Categories
Career

Standby Support Phone

One of my job scopes is to provide system support to our customer through a unique phone called ‘standby support phone’. My colleague and I will take turn to hold this phone. If that is my week, I need be alert to receive calls from our end users for 24 hours. This includes midnight. So, the phone has to be on and put besides me the whole night. But I make sure not to place it too near me to reduce the radiation :D.

If I am not able to solve the problem via this phone for about 30 minutes, I need to escalate to higher level of support and at the same time I need to go on-site to continue to investigate and troubleshoot the issue within one hour after informing user that I will be on-site.

This could be one of the main challenges if you want to be in this cheque processing system industry especially you got a lot of calls during your week. I think each job/company/industry has its own challenges and benefits. However, there will be claim for holding this phone. Addition to that, each on-site there is an extra claim, as well the mileage to and fro. And you can also come to office a little late when you receive midnight calls or need to go on-site during midnight.

Personally, during my week, I did once need to go on-site at around 2am. When I got into my car to prepare to drive to our customer site, I wonder if I’m dreaming :D. Once settle, I went back home at around 5am and continue my sleep.

So, when you see my holding three phones, you know what this third phone is for 🙂

Categories
Tips Macam-Macam

Gambit For An Interview / Career Opportunity

In a chess game, a gambit is a chess opening in which a player, sacrifices material, with the hope of achieving an advantageous position. Our career can be like a chess game where strategy is needed. Let’s create a scenario here,

Mr Lim is a fresh graduate. He got no working experience at all. Although he got a degree in Computing but his results is average and his final year project is not so impressive. He went to Jobstreet and found a programmer position which he likes. After applying for this position, he saw that there are another 70 people who applied for this same position. Same are fresh graduate like him. Same are experienced one.

chess-gambit

So, what is the strategy to get a chance to be called for interview in the above scenario? This is the exact strategy that I applied for my first permanent job – ‘sacrifice’ my salary until I got the right job. You might ask, ‘So, what is a good sacrifice?’. You can do it gradually. Meaning, for example, you can start to put your expected salary at RM1800. If you don’t any response from the company, then lower it down to RM1600 and so on until you got an interview. You might ask, ‘What if I lower my expected salary until RM1400 and yet I don’t get to call for an interview? So how?’. My answer for you is keep lowering your expected salary until you got it. My first job’s pay is only RM900! I’m sure most of you all can do better than me.

If you really love the job and at the same time you know that you do not have enough criteria to meet the requirement for this job and there are too many ‘competitors’, try to apply gambit strategy. It works for me and I believe it works for you too. All the best!

Rahsia Lulus Temuduga Kerja Kerajaan

Categories
Vacation, Trips & Outing

Interesting Video During Melaka Trip

On Friday, 26 February, my church group went to Melaka for a day trip tour. One of the places we went is the Taman Buaya. Later, I got to know that this Taman Buaya is the biggest Taman Buaya in Malaysia. Very fortunately, at that moment, there was a crocodile performance. Below are some clips I took.

In case you don’t wanna stream the video, below are some pictures:
Part 1: (Warning! Please do not try this!)

crocodile_show_1

Part 2: (Warning! Please do not try this!) The performer rolled some money donated by the audiences, hold it with his mouth and put it inside the crocodile’s mouth. Then, he went to take back that rolled money from the crocodile’s mouth. (Warning! Please do not try this!)

crocodile_show_2a

crocodile_show_2b

While waiting for the rest to come over to Studhuys, I was leaning over to look at the Sungai Melaka.

Studhuys

sungai_melaka

At that time, a man told me that there is a ‘lizard’ in the river. I was a little shocked to see the size of the ‘big lizard’ and thus quickly video captured it. I think this ‘big lizard’ is a Komodo Dragon.

Categories
AJAX ASP.NET 2.0 VB.NET

Indirect reference is being made to assembly System.Web.Extensions version 3.5.0.0

The full error message is:

Error 1 Indirect reference is being made to assembly System.Web.Extensions version 3.5.0.0, which contains ‘AjaxControlToolkit.CalendarExtender’. This Project references a prior version of System.Web.Extensions version 1.0.61025.0. To use ‘AjaxControlToolkit.CalendarExtender’, you must replace the reference to System.Web.Extensions with version 3.5.0.0 or higher.

After some time finding for the cause, I realize that this is due to the me using the newer version of AjaxControlToolkit.dll. I should use the older version AjaxControlToolkit.dll for my ASP.NET 2.0 development.

Categories
ASP.NET 2.0 VB.NET

Showing a modal dialog box or form when the application is not running in UserInteractive mode is not a valid operation

The full error message is

“Showing a modal dialog box or form when the application is not running in UserInteractive mode is not a valid operation. Specify the ServiceNotification or DefaultDesktopOnly style to display a notification from a service application.”

This is probably due to you using MsgBox(“so message here.”) for your web application. I learn that you can only use MsgBox for window form application.

So, the solution is to think of other way to display a message to the user.