A Test For Professionals
July 18th, 2007The following short quiz consists of four questions and will tell you whether you are qualified to be a professional. The questions are NOT difficult.
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1. How do you put a giraffe into a refrigerator?
The correct answer is: Open the refrigerator, put in the giraffe, and close the door. This question tests whether you tend to do simple things in an overly complicated way.
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2. How do you put an elephant into a refrigerator?
Did you say, Open the refrigerator, put in the elephant, and close the refrigerator? Wrong Answer.
Correct Answer: Open the refrigerator, take out the giraffe, put in the elephant and close the door. This tests your ability to think through the repercussions of your previous actions.
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3. The Lion King is hosting an animal conference. All of the animals attended except one. Which animal did not attend the conference?
Correct Answer: The Elephant. The elephant is in the refrigerator. Remember, you just put him in there. This tests your memory. Okay, even if you did not answer the first three questions correctly, you still have one more chance to show your true abilities.
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4. There is a river you must cross but it is used by crocodiles, and you do not have a boat. How do you manage it?
Correct Answer: You jump into the river and swim across it. Have you not been listening to anything I’ve said? All of the crocodiles are attending the animal conference called by the Lion King. This tests whether you learn quickly from your previous mistakes.
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According to Anderson Consulting Worldwide, around ninety (90%) percent of all professionals tested got all of the questions wrong, but many of the preschoolers tested got several correct answers. Anderson Consulting says this conclusively disproves the theory that most professionals have the brains of a four-year-old.
Author Unknown
Do you REALLY need email??
July 18th, 2007No Email?????? ……….. An unemployed man is desperate to support his family of a wife and three kids. He applies for a janitor’s job at a large firm and easily passes an aptitude test.
The human resources manager tells him, “You will be hired at minimum wage of $5.35 an hour. Let me have your e-mail address so that we can get you in the loop. Our system will automatically e-mail you all the forms and advise you when to start and where to report on your first day.”
Taken back, the man protests that he is poor and has neither a Computer nor an e-mail address. To this the manager replies, “You must understand that to a company like ours that means that you virtually do not exist. Without an e-mail address you can hardly expect to be employed by a high-tech firm. Good day.”
Stunned, the man leaves. Not knowing where to turn and having $10 in his wallet, he walks past a farmer’s market and sees a stand selling 25 lb. crates of beautiful red tomatoes. He buys a crate, carries it to a busy corner and displays the tomatoes. In less than 2 hours he sells all the tomatoes and makes 100% profit.
Repeating the process several times more that day, he ends up with almost $100 and arrives home that night with several bags of groceries for his family. During the night he decides to repeat the tomato business the next day.
By the end of the week he is getting up early every day and working into the night. He multiplies his profits quickly.
Early in the second week he acquires a cart to transport several boxes of tomatoes at a time, but before a month is up he sells the cart to buy a broken-down pickup truck.
At the end of a year he owns three old trucks. His two sons have left their neighborhood gangs to help him with the tomato business, his wife is buying the tomatoes, and his daughter is taking night courses at the community college so she can keep books for him.
By the end of the second year he has a dozen very nice used trucks and employs fifteen previously unemployed people, all selling tomatoes. He continues to work hard.
Time passes and at the end of the fifth year he owns a fleet of nice trucks and a warehouse that his wife supervises, plus two tomato farms that the boys manage.
The tomato company’s payroll has put hundreds of homeless and jobless people to work. His daughter reports that the business grossed a million dollars.
Planning for the future, he decides to buy some life insurance. Consulting with an insurance adviser, he picks an insurance plan to fit his new circumstances. Then the adviser asks him for his e-mail address in order to send the final documents electronically.
When the man replies that he doesn’t have time to mess with a computer and has no e-mail address, the insurance man is stunned, “What, you don’t have e-mail? No computer! No Internet! Just think where you would be today if you’d had all of that five years ago!”
” Ha!” snorts the man. “If I’d had e-mail five years ago I would be sweeping floors at Microsoft and making $5.35 an hour.”
Author Unknown
A State Job Is Perfect for Mid-Age IT Professionals
June 13th, 2007I have dozen of friends who work as public employees on state IT jobs, — programmers, DBA, system admin, analyst, etc. They tell me the same thing: State jobs are easy, light work load, flexible schedule, and most important, their jobs are protected by the union, — the Service Employee International Union (SEIU) is one of the strongest, toughest unions in the whole world.
A great benefit of state job is the defined benefit (DB) pension plan, that’s rare nowadays. You may have heard in news that many corporate pension plans have been converted to defined contribution (DC) plan, not good. However, even the DB pension in public sectors may not stay forever. CalPear, the California state’s DB pension plan may not be available for new state employees after 2008. If you want the take the last chance to get into the last a few DB pension plans in human history, then go ahead to get a state job.
Working for the public sector, you don’t get big, fat bonus, but base salary is not bad, and you get about 5% increase guaranteed. Since there is not much to do often on the job, many people find that the work time is well used for their own business to get second income, very sweet.
If you are a mid-aged IT pro, tired of working hard, want to have more time with family, like to have a secured income, consider starting a business, then a state job is perfect for you.
The following are the links of state government job website for all 50 states:
The Alpha-Netics Success Guide
June 13th, 20071. State what you want to accomplish in your life. What do you really want? Regardless of the obstacles and assuming money were no object, what do you really want and what would you do with your time?
2. How long will it take you to realize each of the goals you have written in step 1? A goal without a deadline is a daydream. Deadlines are essential to create the drive necessary for success.
3. Determine what short range or intermediate goals you may set and achieve that will keep you moving in the direction of the major goals you are pursuing. Even the movement toward and accomplishment of small goals is motivational and exciting. These make the continued pursuit of your major goals endurable and much more enjoyable.
4. How much effort are you willing to put into the pursuit of your goals? If there are limitations, you are after the wrong goal. Any obstacle between you and what you want can be removed by having the short range goals directed toward that removal. If it is what you want, no price is too high and no obstacle to high, wide or deep.
5. Keep your goals – short, intermediate, and long range – in your mind’s eye, always. Know what need to be done, always. Consider a camera taking a picture. If the camera is 10% out of focus, the picture will be at least 10% out of focus. If your goal is out of your mind’s eye 10% of the time, you reduce your chance of reaching that goal by at least 10%. Remember, “Anything you vividly imaging..” Keep your goals in focus.
From The Alpha-Netics Rapid Reading Program by Owen d. Skousen
Understanding Success and Happiness
June 13th, 2007Success is the progressive realization of positive, predetermined goals.
A person is most happy when they are progressively pursuing a goal or objective. The happiest people are those who are always on their way to someplace.
You cannot reach a goal then stop your progress and still feel successful. If you stop striving, you are stagnant. Successful people always seem to find the means to get what they want. As the saying goes, “If they need money, they get money; if they need people, the get people; if they need ideas, they get ideas.”
It is also true that like attracts like. Act successful, do the things successful people do, and you will be successful. These actions develop confidence, belief in yourself and, most importantly, they create desire, which will enable you to pursue your goals regardless of obstacles, resistance, circumstances or the opinions and actions of others.
People who don’t really succeed in life, do so because they lack direction and motivation. Without a goal as a guide, you are like a ship at sea with no rudder. You will end up wherever the seas and wind take you; you have no choice.
Be the master of your own fate. Go wherever you wish. Become whatever you choose. Have whatever you desire.
From The Alpha-Netics Rapid Reading Program by Owen d. Skousen
Microsoft Is a Little Bit Tender
June 13th, 2007Someone in the comment of The Dog and Tiger’s Evil Fight in China asked what is Microsoft called in China? Here you are, Microsoft is a little bit tender. Smart translation, isn’t it? Here’s how the name is converted to a great Chinese brand. Cutting the name “Microsoft” to two parts, “Micro” is translated to “Wei” which means “a little bit”, and “soft” to “Rien” meaning “tender”, that makes Microsoft a little bit tender in China. Kind of funny.
Many global tech companies are nicely branded in China with smart names translated/converted. The general practice is to translate company name based on the sounding to Chinese pronunciation and then pick up the Chinese words which give a kind of meaning. Take a look:
Microsoft -> a little bit tender
Oracle -> divine’s word
Cisco Systems -> think science
HP -> benefiting the public
Sun Microsystems -> raising sun
IBM -> just IBM, no translation
Apple Computers -> still apple, the same fruit
The Dog and Tiger’s Evil Fight in China
June 12th, 2007In the Chinese IT community, a hot, funny topic is about the fight between the dog and tiger for China’s territory. There is big argument about who is going to win the search engine market. Here the tiger is Yahoo, translated into Chinese by pronunciation as “elegant tiger”, and the dog is Google which means “ancient dog” or “dead dog” in Chinese pronunciation.
Yahoo is happy with its Chinese name “tiger”, but Google don’t like to be called “dog”, especially “dead dog”, thus a few month ago Google announced its official Chinese name as “harvest song” which is also based on Chinese pronunciation (Gu-Ge). But no one wants to use its official name because it’s not fun. Therefore Google is still a dog in China.
As the search engine market competition heats up in China, the tiger and dog become evil. Yahoo, in order to obtain fervor from the Chinese communist party, had released Yahoo email accounts personal information to the communist party. Using this information, the party’s secret police had put several pro-democracy activists to jail. Recently a Chinese couple sued Yahoo and its Chinese affiliates, alleging the Internet firms provided information that helped the Chinese government persecute the man for his Internet writings.
Google the “don’t be evil” dog also surrendered to the evil communist party. If in China you search Google for keywords such as “June 4th”, “Tian An Men Square crack down”, “Falun gong”, “free Tibet”, you get either “page not found” or the communist party’s propaganda page. Google in China voluntarily blocks information based on the communist party’s request. These are the information the communist government doesn’t want Chinese people know. The evil party is afraid of letting people know the truth. The evil dog helps there to hide the truth and tell lies.
That’s not a joke. The tiger and dog is hurting people.
Daddy, How Was I Born?
June 4th, 2007A little boy goes to his father and asks “Daddy, how was I born?”
The father answers: “Well son, I guess one day you will need to find out anyway! Your Mom and I first got together in a chat room on Yahoo. Then I set up a date via e-mail with your Mom and we met at a cyber-cafe. We sneaked into a secluded room, where your mother agreed to a download from my hard drive. As soon as I was ready to upload, we discovered that neither one of us had used a firewall, and since it was too late to hit the delete button, nine months later a little Pop-Up appeared that said: ‘You got Male!’”
Sign of the times?
Author Unknown
Data Integration, Data Warehousing, and ETL Software Tools
May 2nd, 2007The most popular sotware tools for enterprise data integration, data warehousing, and Extract, Transform and Load (ETL).
- Informatica - Tools for Data Warehousing, Data Migration, Data Quality, Data Consolidation, Data Synchronization, and Master Data Management.
- Syncsort DMExpress - DMExpress is the high-speed ETL tool for data warehousing, BI, and other mission-critical applications. For UNIX, Windows, and Linux, DMExpress integrates disparate data from multiple, heterogeneous sources by performing complex transformations and high speed aggregations to create consolidated views of data for reporting, analysis, or other downstream applications.
- SAS DataFlux - Powerful for managing connectivity and metadata, data cleansing and enrichment, ETL, migration and synchronization, data federation, and master data management.
- Embarcadero DT/Studio - A a cost-effective, scalable, and easily extensible ETL solution, helps organizations consolidate data from a variety of data sources in weeks, not months.
- Oracle Warehouse Builder - Oracle Warehouse Builder manages the full life-cycle of data and metadata for the Oracle database. With a single, easy-to-use interface, Oracle Warehouse Builder allows you to design ETL processes between target warehouses, intermediate storage areas and the end user.
- SQL Server Integration Services - SSIS goes beyond simple ETL (Extract Transform and Load) tools by enabling nontraditional scenarios and leveraging the power of the Microsoft .NET Platform and SQL Server.
- Pervasive Data Junction - Data Junction ETL tool is now owned by Pervasive. This software suite includes data management and integration products, ETL tools, data migration, data conversion, and application integration solutions.
- WhereScape RED - This data warehousing software supports entire data warehouse management life cycle in integrated Development Environment. It integrates source system exploration, schema design, metadata management, warehouse scheduling and enhancement into a single, simple integrated design.
- IBM WebSphere DataStage (Ascential) - Formerlly from Ascential Software, this tool supports the collection, integration and transformation of large volumes of data, with data structures ranging from simple to highly complex.
- Adeptia Data Transformation Server - A comprehensive solution that combines data transport with powerful metadata management and data transformation capability. It is Perfectly suited for Extract Transform and Load (ETL) type of scenarios.
Open source ETL Tools
- Talend Open Studio - Talend is the first provider of open source data integration software. Talend Open Studio provides advanced capabilities that dramatically improve the productivity of data integration job design; and proven scalability to ensure the highest execution performance.
- Pentaho Data Integration - The free open source software delivers powerful Extraction, Transformation and Loading (ETL) capabilities using an innovative, metadata-driven approach.
Asset Management Software
May 1st, 2007Asset Management software capabilities maximize the lifetime value of complex assets and closely align them with the overall business strategy, allowing businesses to:
* Increase return on assets
* Decrease costs
* Increase productivity
* Improve asset-related decision-making
* Improve asset service delivery
* Improve regulatory compliance
* Increase business responsiveness
* Lower total cost of ownership
- MRO Maximo - Maximo was built by MRO Software which was acquired by IBM in 2005. Maximo allows you to manage all of your critical assets using a single platform enabling you to implement a consistent set of asset and service management best practices for all asset types, as well as decrease the number of applications you need to run your business. Maximo Asset Management consists of six key systems that enable companies to successfully manage assets, including production equipment, facilities and transportation assets, in alignment with their business objectives.
- Altiris - Altiris (now part of Symantec) is the leading provider of IT asset management software. The Asset and Configuration Management database (ACMD) suite tracks hardware and software, along with associated contracts and costs.
- BMC Remedy - BMC Software’s Remedy Service Management streamlines the processes around IT service desk, asset management, change management, and service level agreements. It also enables you to link business services and IT infrastructure to help you manage the impact of technology changes on business and business changes on technology in real time and into the future.
- ZENWorks - Novell ZENWorks manages hardware and software systems. this year Novell is bulking up its asset management capabilities by integrating tools from Tally systems.
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