stlplace

My older daughter just finish 1st grade. One thing I learned is first graders do have some homework, at the same time they usually don’t have homework over the weekend (Friday, Saturday and Sunday). In other words, homework usually won’t be assigned out on Friday and due to Monday. This is something I like to talk about it today. Over the years I worked professionally, mostly for employers, I did encounter tight deadlines or last minute assignment which means I have to work or “hinted to work” over weekend and holidays. I recall in some scenarios we need to come into office and work. There is the line I want to draw: don’t commit to it if all at possible. In fact this is mostly a sign of bad management or planning when at Friday afternoon, the boss (project manager, someone who manages our work) came in, and say something needs to be done that urgently, and we need to work non-stop over Friday evening or Saturday, or even Sunday. This is both non-sense and counter productive.

We as knowledge workers usually don’t completely stop working even after normal work hours, sometimes we will (I know I do) think about the technical issues on the way from work to home, and sometimes we recall something like “ah, I may have done something wrong there, I will go back and fix it”. In fact I did something like that in my early career. Some other times, we monitor a long run job at home, or we test out new ideas coding on a company laptop. But we need break as human beings. Force us to work over weekend basically took away that, not to mention people who have families.

The downside of mandatory “overtime” in weekend (esp. coming to office) is that the workers never get rest in a normal weekend, thus hurting the productivity in the following week. In the example I gave earlier (the supervisor asked us to show up for work), looking back I think even him did not believe by coming in work on Saturday we will complete the project on time. This is mostly a show from management side, to let the upper management know that we are working hard. One of the dumbest thing I saw in my 17 years professional life.

On the positive side, I do have a few successful stories where I worked or thinking hard on a problem, and was able to solve a critical problems, all on a voluntary bases (nobody told me to come to office, I understand the urgency of the issue).

I finally decided to upgrade to the 4th gen Apple TV, which I had it as a developer kit about 2 years ago. I had not used it as the gen 2 Apple TV worked out fine mostly of the time, until recently it appears “play on Apple TV” feature did not work well on my old iPad mini (it could be caused by the old router too, oh well, I will replace it one at a time). I recall last time (a year ago) when I tried to use it, the TV comes as dev kit was locked, so I went ahead and did the “restore” in iTunes first. After that the setup was fairly smooth, it seems the main improvement over gen 2 was the voice recognition (Siri) and touch control (the touch control is not as precise as the four way control in the old remote in one case though).

Installed PBS kids app, and the screen saver looks new! Over the weekend I bought some TV from iTunes store (peppa pig, for younger daughter). It showed up fairly quickly on Apple TV.

Now the next step is for me to find the box for the old gen 2 and post it on eBay.

Over the years I have rode quite a few United Air on my trips from US to China. Amid the most recent incident on the UA (warning: the video may not be suitable for little kids), I am thinking of a few UA trips I took, such as this one on March 2007, which worked out ok. Another trip (Summer 2002), which is also my first UA flight, was also eventful. The UA857 (from SFO to PVG) was spotted some fire (presumably under the wing, per some passenger) during the take-off. The plane had to drop most of the fuel above the sea, and turn back to SFO. And we had to reboard another plan to PVG. Here are some of the pictures of the plane releasing the fuel. I recall one flight attendant specially mentioned how much weight was the fuel, and the unit price of fuel, I calculated it was about $350,000 worth of the fuel.

Fast forward, the industry had another meltdown during the financial crisis, and has since come back. The regional carriers, such as the one had the incident on Sunday night, was never the money maker. In fact, I recall in year 2009 (Colgan 3407) there was an fatal accident on a flight from NYC to Buffalo NY. And I learned from that accident that those regional carrier’s pilots are not really well paid or trained. This combined with my observations of over the years, when the airlines tries to charge the baggage fees, and on those regional flights, people would just check in the baggages at the gate (to save the money). Then at the destination, esp. when during winter time, you will see a long line of people picking up the luggages. It just feels America is a 3rd world country at that time.

Last but not the least, my friend Wang Jianshuo wrote on similar topic almost 10 years ago.