Milo spoils easily

In my Uni days when I had to go to the lab to work on my Honours Year Project, I had what I thought was a great idea and decided to bring along a thermos flask of milo that I had prepared at home since the labs were always very cold and it was great to have a hot drink.

It was then that I discovered that Milo turns sour very quickly even when you keep it in a vacuum thermos flask…

Designing Experiments

In the course of improving a process or product, you may need to utilise experiments to isolate which are the factors that are most important (remember the 80/20 rule?).

While the design of experiments is usually touched on in University, the concepts may all be forgotten by the time the student is ready to apply them in the commercial world. For a quick refresher, Wikipedia has a succinct article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_of_experiments

The skill of estimating activity durations

Unfortunately, this is one skill that probably can only be developed through repeated mistakes because it is not likely that a freshly minted graduate will be able to give an accurate estimate of the duration that an activity will require.

If anything, it is common for people to overestimate their abilities and underestimate the amount of time required to complete an activity. As a rule of thumb, you will probably need to add a buffer to your estimates but not to the extent that you end up “padding” your duration estimates (which is not considered professional behaviour).

Ah Goh the instant drunk

There was this guy in the same training cadre as me who had a “special skill” — he could get drunk really easily! And by easy, I mean he just needed half a can of SAF beer before he became drunk and incoherent!

I suppose that is not the ultimate because Esh said she knows of someone who is able to be a bit light-headed just by inhaling a bit of alcohol fumes!