Another conflict

I came to my new workplace with slight apprehension, as I thought I knew my new boss, and he appeared to be friendly and easy to get along with.

I was quite wrong, as the next few months were any indication. He constantly blurred my job scope, and then expected and demanded more despite myself still learning the ropes. I took all of it in silence, as I assumed it was a training/grooming process, and that doing more would be worth it.

In fact, earlier in March when I was griping, I tried to reconcile myself to the fact that I would never be able to convince him that I was doing what I could. I did not speak up, I chickened out. I spoke to him at length on many occasions, each time, leaving, dejected, demoralised, and having achieved nothing except to lower his impression of me.

I thought I could run away from my problems by simply ignoring him, which thankfully, due to a recent project, took his attention away from my branch.

I need to reconsider my position again.

Are you AWARE of the furore?

When the news first broke on AWARE's surprise takeover, I read it with mild interest. After all, what would I, a guy be concerned about the forced takeover of the Association of Women for Action and Research?

Then, as more information came in, it slowly became obvious that this was pre-planned, by people from the same church [Church of our Saviour] no less, where they joined the organisation within 3 months of the AGM.

It was then quite obvious that they planned to take over AWARE, despite their claims to the contrary, and went ahead and did it.

Now, what is wrong, you may ask? The organisation had a sloppy constitution, so they deserved it?

What does the organisation hope to achieve?

From their initial stance of no-comments, that they were there to guide AWARE back to the right direction, to a huge media outburst against homosexuals, primarily by Thio Su Mien, mother of Thio Li-Ann, whom we fondly remember for her anti-homosexual speech during the repeal of Section 377 saga.

Let's look at how everyone is related to everyone.

Thio Li-Ann - MP, anti-377A
Thio Su Mien, mother of Thio Li-Ann
Dr Alan Chin, nephew of Thio Su Mien and husband of Josie Lau
Josie Lau, current president of AWARE and wife of Alan Chin; niece-in-law of Thio Su Mien

Non-related:
Ms Charlotte Wong
Ms Irene Yee
Ms Jenica Chua
Ms Maureen Ong
Ms Sally Ang

All attend the same church. Yet during an interview, there was a claim on them not knowing each other before the AGM. How interesting, and blatantly false.

Interesting Links

Additional Information from trevvy.com
The Online Citizen
Yawning Bread

Against my better judgement

Today I attempted to state my point of view to my boss again. I failed miserably. So much so that I have now given up trying to explain anything to him.

He fails to listen, refuses to accept any point of view except his own, and makes decisions on a whim to prove a point than to achieve efficiency at work.

He is my very own pointy-haired-boss.

I am demoralised, I am more unhappy in my job now than I have ever been in my 8 years at work. All because of my inability to communicate. I do not see it as my fault, because I have certainly exhausted all means of communication, be it written or verbal.

I am convinced he is the most terrible boss I have ever worked for in my life. I have no lack of negative adjectives to describe his management style and way of thinking. I will speak to him tommorow in an interview. If this does not go well, I will request to post out.

Ong Bak 2

Ong Bak 2 is a prequel to Ong Bak. The series is planned as a Trilogy in the following order:

Ong Bak 2 - shows Ting as a child and how he learnt his fighting skills
Ong Bak 3 - how he escapes from the clutches of his captors
Ong Bak - why the entire trilogy is called Ong Bak, because a buddha (ong bak) head got stolen and he goes to retrieve it.

Ong Bak 2 features relatively more violence and killing compared to Ong Bak, either suggesting his skills have deteriorated, or that he's trying to renounce violence (more likely).

Ting is a young price, sent to learnt khon, some royal dance. He then gets 'saved' by a group of bandits who teach him martial arts. He then confronts his parents murderers, and finds out the bandit king is one of them (who lets Ting kill him), but he gets captured by the main evil King dude.

Rather dark lighting throughout the movie, very fast paced action, but weird parts in the movie that make you go huh. Like how he escapes his captors at the start of the show, why are there a tiger/lion girl who he kills, and a crow girl who he doesn't seem to fight off very well, and why he doesn't recognise his bandit friends just because they're masked.

What to Blog?

I know that nobody reads this blog, but recently, I've been agonising over what to post on my blog when I actually do.

Should I post

1) Funny stuff that my gf says? (there's alot of them, seriously)
2) My views on various current affairs?
3) Great links to porn!

I have not decided. Nevertheless, here's an excerpt of what my gf has mentioned to me over the past weeks:

Expansion of Drink Cans

Background: We were collecting drink cans to make into shakers (for sound effects) and somehow they got crushed due to a miscommunication in my house =D

She: Let's put them in hot water!
Me: Eh? How will that help?

[She had the concept that it would expand like ping pong balls that were crushed and tried to explain so]

I am user #927

I was reading up on Corporate Governance the other day and about the Enron scandal. In the wikipeda entry, it stated that AOL had some corporate governance debacle recently, so I googled it.

I came across AOL's interesting data blunder, in which thousands of search strings were released for public consumption. No personal data was purposefully revealed, however, some of the search data proved to be quite telling.

Each user was identified by a unique search ID, with their search history accompanying. It was actually pretty interesting (in a voyeuristic way) to see what people searched for, and what they actually clicked on. Of note was a guy (presumably, hopefully) by the userid of #927

His appetite for websites is extremely varied, and most would probably add sick. But on reflection, actually, I figured my own searches would prove to be rather unpalatable to some. >.<

Are you able to say that you don't search for weird stuff?

For those who are interested, here is a mirror of the Full Search Data. It's a huge text file, so try opening it with Excel. Doesn't seem to work any other way for me.

I hate my job sometimes

Someone from my workplace was punished today. He used to be my subordinate, but is no longer, as I have changed departments. I was very upset about it.

He was an excellent chap who worked hard and gave no grief to his superiors while he was there.

But that has been forgotten now.

He was disciplined today, and even though I appealed to boss, he was still punished. Granted, he committed a mistake, but I sincerely felt that he did not deserve to be punished as harshly as he was.

His new superior wanted to make an example out of him, and to send the message that he did not condone ill-discipline. Fine and good, but I felt his actions was sending a wrong message.

Now, we are telling all of them that "We do not care what you have done in the past. You may contribute a hell lot, and work your ass off, but put one toe out of line, and there is no second chance given."

I am not being fair about this. Because I would not have done it were I in his superior's shoes. I agree that in my workplace, discipline is a very important thing, but I am upset because I failed to protect and support this ex-subordinate of mine. I appreciated his work while I was there, and he did put in effort and hard work. This is not always apparent in most people, but he was one.

I feel I have failed, and that I am sorry. But that does not matter to him, as punishment was already meted out, and he is serving it now.

Sometimes I really hate how the responsibilities I have correspond to the power (or lack thereof) I have in my workplace.