It’s time to proceed PC refresh for me in my company.
I continued to use 2019 Intel Mac Book Pro 16 inch.
It’s 3 years and feel so long.

I plan to continue to use Mac, so I submitted my order for M2 Mac Book Pro.
But asset management’s update is it’s short supply and suggestion is submitting order for another model.

It’s quit bureaucratic, and there’s no way I would choose Windows PC because I can just wait.
And I know it’s not so super rare like home-run ball of Ohtani Shohei.
What I’m surprised is there’s no suggestion for waiting and no mechanism to make the ETA transparent.

There’s Hybrid Worker Bundle which is the name of service to give set of PC gadgets and accessories and provided to employee though the cost is charged to the department.
I could get Magic Keyboard and Magic Trackpad, 4k webcam, head-set, Wifi router.
This is great service for employee, but unfortunately flexibility is less, so I can’t choose not to include some devices.
But anyway, this is good.

As I need to have session in Cisco Live Melbourne in Dec, I need to prepare slides.
Since it’s 2 hours session I need to create lots of slides.

The challenge is I’m not a true expert on the topic.
So I’m counting on internal references.

I need to digest all the materials and references to extract kind of valuable resources for external customers.
This is fun but take certain time.

I could prepare 30+ slides in this 3 days, but target wold be 150+ as refined ppt.
Then I can keep only good slides and reduce it to about 100.

Need to work in late night and weekend.

Summer vacation is over.
I stayed in both my hometown and my wife’s hometown and finally returned home yesterday.

I was able to enjoy about 2 weeks of bachelor life and could have nice family bonding with parents and grandparents.
I think this is necessary for everyone in my family, even if it’s a bit tiring sometimes.

A lot of work awaits me and today was a busy day including 1on1 with my boss’s boss’s boss.
He kindly asked me about my stress level and he mentioned that it should be 0.
And he also advised me to take things easy as we need time to both accelerate to full speed and to decelerate from full speed.

This year should be a good year as my company announced 20-year high company performance factor which is used to calculate bonus.
It should indicate that there should be enough budget for promotion and salary increase.

Looks I’m being able to reduce my weight.
At this moment, it’s just about 2kg.

But I’m relatively sure that I’m reducing weight in reality, since I confirmed my weight kept being 105kg very stably.
I tried to go to gym to do exercise, and keep trying to leverage Base Bread to avoid overeating.
Looks this is working.

From 16th, I’m going to visit my wife’s hometown but I really want to reduce my weight, so will try not to take much calories.

Looks I caught cold from day before yesterday, and developed fever up to 38.6 degrees.
Now the fever got reduced to 37.5, but I still feel unwell to some extent.

It’s bad not being able to go to gym due to sickness.
Especially recently, I could reduce my weight thanks to the exercise and making use of Base Bread.
So I want to continue to work out.

For some reason, this type of sentence in English is not so easy to compose for me.
Maybe it’s so much related to the style of English I used in my job.

So this blogs should mean a lot.

Cisco Live is external premier event for customer hosted by my company.
And I submitted my proposal for one of the technical session for customer.

Today I got contact as my submission was accepted, so this is good news for me though this will make me busier.
The problem is I proposed to have session for platform A or platform B but content team requested me to cover both platform as 2-hour session.

2-hour is long especially in case of providing technical session and timeline for preparation is strict as the material due date is 2nd half of Oct.

Anyway, this is positive news which motivated me to some extent, and I will be able to go to Melbourne in Dec.

My wife and daughters went back to their hometown yesterday.
So now I can enjoy single life and all the time is available only for me.

Yesterday I went to Yakitori restaurant where I’m regular customer.
But the mistake is I drink too much maybe.

After coming back home, I was so sleepy and went to bed at 8:30 PM.
I’m growing and alcohol is now having much impact on me.

Today I went to gym, and only had 2 bottle of beer, so so I still can be awake.

First 2-3 days is super enjoyable, but will have bored feeling usually.
Probably I forgot how I can spend my time only for myself.

My manager told me that he nominated me for promotion.

Gradually promotion and pay raise is becoming not exciting topic, maybe it’s because my salary level is relatively high in Japan.
1M yen per year is not a big deal any more.

Funny thing is my mgr asked me to fill the slide deck for proposal of my promotion.
I assume it’s not usual, but anyway it’s for my promotion, so I’m happy to support to complete the proposal.

Promotion will need endorsements from mgr/Director from same or other department.
I could give heads-up to some mgr/directors in Japan since I have experience to talk with them in person, and having some close relationship.
But it’s a bit tough for me to give same kind of heads-up to same in India/other countries.

My Australian college sympathized with me. Maybe it’s related to cultural stuff.

From this month, additional deduction from monthly salary started as Long-term care insurance deduction.
The amount of deduction depends on the income, but for me it’s over 11k yen.
Given the progressive taxation level I have, I need to earn over 20k yen as salary to offset that deficit.
It’s not small.

In addition to that, my company decided to stop commuting allowance from next month and will start allowance for hybrid work.
But in short, this means about 7k yen decrease from monthly salary.

It’s not easy for me to get pay raise as my salary level is almost limit considering the pay level for salary man.
Hence I’m very sorry for having this kind of decrease/deduction impacting me.

Anyway I need to feed my family.

Today I had 1on1 with my boss’s boss’s boss.
It should have been 30min call with small talk and exchange on my tasks and missions.
But it resulted in 70min call.
I was exhausted since I’m not a native English speaker and had some tense feelings on talking with upper management, but it’s valuable experience to be honest.

As an icebreaker, I talked about my visit to the beach with a family friend this Sunday.
Then I mentioned about my sunburn, and that opened the door for the lengthy discussion about the health.
He is health freak actually, and I understood it to some extent.

Anyway we spent 50min to discuss
– benefit of exposing to sun light
– About UV cream and medical creams. And it’s absorption to the body
– fatty liver and how liver prioritize it’s process on various intakes
– impact of alcohol and fermented food on our body

We could have conversation and discussion as team colleagues, and it’s greatly better than not having any discussion or conversation.
Hope I can build mutual better understanding with him.