Handshaking or Bowing?

Handshaking or Bowing?

While reading Chinese Business Etiquette I started to think about cultural differences much more than before. Take Handshaking as an example. Very natural for Western culture, but might be viewed almost as an attack by some other cultures. "Why should a person touch someone else's dirty hand?" is not only a rhetorical question, I bet you experienced a sticky feeling after a handshake a couple times in your life. So why do we do that? Just to show that you don't have a weapon in your hands? Come on!

Bowing

Bowing, on the other hand, is nicely clean, while you still show the respect and openness (boy, it would be so easy to hurt you, while bowing). So is that a universal solution for the whole planet? Not really, as bowing is only supposed to be done to God in Islam or Judaism, not to people.

Kissing

Kissing is the most controversial of greetings from all I know. Although I've seen it done in many French movies, I bet if someone did it in business (outside France), he would be dragged out of the office very quickly. Well, perhaps only Woody Allan could do it without punishment.

So what to do if you're caught in a situation when you need to greet people in a multicultural environment? You might echo what other people do, just avoid complicated combinations, like handshaking and deep bowing at the same time. Who is going to clean all these cracked heads after that?
Well, imagine bowing and kissing at the same time,  you'd have to be a Heron or Rowan.

Posted at 05:03PM Jan 21, 2008 by Pavel Suk in Global Engineering  |  Comments[6]

Vacation Tool = Less paperwork in Prague

Vacation Tool = Less paperwork in Prague

Lesson from movie Brazil

I always wondered why we, at Prague Engineering Center, must fill out a paper form to request a vacation or day-off. And get it physically signed by a manager.
And I was always told that we need a paper copy, since it's required by local law. How much I envied other parts of Sun since they were happy to use various online vacation tools.

Well, one can see that too much bureaucracy and paperwork can even kill people and I definitely didn't want to end up wounded by all the vacation forms. Lenka, from my team, did a quick legal check and guess what: It was a myth! There is no Czech law or regulation that dictates the form of vacation request.

I started to hunt for solution. Every country has cooked up its own solution  to comply with local law. Do I have to implement everything from scratch also? What a waste of time!

Sharing, sharing, sharing

Sharing is the weapon against NIH syndrome.

Fortunately, I mentioned the vacation tool  to Sin-Yaw, VP and Site lead for engineering in China (see the picture). Lucky me! They've already implemented a vacation tool and they're going to share it with Prague Engineering and the site in St. Petersburg. It runs on an opensource platform, using JSPs.

To make it even more interesting, we're forming an international team that will work on the localized version (huh, wouldn't be fun to have Chinese holiday in the Czech Republic?
If anyone else from Prague Engineering Center is interested, let me know.

Posted at 04:34PM Oct 23, 2007 by Pavel Suk in Global Engineering  |  Comments[1]

How Many People Read Your Blog

How Many People Read Your Blog

Tom Ball sent an interesting link to t-shirt design to bloggers community today.


I love that kind of sense of humor and I laughed a lot, when I saw the picture. Then, I told myself  "Wait a moment, it's also about your blog!".

BACK TO HISTORY

When I started blogging 2 years ago,  I expected that everyone in the world would be interested to read my blog. Not only because of the content, but also because of me. Me, INTP (Introverted iNtuitive Thinking Perceiving), who finally decided to share his best thoughts with the all other smart people outside. (erhmm)
So I published my first article and watched the number of hits, hoping that it goes higher than Jonathan's, Roumen's or Geertjan's blog, just to name my favorite bloggers at that time. Well, no surprise, it didn't. I published a couple more entries at that time and switched to hibernate mode. Who would write something for less than 10 hits per day?

SECOND [FALSE] START

Hey-wake-up impuls came from 3 people. Steve Wilson, my mentor tagged me, so I was forced to publish something. Volker Seubert, HR business partner, who writes quite long, but pretty interesting HR articles.
And last, but not least, Yarda Tulach, one of the original founders of NetBeans, who talked to me in the hallway the other day and asked me why I hadn't posted anything for so long (actually he asked "Are you dying or what?" . He watched my blog by RSS feed and he threatened me to remove it from his watchdog. That was very serious.

So I started again. I was keen to see how many people really read my posts, so I inserted google-analytics script in my Weblog Template:

<script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
    _uacct="UA-xxxx-x";
    urchinTracker();
</script>

I felt much better, since it shows real numbers and statistics, including Most Visited Pages and the country where people come from.

Summer came, with now toys, like Facebook and I was back to my old habits, slowing down the frequency of posts to almost zero.

I NEED SOMEONE TO READ MY BLOG!

At least one person! Yeah, and I found a victim finally. It's Tony, my English teacher. I promised to write blogs as my homework and he is going to use it as a weapon against me.

But I wonder anyway, is anyone out there reading my blog? Are you a real person or just a search engine?
 

Posted at 03:18PM Oct 12, 2007 by Pavel Suk in Global Engineering  |  Comments[6]

VISA to the US through American Chamber of Commerce

VISA to the US through American Chamber of Commerce

My old passport was going to expire and although I'd heard that you can travel with 2 passports (old with visa + new one), I decided not to risk and get valid visa in my new passport. Folks told me that it's pretty cumbersome to stay in the line to for the interview, well, what can you do?
I browsed U.S. Embassy web site and found an interesting program for companies that are members of American Chamber of Commerce (which we are, indeed)!

So I

• filled out both forms (Online DS-156 EVAF + DS-157 Czech / English),
  
• got a photo in Fotolab on Chodov,
  IMPORTANT: the photo (5cm x 5 cm - please note that this is a larger format than what is available from the automated machines!) must not be older than 6 months, and must show the applicant’s entire face, always from the front and on a light background!
  
• paid courier and visa feeNew Business Visa Program in CSOB
  
• called AmCham (the phone listed on 420-737-258-088, which a mobile phone,... weird, it's better to call 420 222-329-430, I guess)
• sent them all documents (yeah, including Invitation letter and envelope for sending my passport back)
  
• ... and let them to schedule my interview for Wednesday 2pm
  

I came to the Embassy at 2pm and believe it or not, I was out at 2:05. No lines, 2 minutes waiting time. Amazing!
Passport came 3 days later, so I can fly to the US again without worrying about Immigration Officers.

IMPORTANT: AmCham program  applies to all Sun Microsystems Czech employees! Just be nice to people in AmCham, it's not their regular duty, they do it as an additional service to their partners.

Posted at 10:40PM Aug 17, 2007 by Pavel Suk in Global Engineering  |  Comments[1]

Daylight saving - Prague is only 8h from California

Daylight saving - Prague is only 8h from California

 
I published an article  Daylight saving time started in Europe this weekend a year ago. There was a week, when Prague was 10h ahead of California. It has changed this year fortunately. We have 2 weeks, when there is just 8h difference. So my very first meeting with folks from US and other locations tomorrow starts at 3pm Prague time! I wish it'd stay even longer, but my favorite timezone converter says it's going to be over ;(

Current changes in daylight saving scheme created a new challenge for IT, similar to Y2K, although not so publicly known. Sun took it pretty seriously, as it could have an impact on users. There is a complete web page on Big Admin portal, summarizing all DST related actions that the administrators or users should do in order to fix software.

Posted at 09:11AM Mar 13, 2007 by Pavel Suk in Global Engineering  | 

Daylight saving time started in Europe this weekend

Daylight saving time started in Europe this weekend

I woke up on Sunday morning and my videorecorder displayed 9:35, which was for 1 hour more than other clocks at my home. Summer time is here! Well, looking out from the window, I realized that, despite the Directive of the European Parliament on summer-time, the summer didn't come yet. It was raining. Good excuse to spent a morning on the Internet to look for more details about summer/daylight saving time (DST).

What is the time in other Sun Campuses?

• Europe agreed to observe a "summer-time period" from the last Sunday in March to the last Sunday in October, so all European engineering campuses are on the same page.
• Neither India nor China observes DST. When I chat with Sin-Yaw, VP Site Leader for Engineering Center in China, he told me that China spans five timezones anyway, so why they should bother with daylight saving ;-)
  
• California, as well as most of US states, will switch to daylight saving a week later (first Sunday in April). There will be 10 hours difference between campuses in Bay Area and Prague, only this week, compared to regular 9 hours difference.
  

Example for this week (MAR-27):
9:00 [am] Monday in Bay Area is
18:00 in Dublin
19:00 in Prague, Grenoble
21:00 in Petersburg
22:30 in India
01:00 [am] TUESDAY - in China

Example for next week (APR-3):
9:00 [am] Monday in Bay Area is
17:00 in Dublin
18:00 in Prague, Grenoble
20:00 in Petersburg
21:30 in India
00:00 [midnight] in China

Here is a nice timezone converter that includes meeting planner, if you want to find suitable time for your call in more geos.

Does it really have savings effect?

Daylight saving was adopted during the First World War and eventhough the idea came from  William Willet [UK], it was first introduced in Germany. I understand that in these war times, the most of the power energy was spent by lights and energy at home or at the factory, but I have some doubts that it really saves significant energy now. On the other hand, I can spend more time on biking with my young son during summer, as the sunset comes later.
It's interesting to see that something that's a common practice in Europe doesn't have a big effect in countries that  has enough daylight anyway. Even in the US!  Arizona and Hawaii do not observe DST.

Experiment in the US

One could expects that the daylight saving is a done deal and it's settled up already, but there is going to be an experiment in whole country, starting from 2007. DST in the US will start on the second Sunday in March 2007 and change back on the first Sunday in November. The US Department of  Energy is going to evaluate the impact of the daylight saving extension after that. Congress has right to revert back to current daylight saving schedule, if it can't be proved that there is a significant energy savings. Interesting. I wonder how all of this would be measured and how they reduce the impact of other things on this measurement.

Posted at 08:39PM Mar 27, 2006 by Pavel Suk in Global Engineering  |  Comments[4]