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| Finally Marco, my italian colleague, managed to upload his photos onto flick r.
Here are some of my weekend consultant trip's highlights. I'll try to spend some time to write it up.
more than half of my firm's consultants joined the firm within the last 12 months. so it's a very young and nice team and we felt so compelled to do something to glue everyone together that we came up with an idea of organising a weekend trip. unlike big firms where they have admin people to sort everything out, we organised everything the split the costs ourseles. even though some of us coudn't make it because of projects, they still helped out in sorting things out. the spirit just can't get any better.
These are my colleagues.
Christoph, a funny German who speaks with slight Borat accent.
Ioanna, a very nice Greek girl who is way smarter and nicer than she looks.
Me drinking like a fish. my colleagues managed to learn "black sesame, white sesame" after 1 demo.
Marco, the Italian photographer. another funny guy.
Matthew
Matt and Ray
the dining table in our house. the greeks called it "the snow white table".
tintern abbey, which is an abandoned church built in 15th century.
randon guys doing random folk dance in a pub next to tintern abbey
 
The most beautiful cycling track I've ever been
Consultant's and a baby
Bruno is the most charming yet quiet baby I've ever seen
marco feeling relaxed in garden
Goodrich Castle, which looks even better in photo. built in 12XX
canoeing is fun but a lot of hard work. it's even more so to girls cuz they hardly puddled.
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| My 2nd LCD monitor has finally arrived and my desk feels just like it should.
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I spent my afternoon shopping around Oxford St. today. I haven't been to those high streep shops and department stores for quite a while. Somehow, the way I looked at the shops and brands reminds me of how I have changed the way I think these days. These changes are directly contributed by how the book "blue ocean strategy" influences me.
For those of you who know the book, it's pretty much all about "making the competition irrelevant", i.e. avoiding the bloody red ocean competition by making yourself different from others, i.e. product differentiation. But I can surely tell you blue ocean strategy doesn't always win. Sometimes you gotta know when you have to differentiate yourself and when you don't really have to. Or in other words, when some people (or competitors) try to be different from the crowd, the others are actually better off by being just the stereotype.
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| happy new year to you all!!!
I could have got this entry written on my flight. but i got surrounded by 3 lovely babies (because I picked one of those seats right next to the flip-down tables). they all look absolutely charming and would have been perfect if they got their vocal cords disabled.
anyway, i have written about what happened since last summer. so i'd like to add something about my final year in IC.
as i probably have said before, final year is the worst year to be in uni life. FYP is just simply pain in my ass; the most unforgettably painful period was apr-jun 2006. i was busy
1) revising for exams
2) bloody music tech coursework, which i spent far too much time to get absolutely crap grades for my work. this humanities option could have been a quality and rewarding one if I worked a lot smarter and harder for it.
3) job hunting. i have myself to blame, cuz i was so bloody busy on cwk (rather lazy in everything else ) in 1st term and couldn't be asked to apply for a graduate job. but things turned out to be all right. out of 2 summer internship and 5 full time graduate job applications (yup, I was really THAT lazy) , i got final round interviews for all of them and i finally managed to get a crappy temp job for the summer (which only looks good on my CV and doesn't really do me any good) and a graduate job (which I still have no idea why they chose me...but anyway, will explain later) and a so-called freelance job (lucky that they didn't hire me as a full-time consultant, or I could have missed out the job i am having now). the worst week was probably in late april, when i had 4 exams and 2 telephone interviews and an online test all in one motherfucking week. it could have been impossible without the help of pro plus.
my job:
my job right now is far more challenging and rewarding than I thought, which keeps me thinking why they hired me. but i was lucky that the interviewers asked me about things that i know well enough to convince people that i am capable for the job (i.e. fool people to buy my shit).
my job also helped me put myself together by analyzing myself as a set of problems. btw, I will do some traveling quite soon and I'll update you guys about this once I have more info.
my new year's resolutions:
since this blog is opened to everyone on the internet, so i hope this will give me good incentives to keep my resolutions, or i'll look pretty bad to myself. I'l try to make them as SMART (SMART = Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timed) as I can.
1. become an expert in certain areas in commercial telecoms in an attempt to make my expertise and skill set more transferrable and special.
areas worth focusing :
mobile operators : special attention on vodafone which is trying hard to get rid of share holdings in companies where they don't have a controlling stake and expand into emerging markets, Chinese market and chinese operators' plans to expand abroad, M&A activities and liberalisation in middle east and africa
NGN: it is interesting and will be even more so when 3G becomes something of yesterday and operators start rolling out NGN networks.
2. brush up my skills in consulting, special focus on strategy and modeling skills
3. try to do as much traveling as i can in my work
4. read something useful and watch quality movies every weekend.
5. stay healthy by eating a lot more veg and exercise more.
6. be less shy and be more confident in my job.
7. make better use of my precious time. stop wasting time on checking download progress and getting myself lost in an ocean of data which are not highly relevant to what I'm supposed to be doing. Resist the temptation of doing a bunch of analysis that is interesting, intellectually stimulating, but not very relevant to my tasks, i.e. looking for completely random things on wiki, looking at photos on facebook, looking for things that i will never buy or sell on ebay, keeping up with absolutely meaningless entertainment news on hk.yahoo.com and appledaily.com.hk . thank god that i've given up the addiction of youtube or i'll look just like a piece of crap.
special thanks to...
last but not least, i'd like to thank some people who are particularly inspirational and have made 2006 a good year.
1. my bro. he's always been caring and helpful in my occasions.
2. my pig. although we used to have some problems, things have turned so much better now. given all the difficulties, it could have been impossible if it wasn't my pig.
3. my long suffering flatmates who put up with the noise from my room. u guys are absolutely inspirational in many ways and have made my stay in london a lot more enjoyable.
4.ding. what more can i say!!
5. will, my line manager. this guy is absolutely charming and inspirational in many ways and have great influence on my professional and personal development. all the consulting directors in my firm are incredibly nice and it's been nice to have him as my manager.
6. CW, the consulting director in HK office. he has made my trip to hk worth all the time and money. we had lengthy discussions on the consulting industry, my firm's business and my career. he's told me many things that i cannot possibly hear anywhere else (or from anyone else) in the world.
wish you all a prosperous and fruitful year!
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| I am absolutely addicted to a song called "margarita" by sleepy brown, pharrell and big boi. I had a bootleg version of it ages ago (with some typical annoying radio DJ shouting some shit like "yoyoyo..check this out..world exclusive sive sive sive......sleepy brown brown brown brown....remember where you first heard this...." with silly echo in the background) . cuz the quality wasn't very good, plus it got cut short and incomplete , so i didn't quite realise the beauty of it until i got hold of the album rencetly. The song is simply haunting and it's so good that I haven't quite got the time to listen to the rest properly. But it could have been perfect if Snoop did the rapping instead of big boi. Big Bio's style doesn't quite fit into this laid lack, playful track. speaking of collaboration of sleepy brown and big boi, "the way you move" was one of the best tracks they have ever done. check out the remix of it. it's beautiful. so as the picturedisc vinyl!!! | | |
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