vincent_leee's Xanga

Thursday, June 14, 2007

Thu, 14 Jun 2007 19:45:16 GMT

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.

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Wed, 18 Apr 2007 09:46:04 GMT

My 2nd LCD monitor has finally arrived and my desk feels just like it should.

Saturday, April 14, 2007

Sat, 14 Apr 2007 20:48:26 GMT

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.

Sunday, January 07, 2007

Sun, 07 Jan 2007 07:35:45 GMT

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!

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Tue, 21 Nov 2006 05:34:01 GMT

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!!!

Monday, November 20, 2006

Mon, 20 Nov 2006 11:47:37 GMT

haven't updated for quite a while. been too busy (i.e. managing my time poorly) to update since I worked in London. probably i might have missed out some tiny little memorable moments. these few months have been life changing and if I don't get to write it all down, I'd probably miss it out in my blog for the rest of my life.

let's try to recall what happened in chorological order: when i got the offer to do a summer job at citigroup, the strangest thing is my friends were even more excited than me. probably the whole job hunting process was a bit easier than I expected. But I have clarify that it was a proper process though. Or probably from day 0, I have never really liked banking. but somehow a job like this looks good on CV and it proves to be a bit too irresistible to ignore (for a kid who was still desperate for anything in his career), despite the fact that it was my last proper summer holiday. So i took up the job offer with a lot of hesitation. at that time, I was struggling if I really should take up my perm. job offer from a telecoms consulting firm soon after that citigroup offer.

pursuing a career in telecoms is always at the very top of my wish list. you can only understand how exciting it is if you have followed this industry for quite while + some work experience in this field. The gravity really is this industry is ever evolving. the more you explore it, the more fun and exciting it is. plus successful rollout of new services and their timeline heavily depend on technological, regulatory and economic changes.

And as far as human beings need to communicate to each other, as far as information transfer is still the driving force behind literally everything (eg. think about internet banking. information transfer enables "money" to be transferred from one place to another. think about web-based software such as open office. it's all about transferring 1s and 0s and manipulating them to do something useful. think about how video conferencing has (to some extent) replaced transporting stuff or human beings from one place to another with sending and receiving signals between terminals), there's always demand for telecoms. just like food to human, money to business world.

so back to the struggle. I have asked for advice from a lot of people. I am quite aware of the fact that many people don't really care or like what they do in their jobs. probably they don't really have a choice, or some other things have stopped them from achieving what they deserve. I am so tired of (sometimes bothered by) some advice that I should stick to a large and "prestigious" organisation. I've been thinking if I've been too naive or childish.

So after quite a while of consideration (and making some painful decisions), I believe I should "follow my destiny", cuz I don't wanna make another major painful and probably wrong decision in my life.

Working at citigroup as a summer temp was all right, in the sense that i finally get to see what working in an i bank is like. but the best thing really is I have crystallised my choice to pursue a career outside a bloody bank. I personally have respect for banks, because they are really good in some ways. but i'm a bit bothered by how well they market themselves and they are somehow very successful in attracting and recruiting some bright people.

So I started my first perm job in london in mid september. to be honest, I don't have great respect of the consulting industry. the industry can simply be put in one single sentence: " what consultants do is simply steal your watch and how you what time it is". as far as the analogy is concerned, a lot of people don't know how to tell the time. these are the main groups of such people :

1. they are dumb enough to pay someone else to tell the time. this is probably a bit more exaggerated, but what I am saying is in many cases, they need to hire consultants to package and present the info nicely.

2. they need "an expert" to tell what the time is for the sake of it. eg. gov usually hires consultants to write some consulting reports to support their decisions, just like what i banks tell the research guys to do.

3. they didn't even know they actually have a watch. but it takes some time and effort to dig out the bloody watch. consultants have the resources and the know-how to dig that out. i.e. market assessment.

4.they suspect there's a better way to tell the time or there's something wrong with the watch. in this case, this is something transformational where the management consultants really do something meaningful. this analogy is not quite complete (eg. it doesn't explain the case of outsourcing) but it sort of gives you some ideas what consultants do.

But working as a consultant is (in many ways ) a good idea to start a career. plus you get the freedom on WHAT to do and HOW to build up your expertise. so if anyone is interested, I am more than happy to share more. cuz learning things in the consultants' way is probably the most flexible, exciting and rewarding way you can ever imagine.

my experience as a consultant so far is not as smooth as i expected. I am one of the only 2 junior consultants in the whole firm, because we 2 are the only fresh graduates. the consultants generally have worked in the industry (telecoms or consulting or done an MBA) for 2 to 3 years. the senior

consultants generally have 5-8 years of experience. Principal consultants have like 10-15, and the consulting directors have 20+. so i got surrounded by people who are generally packed with experience and it's always been a nice push to me. yet they are quite open minded and up for anything. somehow i missed the days of working as an intern, hanging out and messing around with others .

as a matter of fact, I spent an hour writing this after I met the deadline this afternoon. Now Iâ€™m fee as a bird in the office and trying to catch up some news in the industry and think of where to go after work.

take care , and good luck to all my friends who are busy looking for jobs.

Monday, July 10, 2006

Mon, 10 Jul 2006 13:55:48 GMT

I went to "St. Paul's Co-educational College 90th Anniversary Show - The Extravaganza " @ AsiaWorld-Arena. It was quite an impressive showcase of different talents. Good to see SPCC has such notable alumni (guest performers include °¼¥Ð, Ted Lo, ¹p¹|¼w, ªL±ÓÁo, Eugene Pao, Eric Kwok , §d·C(°¨µû¤H) and many more) and the school (at least in the concert) has shown to the audience that SPCC is so much more than choirs and orchestras. At least they now appreciate something other than classical music.

I'd say the event was very successful in the sense that most of the audience left the concert feeling proud of their school, plus it really impressed the parents and kept them proud and happy to have their kids in SPCC. It was actually a fund raising event and I hope SPCC did well.

I think it's more fair to say SPCC provides a fairly protective and intellectual environment to its students, so most of its students tend to be hardworking and kinda talented in some ways but they can rarely use their full potentials (unless you happen to be very talented in classical music).

By the way, I wish I can have the chance to practise singing everyday so that I can be "as good as "Justin some day. I can surely tell not many people in HK music industry know as much music (in terms of different genres, styles) as Justin. I think he's actually more accomplishd as a record producer (if you think about his work in Janice's "day and night" album) than a singer. He's quite a rare breed in the sense that not many good song writers and record producers can actually sing well. I hope he enjoys working in HK's music industry and focus on writing good songs (instead of dropping some shit into the canton pop market like "no protection" )

oh yeah. it was quite a nice reunion last Friday. Hope we can meet up for drinks or whatever on some other days.

By the way, it's quite amazing how peope actually haven't changed much over the last 10 years.

Saturday, June 10, 2006

Sat, 10 Jun 2006 16:32:45 GMT

Can't believe that my old school is organising such a big music orientated show in Hong Kong.

This is copied from the flyer (http://www.spcc.edu.hk/90th_anniversary/Flyer.pdf)

St. Paul¡¦s Co-educational College 90th Anniversary Celebration
The Extravaganza
Friday, 7 July 2006
7:30 p.m. in the AsiaWorld-Arena, AsiaWorld-Expo, Chek Lap Kok
The finale of the series of 90th Anniversary Celebration Events, The Extravaganza, will be held on Friday, 7 July 2006, 7:30 p.m. at the AsiaWorld-Arena. The Extravaganza is based on the history of SPCC from 1915 and goes into the future. It features a variety of performances:
classical and jazz, choral and orchestral, gymnastics and dance, kung fu and magic. All
current students, teachers and staff from the primary and secondary schools will be involved in the production of The Extravaganza.
We have invited our alumni, many of whom are established with well-recognized talents, to take part in The Extravaganza. Selina Chow, Eric Kwok, Lam Man Chung, Justin Lo, Ted Lo, Mark Lui, Eugene Pao, Dr. Amy Sze and Harry Wong are just a sample of the alumni that will be up on stage. We expect an audience of around 6,000 at the largest school event in Hong Kong.
Tickets are priced at $1,000, $300 and $100 and sponsorship opportunities are available.
Proceeds will be donated to The Landmark Fundraising Campaign benefiting The Council of St.
Paul¡¦s Co-educational College Charitable Trust.
Book your tickets now! The support of every single student, alumnus and parent is needed to
make this a successful and memorable event!

Sounds like something too good to miss. gotta find out who are going and try to order together. I haven't seen my old school friends for quite a while.

Just got my dual screen set up for my final year project. Now my room (with 2 desks and 2 LCD screens) "feels and works just like it should" . Thanks Ding for the LCD screen.

Thursday, June 01, 2006

Thu, 01 Jun 2006 17:54:20 GMT

some of my hard work over the last month has paid off (to some extent). Although I still have to work hard and have things that bother me as a student and a desperate job-seeker, it's better than being bothered by nothing at all right now, then having a lot more to worry about later on.

Now I feel like having decent cards (eg. A K) in a texas hold'em game. This is probably not a perfect analogy (eg. I don't need to fold them in this case) but not a bad one to explain how I feel right now. It's not the perfect hand to start with (or actually there's really nothing called the perfect starting hand) if everyone checks(or even raises) to me. But after flopping K 10 9 (rainbow), I have the choice to play them aggressively and take the pot right there (because of my fear of someone getting a straight right there) or just check and see if I can hit the nuts straight later. It's not an easy decision. But at least folding is not an option.

Anyway. let's work hard and see if I'll get the nuts straight.

Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Wed, 31 May 2006 18:22:21 GMT

I went to both year's group photo shootings yesterday. Although we come from the same dept, I could see 2 different worlds. One of the crucial differences is being a leaver or not.

Being in the final year is such a "special" period. This is the time when you cannot afford messing around, when you have to worry about things that bother you equally as a student and a person who is desperately for money and job opportunities. This is the time you look forward to a lot of things but you keep having a lot of flashbacks of past events. Unlike being in the final year in a secondary school (or a high school), you don't get to see your "not-so-close" friends around, i.e. some of them may have left or busy with work.

It's interesting to see how people (including myself) have changed over the years in IC, how friends have become strangers and vice versa, and good friends have become couples or "siblings".

IC is such a memorable place to me. I've had some of my best and worst memories here. I have never loved, liked and hated some people so much in a single place in the world. I , and my close friends, have witnessed my ups and downs over the last 4 years. But afterall, it's been such an unforgettable experience and I've made some of my best friends

To be honest, this place makes me well confused as I get to see and learn quite a lot of different things. This is the place where I start to see the shortcoming of science. I have done so many things that I probably couldn't do anywhere else.

Anyway. I hope all of you have made the most out of your uni life, wherever you are and good luck to everyone.