Merry Christmas

The year 2019 has brought us a concoction fun, hard work and mind-crushing challenges, but it also came with a couple of good rewards which I should talk about later in the upcoming posts.

They say that if a dragon or a "lion dance" has come to pass by and dances nearby, and someone happens to be present at its path, well not necessarily directly on its path, but somewhat closer to where it's at, then luck will come to that person.

I'm not sure if touching the lion costume will double that "luck" but it doesn't hurt to try.

Anyway, I just want to greet everyone a Merry Christmas and I wish you all good luck in 2020. Cheers!

A Busy Life and A Little Experiment

A golden rule that I've come to learn over the course of my life is that there is no harm in trying. Thus, I and my IT staffs have gone to extra lengths just to try and test for a very common information that a Hikvision IP Camera will not run by a UTP cable of more than 50 meters away on a POE supply. While some people with glimmering technical background in this field will probably agree with it, I am not ready to jump on the bandwagon just yet without putting up a little pillow fight and proving how correct that information is.

So it has come to pass that I have asked my two staffs to cut an approximately 100 meter of CAT6 pure copper cable and to help me run a test of our own. Oh by the way, the person on the left side whose two hands are gripping a roll of orange cable is Sylvester and and that's his cousin Dickson on the right.

If Discovery Channel has Adam and Jamie for MythBusters, I have the back of  these two guys here to help me perpetuate an unscrupulous plan of busting some myths for fun; and to whom I had promised a bottle of cold Coke should we emerge victorious in the end.

The camera location is perhaps around 30 meters close to where we have set up our NVR (Network Video Recorder) so we still have the remaining 70 meters of CAT6 coiled under the table.

And look at that, it works! While it is not in my best intention to prove other people wrong, I do acknowledge that I wanted to prove something to myself. Things could be better understood if one chose to tackle the subject in an engaging manner.

Here's the detailed summary of our mini-experiment:

Success rate                             :  100%
Hostilities met along the way   :  0%
Casualties                                 :  0%
Minor Injuries Sustained          :  0%
Satisfied people                        : 3

 Oh we did go and drank some cold Coke afterwards. Happy weekend everyone!

Confidence in the Workplace

Having a job and doing the actual work is like being in a beach, trying to walk our way past against a series of waves. The water is your work environment and the waves are the problems you encounter each time.

Life in the workplace isn’t smooth, and you need to face the proverbial waves. No matter how small or big the waves are, you still take the courage to face them head on, even if they swat you like a bulldozer. But like the waves, those problems will come to pass, whether you’ve solved them or not. Like the waves, if you’re not able to stop it, something else will (thanks to the big rocks on the shore).

Or somebody else will.

The good thing however, is that each time you have courageously stood against the incoming waves, you gain experience. You build character. And those characters become you. You can even say, “Hey look, I’m The Hulk!” But I’m just kidding. What I actually mean to say is that the more problems you overcome, the more confident you may become.

Confidence is actually about thinking and saying, “I’ve done this before, and I know I can do it again.” That is, if you’ve been through that situation before. But when you’re about to face something that you have previously never come across of, confidence becomes believing in yourself.

So confidence is really about knowing what you can do and believing in yourself that you can do more. Apply that sense in the workplace, you won’t become unstoppable, but you’ll become adequately and confidently capable.

If not, then at least you become a "Papable."