A New Phase

I’m having my last assessment centre tomorrow with the interview held next Wednesday. The interview is supposed to be held tomorrow as well, but the partner that’s supposed to interview me is away. Thus, I have to do it next Wednesday; such a drag as I have to return there again next week. On the other hand it might be a good thing as I have one less thing to worry about. Also, I’m fasting starting from today for the next 30 days or so as it is the month of Ramadan now. It will be interesting to see how it will affect me; be strong dude

I feel surprisingly calm and I hope I will stay that way throughout the assessment. I think I was a bit nervous on the other assessments that I’ve attended especially in the group exercise. Maybe it was down to my inexperience. But I didn’t really have this problem back in University when I did numerous group works. Guess familiarity was a factor back then as my team members were people that I had known (usually). Even if I didn’t know them, I had seen them in the class which provided some sort of familiarities. Fingers crossed, it will be okay tomorrow as long as I maintain my calmness.

The task that I worry the most is the presentation. It’s not that I’m bad presenter (I think I’m OK), but it’s more about gathering the information and deciding which to present. Also, usually I practise my presentation by going over it many times until I know it by heart. Time is limited in the assessment centre which makes it impossible to practise it over and over. I need to gather all my concentration and skills tomorrow.

Good luck tomorrow dude and hope it will go well

This is a kind of late entry. Was planning to write this article a long time ago after reading this article.

Recently, Microsoft tried to fast-track its Office OpenXML document format as an international standard alongside Open Document Format (ODF). From Microsoft’s perspective, the economic gain is there if its standard is accepted as an international one. Governments and organisations are weary that they have to bow to the software vendor if they keep storing documents in proprietary formats. Thus, they encourage documents to be stored in an international standard. However, there’s only one international standard at the moment i.e. ODF which Microsoft doesn’t support in its Office suite. ODF is natively supported by several programs including Open Office; a free, as in free lunch, office suite. Microsoft could lose a lot of money should the move happen.

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Crap it’s been a long time since my last post; a bit longer to my liking anyway Since then, I’ve removed Windows XP from my laptop and installed Ubuntu which is one of the many GNU / Linux distributions to replace XP.

I was dual-booting XP and Ubuntu for quite some time; since I started this blog if I’m not mistaken. However, my first encounter with Linux was at University where I had to use the tools available on Linux to do my coursework. Mandriva and openSuse Linux were the two distributions I used back then. At that time I thought Linux wasn’t ready yet for to be used as an everyday Operating System (OS), although from a technical point of view it was a great OS. One of the main reasons was the RPM hell I had to go through to install certain software

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