the countdown has started..

until i'm done!

skipped out

i didn't go to that interview. i didn't apply for the job, which had me wondering, so i googled the company. apparently they're not a company anyone would want to work for. duh reena.

dr. angry and mr. smiles

up close, the angry face is on the left, the calm face is on the right. step back about three to four feet, and the angry face is now on the right, the calm face is now on the left.

what i don't get is why they call it MR. smiles.. it's a woman's face!
[credits, yada yada are here]

let's just not tell the city..

someone called work interested in an inventory home. (inventory homes are built to standard specifications to compete with the resale market - those looking for a quick closing and don't have time to wait for a house to be built. also, keeps the trades busy during slow periods.) the house he inquired about is drywalled and is basically just sitting there.

prospect: when's the earliest closing available?
me: it takes 12 weeks to build the kitchen cabinetry. so 13 weeks from firm would be the earliest.
prospect: is there a way to put in a temporary kitchen until the kitchen is built?
me: all kitchen cabinetry is custom built, so that would not be possible.
prospect: can we move in without the kitchen?
me: the city requires the house to be completed to a certain degree before anyone can take occupancy. that means the kitchen needs to be installed.
prospect: does the city really need to know that the kitchen's not in?
me: yes.. our lawyers like to do things by the book.

*eye roll*

i have an interview..

for a job i didn't even apply for. today i got a call from someone who was forwarded my resume. the way he was talking it was as if i sent my resume to his firm. they're conducting interviews over the next couple of days and was interested in meeting me. i'd normally be happy, but i kept thinking in the back of my mind.. did i even apply to this company?! honestly, i don't even know what the job is. all i know is i have an interview thursday morning. anyway, it's probably a sales position, ugh.

for the entire month of march i've cut back on the whole job hunt. now that i have time again, it's getting a bit difficult to get back into the swing of things.

coldplay concert

two weeks ago (march 17th) i went to coldplay's concert in ottawa! this was the second time they were in town; i missed their first concert, which was apparently amazing! anyway, the concert was excellent and i'm so glad i was able to go. sarah, corey, and i were on the 3rd level - high up, but i was there for the music more than anything. here are a few not-so-great pictures: coldplay concert.

tanks and booze

i went to my grad gala last night. it was interesting. first, it was odd being around so many people i didn't know and haven't ever seen before. second, the dj was horrible. third, the food was meh (i have yet to be impressed by a veggie meal served at a fancy party or whatever). fourth, i was hit on by a drunk brown boy.. again.

drunk brown boy: so are you in accounting?
me: no. do i look like i'm brown?

the only really good part of the night was that the gala was held at the new war museum. quite the place! the hall had tanks around the perimeter, which made for a nice contrast to the mood. i'll have to visit sometime when i can actually walk around the place. i've been to the old one many, many times before (school and visitors), so it would be nice to see the exhibitions they've added.

oh the atrocity

i forgot one more highlight (or not so much) from intopia. in the end, we were one of two teams (out of 24) who survived the entire simulation without running into supplier's credit. very exciting indeed. anyway, for this achievement, dr. jones bought my team a pitcher of beer after the simulation at the pub. a FREE pitcher of beer placed right in front of me and i couldn't indulge because i was driving home. *sigh*

crash!

this has been one of THE craziest weekends i've ever experienced. so crazy it's up there with the weekend england trips. it was intopia weekend plus the coldplay concert, so it was very exciting yet somewhat tiresome.

i'm not going to sum up the whole weekend because there's far too much to talk about! i wish i was able to post stuff over the weekend, but unfortunately there wasn't enough time to do so and whenever i got home i went straight to bed..

some highlights of intopia:

- the team we thought was going to be the super power, the suspected "walmart" of the game, turned out to be somewhat incompetent with their finances. the girl who was to keep track of everything was apparently a finance whiz. i don't believe that's the case at this point in time.. cause it's not hard to keep track of it if you have a simple system set up. *shakes head* plus we had a couple of run-ins with them, so now i have less respect for anyone on that team.

- the rumour board on the forum was getting pretty silly because people could post anonymously if they wanted to. anyway, there was one post about how we had child labourers in our plants, even though we had no plants! it was an amusing post though :)

- omigod, drama galore! fights, fights! holy batman, i never expected this weekend could get so intense. one girl left her team and joined ours, bringing with her $3 million. she couldn't deal with a team member who was responsible for causing problems with their inputting. and after so much effot, she gave up and asked if she could leave the team. there was other stuff that happened. an incident happened to "walmart", who didn't realise that over 4 periods they were overcharged $17 million for some products they bought from one company :|

- our 3rd decision didn't go through properly. apparently we handed in an empty decision ... which i don't believe cause i triple checked our forms, and so did another member of my team. we figured after that they were testing us to see how we'd deal with it because part of the simulation is to test your ability to deal with different problems when they arise.

- the administrator for the game, dr. jones, was known as an arse. he's a professor at the university of nipissing, but comes to ottawa u for a weekend just for the simulation. anyway, just from the emails everyone had sent him during the test round, the entire group of us came to the conclusion that he was an arse. during the weekend, it became a running joke that dr. jones had a thing for me because i was the only one that would have conversations with him and make him laugh out of anyone on my team. umm.. no. i tend to get along with people who are sarcastic and use dry humour, which he did.

so this was an excellent learning weekend. i'd like to do it again if i could just because it's an interesting experience that you wouldn't typically get in a classroom setting.

call me unaware

for the past two weeks i've been missing my tv shows, haven't been able to read my regular blogs or the newspaper.. i basically have no clue what's been going on in the world.

intopia (as well as other responsibilities) is sucking the life out of me as we speak. my procrastinating has come to a complete stop! as hard it is to believe, it's true. okay, i'm procrastinating right now by writing this, but this blog doesn't count :P

anyway, it's starting to get a little crazy. the actual simulation starts on friday with our first decision due by 8:15am. tomorrow night we find out how much capital we have to start with - anywhere between $20 million to $30 million. my team is hoping for $30 million (obviously), but that's dependent on our ipo.

so my team is an insurance company and a wholesaler. our rates for insurance are such that the more plants you are, the lower the rate per plant. same goes for sales offices and inventory. so we're the insurance company for large companies. we thought we had two other competitors in insurance. one team, who's a manufacturer, was planning on offering a few teams insurance because they didn't want us to have a monopoly (it's in their slogan!). i'll call them anti-monopoly. the other team who was offering insurance was a surprise to us. monday night we found out they were starting an insurance pool with their suppliers. we thought they were only going to be a wholesaler and an administrator for the patent pool. we'll call them walmart because that's their new reputation. anyway, apparently one team took walmart's plan and went ahead with it as their own. the rumour is that other team has 9 teams already signed up on their insurance plan! crazy. so walmart came to us with a proposal to load off their insurance pool onto us because they found out they put too much on their plate. well, they provided us with the terms they wanted the pool to be. i'm meeting walmart's team leader tomorrow to discuss it because, well, their terms suck.

anyway, this weekend should be .. interesting. maybe i'll become more insane than i started out.

flubber.

friday was an odd day for me. it started out with me dropping a corningware container thing on a glass cutting board.. the cutting board shattered, the container was unharmed. luckily, there's a film underneath the glass of the cutting board, so pieces of glass didn't go flying in every direction! my dad was amused by it, so he made me take a picture:


for lunch, i wandered downtown to settle on the blue cactus for my dining pleasure. i had THE best martini! straweberry cheesecake martini:


mmm... so DELICIOUS! there are a few other martinis that caught my eye, so i'm going to have to go back there again.

as i was eating my lunch i looked at my treo to realise i had a test today in business ethics.. a big "oh fuck" considering i didn't study. i had planned on studying that day after strategic management, but completely forgot about it. so obviously the waitress was taking her time with my bill as soon as i was in a rush! anyway, got to school and studied for twenty minutes. thank goodness he gives us a choice of two questions out of four, so i only needed to study two lectures. it seemed to go alright, we'll see.

ah bugger, this week's going to be insane.

dad's a dope

dad bought himself a motorola razr while in india. he'd been eyeing this phone ever since it came out, so finally he bought one. i think he likes it most because the dial pad is big. anyway, he arrived home from his trip on tuesday night. he's emptying out his computer bag of all the gujarati cds he bought then hands me his phone manual. ... as much as i enjoy reading manuals, i'd rather see the phone thank you very much. so he starts looking for it, and looking for it, and looking for it. he then came to the realisation that he left his phone at his brother's house in london (uk). SMART! at least he had his old phone here with his sim card, so it's not like he'd be phoneless; just separated from his new toy. apparently this bugged him so much that he got up at 1am to call his brother about his phone. 1am! my dad's insane.. must be the jet lag. he was told that the phone wasn't there, so back he went on his search. he finally found it beside his laptop in the computer bag.

i've come to realise i'm turning into my dad because i've done the exact same thing before (well not the calling anyone at 6am, their time, about my missing toy). scary.

i want to be an oscar presenter..

these truffles look SO yummy.. too bad it costs us regular folk $175 to buy them!

[rest of the goodies]

foodtv is addictive

i LOVE this channel. if i had no channels except this one, i'd be a happy camper. actually, i lied. hgtv would be nice too. anyway, my one disappointment with foodtv is a lack of a vegetarian show. about 90% of the recipes shown are meat based, so often it's difficult to even consider a recipe if meat is the main part of the meal. i'm surprised by their lack of a veggie show. i mean, considering how popular vegetarianism is becoming, not to mention how some families are not turning vegetarian but are looking for more meatless meal options, you'd think there would be one show dedicated to the lifestyle. i'm not saying a vegan cooking show, just vegetarian. would be nice. if only i could ACTUALLY cook..

jon stewart is funny

"bjork couldn't be here tonight. she was trying on her oscar dress and dick cheney shot her."
jon stewart at the oscars

my name is too long

well my legal name that is. my parents named me reena (actually i think it was my brother who picked the name reena) after i was born. going with family tradition, dad attached an suffix to my first name. on top of that, in our culture, your dad's name is your middle name (so people know who you belong to :P if you're female and get married, your middle name is *supposed* to change to your husband's name.) so my legal first name is 11 letters long. my middle name (dad's name) is 10 letters long. my last name is 6 letters long. 27 letters, actually 29 characters counting the spaces.

in elementary school, my legal name was on the attendance list. made for some interesting looks by supply teachers. "uh.. reeeeeenaaaa.." yeah, reena. then i attended middle school where they had a "known as name" column. relief. this carried on through high school. then university hit and somehow the suffix of my legal first name became my middle name. my dad's name was completely dropped! :)

which brings me to today. i had to bring in my birth certificate to school because it's the only id i have that has my full legal name. everything else says reena. the reason behind it is dad's very insistent that my legal first name be on my degree. i think he just wants his name to be on it :P for me to change the name i had to bring id showing that i really am who i am asking to be.. which meant changing my name at the registrar. so i had to fill out a form except my legal name didn't fit in the boxes provided. it could only fit my first name. dad's name was too long. heh. the lady at the registrar had a good giggle over it :)

intopia has begun.. well sort of

so intopia has kind of started. we're making test decisions right now to get used to the forms, system, and creating relationships before the actual weekend of insanity.

groups can choose what they want to become: manufacturer, wholesaler, bank, research & development, or insurance. my group decided to become an insurance company because it seemed the most interesting.

this term the market is the hockey stick supply industry. there are two components: the blade and the shaft. only two pieces can be produced by manufacturers, which are x (the blade) and y (the hockey stick). you cannot produce y unless you have x in your inventory. manufacturers can decide to produce x, y, or both. manufacturers can go through wholesalers to sell their product to the end consumer or set up sales offices themselves to sell to the end consumer.

there are three areas (western canada, central canada, eastern canada) plus the head office in st. john's. even though st. john's is in eastern canada, it is not considered the same area in this game. all the money is located in st. john's at the start of the game, so if you plan on building a plant in an area at the start, you have to transfer the money to that area to do so.

that's the basics of it. to understand the game in its entirety requires reading the manual. anyway, we put a shit load of work in this compared to other groups because we had to have stuff prepared as much as possible early on so that we could sell insurance to other groups (rates, hand outs, purchase agreement).

one group emailed the game administrator (who's at the university of nipissing) regarding the possibility of being a bank. he replied saying that it was not the best idea to be either a bank or insurance company during the game this term because the environment will not be as favourable. uh.. what? we told him last week that we were an insurance company (because we had some questions regarding that specific type of business). he answered them but didn't say a word about choosing something else. ugh. we're sticking with it anyway. we not solely concentrating on insurance though. our plan is to build plants in different areas and sell them to other teams who want to expand or have lost a plant (due to a 'fire' or something).

it should be an interesting game overall! that is.. if other teams stop acting like complete idiots. there was one team i tried to talk to. i asked what they were, and they just sat there .. "uh.." they said they didn't want to tell me because it would ruin their strategy. right. afterwards, they came out and said they were a manufacturer. seriously, to be able to do well in this game you have to make yourself known and create a network. if you don't let people know what you are and what you have to offer, how in the world can you make money? the magic intopia fairy might come and give the team money.. right. it's quite possible they chose to become an insurance company and didn't want to tell me (people know that my group is insurance - we've been spamming everyone). meh, usually word gets around; i'll find out what they really are.