Ego

Another good lesson to learn is not to tie your ego to irrelevant things. A project is a project, it can be your baby, but its not an extension of your ego. Never seen a case where people view irrelevant subjects as their egos ending well. Things get personal, you are not able to remain objective, drama ensues. Never ends well.

Two Things

Two things I've learned at my current job:-

(1) If someone really does not want to do something, you cannot twist his arm to make him do it. I'm not a big burly man, nor is it my job to twist anyone's arm (last I checked I am not a bouncer at a club);

(2) If someone really insist on doing something, there is nothing you can say or do to stop him.

All you can do is to "strongly recommended" or "strongly advise against" someone doing something. Beyond that, everybody is an adult and must live with the consequences of one's own actions.

Whiners

Without delving into too much details, I hate whiners. I absolutely hate people who not only take my effort for granted, but would also offer their highly unsolicited suggestions of "can we _______?" or "why can't we _________?" If you are not going to volunteer your service, STFU.

You may be used to dealing with some ridiculously accommodating or passive-aggressive individuals but if you think I am one of them, I am afraid you are gravely mistaken.

Under two situations will I tolerate whiners:

(1) you are a paying customer, because $ talks;

(2) I am paid and it's part of my job to listen to your pathetic whining, also because $ talks.

When neither one of those applies, next time you tell me "I want ________" in your little whiny noice expect to get one or more of the following responses:-

"Well, that's nice."

"And that means what to me?" or "And that concerns me how?"

"Let me try to find that rat's ass I care to give." (From Pushing Daisies, said by Elliott)

and my favorite line that I have recently learned,

"We all want many things in life, it builds character."

Playing Chicken

In American English, "playing chicken" is this "game" when two cars drive at high speed straight towards each other and see who will turn away first. Obviously the psychopath with the death wish will always be the winner. I do, however, like to play chicken with fancy cars like Mercedes and BMWs on highway merges. Allow me to explain how merges work, evidently the simple concept of one car at a time depending who's further ahead eludes many people. Particularly people in fancy cars, they LOOOOVE to try to PASS you from behind during a merge. Ugh, excuse me. Anyway you look at it my car is in front of yours. Really, let me ask you this, do you seriously want to play chicken with a 10+ year old Dodge Neon? I sure as hell ain't gonna be the one who steer away first. Even if it's a no fault incident and we are each responsible for our own repair cost, I still come out ahead in $ amount. Muhahahaha. You want to play chicken at a merge, drive a crappy car!

Persistency

Okay, I am not going to lie. I am not a persistent person nor do I have a lot of stamina. I give up quite easily. Recently someone had told me that she believes that one can achieve whatever one sets up to do, as long as he/she wants it enough. Not to say that being persistent is not a good trait, but I certainly hope that only applies to certain situations.

For example, when a man (or a woman) are too persistent about an object of affection despite their lack of interest, that's a stalker in the works. Okay, that maybe an extreme example. Some goals simply cannot be achieved with hard work and determination, e.g. becoming the next James Cameron. It takes hard work, luck, AND talent, and no amount of hard work can compensate for a lack of talent.

Sometimes, one simply needs to know when to quit.

Devil's Advocate

Took me a while to learn what the term meant. Which is odd considering that I played the devil's advocate A LOT. Just a note that what I said does not necessarily reflects what I believe. I just like to make sure I have considered all perspectives of an event is all. =)

Freecells

If you don't know what Freecell, the solitaire card game is, here's more than you will ever need to know at Wikipedia.

A week or so ago I got into a discussion with the Hubby who claimed that he had heard from various sources that ALL freecell games are solvable. Here's another thing you need to learn about men:- they will believe in all external sources except their wives! (Okay, to be fair to him, only on certain subjects and occasionally.) I had my doubts but was too lazy to look it up online until today. Evidently, a few are universally (and I use that term loosely) agreed to be unsolvable. For the fun of it, I'll post them on my random blog. :)

According to one Robert McMillan, there are 8 unsolvable games in the Window FreeCell game, and they are:

Games Nos.

11,982
146,692
186,216
455,889
495,505
512,118
517,776
781,948

Also from Wikipedia:

Game 11982

When Microsoft FreeCell became very popular during the 1990s it was not clear which of the 32,000 deals in the program were solvable. To clarify the situation, Dave Ring started The Internet FreeCell Project and took on the challenge of trying to solve all the deals using human solvers. Ring assigned 100 consecutive games chunks across volunteering human solvers and collected the games that they reported to be unsolvable, and assigned them to other people. This project used the power of crowdsourcing to quickly converge on the answer. The project was finished in October 1995, and only one game defied every human player's attempt: #11,982. Although this deal has defied every attempt to solve it, even by several exhaustive-search software solvers, no definitive proof has yet been offered that it is, in fact, unsolvable.

Several more presumably unsolvable instances were also discovered when Windows XP updated Freecell to 1,000,000 game instances, but 11,982 is still the most infamous of them.

11,982 is inherently difficult due to the large number of aces and other small cards high in the stack, as well as the high cards being relatively evenly distributed among the stacks, requiring one to use many of the cells to get to any useful cards.

Game 11,982 in Kpatience is identical to the one on Windows.

Awwwww man, how did I miss being one of the human solvers for this project? LOL