Archive for December, 2006

Satay night

Published on 22 December 2006 in satay, culture and food. 7 Comments

We had satay at my parents’ place last night. It was a big party, with my siblings and their partners (pity you weren’t there, jl), two couples visiting from Malaysia, and five friends - twenty people all told, plus a dog (who had a great time getting fed bits of satay by almost everyone).

Homemade satay is always tastiest, and ours was quite authentic, complete with traditional basting “brush” - a lemongrass stalk. We had chicken and beef satay, and the skewers you see closest to the foot of the picture are kangaroo - all the way from Three Springs, Western Australia. The roo meat had been marinated in sherry, ginger, oyster sauce, soy sauce and pepper, and was very tender. The hand is my brother, MC’s. He had tukang sate (”satay cook”) duties all evening.

The sharp-eyed among you may have noticed that the satay is being cooked on a special satay stove (all the way from Malaysia) that’s resting on a barbecue. Another example of Malaysian and Australian fusion, I reckon.

Satay with traditional accompaniments:
raw onion, cucumber, and rice cakes.
How did I leave out the peanut sauce?
There’s also a great dish of rice noodles.

Ch-ch-ch-changes…

Published on 20 December 2006 in change and work. 8 Comments

It was a bit of an emotional day for me yesterday. I was surprised, I wasn’t expecting to feel as sad as I did. The other day I made some allusions about changes happening in 2007. Well, one of the big changes is that after about four years as the librarian assigned to the business division/faculty at the university where I work, I’ll be swapping divisions in the new year and serving the academic staff and research students in the science and engineering division.

I couldn’t talk about it any earlier because at first it wasn’t 100% definite, then I had to wait until all the relevant people were informed.

After sending out the email I received a stream of replies:

>I can’t believe you’d prefer the bloody boring engineers and scientists over the boring business people!!

> Noooo!! You can’t go! Seriously though, your work has been greatly appreciated.

> The previous incumbent has left quite a legacy to live up to….

> You can’t leave me, what the hell are you thinking.

> This is great for you but I am sad - you have been a fantastic support. I, for one, will miss you. Well done on a great job here - good luck with the future.

> you will be sadly missed. But I believe the earth is round, so you may come back one day :)

> Oh, CW. How sad that you’re leaving us. All the best with your new Division.

It was almost like a Christmas present to receive so many emails letting me know that I am well thought of and that I will be missed. I’ll miss the people in the business school - lots of great people who work very hard and genuinely care about their students.

One thing I enjoy about my job is the fact that I work very closely with people, and that I get to know them over time. Some of the doctoral students who started three or four years ago have recently completed their theses and at times I’ve been so involved in their trials and tribulations - chasing up obscure references, troubleshooting misbehaving EndNote libraries, formatting 100,000-word documents - I’ve felt like I was writing the theses too! Working with academic staff has its own challenges and thrills as well. Everyday is different.

I’ll now have a brand new group of people to get to know, and a whole series of resources to become familiar with. No more ABI Inform and Business Source Premier - it’ll be IEEE Xplore, SciFinder Scholar and Inspec for me!

In other news, I’m now on holidays. I don’t go back to work until the 15th January 2007.

Paper

Published on 19 December 2006 in waste and work. 4 Comments

So much for the paperless office. For the last week or so, in between my other usual tasks, I’ve been spending time tidying my office, and in the process have filled one whole 120 litre paper recycling bin, and am halfway through a second bin. I feel like I’m drowning in paper!

It’s so wasteful, and lest you think I’ve been responsible for creating every single sheet of that paper - printing each sheet out for myself - much of this paper was from meetings I attended, agendas, minutes, and assorted documents, all printed for members of the various committees. In my job I have the task of attending numerous committee meetings - teaching and learning, research and development, school board, collection development, team - they all generate paper.

Every time I do my annual tidy up, I ponder this waste, and wonder whether I should insist on just getting my meeting papers electronically, and bring the agendas with me on my PDA. I’m sure I would still collect a certain amount of paper from the documents that are tabled at meetings, but this would still cut down on the amount of paper quite significantly. The only problem with this is that I would be the only one who asks for the documents electronically, so the secretaries would have to remember to send them to me, instead of printing them out as they would for everyone else. (I’m not sure they would be happy about this, as I think it would be an extra task for them. Printing the agendas, on the other hand, would be routine - just set the photocopier to print, collate and staple twenty copies.)

I shouldn’t give the impression that I’m merely a passive receiver of paper. While much of the paper is meeting fodder, quite a lot of the paper that gets discarded is paper I’ve printed myself. Even if I can’t get the secretaries to stop giving me hard copy, I really ought to start with myself, and consider whether I really need every single thing I send to the printer. I seem to have a penchant for printing journal articles to read later. That’s my excuse, but printing the articles off seems to allow me to procrastinate and the actual reading may or may not happen. In the process I end up with yet more paper. The other excuse I make is that if I have the hard copy of the article I can annotate it - and yet, if I am honest with myself, very rarely do I actually annotate anything I read. Saving said articles on my thumb drive would probably be a better option - I don’t have any problems with reading things onscreen, and filling my thumb drive to capacity would be a good reminder that I haven’t read all those articles yet!

I also need to get over my impulse to Save-Things-Just-In-Case. This is how I end up with three or four year old documents that I couldn’t discard at the time, for whatever reason, and which I never ever look at or even remember the existence of.

The next thing I need to do is to resurrect my PDA. I stopped using it because it was playing up - occasionally the screen wouldn’t respond, or the whole thing would freeze - but I didn’t really investigate to see if there was something I could do to improve its performance.