.: What’s Bruin :.

This marks the premiere of a new series on What’s Bruin, called the Pourpa Letters, establishing a legacy from a dad to his son on life, work, and faith. Pourpa is the adopted stepson of JoeBruin88.

Dear Pourpa,

How have you been? It’s been a long time since we last talked. I hope you are well and school is going well for you. How are classes?

Being Thankful
Mom and I were at bible study the other night. We prayed for you, for your studies and your spiritual growth. We also gave praise for how God is blessing our family through a good start on my new career. It’s important to remember to give thanks and praise to God for his blessings, not just to always ask him for things. “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights…” (James 1:17).

Using Your God-given Spiritual Gifts
As I was reviewing the work events of the other day, I was thankful for my work environment and the current manager I have. I was on a conference call with another design team in Florida. My manager, F, was telling these other people on the phone that if they have further questions they should “contact ***** [me] because of his expertise”. Later on during the call, she praised me for my advanced planning, thinking ahead, and organization skills.

It’s interesting how during bible study the other night we discussed spiritual gifts. Of course, you know my two strongest ones are servanthood and humility … J/K, obviously. But anyways, I believe the biggest reason I’m so happy in my current work is that I’m using my strengths–the gifts God gave me– which are administration and teaching.

Lesson Learned
While I was in business school, I had the opportunity to read a book “for fun”. I had chosen to read Jack: Straight from the Gut by Jack Welch, the very successful former CEO of General Electric. It’s a very good story, but as you know from reading good books as these, sometimes it’s difficult to process because there are so many good things to incorporate into your life. Well, I focused on one thing in the book that resonated strongly with me.

When Mr. Welch first started as a chemical engineer with General Electric, he struggled with the work for GE because he wasn’t being recognized, promoted, etc. for all his hard work. He had a tremendous work ethic. One of his work tenets was to always try to deliver something extra above and beyond what is expected. Well of course, someone finally did notice. And he retired as CEO of GE several years later.

On Friday, my manager had come by my desk to ask me to work on this updated project calendar. She wanted me to set up a review schedule to organize our efforts for this project because when it starts, it will be massive. Realizing this for myself, I had already begun analyzing the project calendar with respect to our efforts that will be required when the project ramps up. She specifically asked me to create a process organization chart in Excel similar to another one I had created earlier. Anyways, when she started talking to me at my desk, she realized that I had already started working on the very thing she wanted– I was thinking ahead, planning, basically using the strengths God gave me. She smiled when she saw I was already working on it. I was glad too because she knows that I’m taking initiative to do something important without being told.

Anyways, I hope you actually read this letters and enjoy them. Hope all is well.

Love,
Dad

Tags: Bible_study, Books, Career, Jack-Welch, Life, Pourpa, Pourpa_Letters, Prayer, Reflection, Spiritual, work

Sometimes in my line of work, I get to review some pretty funny stuff in some of the learning material we’re developing.

Comment from another reviewer: Why is there a midget standing so far away from the safe. The second person should have no more than an arm’s length distance away from the other person at the safe.

After laughing out loud, I get to “clean up” the comment so the person who created the graphic for the course does not get offended.

Sterilized Comment: Change graphic to show people in scale. The second person providing TPI looks like a midget. Additionally, the second person providing TPI needs to be next to the person opening the safe, no more than an arm’s length distance away. The whole concept of TPI is that each individual must physically see the other handling the material. Currently, the second person does not have an unobstructed view into the safe as it’s being opened.

BTW, TPI means Two-Person Integrity.

Tags: Career, education_and_training, Humor

If you think the following sounds like a conversation or an email/letter, you’re right. I couldn’t have said this better than the way it’s written in an email to a friend of mine below, except for the quote from my manager’s email.

It’s been a hectic week for me since my manager is going on a business trip, so I had to help prepare her presentation materials and stuff for her. It was a load of fun though. And she really liked my work.

Thank you both for all your hard work and contributions on this…and JoeBruin88 (yes, I changed it to my pseudonym), thanks especially for putting all the finishing touches on it. Beautiful job!

Anyways, I’ve had a blast this week on the way to work. After listening to the traffic report, I plugin my iPod to my car stereo and listen to the latest podcast sermon from John Piper. He is such a great teacher/pastor. You should listen to his daily radio messages, which are only 25 minutes long. I subscribe to his messages using iTunes. It’s a blessing listening to his teaching each morning instead of the depressing world news. I get to fill my mind with God’s word and sound teaching instead. The web site is at Desiring God Radio.

I’m not sure if you have an mp3 player or an iPod yet. But it is well worth it. Pourpa is selling his brand new iPod (20GB 4th generation) because he just got a new iPod Nano as a gift from his aunt with his name engraved on it. I highly recommend iPod if you don’t have one yet. Let me know if you want to buy it. It’s only a few months old from this summer. He also has an AppleCare extended warranty that he is selling separately.

Anyways, back to the good stuff, commercial is over.

For Christmas I also got this audio bible. It’s perfect too because I hardly have to time to read the bible because I wake up so early every day and am busy. But I can play the bible on my iPod while driving in the car. What I like to do is listen to the chapter that the pastor is going over in church so that it can soak in during the week of the sermon. The audio bible came with mp3 files, so I burned them to a CD as mp3’s instead of audio CD. My car stereo is also an mp3-CD player. Because mp3’s are so compact, I was able to fit the entire bible onto four CDs. If it were regular CD audio, it would probably require over 10 CDs to do that.

Finally, I wanted to tell you about our small group bible study first meeting. I really like this group. We had a pot luck this past Thursday for the first meeting. When we came in we felt so welcome. The host/leaders were very friendly. The guy looked very familiar and then we found out that this person plays the drums at church. He is the best drummer there. I like it when he’s part of the worship team.

I hope you and Gina can get into a small group some day when your schedule eases up and when Aiden is old enough to have some short babysitting. It’s big blessing. I had forgotten how valuable being in a small group is to my walk.

Tags: Bible, Bible_study, Career, Christian, faith, Friends, iPod, John-Piper, mp3, podcast, Sermons, small-group, Spiritual, work

One of the Navy guys working with us here wore this annoying hat after lunch.

It was kind of annoying. I sure hope they lose to Texas in the national championship game coming up.

Tags: Career, Sports, USC-sucks, work

I’ve been up since 2:30 this morning. My nose is congested and sometimes running. I was sneezing. After laying in bed for an hour, I decided to just get up and do some work out of my home office. In addition to working two hours from home last night, I’ve put in a couple of hours already for a total of four. I like working remotely like this, but it sucks not being able to sleep or breathe very well.

Working remotely may have its advantages, but they are totally negated when you are sick.

Good news is that my manager said I can log the hours I’ve put in as regular time and any balance from 8 hours not worked as personal time. This is a plus so that I don’t have to use a full day of “vacation” time for being home sick.

Tags: Career, Life, sick, work

Although Josephine and I had been looking forward to the S Tech Holiday Party for several weeks, we both fell asleep on the couch.

Gasp. It’s 4:45 PM. We have to leave in 15 minutes.

So since I had couch-head, I hopped in the shower… again.

And we were out the door by 5:02 PM. Destination. Padres Hall of Fame Bar and Grill at Petco Park, the old warehouse standing in front of right field that has been converted to a souvenir shop on the lower floors and a nice restaurant on the top floor with the balcony overlooking right field.

Ticket for the Holiday Party

Despite the heavy traffic on a Saturday night in North County off the 15 freeway, we arrived at Petco Park a little after 6:00 PM. At the door I was greeted by name by one of the HR people, which is pretty good considering I don’t work at the corporate headquarters. I got a company Christmas gift, which was a nice mini portfolio with notepad inside. I also was handed my parking validation worth $8. This company is awesome. Free holiday party, free parking in downtown San Diego.

Company Christmas Gift

[What a breath of fresh air when you compare this to the lame-ass party that A Corp had last year. Thank goodness I didn't go. Not only would I have to spend it with a bunch of lame people, but I would have had to pay $100 for the both of us to go have a party at some lame hotel.]

Before dinner, we enjoyed a variety of nice hors d’oeuvres like sushi, shish kebab, crab meat patties, stuffed tomatoes, and empanadas. We also enjoyed soft drinks and a modified 7 and 7 from the open bar. Modified? They didn’t have Seagram’s whiskey, so the bartender made it with bourbon instead.

Dinner was delicious! They had salads (mixed greens and Caesar’s), potatoes (scalloped au gratin and garlic mashed), teriyaki chicken, baked fish, prime rib, and vegetarian pasta (heavy on the garlic!). We definitely ate too much.

After dinner the company gave out 5-year service awards and made some other announcements. But we didn’t hear much of it very well. The people sitting with us at our table were very rude. They were practically shouting their conversation as if they were the only ones at the table. I think they had too much to drink. One of the executives sitting at the adjacent table was trying to get those rude people to shut up during the announcements, but they were oblivious.

They raffled away some company goodies, which I did not win. However, I did win a cool prize when they were doing some Christmas song trivia. When it was our table’s turn we had to guess the last words of Frosty the Snowman. So I started singing the song to myself. My first inclination was to guess, “Christmas is on its way,” but I knew it was wrong. Other than “Thumpety, thump, thump,” my brain was running out of options. So I started singing away some more in my head. Then I blurted out the correct answer: “I’ll be back again some day!”

My prize was this plastic maze money holder thingie. You had to maneuver this tiny metal ball inside of a plastic maze into this small boxed area. Once inside there, it allows you to open the plastic drawer, which held a $30 Blockbuster gift card. Pretty cool.

Plastic Prize from Frosty

After struggling with the maze for several minutes, I let Josephine and someone from another table try it. None of us could figure it out. The guy at the next table had the same idea as me. It’s “hammer-time” baby.

We left the party early at around 8:45 PM. We skipped out on the video horse racing, dancing, and any other games and activities they had planned. On the way home, Josephine and I stopped to finish our Christmas shopping. We made it home by 10:00 PM.

All in all, a great party and great food.

P.S. I took a hammer to that plastic thingie this morning. With my gift card, I rented Cinderella Man (Widescreen Edition), The Skeleton Key (Widescreen Edition), and Murderball.

Tags: Career, work

So my friend was telling me about this guy he works with. So here’s the deal. Whenever the boss is out or basically not looking, my buddy says this guy just surfs the ‘net looking at online comics and posting comments on forums. The other day the boss was out for the day in meetings. My friend says that his co-worker only worked a total of 40 minutes out of 8 hours or 480 minutes. That’s a work effectiveness ratio of 8.3%. 10 minutes talking with someone in the office and assigning him some work, the other 30 minutes …

Well, let’s just say the boss called the office to check in at 3:30 PM and asked about some stuff that he was supposed to be working on. Apparently, according to my friend, he totally lied on the phone, telling his boss that he had been working on some presentation and evaluating some documents. So after he got off the phone with his boss, he worked for half and hour and left the office an hour earlier than he was supposed to. I guess he planned on working on at home since the boss probably was expecting some deliverable the next morning.

My friend can’t believe this is going on. He says the office he works in is an open area office and this guy has the gall to surf the web in front of everybody. Everybody is working away. I guess the other support personnel can feel irritated when this guy assigns work at the last minute because the boss is coming back and so this guy piles on the work for the support personnel at the end of the week just so he can look good and meet his deadlines.

Anyways, if I were working with someone like this, I certainly would have no respect for a person with such a lack of integrity.

He should get one of these for his work area so that when anybody is looking at his monitor…

“Lies, lies, lies, yeah”

Tags: Career, work

Half a desk when we moved

Our small instructional design moved across the street into the Navy schoolhouse on Tuesday. At first, my desk was only half completed. I was not too happy about that since all our desks were supposed to be L-shaped. But yesterday, some Navy personnel brought in another desk for me to complete the L.

The other half

Tags: Career, work

Tags: Career, Navy, Rants, stupid-people

Josephine has obtained another promotion in her work. She learned today that she will be the new Executive Assistant for Learning Support Services for Elementary Education. Translation: very nice instant pay raise. And one year from now, almost a $10K annual raise.

Sweet!

Update 9/6/05:

I am extremely pleased to announce the selection and appointment of ****** to the position of LSS Executive Assistant. Previously serving as an Administrative Assistant to the Director of Secondary Curriculum, ***** replaces my former assistant, Brigitte ******, and will continue to be a strong addition to the LSS division. During a brief transition period, Karen **** will continue to provide secretarial support on a substitute basis. Congratulations to *****!

Email announcement from *****’s new manager

Tags: Career, Events, Josephine_Bruin, work

Pourpa and I are headed to Anchors Restaurant on base tomorrow for the Seafood buffet, which only costs $9.95. Since it’s a long weekend, I’m only working a half day, so I get to go home after the feast.

All-You-Can-Eat
Lunch Buffets!
ANCHORS CATERING & CONFERENCE CENTER
Bldg. 3210, NAVBASE• (619) 556-7788

All-You-Can-Eat Lunch Buffet
Every Wednesday-Friday • 11 am-1 pm • All Hands • (Call for cost)
Wednesday: Prime Rib Buffet
Thursday: Roast Turkey and baked breaded pork chops with all the trimmings
Friday: Seafood buffet including fried catfish and shrimp, also, BBQ ribs and chicken

Each buffet includes vegetables, soup, salad, rolls, dessert, tea or coffee.

Restaurants and Club Events, Morale Welfare, and Recreation

It’s gonna be good! Yum, yum!

Photo Update:

Pourpa’s plate

My plate

Tags: Career, Events, family, Food, Pourpa, work

I found out I was approved for a *** Clearance today. I have my security briefing on Friday.

Right now I’m not working on anything that requires the clearance. Our current work is unclassified. But it’s good to know that I have this clearance. It will be an asset for other contracts and work.

Tags: Career, work

Day 2 of the VRR IPR consisted of another all-day meeting. We stayed downstairs in our office. My finishing up of summer school this week has left me tired due to lack of sleep. So it was difficult to stay awake today. The highlight again was lunch. Although Felicia decided we needed to make it a “working” lunch — meaning we work while we eat, which is what we normally do anyways.

Base Bowling Alley

So we went to the base bowling alley across the street. It has a cafe. There was a lot of food items to choose from. So I waited until almost everyone ordered before deciding. I was just about to order a cheeseburger and fries when I overheard two of the workers talking in Tagalog. Translation: “Do we have any more lumpia in the freezer?” BINGO!

Bowling Alley Cafe

I scrapped my order and requested fried rice and lumpia. Worker: “You want ‘pried rice and lumpia’?” I replied, “Opo.”

IT1 Hall chimed in: “What?!? You have lumpia?”

“Yup. And you’re too late to order any because they’ve already started cooking your food.”

“Well you’re gonna hook me up with some.”

“I don’t think so because Filipinos don’t share lumpia. Once the lumpia is placed on a Filipino’s plate it becomes all his.”

“I see how it is.”

Pried Rice and Lumpia

It was again a large meal. But how can you say “no” to lumpia? So we ate chowed down while continuing our teleconference call when we got back to the office. Nobody really was saying much except for Felicia since she was leading the meeting. We all we enjoying our food.

IT1 Hall and Chief Walker,
Done with their Food

Tags: Career, Food, Navy

Dining area

Today we had lunch at the catering/restaurant on base, called Anchors. The menu today was prime rib and fried chicken. It’s a buffet style, all-you-can-eat for $9.95. And there were definitely no cockroaches in this place. It was very clean and nice looking.

Felicia going through the buffet

My plate

The menu

Pourpa and I plan to have lunch here, hopefully Josephine can join us too. It’s located just outside the base where you don’t have to show I.D. to get in. We want to go on Friday when it’s a seafood buffet.

Tags: Career, Food, Navy

I never thought that I would get to eat such a cool lunch while at work. There is a fundraiser going on right now outside where the new Navy Chief Selectees are selling food: rice, pancit, and lumpia. It’s kind of pricey for $5. You only get two lumpia. But two is better than none. It’s not often that I get to eat Filipino food, only when I go home to visit with family.

Tags: Career, Food, Navy