Today's a glorious day. The weather's good, I have a chance at winning the B circle for our table tennis competition, and best of all it's the last day "Geoff" will be working at our company. In one sense, I guess you can say that tomorrow will be a glorious day as the first one post-Geoff. In case you don't remember Geoff, I first mentioned him here, here, and again in the last post.

Over the last few days, our team lead and I spent some time transitioning all the work that Geoff did. Through detailed discussions, I think these meetings solidified the fact that Geoff did an absolutely lousy job during his time here.

Meanwhile, back at the Bat Cave, we've got some new hires on-board to take over his duties, as well as my testing duties (finally). We've got a 25 year old and a 23 year old female. One joined this week, and one will be in next week. A third hire will be coming in on Sept 18th, who we'll train to be an Application Engineer. So it's seems like we're filling our headcount while dropping some dead weight in the process.

Let's say you were a manager.

Under what circumstances would you fire an employee? If an employee royally screws up an expensive project, or crosses the line and sexually harasses a coworker, then it my be a no-brainer. But what if the employee doesn't do anything terribly wrong, but doesn't do anything very right either: just an employee who constantly under-performs. Does a worker who needs continuous baby-sitting and micro-managing because there isn't any trust or faith in the work s/he does deserve to be fired?

We've had someone in our group for the last year and change who continually shows his inabilities in every facet of his job. I've mentioned this guy before in my blog. He's a coworker that can't think on his own, can't follow instructions properly, and can't remember the details of his work (or of our product, for that matter). As our dedicated QA engineer, the majority of his testcases don't test to completeness and aren't written well. His organization skills are atrocious, and documentation and presentation skills are equally poor.

Yet, in spite of his obvious cons, we've kept him around for over 1 year. The fact of the matter is, we haven't been able to hire anyone else to do QA for our product in his place or with him. Resources are tight, and perhaps even having someone on board to do a half-assed job is better than having no one at all. I had my concerns during his 3-month probation, but the decision to keep him or drop him wasn't mine to make.

If you had this kind of a employee on your team, how would you handle it/him/her?

Here's a first. Today at work, when my 23 year old female coworker heard that I was born in 1978, she said:

"Really?? I thought you looked young, but were much much older." (like, above 30, she said)

Hmmm... that's a new one.

I've come down with a cold. The timing is horrible.

I am giving two days of training tomorrow and the day after.
My Fitness Club (from work) has a outing to Alexander Health Club tomorrow evening.
I have a yoga class at work on Wednesday evening.

I hope I get through the next couple days.

I wanted to post about a few health topics. The first will be about pH balance in your body. I recently had a health exam and my body's pH is 6.0, a little too acidic.

In short, health problems (disease) often are a result of an acidic body - a consequence of eating too much meat and sugary-sweet things. Therefore, we need to neutralize our bodies to prevent health complications, such as cancer. Very, very few cancers (some reports go as far as saying "none") can live in an alkaline environment. The ideal body pH is between 7.2 - 7.45 depending where you look.

There's a difference between acidic and acid-forming, and alkaline and alkaline forming, foods. To quote one website:

Note that a food's acid or alkaline-forming tendency in the body has nothing to do with the actual pH of the food itself. For example, lemons are very acidic, however the end-products they produce after digestion and assimilation are very alkaline so lemons are alkaline-forming in the body. Likewise, meat will test alkaline before digestion but it leaves very acidic residue in the body so, like nearly all animal products, meat is very acid-forming.

Here're a few websites on the topic (with a lot of overlapping information):
Acid - Alkaline Balance (Natural Health School)
A List of Acid / Alkaline Forming Foods
Alkaline and Acidic Food Chart (Essence of Life)
About Alkaline Body pH
Lemons for Balanced Health
The Alkaline Diet (About.com)

I pass this information on to you (perhaps you knew, perhaps you didn't) because it's something you should consider in your diet. I never paid much attention to this, but thanks to my dad who's been studying quite a bit of medical material, I'm glad I got an earlier start. Thanks dad!

As part of my daily routine, I drink a cup of lemon water (1/2 lemon), and I'm still trying to eat more fruit regularly. Just the beginning, but I think a good one.

Jeremy Pivens. Now here's an actor whose presence seems to make every show more fun to watch for me. He seems like a light-hearted actor whose comedic timing is as good as anyone's. His cameos, like in Rush Hour 2 as a Versace salesman, are hilarious.

Just to let you know.

Everyone has lulls in their day... or just any reason to look for a distraction. These are the websites I visit to kill time:

Blogger, to write this here blog
Gmail for my email, of course
Google News Canada
Canucks.com
Taipei Times
Freakonomics' Authors' Blog
My company's stock performance on Yahoo! Stocks (no link, sorry)
Taiwan Yahoo! Bid
eBay.com

What about you? Where do you go?

A bizarre trip for the tastebuds.

I had a McDonald's breakfast this morning. Ham and Egg McMuffin with cheese. A different choice from my usual Sausage and Egg McMuffin (which I only have maybe only couple times a year as it were) - but I decided that the "sausage" is a little too salty and went with ham today instead. I don't know how H&EMs are made in Canada, but in Taiwan, it seems they put mayo in there. Understand now that mayo in Taiwan is closer to the Japanese sweet mayo. Put that in a salty McMuffin and you get a strange combination of salty sweetness that I don't care for in a McDonald's breakfast. I would advise against trying that here.

Sweet & Salty popcorn on the other hand is tasty. Try that instead.

I'm the kind of guy who likes coffee when it is doused with enough milk and sugar to make it taste unlike coffee. I'm not a coffee-lover, but I still like the smell of coffee. Coffee grounds are a good way to get rid of a stink in the fridge too. Does anyone not like the smell of coffee?

Went to the Taipei Zoo this weekend with A. I don't remember the last time I was at a zoo, but it was many, many moons ago. Going to the zoo is great. It's a relaxing stroll at your own pace out in the open air with lots to see. The Zoo is a short ways away from the city, so the air's much cleaner - better for both animals and humans. And at only 30nt for us "students", it's money very well spent.*

For a place whose purpose is to bring animals together, do you ever feel like you spend a whole lot of time looking for animals? You shuffle from one holding pen/cage/glass display to the next, read the introductory sign, and then spend the next couple of minutes scanning the premise for the actual animal ... often cursing it for hiding away in an unseen corner. Why can't they be more like show-off zoo animals in Madagascar?

A highlight for our visit was at the black bear pen. After feeding, one black bear sat up, looked up, and called towards the zoo visitors perched over the wall. The crowd looking down started waving at the bear, snapping away with their digital cameras. Then, the bear waved back! So that's the enclosed picture I've decided to share with you.

Turns out that the Taipei Zoo is much bigger than I had thought. We walked at a fairly relaxing pace, and I thought we covered pretty good ground. But a second look at a zoo map told me that we'd only seen about 1/7th of the zoo. We entered the zoo just after 3pm, so we didn't have time to see much else. We saw parts of the insectarium, some deer, emus, birds, reptiles and amphibians, and smelled some camels. We left seeing only 1/4 - 1/3 of what the zoo offered. So, I guess that means another visit is in order.

*30nt is less than $1 USD. Adult admission is 60nt. Compare this to $32 USD for adult admission to the San Diego zoo. Ouch.