The 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. (more…)
No 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.” (more…)
Someone 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
In 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.
A 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
A web translation firm wanted to sell translation service to me, so they sent me a page of my web site ITCareerSuccess.com that was translated to Chinese. However, they translated “IT Career Success” to “Its Career Success”. How ridiculous, IT is not It!
Why is IT not it? Because things are transformed in IT:
In IT, the web is not for spiders, it’s for people.
When you surf, you don’t surf the Ocean, you surf the web.
The net is not for fishing, but for phishing.
You start windows, not open it (not them).
You don’t go to hardware store to get hardware.
In the hardware you have bus, but that’s not the bus to carry you to school or mall.
You tools are not in the toolbox in your garage, or your real toolbox don’t hold the soft tools.
In IT, everyone keeps a lovely pet on desk, the mouse.
IT is not it, because in IT things are virtualized.
In IT, I meet my friends in my space, but that’s not my home or my office, it’s just myspace. When I say we meet, I don’t mean we meet face to face, in fact, we never meet, I mean, see the real each other.
Virtulization is great, you can have almost virtual everything, virtual relationship, virtual love, virtual sex, you name it. What’s virtual anyway? As I understand, Virtual mean true but not true at the same time. even the truth can be virtualized, call virtual reality.
Now you see, IT is not it.
“What do you do for living?”
“I am a computer for the First National Bank.”
That was a conversation 50 years ago, when computer was a job title, a position for employees.
“Honey, How’s your day like?” My wife asked.
“Very busy, I worked whole day with enterprise manager to fix problems.” I answered.
In my job as database administrator, I work with many managers, but they are not my bosses, so I don’t listen to them, instead I use them and abuse them sometime, that’s OK because they are not real people. Of course I have real human managers that I don’t want to abuse.
Now let’s see how many managers I’ve worked with:
Not only managers, I also work with a bunch of assistants, brokers, and advisors, such as Database Configuration Assistant, Data Guard Broker, Automatic Segment Advisor, SQL Turing Advisor, SQL Access Advisor, just name a few. What a great team.
What’s your team look like?
In our office, programmers and system guys often joke about software, tools, and vendors named after animals. A fun game is to count how many animals we keep in our virtual zoo, – our PC. We found birds, cats, frogs, snakes, and more, very amazing!
See what we’ve had:
OK, time to go home now. What animals do you keep in your zoo?