冤枉啊！！！

This incident happened in JC where a group of us were gathered in the canteen having our ice milos and just having a small gathering in between lessons. The moment we stood up to go, the grumpy old lady in the canteen shouted at us to remind us to pick up our cups. This was uncalled for as we always picked up after ourselves and never left any cutlery or utensils behind.

Unfortunately for us, the VP happened to be in the canteen at that time and he immediately thought the worst of us and sent us to the office to be dealt with. As we knew that we did nothing wrong, we had a standoff with the VP and things remained at a stalemate until our form teacher came to the office to vouch for us and we were allowed to leave.

XHTML DTDs

With so many people using visual drag-and-drop tools to create web pages nowadays, I wonder how many people still truly appreciate what goes on behind the scenes after they click on “Save”?

Based on current standards, if the tools you used to create the web page is compliant with standards, it should specify a W3C DTD that it will comply with, failing which it may not be rendered properly by an Internet browser. But of course, so many Internet browsers are so flexible (read non-compliant) that they tend to forgive errors and attempt to interpret and render the page anyway.

Here are the 4 DTDs where one be used in your web pages depending on your needs.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”>

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Frameset//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-frameset.dtd”>

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd”>

The Project Dashboard

The Project Dashboard is a business metric that is sorely lacking in many organisations. Even if it exists, it might not be updated in a timely manner. However, credit should be given to the people in the PMO who valiantly try to get the PMs to update the Project Dashboard in an accurate and timely fashion.

In one of the places where I worked, the management tried to introduce a Project Dashboard through the use of a Knowledge Management tool. I must say that it was a very good effort as it immediately gave the HoD an idea of a project’s status via the green, amber and red indicators. Buy-in was an entirely different story as the people running the projects were already overloaded and could barely contend with their daily tasks and project tasks…

SBC dramas

Back when I was a wee laddie, I was staying at my grandma’s home for the weekdays as it was closer to school. What I can vividly remember was staying up to catch every episode of those SBC dramas that were broadcasting at Channel 8 at 9.30pm on weekday nights.

Well, it turns out that watching Chinese dramas does not improve your Chinese language skills as I can bear testament to that. Perhaps the learning benefits of the drama could not overpower the TV’s power of turning brains to mush…

Sungei Buloh Nature Reserve

So far, I’ve only been to the Sungei Buloh Nature Reserve once, and that was during a field trip for one of the Cross-Faculty modules in University!

I wasn’t particularly impressed because I don’t really think I’m really a nature outdoorsy kind of guy, or maybe it’s just because I’ve had more than my fair share of flora and fauna during my army days…

The Project Charter

How important is this document called the Project Charter? I must admit that I have not seen such a document nor have I written one so far in all the organisations that I have worked for. Conventionally, it is supposed to contain quite a few bits of information, but I feel that the most important sections that should be shared with all members of the project team are the Statement of Work and the Business Case

The Statement of Work describes the expected deliverables of the project while the Business Case illustrates whether the project is viable from a business perspective. With these two documents, the members of the project team will know what they are striving to achieve and should get the bigger picture of what their “small” individual tasks are contributing towards.