A big Balancing loop in my life

Image by iandavid via Flickr

Sometime in March, my school has nominated me to attend an external course entitled ‘Systems Thinking‘.

After attending this course, I realized that my life is filled with balancing loops. I would like to elaborate on one of my own version of balancing loop.

Analogy 1: my savings account. I am personally comfortable with having a balance of $x amount in my account. Whenever i receive any small bonus or any other minor benefits, say $y, i will have a balance of $(x + y) in my account. Of course i will be very happy of my own achievements, and most of the time, i will spend the extra $y to pamper myself or to treat my hubby and so on. So i am always back to $x in my account, because $(x+y-y) 

Analogy 2: my hobby. Being one who loves to travel around the globe, i will surely book a tour to go somewhere far away during the school holidays whenever time allows.  The tour package will cost $p, which is way more than my $y (Pretty Yucky). Thus having $p > $y, my bank account will be left with an even smaller balance of $(x-p). I hate the feeling of being back from my holidays, because this is the period which i will usually announce to my friends that i am pathetically poor, so no more outings for me. I had to scrimp and save all over again in order to reach my comfortable level of $x again.

My savings graph, when drawn, could look something like this:

Sounds familiar? I am sure many of you out there have your so-called comfort zones. Whether it’s in school or at work. Once you are out of your comfort zone, you will feel uneasy or feel threatened. Most of you will strive hard to bring yourself back to the comfort zone level, by resigning or quiting school etc…

I personally think this is a bad kind of loop. After listening to the trainer’s explanation, people who followed this loop are doom to fail in life. We should always strive for the better and aim high. In order to succeed in life, we need to break out of the comfort zones.

That’s all i have to share here. Enjoy!

Updates to my blog

I think you already have noticed. I’ve made some changes to my blog:

1. Changed my layout to my favourite color scheme

2. Added Feed subscription form

3. Realigned some of my sidebar items

Work is so stressed up, to the point that i have to do something to de-stress myself.

Cushion for office

I’ve recently changed my office cubicle. The new cubicle was more conducive and I finally can have some space for my music. I tend to focus better on my work with some light-hearted music in the background.

To add some spice to my office life, I’ve done something which I’ve never done in my previous offices. i.e. I bought myself a cute cushion !

Isn’t it kawaii???

You can find more cute cushions here:

How to blog ‘wisely’

Image via Wikipedia

Do you know that one can get sued for slander by blogging about the ‘wrong’ and abusive stuff about a person? In my free time, i did some googling and i came across websites of students blogging badly about their lecturers or teachers — brainlessly. They go to the extent of placing the teacher’s face, full name etc on the blog. I could easily use this as evidence against the blogger if i want.

What’s worst is, these students actually put their real faces on the blog , together with the school name and their classes. I am not going to name those students here though, if they happen to stumble upon this blog, they should know who they are.

Whatever things you have placed onto the net, it will eventually surface out in the search results; especially if the key words used are common. We teachers do read public blogs too.

As a blogger myself since i was a student, i do censor what i really write in my blog. If you have noticed by now. I kept all personal and touchy stuff in my private blog where it’s only viewable by my close friends.

Let me give you some tips on how to ‘bitch‘ without getting yourself into big trouble; especially if you are those who feel better after sharing and writing it down:

1. Lock up the entry and make it visible to only your good buddies. You can swear or bitch whatever you can in there. However, do watch your words too. Anything that is listed on the net is still not-so private. Best is to take them offline.

2. Do not reveal your real name and face on the blog if you don’t want people to find out who you really are. And especially if you want to write terrible negative comments about the people around you. Well, unless you want attention and don’t mind being a net whore. But strangely enough, people who do this tends to get a lot of attention from other bloggers. I loved reading bloggers flaming one another. it’s so entertaining and it drives traffic too

3. Leave out the company or the victim’s real identity. Instead, drop subtle hints on who the victim is. The victim will definitely react if he/she finds your blog entry description familiar. :X But by then, you could simply deny that you are referring to him/her, since no names are mentioned.

Last but not least, the best way to deal with your problem and anger is to speak to the ‘victims’ personally. We teachers are human beings after all, and can never be perfect. We do appreciate feedback from others too.

Life can never be perfect.

Sunday at Home

It feels so good to be at home today. I hardly had the time to do my own personal work ’seriously’ since school reopened. And today, after releasing my students’ grades online early in the morning,  i make it a point NOT to check the school email nor do anything that’s school work related.

True enough, this little diversion has allowed me to focus on my personal tasks. I completed quite a number of things today:

1. Blog

2. Iron my clothes (more than usual)

3. Whipped up a simple lunch with hubby

4. Made jelly (a simple task but took me so long to squeeze sometime out of my forever tight schedule)

5. Make nice tea and have a relaxing afternoon reading my new book (will review about it when i finish)

Wooo, i really have a relaxing day at home. But the weather’s kind of irritating, don’t you think so? The temperature stood at 31 degrees the whole afternoon.

Gotcha!

Upon opening my mailbox today, i was greeted by a shocking email stating that i had been nominated to take part in a mock audit today. My mind went blank, and my eyes focused on the word ‘MOCK‘. Oh i see, it’s just a mock, so i don’t have to worry.

In the past, i used to audit people. But now, the roles have changed. Frankly speaking, it’s not a nice thing to be audited.

For this mock audit, we were given a set of notes to read and understand. I spent 45 minutes on the notes and managed to finish the last page before the stipulated audit time. While i was flipping through the slides, i saw a very old photo of mine (see left). I was pretty shock to see myself staring at me from the PowerPoint slides.

I racked my brain juices hard to recall the day when this photo was taken. Oh yes, it was taken on one of our school’s anniversary dinner. We were queuing up patiently to sign our attendance and to collect our door gift. But why on earth do i look up and smile so happily into the IP camera? Oh my gosh! I can’t even remember what door gift i’ve gotten.

If not for the notes that i had to read, i don’t even know my picture was used! What a day.

lazy weekends

Nothing can be more bored and dry than to do work over the weekends, but there’s nothing we educators can do especially when we are involved in crafting curriculum. Most of the time in school were spent on meetings, lunches, grading and classes. Nothing ‘concrete’ was ever done.

On weekends especially SUNDAYs, I usually seek solace at my little working area in my home in between meals. I know some of you will be raising your eyebrows, thinking that this is merely a dining table!

Well, i get the most inspirations while sitting at this desk, and better still, i don’t need to move around when i am hungry or thirsty. Everything is in front of me. If only time will just stop here for now.

The world just falls apart in front of me this semester. Everything is going hay-wire, everyone seemed overloaded and nothing I do seems right. I find myself forgetting things easily nowadays. Perhaps i got too many things at hand? Even a simple task of merely assigning students to supervisors is peppered with students withdrawing, ending deferment and so on. I have a nice admin assisting me in doing this, but then….if anything goes wrong, my head will roll first right?

Aww…. If only this semester will come to an end soon.

Viwawa

I cant play games for nuts. Most of the times, my hands and the brain doesn’t seemed to be able to coordinate well and i ended up losing in all the games that i played. A friend of mine introduced me to this game called Viwawa. The name of the website is catchy, because the ‘wawa’ means ‘little doll’ in Chinese. So this caught me, and i signed up an account with it last night.

As i am feeling particularly stressed up this week; especially with all the classes and drafting of module curriculum, i decided to give this online site a try.

Much to my disappointment, all the games required the use of the BRAIN. There are practically no brainless games in the list. So in the end, i spent my time playing Sushi Do and MatchIT. MatchIT is the worst and i can safely conclude that my memory is in fact failing me. I did well for the 4×4 matrix but done horribly for the 8×8 memory matrix. No matter how many times the cards are turn, i just cant seemed to remember anyone of them!

Well of course i will log in more often now and then for a game or two. If anyone of you are keen to play with me, do drop me an email to arrange a time.

This is my wawa and IGN

The ‘joy’ of Project Management

I am tasked to facilitate the IT Project Management module this semester. Frankly speaking, i face great difficulties trying to bring the concept of ITPM across to students. If only we can create a real life working scenario within the four walls of a classroom. Unfortunately, due to time constraint, it’s rather hard to achieve this goal.

Being an ex-hamburger meat Project Manager myself before i join this tertiary institution, I could see myself adding value into the day-to-day lessons with the students. This of course can be a great disadvantage also, as i tend to ‘nag’ the students more whenever they did something wrong or irrelevant. It just gets over my head sometime and i find myself having more and more difficulties ending my lessons on time.

The true life of a PM is not as easy as what the students thought. We introduce the Project Manager as the piece of meat wedged in between two pieces of thick halves of a bun. He/She has to appease the top management and the users (a.k.a customers) as well as to manage the teams under his/her charge below.

Most of the time, the users and the top management are not that nice to work with; and they can scream at the top of their voices whenever a project slips off the deadline or doesn’t meet their requirements. So being the meat of the burger you had to try ways and means to ‘protect’ the bottom half of the bun from sinking further, else the meat will be the one touching the ‘hot’ ground.

Aww…. this is also the main reason why i tend to be stricter to students in my classes this semester. I am just trying to be the bad egg in the basket. Hehee.

The world is a treacherous place to work in.

Our wedding

I was playing around with my new account with Scrapblog this morning. I even managed to dig out two of my wedding pics, and made them into a simple multimedia scrapblog. Scrapblog provides a lot of custom themes to chose from, so i picked one of their popular wedding love theme.

What i dislike about this site is, when i finally decided to publish my scrapbook, it took ages for it to accomplish this task! In the end, guess what this impatient girl did, i did a print screen instead.