#download a.download{ font: 14px "Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color: #fff; }

Hi,

My apologies for being so delayed from regular posting. It's been a painful few weeks in coding for me, and time passes by extremely fast.

Now, if you're at all familiar with creating a website, you know it can be super fun to make one. If you're an expert, what you're going to read in this post will look stupid. If you're not an expert, you'll think website-making is a terrible world best left for professionals.

The thing is, to further expand my adventurous life as an entrepreneur, me and my business partner decided we could make an online shop for stuff we could sell cheap from China to Finland and elsewhere in Europe possibly. Not consumer goods, but stuff businesses need. Not like industrial components, but practical things. I won't give futher details, though, as it is still not ready and giving away details of my business to our millions of readers would probably end up in an idea-theft. Anyway, to get such a business going, we need a website.

I'm the only one of us who actually knows anything about making a website. So I got that winning ticket. I have a good understanding of HTML code and a bit experience in CSS. That's it. And I write everything in Notepad. I'm that old-school (or unskilled).

So, with those skills of mine, I had a task of creating a fully operational website that can provide a kind of online shopping function (not a real webstore, but with plenty of online forms to fill).

The first week went really well. I was creating the main graphic layout and the CSS to support it - albeit the visual image has changed about 3 times since, everytime to the better. I managed to put in a basic ordering system and some contents.

Second week I was working 14-15 hours a day (sleeping 5-6 hours) to get stuff into the website, and finally started having those rookie mistakes that make pros cry.

It's easy to put text into a website, but it's not easy to make them look super-cool and have them behave as you want them. Especially when you're using a frameless CSS layout. It's a magical thing what one misplaced comma or a missing '>' can do. With one small typo your whole website might ceace to exist the way you knew it. It might take a life of its own. The worst is if you don't exactly remember what you changed in the code just before - or if it takes you a long time to notice you've made a mistake (the changes are, you might have to go through everything to find that missing comma).

I had that. I missed one > after closing a bold text command. Took me two hours to find where I went wrong.

Also took me around two hours to find out why some pictures didn't open in Internet Explorer while opening perfectly normally in Mozilla. I thought it's my code and I went through it over and over again. No mistakes there - simple code - why isn't the damned thing working?! Oh, turned out some of the pictures were saved in CMYK-colours which, it turns out, IE doesn't open but Mozilla does. I converted the pictures to RGB and the thing worked like a charm again.

For the online forms, I also added a CAPCHA-security field so that visitors have to type in those funky characters to designate themselves as humans and not as spambots. For this I had to venture a completely new world of coding: PHP and Java - both which I had no experience from before. After working zealously to get CAPCHA working, my form stopped working. It worked almost, but it had one flaw: the emails that I received from the process.php protocol didn't have any of the '+' signs in the contact information (as in, someone would put in country code for a phone number). Turns out PHP code considers '+' as a space-character. Took me god knows how many hours to figure out how to fix that.

Today, I've had my favourite code-glitch of them all! Didn't take me as long to find the problem since it's in my familiar CSS code, but it's quite amusing.

At a location of the CSS code file, I have: #download a.download{ font: 14px "Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color: #fff; }. This means that in Div type="download" if there is a link class="download" it'll have font size 14px in Arial and black colour. I used to have a html file that used that Div Type but I didn't need it in the end so I've deleted the html file a long while ago. However, I forgot to take out this line from the CSS file, but then, usually it shouldn't be a problem. The important thing is, it's a kind of leftover in the code that nothing uses.

Or so I thought.

Internet Explorer uses it. Internet Explorer needs this particular piece of code to make the website work. Mozilla doesn't, nor does any other browser. IE, for some reason, can't make my right side window and footer work if there is no code that would tell IE that in Div type="download" if there is a link class="download" it'll have font size 14px in Arial and black colour. I can change the font size and nothing happens, I can change the colour of the font and nothing happens. But if I take out the code all hell breaks loose! So, I'll leave the code there.

I'm quite sure this kind of leftover code is what will eventually make real Artificial Intelligence - or a kind of a real intelligence for machines. By wilfully creating AI ourselves, humans can only aspire for intelligence similar to our own intelligence. However, true intelligence has freedom and it cannot be dictated. Hence, only from true randomness and chaos can it be born!

I know a missing comma doesn't sound very intelligent. But look at it this way: I wanted it to work - I made in a way it should work and it looked smart enough - however, through a small mistake, I lost control of the beast and it took a life of its own!

Geeks are the lion tamers of today.

Tomorrow life is "ho best".

I decided to dig an old draft from the depths of infinite bit-space, and finish it , to commit to our blog in somehow, since I've been recently very lazy with my posting. This is excusing myself, but I tend to do that sometimes, so deal with it or go cry to momma. Anyways, the post.. ;

Malaysia has been criticized by some because of its "tomorrow" culture. Simply put, it means that in Malaysia everything is done "tomorrow" - nothing happens today, now, very soon, or currently. There is just "Today I'm having this and that, but TOMORROW everything is fixed." Sounds great until you realized that this applies to every single thing on every single day, so virtually nothing is ever happening.

In work life this is quite annoying; boss is pushing me to push projects through, and then I have to explain him every day, today and TOMORROW that why the fuck nothing is happening today. Luckily enough, he seems to be quite accepting to the concept of tomorrow as well. I've learned, however, that telling him "next week" is way worse. If you tell "next week", he says "ALWAYS THE NEXT WEEK! CAN'T WAIT ANYMORE!", despite its possible/happening/etc or not. 'Tomorrow' answer, however, makes him smile despite the thing happening or not. Strange.

Well. Anyways, I guess the main thing to pick from this post is that making a successful business is quite difficult in Malaysia if you depend on contractors or other outsourced elements, because I'd claim that managing them takes a lot more effort here, than in Hong Kong for example, where everyone is more than eager to work. Culture and motivation issue then, so to say.

Mess

Today I'm going to whine about dress code. My company has one, and I'm quite sure a great number of companies in Malaysia do also. Dress code custom is ridiculous, it's just like the old rule of taking one's hat off when eating. On a practical level you DON'T need to wear a suit when typing and making phone calls nor you need to take your hat off while eating, because there is no practical reason behind either of those.

Does everything need to be practical? Well certainly not, but how about letting me mind about my hat and my dressing and my practicalities? Dress code has been invented by someone sometime and the reason is "because". For example, last week I poured coffee on my pair of trousers which I've just picked from a dry clean service. Today, I poured melting butter from my toast on my other trousers (also dry cleaned last week). If I had jeans, I couldn't care less - wipe n wash. But now, I have to went again through all the trouble to bring both of my trousers to dry clean service, open my wallet, hand them money, wait one (1) day, and then I can mess my trousers with some other funky stuff again (;)). Just because my boss wants me to look professional. People who have no real problems have great talent of making their life harder in some other ways.

Hopefully it's something really permanent next time when I mess my trousers again, like epoxy paint or superglue, so I need to spend more fucking money to buy more fucking ridiculous suits and trousers to be allowed to work in this company 'cause I fucking need to look fucking professional. I mean, in army I understand the dress code because they actually DO have some practicalities behind it, but on a real life. What the FUCK?! Maybe you, dear reader, think that I'm whining about the slightest things - sod off to you too.

Thank you Mr. Dress Code Inventer. You ruined my day today again, as you have done for oh so many days before.

Super Duper Management

I don't even know what a good management means nowadays, but I'm pretty damn sure what super duper management means. Super duper management = make your sub-ordinates bust their assess off from every penny you pay them, and then.. Don't pay them! The plan is perfect until you realize that all of the subordinates have resigned and there is no-one to actually do the work anymore.

Two statements;
-Paying minimal or no salary is a great way to save money and use it on something less useful instead.
-Finding employees with good spirit is easy, but after 2 months the spirits can be brought down irreversibly.

I don't know yet how costly it is to a company to lose an employee, but I'm sure the idea of "lets make him work his ass off until he quits" may become cheaper than the normal way of paying decent wage to an efficient employee. However, this requires a steady supply of blue-eyed employee's to be taken in and tossed out of the company.

Human Resource Management has billions of aspects, and I believe that normal levels, principals and customs of salary is just a small thing needed to be done right. Doing the salary dance in a proper way results in less de-motivation, as stated by Frederick Herzberg in his theory of job motivation. Everywhere. People care about the money, and its a bit sad to all the noble employers in the world who just would like things to be free and everyone be happy for free.

I'm not saying this is the style of management in some particular area of the world, but you can draw your own conclusions from this Blog's area of focus.

Bad Week, Eh?

Judging from Markvs's previous post I'm not the only one having a rough week.

But let him tell you of his and let me tell you of mine. We've got a container coming up. If all goes well we're loading on Friday and next week will be smoother sailing with at least one fun project coming up.

But the workload for this container, just one, is serously unproportioned. We have a new location from where we are loading from - I will arrange the workforce and loading. We have a new shipping company we are using - extra worry. The products for the container won't be finished until day before the loading and will need to be transported to a different warehouse. Oh, and we have several side projects going in to the container including prints and stands.

So I'm running between the factories doing the products and arranging everything for the container. If I pull this off I believe most future containers will be much, much easier. It's just that this one can not be late and is more difficult than any of the previous ones.

I know it's my job, sure, but I'm stuck between a deadline and my boss doing equal parts of work, worry and hoping for the best. It's stressful enough. On a side note, I used to have problems waking up in the morning; up to this I've been a late sleeper. Not anymore. I wake up 20-30 minutes before my alarm, having checked the time usually more than an hour before. Nothing serious, but I believe it's caused by pressure at work. No problems falling asleep though, and I get enough hours a night to get trough the day, it's just different.

OP out.

Off to a Bad Start

Ever met a guy who had a deadline, who proceeded to ask a supplier for a schedule and got a big Can-Do as an answer? Let me know, I want his job.

The first phone call to the factory today wasn't a success and I'll definitely need a second opinion from the same people. I hope I can get the schedule better as my boss will probably kill me otherwise. 

The fact that it's basically the factory's responsibility for not meeting a wanted deadline doesn't mitigate the response I get from my boss. Well, I'll try to worry about that when it comes to it. Worrying never solves a problem, it doesn't even make you feel better. It's just that when you have pressure from work, worrying comes quite easily.

But it's not like I don't have pleasant things to look forward to, as well. It's just that I would like one of those things to be telling my boss what the factory told me.

OP out

More about Power and Distance

To supplement Markvs's post about Power Distance, I must say that having a short (or is it small - two words you don't want to hear from a woman anyway) Power Distance isn't that great either with the wrong boss.

The thing about short power distance is that while your boss is more friendly with you, and maybe acknowledges your skills better - you might not want him to do either.

Let's elaborate:

Having a boss as a friend is great, if the particular person is someone you'd most likely to be friends with anyway. However, when a boss you don't really like wants to be friends, the situation turns crap. You don't want his attention, you don't want any extra crap. You just want to do your job. Period.

In a proper company, if you have to do overtime or anything extra, there is a proper compensation for it. Or at least something is agreed upon. In a "friendly" company, there's a chance the extra work turns to be the standard, and are expected to do extra work because you're all such a big happy family, all putting in 130% effort for the common cause.

And he acknowledges your skills, eh? Well great. He can throw more work at you! Super fun since now you can work extra tasks.

"Our company hires several professionals"
Wrong, it's one guy doing several people's jobs at one go. And no need to hire any more people.

Well, of course not all bosses are like that, and having a short power distance can be the greatest thing ever. However, though maybe most bosses are not total pricks, all it takes is one. Your own boss.

Nothing personal here, of course.

Analysis on Asian Power Distance

One thing that I completely hate about people is the concept of power distance. Seriously, I unleash my blackest hatred on people who think of themselves greater than others, and this can be also applied to work life. Guess what?Asia has power distance, I live in Asia. Maybe Asian people are so beat-down in the beginning of their career that they become tyrants later on? I really don't know, but I know that I damn sure don't like Asian bosses shouting, disrespecting, spitting and telling their sub-ordinates how to live their life. Job is just a job, and despite how much a boss values one's employee's skills, there should be mutual respect with an employer and an employee.

Maybe I'm talking about this with too narrow perspective, but before proven otherwise, my conception is this. Of course on the other hand, it is easy to see the benefits with power distance once you've grown into it (ie. without it workers don't do shit), but a method of managers discussing the solution, and later on forcing the workers to complete their job does not deliver enough to me. It results in serious overtimes, exhaustion, too high competition amongst the workforce, and all-in-all missing the real point of life. Pooping.

When managers don't cope on a same level with their sub-ordinates, they will never know how to create a solution to the problem. They instead create even more problems, while they should create solutions. I dare to argue that with a great power distance, a manager is bound to be partly unaware of one's employee's competences and areas of expertise. If the situation would be different, we could easily see how and what are the means of completing a task. Right now we instead got pink-clouded dreams of impossible schedules, technical solutions and such. A common worker knows how to dig a hole, he knows how long it takes, and he damn sure knows what tools and how many men are needed. Manager doesn't know these things in a situation where one just wants things done, but never contributes.

In order to understand the procedures and requirements of digging a hole, manager should have respect, discussion and genuine interest to those who can and will do it. Otherwise the job is done inefficiently, there is unnecessary tension around, and furthermore, the job takes a good while longer to complete. For me, this is directly connected with the concept of power distance - without it, if the problems still persists, its relatively easy to discover which of the involved parties (employee, employer etc) are incompetent.

Power distance does not need to be completely absent. However, it should derive from a healthy and natural respect of higher position instead of a whip and shouting.