Friday 11 May 2007

more lessons learnt

Oh gosh, and the title says it all.

1) Don't trust your memory. When Mr Siva rambles off a long list of instructions, it's best to get a pen and notebook and jot down everything he said. 'cos he won't repeat himself. Hard lesson learnt.

2) Never ask Mr Siva to repeat what he said, 'cos he won't. Anyway what he said was that people usually can't be bothered to repeat. Else sometimes when people explain things, they ramble on and on and get themselves into a kind of "zone", or "trance" if you get what I mean. Then when one finally ask them to repeat themselves, they find that they can't. 'cos they lost their momentum, and they forget what they just said. Even if they try to, the things they say won't be as detailed.

3) Seemingly complex stuff can be simple. For example while we were doing the RBZ Book Review entries, Mr Siva went on and on until I asked him to repeat himself 'cos he was going too fast and I couldn't catch up. Which of course he didn't. Then I went to figure out things by myself, and I got it out. It was actually just a simple matter of copying and pasting from pdf.

Oh but I wish to add in a point about seemingly simple stuff can be complex too. Right now he's getting me to install the Mac OS10 combo update and he gave me some simple instructions (just go to this website, click on this link, follow the instructions there). I mean, how difficult can installation get? Until I really tried installing the combo update, and found myself swamped with problems of "where's the external drive he's talking about?" "what's the password". You know, things ppl'll never think of when we install something. Well, I guess I think too little =/

4) It's good to want to clarify something and hence ask for it to be repeated. But sometimes if we stop and think about it, we may figure it out by ourselves. For example, I asked Mr Siva while classifying picture slides what we should do for duplicate slides. Actually I should have known that since the purpose of the classification was for storing and also to allow for easy retrieval, it makes sense that duplicate slides should be put together. Yea that's it! Think of the user and understand his purpose.

5) We understand better when we really start doing something, as compared to just hearing instructions on how to do it. So it's better to get corrected after doing something wrong, rather than aiming to do everything right the first time round.

It's time to knock off. So I'll stop here! ^^

PS: the time is corrected. and nope i don't knock off at 4.05pm, for goodness sake. that time came about when i saved this entry as draft.

5 comments:

Sivasothi said...

Well done with the OS X 10.4.9 combo update installation!

Kevin said...

Erm, your knock off time is 1.05am? I like the tone of the blog thus far. It has a "behind the scenes" feel to the work you guys do at Raffles Museum. Keep up the good work. :)

Sivasothi said...

You need to add links to Raffles Museum News etc on the sidebar, and correct the clock setting.

Sivasothi said...

"Listen very carefully, I will say this only once," preferably said with a French accent.

Ivan Chew said...

Siva is just dishing out "tough love" :) He likes to toughen the interns, heh.