w00kie's ramblings

Category: Work stuff

  • REAL TALK 🇯🇵

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    w00kie
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    I appreciate the transparency effort of giving average monthly overtime at your company in a Job Description for recruitment. But how can you write down “40 to 70 hours” and not think “we have a problem” ?

  • Corporate flu prevention in Japan

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    w00kie
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    Since coming back from Golden Week vacations, my company has been sending flu-related information by email to all employees twice a week. Last week we had an employee coming back from the US get yanked into quarantine at Narita for a week because he sat in the vicinity of a guy with a fever. Today…

  • Golden Parachutes or Organized Cartel: which is more popular?

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    w00kie
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    Last week my company, Valeo, made the frontpage of all the big newspapers (at least in Europe) as our CEO stepped down and was given a 3.2M€ “golden parachute” farewell bonus in spite of the company needing governmental aid to stay afloat. The French government promptly started working on a new law to ban such…

  • What is your job?

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    w00kie
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    I have a private mailing-list with my closest childhood friends which we use to keep in touch now that we’re spread all around the world. One of them, who recently finished an MBA at Waseda and has yet to jump into the business world, started a thread asking all of us to describe our jobs…

  • Alone at work for Christmas

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    w00kie
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    It’s christmas day and I’m at the office, working… Actually, it’s nothing unusual for Japan where the 25th is a day like any other day. But this year is special: you should know that I work for a big French automotive parts manufacturer, and this is not a very fun time for us. Car production…

  • Custom Django filters in Google App Engine

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    w00kie
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    You want to create your own custom Django filters in App Engine without running a whole Django stack? Here’s how in a few lines of code. First create a specific python file to hold your custom filters at the root of your application. In my case I use customfilters.py like this: import re from google.appengine.ext…

  • Crossdomain proxy on Google App Engine

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    w00kie
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    Here’s a crossdomain proxy to pipe Javascript Ajax calls from you Google App Engine application to the Flickr API, since most browser will not let you call another domain directly. import cgi import urllib from google.appengine.ext import webapp from google.appengine.api import urlfetch class FlickrController(webapp.RequestHandler): “””Proxy for Ajax calls to flickr””” def get(self): flickrapiendpoint = ‘http://api.flickr.com/services/rest/’…

  • Let’s leave 20 teeth at age 80!

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    w00kie
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    More cool Dental Health info from my Japanese health insurance society. Coming back from Golden Week vacation, I find the following letter on my desk at work: Information for Dental Checkup and Treatment: Announcing the “Let’s leave 20 teeth at age 80” campaign Aren’t your decayed teeth or pyorrhea getting worse while you are unaware…

  • Meeting shenanigans

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    w00kie
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    Just a random conversation during one of my team’s daily meetings at work: Colleague: We have a problem with the *censored* server. Boss: Where is that server located? Colleague: It’s in the Intellectual Property room, on the 2nd floor of the Reliability building. Me: Yeah, you know that place? It’s right next to the office…

  • More tax fun!

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    w00kie
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    January sees its share of administrative tasks for the new year that just started. So I received some new forms from my office’s executive assistant and as usual the English information sheet is of great help: Special Tax Credit Inform of special tax credit (deduction of housing loan) system like house loan etc. of residence…

  • MQL baffles me

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    w00kie
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    My job consists of writing functional specifications and generally managing the architecture of a big R&D information system based on a wonderful jack-of-all-trade application called eMatrix from Dassault. I often delve deep into the application with the MQL console (for Matrix Query Language) to dig out some insight into the data we manage. And, more…

  • Year-end tax adjustment

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    w00kie
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    I was just handed by my service’s executive assistant a 2 page “Year-end tax adjustment declaration for 2007” with a little not saying the deadline is in 5 days. The forms are accompanied by an English leaflet full of statements like this one: Special exemption for spouses Due to the change of income low (sic.),…

  • Cursed business trip

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    w00kie
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    I’m in Detroit Metro airport waiting or my flight back to Tokyo from my 1 week business trip to the US and I hope my troubles are over. Here’s a quick list of the problems so far: In NYC on the first night, my friend got strangled by a crazy drunk jock as we were…

  • Business trip to the US

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    w00kie
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    Tomorrow I’m leaving for the US we’re I’ll conduct some training sessions and will discuss implementation of new systems with people from the North American division of my company. Here’s the flight plan: One weekend in NYC to see a friend 2.5 days in Dallas 2.5 days in Detroit 15470 miles 32 hours 35 minutes…

  • Recruiting

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    w00kie
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    Today I had my first interview from the recruiting side of the table. My contract will end in less than 6 months so we’re looking for someone to replace me in job. Right now I’m working 50% on technical administration and 50% on functional administration. My replacement would take 100% of the technical stuff and…