Last thing you'll ever read…again
Posts tagged Macquarie
Hilarious Comic Time!
Mar 30th
http://abstrusegoose.com/90
http://abstrusegoose.com/99
http://abstrusegoose.com/106
So I’ve been reading a lot of abstruse goose lately. The guy’s awesome. He’s also asian judging by the characters he leaves behind in his comic which I assume is his name
I even bought two t-shirts and a poster form his store.
xkcd used to make my laugh out loud (actually lol) but recent comics just doesn’t do it for me, they’re funny and enlightening but not very lolworthy. Abstruse good has been pretty lolworthy. Though, often I find that I am not actually laughing at the comic, but the predicament of my situation reflected in the comic. So technically I’m laughing at myself.
I had a Chai Latte for the first time yesterday. It was amazing! I hear people say it’s good and what not but in my head it was just another drink. But I had one yesterday (and again today) and I think it’s going to replace my mocca.
I find I don’t particularly want to go home any more these days. I don’t mind staying around at uni. It just seems so…”familiar”. My mum has been looking at apartments to invest in for me. She showed me this awesome apartment block over at Edgecliffe that faces the water. It’s a 1 bedroom apartment but it costs like $500k. Which isn’t too bad I suppose given the location.
Currently she’s looking at another apartment that’s not even built yet in Bondi Junction. It’s like right next to Westfield and has a view of the city/ocean depending on which room you’re in. I think it’s around $600k and will be built in 2012.
I think if I were to move out, I’d move to the East. I can’t handle the North (you’re all a bunch of snobs, I’m sorry), West has a bad name and the South is too familiar. I just want to escape.
In other news, got my Macquarie Grad offer for 2011. Really glad I didn’t have to apply for numerous companies and what not. I feel as if I got given a free pass, although the interview process for the internship was intense, probably the same for the graduate positions I’m guessing. For those that are applying for grad jobs, good luck, don’t fret if you don’t find anything what’s the rush?
However, I sort of told HR that I would accept it but still NOT 100% sure if I should just hold it off till 2012. At the moment I want to just have a year to myself and not worry about work but things might change.
What do you guys think I should do?
I’m enjoying uni a lot more now, too bad I have to experience it during my last year and not during my first year. Ah, well.
Oh and for those that saw my facebook update regarding bumping into songs, here is the song I bumped into today. Interpret at your own discretion.
Thought Process of Me
Mar 29th
During internship interviews for Macquarie and CBA they asked a lot of similar questions.
What do you know about Macquarie/CBA?
Jackshit to be honest, you guys make lots and lots of money?
Why do you want to work at Macquarie/CBA?
Because I too want to make money?
I did fine on most of the questions but there was this one question that absolutely stumped me. I winged it okay during the Macquarie interview but I failed so hard during the CBA interview. What was the question you ask?
Name a situation where you had to make a difficult decision, and tell me how you came to a conclusion.
I tried pulling all the bs out of my butt but it was an utter failure. I ended up talking about how I made a decision choosing degrees back in High School. The guy wasn’t impressed. 10 minutes later, he jumped back to the same question.
Him: Can you try and provide me with another instance where you had a to make a difficult decision?
Me: *thinks* This is just so you see how I think right?
Him: Absolutely
Me: And it can be anything at all?
Him: Anything
Me: Well, I can think of one difficult decision that we have to face on a daily basis…
~ Guys, take a deep breath, learn from the master ~
Me: … and that’s…deciding on what to have for lunch
~ If this was an anime, you’d all fall over backwards with your feet in the air ~
Him: *Starts chuckling* Okay, go on…
And then I literally talked for like 5 minutes straight outlining my entire thought process on deciding on what to do for lunch.
I talked about time, how time affects what I’ll eat. I talked about money, how depending on the amount of money in my pocket it will affect what I buy. I also then went on to talk about how what I had the day before will also impact what I have. People is another factor, am I eating by myself or with others? I also brought in Aaron into the conversation saying how I have a friend who is allergic to nuts and thus we will have to consider other people when making decisions for ourselves. I went on and on and on.
He was impressed.
Needless to say, couple of weeks later, I got a call from CBA 9am in the morning (I was still asleep) telling me that they’ll be sending me a contract (which I obviously rejected).
Now, don’t tell me you’re not in awe by my amazing interview skills.
The thing is though it may sound silly but it really isn’t. I would love to see you use my example in your interviews. But if you really feel “silly” you can easily adapt it to say “volunteer work”. Most of the elements are the same which are time, money and people.
That’s it for now. So tell me folks. What quirky responses have you used during an interview?
Workity Work
Mar 10th
Spent 10 hours in the office today.
2 hours spent setting up my PC…again.
1 hour spent at lunch.
6.8 hours getting jboss, swing and python 2.4 to work
0.2 hours of coding, totalling a massive 10 lines of java.
You would think I was getting paid for each line that I write.
Sounds horrible doesn’t it? Well, it’s alright, I mean the work is not that high priority, I’m getting paid well and I don’t mind it.
Some guy also burnt his toast and set off the fire alarm. Had a fire truck rock up, check the premises and leave. Quite hilarious. Macquarie probably got slapped with a massive bill though. To make it worse, it’s apparently the 3rd time that it’s happened since I left. The toaster did not suffer from any injuries.
Chopsticks is holding “amazing race” on Saturday, if you want to come ask me for more information. It’ll be fun with lots of Asians.
Oh and Ben…screw you…I was trying to pronounce “ball” today. Made me realise that I’m one of those few Asians that’s not a banana but hang around a bunch of white guys, w00t?
Sorry, I’ll go back to being polite. Speaking of polite I was lining up to buy ham and delicious sandwich pickles at Woolies. Got up to the counter and the lady said “Hi, how are you?” in one of those extremely bored and rehearsed way. I gave the usual “I’m good thanks. How are you?” but slightly more enthusiastic than usual, with a smile of course, and her faced literally turned from a frown to a confused smile. I guess she doesn’t get a lot of friendly customers, which is a reason I hate customer service jobs. I cannot tolerate lack of appreciation. If I do something nice, you better appreciate and acknowledge it.
My WongFuProductions t-shirts came in yesterday along with my awkward turtle I’ll be wearing them most likely tomorrow, Friday and most definitely Saturday.
Anyway, I’m gonna finish my dinner and watch House. In the mean time here’s a video 
and proud of it 
Edit:
Oh and I realised that people don’t comment unless a) They really want to get their voice heard b) I tell them to
So um…comment!
Start of corporate life
Dec 1st
I started working at Macquarie yesterday. Went through an induction where there were team activities, presentations and of course free food. Today, I got told what I would be doing.
It seems easy enough, but like everything, it’s all easy when you first hear it.
I have 3 tasks.
First task is to upgrade an existing permission system. Currently users are allocated various permissions given their role. However, if their role were to change, admins would have to manually remove and add permissions. This worked when user base was small, but in order for it to scale a new system would have to be implemented. I would have to create a profiling system, where each user would have 1 profile rather than several different permissions. The profile will then contain the permissions. This way you just have to change the profile rather than changing a dozen or so permissions. Seems easy huh?
Well, I guess the problem I have at the moment is understanding the system. It is quite monstrous (by my standards anyway, probably small compared to some of the other applications). The code is actually quite easy to navigate, it doesn’t contain any javadoc but is intrinsic enough to understand. Hopefully I can work out how the permission system work by this week. It uses hibernate which is an ORM for java, which is extremely funky. Basically turns DB table rows into objects which you can manipulate directly upon.
Two other tasks that I have to do is replace the webware python framework with another framework (possibly cherrypy) and also migrate the system to unix (as opposed to windows).
I stayed back till 6:45pm today, and it’s only been my second day. It was by choice though, nobody forced me to. I’m also sick so I feel like crap.
