Holy Week 2012

I have been blogging on my Geeks'tuff label these couple of weeks, so this Easter (while trying to stay up to monitor the stocktake processing in my laptop), I thought of just sharing something about the holy week.

Last Friday, 6th April, I had the opportunity to attend the last Way of the Cross and the students did a very good re-enactment of the stations of the Cross - unlike in other few countries, no one got seriously nailed on the Cross here ya!  I was so touched by the whole re-enactment that my tears just suddenly flow throughout the whole service.

It was very fortunate that I could sit in the main church where the re-enactment took place - to be able to imagine and feel such torture and suffering - I can't imagine how a person could go through that much.  Well, His love for us is so great that he is willing to show how he would suffer and bear the torture for us - I can't help myself from feeling so remorse after the whole thing.  Good Friday has always been a holiday for the East Malaysians and the mass is always at 3pm.  Since it is not a public holiday in West Malaysia, the mass is scheduled to be during lunch time and after office hours.  I'm glad that I went for the 7:30 pm mass because I don't have to rush back to office after that.  It also gave me time to reflect during the drive back home - John 3:16 says: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life"

Dad used to say that Easter should be a bigger celebration than Christmas.  I never thought about what he said seriously before.  Now, come to think of it, it does make sense for us to celebrate it more than Christmas.  The significance of Easter is more because it shows us the hope for salvation and redemption.  This is the time when we should be celebrating Easter with our family members.  This year, since we are quite busy with the stocktake and many other activities with the other projects, plus I was already away last week for a family event in Singapore, I've decided to spend the holy week in KL.  I don't know why but it is not the same - to have at least that Easter Sunday brunch with the family seems to make my Easter more complete.  It's like celebrating your birthday alone - you don't mind but it would be more meaningful to have family and friends around, that's all...

So, to my dearest family back home, have a wonderful Easter and I miss all of you so much!

Till my next posting, to all my readers, I wish you all a great weekend and to those who are celebrating Easter, have a blessed Easter! Peace!

Yammer-ing Away!

Yes, Yammer is live and the network community is increasing by the day.

While I am still in search of a better mechanism to introduce some steps / guidelines to our new Yammer users, I found some materials from the WWW that may be usable in our company.

My initial perception of Yammer was... an intranet 'facebook'? Hmm interesting and has potential...  This will definitely attract those Gen Ys and Gen Zs team members!!!

I like the idea of having our external IT consultants to be in Yammer where we can create our own network and collaborate.  This will definitely reduce spamming in our mailboxes.  One drawback is that everyone is so used to emails and therefore, Yammer notification is something new and not being looked at as frequent as emails.  At this point in time, I will NOT encourage any users to configure their notifications to receive real-time notification for every feeds in our Yammer network, that will just create a lot more traffic in our email server.

Nowadays, I prefer to ask general questions in Yammer rather than spamming a lot of people's mailboxes.  At least with Yammer, you can post your question to a particular group or network of people.  With that, unlike emails, my question is targetted to a selected set of people within my network without me forgetting who to include in the TO and CC mailing list.  If I were to ask a general question for the entire company, I will be able to do so and I can get feedbacks from various team members from other departments as well.

Another thing that I like about Yammer is that its support on mobile devices - which is a useful thing to have.  I am planning to get a group of people who usually are assigned to work out of the office to test this out.  Basically, get their mobiles installed with the Yammer app and then get them to send updates via Yammer in our group.  At least, less emails and they can freely update everyone involved while they are on the road too.  I think that they will be more receptive to use Yammer to send updates because it looks more casual than sending an email out.  If the response is good for this group of 'guinea pigs' then, what we can do is to encourage more out-of-office team members to do the same :)

That's all for now, will post some #Yams again soon! Till then, peace to all readers ;p