Simple^4 Xiaoming Wang

Flickr is one of the best online photo sharing Website which was blocked by GFW recently.
I do not want to argue the reasons or how stupid Chin-gov is! But you can refer to a tread
of my friend cokee’s blog.

Fortunately a walk around has already been there for Flickr+Firefox users to access their
photo album without any trouble.

The Firefox add-on is called Access Flickr, current version 1.5 by Hamed Saber who is
an awesome guy! Access Flickr support Firefox:
2.0a1 – 3.0a5 currently and released

Version 1.5 — June 2, 2007 — 18 KB

Iran, UAE, Saudi Arabia, China and other banned countries and places… banned Flickr!
Shame on those countries!!

China, check who you are standing with!!!!

Thanks Firefox, Open source and Flickr users!

UK is one of the dream lands of young boys and girls for education. Not only because there is the best are educational system on the planet but there are friendly hosts, fabulous living environment and good job opportunities.It is legal to work in the UK by holding a student VISA. Please check the legal statement below and be aware of the terms and conditions.

Having been granted leave to remain as a student, there is no objection to you to taking part time job or vacation work. However, while you may work full-time during vacation periods, you must not work more than 20 hours per week during term-time, expect where the placement meets the definition of a sandwich course or an internship. As a student, you must not engage in business, self-employment or the provision of services as a professional sportsperson or entertainer; and you must not pursue a career by filling a permanent full-time vacancy.

There are different part time job opportunities available for students to choose. They have been organized into the categories and illustrated in the Fig A:

Fig A

From Fig A, we can see there are plenty of chances in the universities and Chinese or anti-Chinese business.

As well there are different job seeking mechanism generally. See the Fig B for more information:

Fig B

It seems that the job seeking mechanism is not as much as available jobs. Basically, “Ask help from A friend” and “Go to the job centre” will be the two efficient ways to get a job successfully. Although the accurately number has not been calculated based on certain surveys readers can still see how many ways to get a part time job.

The relationship between the job seeking mechanism and Work categories is illustrated in the Fig C:

Fig C

From the three diagrams we can clearly see the points below:

• University jobs will be applied only in its own framework
• If you want to work in a restaurant or as a cleaner “Ask for help from a friend” would be a good choice.
• For the Anti-Chinese job opportunities go for the job centre or newspapers for more information.
• Sometimes, students can directly visit the shops, restaurants and ask if they need staffs to do part time jobs.

Generally the process of getting a job will be:

1. Look for job vacancies information
2. Contact the job opportunities publisher or employer
3. Try to get an interview
4. Sign a contract
5. Get pay and your payslip every week or month

OK, last thing, payment. Different job has different value, so the employer will pay differently. The experience told us that Chinese teacher and working in university normally would get more money than any other business. Chinese restaurant would always be the last place to work because the pay is a piece of shit.

Cleaner is probably a good job for lots of new comes. You do not have to speak English frequently and the money is not bad compared with the jobs in restaurant. Key job has its advantages because you do not have to work in a solid hours. However it is not easy to get one.

Tips:

• Working experience is important. If you do not have some, at least pretend you do.
• Chinese students, always join a working environment without Chinese people around, otherwise your English would never been improved rapidly.
• As fast as possible call your interested employer when you get information from Friday AD, other newspapers or job centre.

Reference

Friday AD: http://www.friday-ad.co.uk/

Job centre: http://www.jobcentreplus.gov.uk/JCP/index.html

Definition

Consulting business has been getting more and more market share across industries.

IT giants (Oracle, IBM, HP, SAP, SAS, Accenture etc ) have been doing this business for quite a long time. Most of the big enterprises have benefit from those IT consulting service by improving their management of Information system.

There are still lots of medium size companies and manufacture in south of China don’t have good ISIT strategies and Management system. Focusing on these customers, this would be an busness point.

Above, the possibilities of creating a new business growing point are obvious. Then how to run the business, in another word how to run an ISIT consulting company has been put on the table.

There are three keys for running such a business. They are “Client”, “Contract” and “Resources”.

Obviously, Client is the most important one of the three. No client, no contract , resources would be useless.

Client — Satisfaction

• Client’s satisfaction. KFS, in order to achieve Client’s satisfaction, there are several things we need to accomplish.

1. Create benefit which can be seen in Client’s finacial report
2. Cut down CTR
3. Management team and employees satisfaction.
4. Accomplish deliverables on time.

• What does Client really wants? It really does matter. Sometimes, Client is not 100% sure what they want. Consultant has to help Client to produce an equirement report.
• How Client want the deliverable to be delivered? Sometimes, consultant did an excellent job but did not deliver it in a right way. For example, Client want all the documents to be deliver in a Website with doc lib but we might deliver it in a hard copy. Although there are nothing different for the deliverables.
• Communication. Could not be less important. Before everything has been started, clarify the resposibilities of everyone involve in the project and build more than one communication tunnel and set up interface in the process of communication.

Contract — Achievable and different

• Contract template, don’t have to talk too much about it. A professiona template is enough.
• Bottom line, what we can do. What we can do in the period of contract.

1. Promise only what we can do and do well.
2. Know what we can learn and do well in a period of time (contract period)
3. Never tell Clinet what we can not do, but what we are not professional at.

• Breakdown into different phases

1. Break down contract into different phases, if the contract is too hard to be negotiated.
2. At least get one phase of the contract and try to get all the phases of the contract.
3. Avoid doing the phase that we are not good at.

• Budget of the contract, get a good negotiator to deal with. Any other good way?
• Market price, be aware of the market price of the business, try to know other biders’ bid in the competition
• Shining points, something different with other competitors. Something that they would care, maybe.

Resources: MIS + knowledge database + People — All of them are crucial

1. MIS (ERP) — Finance + PM + HR + File server (Document lib) + Website + Simple CRM + Software dev environment (Optional, for fun). MIS is for ourselves, for the continuing improvement and growing.
2. Knowledge database — Web based application with portal. “Tools”
3. People — Consultant, has to be or have

• • • Team player,
    • Business sense
    • Never stop learning.
    • Good code of English and Mandarin.
    • At least be professional in one scientific area.
    • Have more than one hobby.

Project management

It is a complicated topic, refer to A Guide To The Project Management Body of Knowledge

Key factors of success

Deliverables, credit, partner + relationship

For cooperation, policies:

1. There is no difference between employees. (Wal-mart)
2. Be creative, do things differently (BOC)
3. Open working environment (Platform)
4. Work as a team, there is only one team! (Tesco)
5. Everyone is talent. (From me?? haha)
6. Treat everyone as treat your self, life as one family (Tesco + Dalian Loco)

Notes and Definitions

It’s hard enough to make local relationships work, but having miles, states, and sometimes even an ocean between you makes it even more difficult. However, successful long distance relationships can and do exist. Here’s how to give yours every chance to survive and thrive.

Steps

1. Ask the important questions at the onset, to make sure you are both clear on the parameters of the relationship. These can be difficult and awkward questions to ask, but will save you great heartache and misunderstanding down the line.
   • Will you be dating others and will you tell each other about your other dates
   • Are you open to the possibility of relocating if the relationship should become more serious?
2. Communicate in some way every day - more than once if possible. Since you won’t be seeing each other, it’s important to establish and maintain an emotional connection. These don’t have to be long, in-depth conversations (though those should occur sometimes). Tell each other about your little triumphs and tragedies. Ask for advice. Sing songs together. Use an instant messenger program or VoIP for real-time chat, or webcams for that visual connection. Have “racy” conversations late at night. E-mail is great so make sure you use it, especially if long-distance phone calls put a strain on your budget. Write love letters. Send small gifts or flowers for no reason. In this case, quantity is as important as quality. You may discover an advantage over others whose partner is close at hand - you don’t take communication for granted!
3. Take advantage of the benefits a long distance relationship offers: more time with friends and/or family, no arguments over toothpaste caps, the pleasure of seeing your sweetheart again after a long absence, time to mull your options (rather than snapping at your partner impulsively) before you respond to that email s/he wrote that seemed so rude the first time you read it, etc. Most important, being far apart gives you a chance to maintain your individuality - something that can get lost in the shuffle when couples spend all their free time together.
4. Pursue common interests, even if it means pursuing them apart. If there’s a movie you’re both interested in seeing, watch it individually and then call each other afterward and talk about it. Read a certain book at the same time. Stargaze while on you’re on the phone. Set your watches to go off at the same time every day, and synchronize your alarm with that of your partner. Make it a point to think of each other when your watch goes off, and revel in the fact that he or she is thinking about you, too. Find creative ways to bond.
5. Avoid the temptation to try to control your significant other. People have free will and no one can control another person. As long as you are both interested in being in the relationship, you will stick with it and distance will not make a difference. As soon as one of you decides the other is not a good match - or someone else is a better match - your relationship ends, whether you live 3000 miles apart, two streets over, or share the same bed with your wedding picture on the wall. You’re going to have to trust your significant other completely if this relationship is going to work.
6. Talk about your future together. Assuming that ultimately you’d want to live together, discussing how you’re going to get to that point will help you prove to each other that the relationship is going somewhere and that your efforts and frustrations are not in vain.
7. Know when to say good-bye. While this is tough in any relationship, this can be especially hard over long distances. When communication becomes one-sided or sparse for too long and for no apparent reason, when arguments (yes, you’ll have them) become too frequent, when the whole thing just seems like more trouble than it’s worth, it’s time to re-evaluate the relationship. Either you’ll decide to go your separate ways, or you’ll get closer for having overcome another obstacle to your happiness together.

Tips

• A long distance relationship is no different from a proximal relationship in that they both require a great deal of work, excellent communication, patience, sacrifice and understanding. But you will have to work extra hard to maintain the communication and to stay focused enough to not let your daily life interfere with your desire to be with the other person. Don’t forget them or you can forget the relationship.
• One of the hardest parts of a long distance relationship is connecting when one person gets busier than the other. If this happens in a relationship it is important to maintain communication. If you are the busy person, try to warn your partner ahead of time that you will be working many hours and may have limited time. If you are the not-as-busy person, take advantage of the time by picking up a new hobby, getting in shape, reading a new book, etc. Flexibility is very important.
• It helps to have a solid time in the future for when the long distance part of the relationship will end, no matter the time length. Without it, the relationship can begin to mold into something that is always distant - even with great communication. With it, potentially each person can see the point at which the distance will end and work harder to keep emotions readily available.
• When talking to your partner, take note of things they enjoy the most (hobbies, day-to-day activities, etc…) and do a little research on it so you have more to do when you see them next. For example: If your partner likes to dance, find the location of different clubs where you will see them next. If you don’t know how to dance, take lessons and you will impress them by your willingness to make an effort on their behalf.

Warnings

• Long distance relationships are not for the faint of heart. They can be very trying - but so can proximal relationships. If you are a very needy or jealous person, recognize that these tendencies may not be compatible with any type of healthy relationship, but may make a long distance relationship nearly impossible to sustain.
• Remember that only you and your long distance partner understand the nuances of your relationship. Friends, family and colleagues may not understand your preoccupation with someone you have never met or rarely meet. Listen to their advice with a grain of salt unless they have been there themselves.

The article is from wiki.ehow.com