My job hunting chronology

My first post since I came home to Indonesia several months ago. So many think want to share, so little time and busy schedule.

Anyway regarding to job hunting, here are some my chronological breakdown

• January 2010, Decided to start look for another job
• January – July 2010, go to several interview, but very limited since I dont have N1 certification
• July 2010, Taking N1 Japanese certificate exam to increase my probability to get hired (I did pass)
• July  2010 – January 2011, After getting N1, lots of job offer came and when to a lot of interviews
• January 2011, Managed to get to the final interview of the company that I really wanted to join
  However with the reason that suddenly they changed the job requirement to at least Master degree holder
  I didn’t get the job
• February 2011, Quit my job in Japan, Head section and Chief of HR tried hard to make me stay there by
  promising promotion, better income etc. But it’s too late I already made up my mind
• March 2011, Came back to Indonesia (not because of the earthquake, I already resign at February)
• March 2011 – April 2011, just within 1 month time span I had 4 interviews in Jakarta and 11 interviews in Singapore
  (Yes I did went to Singapore too) and passed most of the interviews

After summarizing all the company that wanted to hire me, I made top 3 list (all of them are Japanese company)

1. General Trader (Import Export) in Jakarta
2. Bank in Singapore
3. Telecom Company in Jakarta

After having hard time and some dilemma to choose, I decided to join 1 of them and start working since end of April 2011.
Currently when I’m writing this, I haven’t become their permanent worker yet. But so far so good, I’ve met a lot of
great people since I joined.

Japan’s Earthquake donation

Japan has been my home for the past 4 years. The earthquake, tsunami and also nuclear reactor plant crisis that Japan face right now is a serious problem. The least I could do is to donate to their red cross for disaster relief.

Taken from the official japan red cross’ website

http://www.jrc.or.jp/english/relief/l4/Vcms4_00002070.html

This is the account number information

Name of Bank: Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation
Name of Branch: Ginza
Account No.: 8047670 (Ordinary Account)
SWIFT Code: SMBC JP JT
Payee Name: The Japanese Red Cross Society
Payee Address: 1-1-3 Shiba-Daimon Minato-ku, Tokyo JAPAN

I’ve donated this morning and I encourage anyone who live in Japan’s Tokai,Chubu and Kansai area (and all other area that weren’t affected by the disaster) to donate if you have some money to spare.

 

Japan’s Earthquake March 11th, 2011. The biggest yet.

March 11th, 2011.

Today I have an interview session via Skype from Japan with the prospect employer in another country. At morning around 10.00 Am I got phone call that he wanted to change the schedule from 13.00 Pm to 16.00 Pm. Which is good for me because I have more time to prepare myself.

At around 15.00 Pm while I’m preparing for the interview session (wearing suits, necktie etc) the quake came in. It is not my first earthquake experience but it is definitely one of the biggest I’ve ever encounter. I tried to check to Japan’s earthquake site but the site itself was down. So I checked the American website and found that the epicenter of 7.9 earthquake is 700km apart from my place. Later on it got updated to 8.9.

The interview went on at 16.00Pm smoothly without the quake.

After the interview I went to BBC news website and see a shocking image of the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan. It is really scary, just like watching armageddon sci-fi movie.

My actual plan is to go to tokyo yesterday at March 10th, but because the ticket has been sold out, I changed it to March 11th. And guess what, at March 11t, the earthquake hit and my destination place is also got hit by it. I couldn’t imagine if I DO go to tokyo at March 10th. I guess I’ve been blessed by unknown force.

New Laptop Dell 1558

Okay so I finally got my new  laptop. Quite early if I might say because the invoice said it will be delivered on 5th August but instead it was delivered on 28th September.

Here is the main Spec of my new Dell Studio 1558

• CPU Intel I7-740
• Memory 4 GB RAM
• Graphic Card ATI 5470 1 GB
• LCD 15.6 inch Full HD
• HDD Sata 500GB 5400 RPM
• OS Windows 7 64 Bit Home Premium

Price paid : almost 90.000 yen

Optional Package :

• Advanced Warranty 3 years

Total price paid : 101.000 yen

I got special company discount and special online store discount when I bought this so it was cheaper than buying it at computer retail stores.

Since this is my first windows 7 experience, and also my first 64 bit OS experience, I had a lot of things to catch up. For example, I found my favorite uinstaller utility didn’t work well in windows 7 64 bit and my audio editor software also has some bugs in 64 bit. But most of the stuff ran good.

The 500 GB HDD came with only 1 partition so I made it into 2 partitions (OS and Data) with almost the same size each. I used windows 7 internal tools to the partition itself and it was pretty easy to do (Kudos to microsoft for this one).

I also made several recovery disks (including USB key), both by Dell utilities and also windows 7 utilities. Since I don’t like OEM bloatware, after I use Dell Utilities that I need (in this case, the local backup utilities) I disabled almost all Dell Service on my laptop.

The Windows Experience Index scored 5.0 in the first test (with all factory default setting and without optimization applied). With Aero in the lowest sub score. Yes indeed I found Aero effects kinda make my new laptop a little bit sluggish, but after I do some optimization here and there, especially services.msc and msconfig file, I saw some improvement.

I also tested the machine with Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, which is one of the reason I want to buy this mainstream gaming laptop. The auto graphic detect from the game set all the texture level at highest point which is very good since I don’t really expect my machine could handle the extra (very high) setting. But the Anti Aliasing is only at 2X and full frame synchronization is off (which is very reasonable and infact quite good considering it’s only a mainstream laptop). Considering the machine couldn’t handle Aero in full performance, I’m quite surprised and impressed that it ran Cod MW2 quite fine.

The only problem I have is there is some fan screeching sound randomly at the left part of the touch pad which I believe is where the HDD located. Kinda worried about it at first but since it’s not click of death (I have experience of click of death so I knew what it sound and I also have experience of recovering click of death HDD) so it was probably by bad design. I searched the internet and several people complain almost the same problems. It looks like the fan and heat sink design at the left part of the touchpad is not really well considered. But this is also my first SATA HDD personal laptop. So it might be normal for it to make sound like that, up until know I only familiar with IDE based HDD sound.

*updated

It turned out that the problem is with my electric plug. Probably because I’m using the extension plugging device and the voltages didn’t went through well. After changing the configuration of my external power outlet. The strange sound disappeared. So basically the machine is beautiful and powerful without problems.

Ok so there was my first impression of having my new laptop for this 3 days. I hope you enjoy it.

Who Moved My Cheese

Several years ago I got the pdf version of “Who Moved My Cheese” book from a friend. I read it of course but at that time I didn’t find the content interesting enough.

Last week, while cleaning up my HDD and trying to dispose my un-needed old files, I stumble upon this file. And finally I re-read it again. And to my surprise, Now I feel this is a really good book and it has a good points for me right now in my life.

Several years ago when I first time read it, I was still in the beginning of my career, so perhaps of that I wasn’t able to grasp the true meaning of the book.

But now I’m on the mid career and I feel that I’m on a transition and or changing and suddenly when I read the book I felt so moved and found it really really great.

I wouldn’t describe the content of the book here, but you could find the summary of the book over the internet. I highly suggest to search for it or even better, read the book, for those who want to try to leave their comfort zone, but too scared to do it. This book could overcome your fear of “change”. But since “change” is always inevitable,  you need to prepare for it right.

Book Again

Once in a year. My current company give their employee a kind of voucher to buy books that related to job and or technologies. It only valid until 3000 yen.

Last year I bought “IT Passport” book, and this year I bought 2 book from it which is :

• The Basic of System Engineer
• Fundamental Information Technology Engineer

Of course they were all written in Japanese. I hope I’ll have the spare time to read all of my un-read yet books.

Brasiliana Catering

After 3 year living here in okazaki, I just found out that one of the brazilian restaurant near my living place have delivery catering service.

So I tried for 1 week, and it was quite good. Although it was primarily meat menu with none or very little vegetables. But the price is not that bad.

Now I extend the delivery service to 1 month.

Finally now I have more time to do something else because the time for preparing meal and dinner is now almost zero ^_^

Foreign currency deposit / 外貨預金

Japan was hit with yen appreciation. Now yen is in stronger upper hand against dollar (strongest point yet in last 15 years)

Hearing so, I tried to convert some of my yen to US dollar and find out it’s better to open a foreign currency deposit instead

Here is the detail of it. If you want to convert yen to US dollar by cash, aside from the conversion rate, you need to pay another 3 yen per dollar as a handling charge.

Now if you open up a foreign currency saving account, the handling fee is lighter. It’s only 0.5 yen if you open it through Internet and around 1 yen if you open it by usual method.

Knowing that, I opened up the account using internet. Now here is the catch, if you want to convert the US dollar back to cash Japanese yen, you need to pay 2 yen per dollar as a handling charge. But if you convert it to yen by account transfer the n the handling charge would be 0.5 yen per dollar.

I’m still new in this kind of thing but I guess it would be nice info to share this with anyone who interested

Borrowed some book from Boss.

We just changed to new room at my working place, and during the process of that I found several books that interests me. After I knew that it belongs to my Boss (the head of IT department), I approached him to know whether I could borrow some of his books or not.

In the end, I borrowed 3 books. Of course they all written in Japanese, but to translate the title than it will be :

• working with intelligence (business EQ)
• logical writing
• logic in writing, thinking and problem solving

Passed JLPT 2010 N1. ＪＬＰＴ 2010 Ｎ１ を合格したよ。

今年から日本語能力試験のフォーマットが変わって、初めて１級（Ｎ１）を挑戦してみました。

ラッキーなことに、変わった点は私には有利なので、難しくなるはずなのに、私にとってはその逆です。

今日はその試験の結果をもらいました。合格でした。すごくうれしかったです。

私の点数は １４９ / 180　です。

細かく分けると：

• 文字語彙文法　：　57/60
• 読解　:　32/60
• 聴解　：　60/60

結果を見た通り、聞き取りの部分は楽勝だったんですが、読解はちょっとやばかったです。これで日本語の実力を証明する書類をやっと手に入れました。