Winza

This article on TheAge warns about going to Japan to teach English. I’ve heard a lot of stories from other people saying how bad Nova is and how bad they treat English teachers in Japan. From the TheAge:

One 27-year-old from Melbourne, working in Chiba, in the east, said he had been forced to eat only rice and instant miso soup for a week while waiting for his pay, which arrived two weeks late: “Many of those were one-meal-a-day affairs. We’re not loaded — a lot of us live week to week.”

I wouldn’t be able to manage in such harsh conditions. To eat the same thing everyday without meat, veges or other snacks would be a nightmare for me. Thinking back about the application nine months ago, I am starting to appreciate the rejection of the program. If the interview was successful, I would be having a hard time in Japan, I wouldn’t have bought my own car and I wouldn’t have gotten the opportunity to work where I am at now. It would be hard to adjust to living by myself anyway as I am so attached to Melbourne and being with my family.

My current job suits me better. I don’t need to talk to people and I can face the computer eight hours a day and draw maps. That is what I enjoy doing, teaching English to strangers isn’t.

Today I was going through a bunch of new jobs (mostly new developments) to be inputted into GIS. As I was going through them, I found two sewer pump stations that were way too advanced, a couple of water main renewals that had already been done and some other random bits and pieces. And then there were three more that I had to put on hold because the prerequisite data are not on the system yet. Two hours later, I managed to find something that I could input. So I was happily importing files until I encountered an error in the GIS software, which I didn’t know how to solve. I sought help from the person who sat next to me and he inspected the raw data which was in ascii format. Thirty minutes later, we discovered some coding for the pipes were incorrect and we fixed it. Then we ran the importing process again and it worked. We opened up the development area in GIS and found the sewer features had been duplicated. And guess what? The job has already been put it but it hasn’t been marked as done in the job recording database.

This was stupid. But I did learn another lesson: It was to check the area before importing and adding new features into the system. As simple as that.

Today at work, I was drawn attention to this article and it made me realise that the amount of we consume is much greater than we’d thought. This excludes the water we drink, wash and flush our toilet with. It is not suprising that the more processed an item is, the more water it consumes because processed things undergo more stages in their life compared to less processed goods such as apples and eggs. (LCA - different thing, but can also be applied to water)

So.. should we only buy things that has the least water footprint? No way!

While this article reminds us of how much negative impact we can impose our environment and our (limited - because water is scarce in Australia) water resources, it is unneccessary to totally deprive ourselves of luxury items just because it would increase our ecological/water footprint, but rather be a little bit more conscious on what we buy and how to use our resources more wisely.

Buddhism holds that all things exist together in mutual interdependence and that nothing exists in isolation. (Indigo, May 2007)

Productivity decreases dramatically when working with old, complex and tedious datasets. And on top of that, different people have bombarded me with different approaches for the data cleanup. Three days and I haven’t completed converting one single record.

This is bugging me!!!