bad traffic, the con men walking the streets etc.

But actually the role she offered was maxed out at SGD150K per annum. That's probably why I turned it down...

Village

Just came back from a morning market. Brought my 5 year old son there. It was an eye opener for him.. some things he saw
- a cute little puppy
- some lady killing a frog on the spot and skinning it
- some man standing on one foot and digging his nose and teeth with a dirty straw

... ahh.. the scenes from a morning market... good to expose to city kids...

Misalignment

I was out with my family at 1 Utama. Normal weekly pilgrimage. Love that place.. free Wifi.. so I can check the latest soccer tranfer happenings...

I got a call from the dumb vendor (all vendors are set to that default mode) saying that he could not make the Monday meeting to prepare for our demo on Thursday. I go like "what?". He said it was because his MD was gonna be around. What in flip's sake does that got to do with our prep? Oh.. his MD wants to discuss some "must win" account.. Does that mean the opportunity we're working together is dispensable?

So, if u were in 1 Utama on Saturday afternoon and you noticed some kinda heat spot radiating from Oriental Cravings.. no.. that's not the human torch "flaming on".

I'm gonna kick some serious butt!

Sales

About 9pm last nite, i got a call from a vendor asking whether we wanted to participate in a regional CRM rollout. 5,000 user licence! Problem is.. RFP is due on Monday. I go "niama.. how the hell can we do that?"

As tempting as it is, because I work in a big firm, things like that will never pass our QA. Yes.. this is probably some multi million dollar deal.. but those dumb QA partners will ask shit like whether we have a relationship with the client (we do), whether the estimates have been QAed, have we implemented the software before... etc etc... and this is likely to be done with some kwai low QA partner who doesn't know the local climate so we'll probably fail...

Talking about multi million dollar deals.. Someone asked me before what does it take to make partner in our firm. Honestly, it's just luck. It's just you being at the rite place at the rite time.

2 years ago, I was chasing this large SGD74M custom building of a life insurance system J2EE .. job which at the last minute, the CEO said "I like you guys, but I got to give it to the incumbent because if I don't, they will pull out from their current project". Damn.. If I had sold that piece of work, I'll be a partner now.

At that very same time, because I was anchoring that project, my firm asked one of my colleagues to anchor an outsourcing bid. If I wasn't stuck in Singapore chasing that above project, I would have probably gone over to that outsourcing bid because I actually had a lot of relationships with many of the CIOs of that client. So, there I was, kicking my own butt when I lost that SGD74M job, and I saw how lucky my colleague was.. cause that outsourcing job was a sure win one!

Ha ha.. but latest turn of events make us even further away from winning that outsourcing job. So my colleague is also lamenting the fact that to make partner, it actually takes luck!

Then down south, another of my colleagues took a bet, went after Singapore's largest bank, and he secured the deal there. I bet he's making partner this year.

So in short, it's all luck. If you compare the 3 of us, there's really no difference in terms of skill sets (except one is balder, one is fatter etc).

Thus, the advise for all you aspiring consultants who wanna make it big... Sell Sell Sell...

Hunted

I'm sitting here in the vendor office ... working on the response to a client RFP... I'm done with my part.. the vendor's still slogging out his part.

Just 5 mins ago I got a call from another head hunter. Offered me a solution architect role with BEA. I'm like "this is my current salary". He goes "err.. i check first.. see whether they can pay". I might not be hearing from them again.

Last week, I got a call from a Hong Kong based head hunter. God knows how the hell these guys get my number. I might as well put a website with my number on it.. it's kinda like public property.. dammit...

So.. this head hunter goes "eh.. Mr. Karipap (and you thought I would reveal my name here?)... I got this insurance client who wants to roll out a new core insurance system out into 8 countries..."

My mind goes "heck.. here I am in Cyberjaya, working for an insurance client, also rolling out a new core insurance system.. but to 11 countries instead...". So I test the water ... and the head hunter tells me that the job involves going over to Hong Kong, I said "no lah.. very satisfied in Malaysia, my son starting Standard 1 soon.. you know how hard it is with schooling". Headhunter tries to tell me how much moolah one can get in HK.. but in the end I wasn't interested... I also try to find out of his client was the same as my current client.. so I go "eh, your client, does it have a woman's face as a logo?" The head hunter goes "huh?" Must be different client then...

So what happened to all my other job offers? I turned down the end user environment job. I'm still waiting for improved contract offers for the CTO position. I kinda feel like Rio Ferdinand (not in that kinky way) .. the bastard was offered a 100,000 pound salary a week... dirt bag wants 110,000 pounds a week...

Owl

4am in the morning.. and I'm sitting her whacking this down whilst watching Liverpool's Champions League title defence start against TNS. No.. it's not some Cantonese swear word (yeah.. you know what I mean).. but they are supposedly the Welsh Champions. Finished 3-0. Liverpool was good at it's passing, but just missing too many chances. Luckily Gerrard decided not to leave.. he scored all 3 goals!

Tomorrow is a break from Cyberjaya. I will travel to Menara Tan & Tan, sit down with the bloody vendor and thrash out an RFP response and prepare for a demo next Thursday. It's a portal implementation. Am I a portal expert? In our firm, if you can spell a piece of technology, you're an expert.

Me? I am damn keng chow in spelling all sorts of technologies. SOA, HTTP, XML, JAXB, J2EE, .NET, RPC, ODBC, RMI, JNDI, JMS, MDB, EJB, POJO, CCB... I know them all. Of course, if you're a techie.. you will know that CCB's just something I threw in. But it's a well known verse typically uttered when you're sitting down, debugging some obtruse piece of code and the compiler throws up a stack error. CCB!

Talking abt this vendor... we have Neanderthal for an Account Manager. No.. it's not that she looks like Alley Oop, it's just that her brain cycles kinda click with the dinosaur ages. There was once when we were doing this implementation, and their application server just was a piece of shit. Too many basic errors. So I told her
"eh.. there are just too many problems with this piece of crap, can you please escalate"
She said "escalate to who?" TNS!

warming up

Yesterday was my 2nd day at the client in Cyberjaya. Did I ever say how expensive it was in Cyber? Daily parking is about RM12.1 for 10 hours. Luckily season parking is RM80. 1 way toll is RM6.4 from Sg. Buloh. Lunch? Ha! Average of RM10! Unless you drive to Dengkil!

But things are warming up. I got my first taste of the client today. Sat down and walked thru my findings of the architecture. Interesting conversation
"Do you have an error handling or exception handling architecture?"
"We're looking into that right now"

"Do you have an enterprise batch scheduler that strings together the batch jobs across the multiple platforms?
"We're selecting a package right now"

"Do you have more details on the workflow architecture?"
"We're documenting that right now"

"I believe the interface between X and Y will cause some concerns. This definitely needs to be POCed"
"Yes"

Man.. looks like the client's got everything covered!

Coincidence

A couple of interesting coincidences happened today.

In my last post, I mentioned getting this job offer to be a CTO, lower salary tho'. Of course, I was a bit disappointed in the offer.

Then I read my horrorscope in the copy of the Sun. Said something like "I'll be happy today, then I'll feel sad, then towards the end of the day, something will turn up to make me happy again".

Well, when i got back from work, my son was feeling a little better.

Also, when I got back, I got an email from the fella who made me the offer and the person said that they would review their offer and get back to me. Hmm..

Then I sat down and read my horrorscope in the Star. It said "Freedom seems more important that ever, and many archers will be looking for job opportunities further afield. Hop on your horse and follow that heart - wherever that may lead".

Coincidence?

Well check this out then.. I subscribe to the Daily Om (http://www.dailyom.com) and here's today's article http://www.dailyom.com/articles/2005/463.html

Amazing? Is someone out there pushing me to a certain direction?

Wondering

Here I am, sitting in the KLCC working on some response to additional clarifications from a client. At least I did not have to go to Cyberjaya today and incur RM6.40 each way for toll and at least RM20 a day for parking. Damn, that place is expensive...

But I am in a funny situation. Every year, I find some time to bitch about the firm that I'm working for. I call it the bitch cycle. You get onto a tough project.. you start bitching and thinking about leaving the firm. You finish a project and find yourself doing "business development" and you bitch again because you're not on a project.

All year round, bitch bitch bitch.

The funny thing now is I have a few job offers which I'm seriously conteplating.

One is to join a local start up company as a CTO. Lesser pay than what I'm making right now, but the pros and cons are
+ I get a CXX title. That's important for jumping to other careers
+ I get to play with damn keng chow technologies (Java, Hibernate, Spring Framework, Rich Internet Architectures).
+ And if the product sells, it's gonna be a blast. All the excitement of a startup... IPOs, Stock options.. droolll...
+ I don't join a competitor. So, for whatever reasons that I fail, it is likely that the firm will take me back
- Less salary

I've also been offered to go to an end user environment. Pros and cons
+ Quite good salary. Almost the same salary that I have
+ Housing loan! Credit card (not really a big deal)
- It's an end user environment, what do you expect? System maintenance. Bitchy users.
- It's a dead end job. If I take up this offer, I probably end up not moving

Of course, I could stay where I am right now:
+ I could make partner
- I could not make partner. Damn.. there are 6 partners in the market unit that I'm in. What chance do I have? How many big deals would I need to bring in to sustain being a partner?

I'm still considering.

Hoping

It's Sunday, 3pm. I'm sitting down here next to my son.. he's trying to get some sleep.

The last few days have been tough. My son's cough just did not get better. And he's quite afraid of spitting his phlegm out, which makes things worst.

Fri nite was bad. I did not get much sleep.

Sat nite was slightly better. I just hope he recovers soon

Points to ponder

here i am, sitting down with my son, and he's watching Power Rangers yet again. And I made a few astute observations..

1. Why does the blue ninja storm ranger (girl) have a skirt on her costume?
2. It's always the Savage Slash (in Power Rangers Wild Force) that destroys the monster.. so why not right at the start of the fight, just bukak that power lah...no need to fight so long, then like wanna die, wanna die, then last minute only bukak the Savage Slash... reminds me of Ultraman
3. Why do the rangers all jump up and face the opposite direction after whacking the monster with the Savage Slash? What if the monster doesn't die? A bit stupid...

zombie

i did not get much sleep last nite. My son's cough got worst and I was up all nite giving him water, comforting him. My eyes feel like it's gonna pop up. What a better time to blogg this. He's finally getting some sleep... at 6am! Niama...

Yesterday was bizarre... I looked thru the client's architectural documents and a lot of things were not there. There was no exception handling architecture, no undo/redo (insurance client lah), no ability to write a cheque online (how to do Policy Loan on the spot?), no batch architecture, no version control and software change management (multiple vendors, multiple off site development environments)....

Worst still, some of those areas were actually handled by our own guys...

I have a feeling some shit is gonna hit the fan.

Then before I left yesterday, I found out that the guy I was gonna sit down with and do a QA with tomorrow is gonna be on leave. Damn... it gets funnier and funnier...

But there was this new analyst on the project, supposedly an Olympic swimmer. I just had to check her legs out.

After work, I had to go to this ISAC-M meeting. Independent Software Architects Council of Malaysia. http://www.isac-m.org/

We talked, drank teh tarik, talked some more about how we can concretize (if there's such a word) software architects in Malaysia. Here are all the ugly fellas in the council: http://www.isac-m.org/Default.aspx?tabid=60

The meeting place was opposite a Chinese cemetery. No.. it's not that morbid. It was in Menara MAA in KL.

Might skip work today and stay in and care for my son.

He's quite funny. When he's sitting around doing nothing, he'll be coughing like there's no tomorrow. When he's watching his favourite Power Rangers, not a single cough.

Talking about power rangers...http://rangercentral.com/. Bet you didn't know there was so many different streams of rangers. My son has watched Wild Force, Ninja Storm, etc etc. Ask him to name all the rangers, zords, power spheres, etc... no problems! Ask him to spell "beratur" he says "b-e be" "t-u-r tur". Makes me wonder

My first hour in cyberjaya

here i am.. 1st hour gone...

I walk in here, saw some partners... and they said "tomorrow your meeting is in the morning... and it is a QA meeting".

I'm like "what the f*ck am I QAing?"

I'm reading like there's no tomorrow now...

Here in Cyberjaya

OK. I have sent my son to the doctors.. checked that my wife is ok leaving her and him alone.. and off I went.. to Cyberjaya...

First thing I'm bitching about is the toll. Dammit.. RM6.40 from Sg. Buloh to Cyberjaya. What the...

Secondly, the parking's expensive...

Damn.. I just cannot stop bitching.

I arrived at 1.45pm, and my other colleagues are out for lunch.. leaving me time to blog this...

son not well

damn... my son is not well.. he's been coughing all nite and he just woke up with a bad phlegm... wondering if I should really start my new project in Cyberjaya today.. if i don't, i'll probably be castrated by .. ahem.. if I do.. I will be so worried about my son..

morning blues

Ok.. it's 530am in the morning.. yes.. i normally wake up this early to do the laundry, do some work before I start waking the wife up and prepare my kid for kindergarten...I do this because I love my wife, love my kid, more importantly, to help my wife out. She stays at home all the time to take care of my kid that I just got to chip in someway to help out. God.. if one stays at home all the time to take care of a child, it's maddening..But today could be the last day I do it. That dragon lady says "got to come to work early". I go KNNECCB.. what lack of family empathy is that?On my last project, I also did the same, yet I ran this RM10M project, on time, on budget (in fact, we had quite a bit left in our pockets)... so, why such crap from this dragon lady this time?Well.. because last project I did not work for her!Enough crap. Time to put the laundry in.Also just checked that Steven Gerrard is really gonna sign a new contract. If he doesn't, i'm gonna ask my old gangster friends to look him up. HA HA

My first blog

it's taken this long for me to start whacking this crap down.But let me get straight to introductions...

I'm a 30+ consultant, work in the world's largest consulting firm (and it is not IBM.. dammit) and I focus on financial services. I am close to the top, but not close enough coz we have too many damn partners in the firm, so as much of a superstar i am, i stay as a "senior manager".

Hell... i have bailed the firm out many times..During the dot com days, we had this partner who promised a client that "we can launch a complete clicks and mortar in 100 days".. and I was put onto that project on day 40 because the current project manager said "for f*cks sake, this cannot be done".

I work in Malaysia. And tomorrow, dammit, I start a new project at Cyberjaya.. damn, i hate the drive.

Worst still, I hate the person I'm gonna work with. We have this female associate partner who's like a dragon lady... she pissed off one client so much that the client said "I don't want XXX back here again". So there... just me venting out frustrations... before my long drive to Cyberjaya tomorrow morning.. dammit..What the heck.. more introductions and crap about me later lah.

But the good news is Steven Gerrard has decided to stick it out with Liverpool. Made my day.. just..