Winza

Here comes the weekend and I am sitting at home doing nothing but surfing on the net, playing on my Wii and watching random videos on my mac. For the past two weeks I have been staying at home all Saturday and Sunday, refusing to go to the kaikan, refusing to call my friends and refusing to travel elsewhere. The only times when I have been out on weekends is when I go out for lunch with my parents on Sunday afternoons - that is the only time I get to go out without spending any of my own money. I might be lazy or I might be reluctant to spend too much. When you go out, you would have to conform to the long list of rules of social etiquette. When you go out, it is more than likely, you would need to spend money. Even if you don’t buy anything or have a meal, you would need to pay for at least $6 for the train ticket. At the moment, I am trying very hard to resist the temptations of cake, Starbucks coffee, good food, going to the movies, travelling to the city and buying random things to indulge myself. It is working so far, but I don’t know how long it can last for. Every dollar I earn, every dollar I save, will go towards my debt repayments and my future house, my future home.

I haven’t done anything interesting lately besides work related stuff.

Yesterday, I attended a GIS seminar/open forum event in the city. As a result, I had to take the train to Mitcham in the morning and then to the city in the afternoon. Commuting to work took twice as long, but it was a nice change from driving. I attended the seminar with another colleague.

When I first got off the lift, I was quite nervous and wished that I hadn’t put up my hand for it. There were about 15 representatives from various water authorities around Victoria and all of them were experienced in the spatial industry. I was the only new kid in the industry who attended the event. For the first hour, one of the representatives from another organisation presented their own GIS system and the challenges in dealing with spatial data in the water industry. This was followed by a discussion in the second hour about the same topic. All I did there was wrote notes and listened to others.

There was something important that I learnt in the forum. And that was the amount of politics involved. There was quite a bit of discussion regarding whether there should be one entity involved in distributing data to other organisations and whether water authorities in Melbourne are in the government or public sector. Things like sharing data with other government authorities and having property data with different attributes had generated a lot of heated discussion. One solution to solve such kinds of problems is to form a representative group from each of the water authorities and to set a standard for sharing, submitting and recording spatial data. But then again, that in its own is another issue.

I am never good at public speaking, but I hope to improve. So far this year, I have had to do two speeches - one at Steph’s wedding and another for Youth Day in SGI. Other than that, I occasionally have to do some random demonstrations in team meetings and attend a few job interviews. I have had a bit of practice doing prepared speeches but I never seem to be confident enough to do it out of the blue. So I’ve decided to attend a few toastmaster sessions at lunchtimes to see if that would help me with my speaking. The first two sessions were a little daunting because most people are experienced speakers. But as long as I have the determination, I will eventually get the best out of toastmasters and improve.

From top to bottom: Cardboard Structure - Flower on Peak - Droplet on Leaf - Cafe Spy - Life in the Cold - Survival.

The long weekend is almost over. It’s work and problem solving all over again tomorrow.

Cycling/Pedestrian Path under High Street. Taken 1st June 2008.