Points? what points?

When I go shopping, I usually go looking for something I need at the lowest possible price. What I get annoyed at is when I start having to carry point cards or membership cards to get some kind of discount. When I get into a situation like that, my wallet starts to get bloated with more cards than cash and eventually I become generally annoyed with dealing with excess baggage.

I also hate gimmicks where stores make it look like you're saving more cash than you actually are. When I was a kid, I would always be mystified about the idea of a "sale." Something could be "50%" off, but I used to wonder what if these guys just doubled the price and then said that it was "50%" off? Essentially, that is what the retail business is all about-- finding ways of getting people to spend more money.

Air miles, I've never in my life have ever spent an air mile before, but it just seems like one of those big things that you ought to save up for a trip to somewhere or something like that. I ended up getting an air miles card for one of the flight carriers in Japan since I had to fly out to the country side to visit a factory. Free miles, so why not, I thought. I got card in the mail just today and according to the system they have, is that I have to spend $2 to get 1 cents worth of points. In other words, I would have to spend about $20,000 to get a $100 worth of cash back!?

What kind of insane system is that? It just sends the wrong message that you have to spend ridiculous amount of money to just get a little back. I am rather surprised at how some people are so keen on collecting points to get something back, especially when what you get back is so little.

Rather than collecting points, I would believe that there are better ways of spending one's time.

Obviously, I am a guy

Just got an e-mail from a female friend tonight CC'd to a bunch of people about how an old lady scolded her when she was sending e-mail from her cell phone by the priority seats. Generally in Japan, most people ignore that rule and no one really minds, except for the old lady in question.

Apparently after being scolded, she sends out an e-mail to her friend how she was kind of depressed about the whole incident and that it would have been nicer if the older lady was a little kinder with her words, though she was explaining how she was trying to be understanding. The e-mail rattles onwards on how it is hard to deal with situations like these... yadda yadda yadda and finally comes to the conclusion, "what would you do?"

I fired off an e-mail in about 5 minutes with 2 lines compared to her essay "Just say sorry and tell the old lady to be a little nicer when telling someone to do something."

After hitting send, I just realized how much of a guy I was: she probably wanted comfort instead of advice. And I get a lot of trouble from that when other girls when they come to me with their problems-- they aren't looking for a solution.

When rules get in the way of work

I can't say for certain if this is a good or bad thing, but one thing that really annoys me about work is how managers like rules especially when something goes wrong (no matter how benign).

Just a few days ago, I made a small mistake that basically killed a sample. I opened a bottle of resin a little to close to one of my samples and unfortunately it squirted on to the sample, thus ruining it. Fortunately I had a spare sample to replace the ruined one. I figured that I would just make a mental note to not do that again.

Since these samples I am working on are being passed through a manual labor processing line, I naturally reported in on the little mishap and informed the people in charge that I'll be replacing the sample with another equivalent one. Apparently that wasn't enough.

Management type people aren't involved first hand with what is going on, so when I told them about the problem, they weren't necessarily satisfied that I just replaced the sample. They wanted some action-plan to thus prevent this kind of problem from ever happening again. The first one manager suggested to me was what about having a rule where you should open the bottle at least 1 meter away from the sample. Seriously.

What turned out to be a small mistake which could be remedied by having the sample put on a shelf nearby for when I open the bottle, I ended up having to spend a few hours taking photos of the work space and writing a power point presentation with a play-by-play of how some resin got splashed onto a sample. Bloody waste of time in my opinion, where as I could be off doing some productive work instead.

I sort of feel for these managers though, it seems that because these guys are in a position of power (perhaps?) that they have a need to get actively involved in making decisions or that they are involved some how in getting something implemented (albeit from a sort of distant kind of manner). Honestly, sometimes they should just learn to stand back and let the front line people deal with the problem instead.

The problem with the need for counter-measures and loads of preventative rules (though I would not say that they are all bad) is that it gets in the way of getting real work done. This is actually one blaring weakness when it comes to wanting to get work done. The best managers that I have worked for are the ones that do their best to shield us from dealing with all these annoying rules and simply let us have our way (within reasonable means of course). Because when I have to start following a gazillion rules to reduce errors that happen on a 1 out 100 probability that suck up my time, it becomes a pain in the ass to get anything done.

The ironic thin instead is that one of the guys that I am working with now has decided that it would be much better in our interests to just not report small problems and deal with them ourselves instead of wasting our time taking photos and writing up reports of benign events, which probably won't add up to brownie points on a performance review.

The moral of the story? Don't report small issues, just successes. Though it might not be how things should be setup, it's just more "cost effective" for people like me working in this kind of environment.

Avoiding distractions

It should be obvious, but distractions are a hell of a productivity killer.

Sometimes I wonder how much more I could get done without being distracted, but alas it only remains a figment of my imagination. I have, for the time being, come to accept my fate for now and instead keep a list of a few things that I need to get done everyday. So long as I get the important things done, anything else I get done is icing on the cake.

The key to success is keeping expectations low?

I would have to disagree with that as some of my most productive and driven times are when there are things that I really want to do. Another way of describing it is "having the right motivation." Where does motivation come from, I do not know. There are times when I have been highly motivated and I would stop at nothing to get something done and there are other times where I could care less. The fickleness of human emotions defies my logical thought.

I used to run on the assumption that as long as I saw a logical reason to doing something then I would have no good reason to no do something. Unfortunately, the human body doesn't work like that. Why is it sometimes that the right thing and the hard thing the same thing? I wake up at 7 am and I know that I probably should get out of bed and do something productive, instead I lie awake until about 8:15 instead. But I think I am straying away from the topic... now what was it... oh yeah, avoiding distractions.

How to not be distracted

The only easy answer I've been able to figure out for my case is simply to not be at home nor at work. As long as I am away from familiar territory, my productivity shoots up like mad. I could probably live traveling through hostel to hostel and spend the days checking out interesting places and then come back and spend hours writing up about the interesting things I've done. I could probably live away in a garage surrounded with cool tools to play with and would probably end up spending hours building something.

Being somewhere comfortable is probably the biggest hindrance to me, simply just because I know how to distract myself in comfortable situations compared to when I am away and need to get things done.

The question is how to bring those qualities into my everyday life.... something I need to figure out.

On Touch Typing

I decided recently that I needed to to some practice with my typing as I generally seem to get a little annoyed when I make errors when typing. I generally feel that making a typing mistake and then hitting the backspace key to correct the error to be too much of a pain even to the point that I just keep on going and let spell check deal with the mistakes later on. It just feels really good to keep on going, but it drives me nuts sometimes to see an error just sticking there on the screen that I eventually need to go back and fix it. To alleviate this problem, sometimes I just shut my eyes and just keep going on wit the typing, often to catastrophic effect.

In the old days, you'd usually have to buy software to practice your typing, but now with the internet, there are plenty of places online that you can take lessons for free. I decided to do just that. The first site I came across was here, which was the first site that popped up after a google search for me. So I decided to give it a shot.

My average wpm while for just transcribing text is about 60~70 wpm, but this does not count for errors and going back to fix them (I would assume that my speed would drastically drop once factoring in mistakes). I then tried out their lessons which involves something in the effect of what you might have learned from a touch typing class in high school, which basically is:

1. Hands on the home row
2. Practicing using your index fingers
3. Moving on wards to using the index fingers and middle fingers
4. Using your ring fingers or learning how to go up and down the keyboard
5. Etc

I find that learning how to type like this to be really unnatural to me as my hands and brain doesn't work like this at all. The first lesson where I was just using my index fingers went fine (using the 'F' and 'J' keys), as soon as the program started bringing in my middle fingers into the mix and incorporating the 'D' and 'K' characters into the lesson, I was thrown for a loop. My speed was just ridiculously slow and I had a hell of a hard time trying to get my hands working for me.

I believe that my hands have already some kind of muscle memory built into them as a result of learning to type words whole words instead of gunning for random letters. If I were given a set of random letters to transcribe, I would be at a terrible loss to type them at any sort of speed, where as I would end up being much faster at typing natural words. For example the word "The" I would my left hand only to type this word, though it would probably be more proper to use the right hand for the letter 'H'. I just figured that since my left hand was already doing the typing already, it just felt natural for the hand to do all of the typing.

I type predominantly with my left hand as most of the letters are located on the left hand side of the keyboard and with most of the punctuation located on the right hand side. As a result the span of my left hand is greater than my right hand as I ended up going as far as the letter 'H' with, my left hand and sometimes going as far as the letter 'U' in some cases. For example the word "you," since my index finger has already gotten to the letter "Y", after hitting the "O" my index finger is already beside the the letter "U" so I naturally hit it with my index finger of my left hand. Depending on the context through, I do also hit the letter 'U' with the right hand as well, so a good bunch of the keys that I use are shared between both hands.

If anyone ever bought me one of those ergonomic keyboards, I'd probably take it and kill them with it because it would be utterly useless for me. But still, I think my error rate for typing is still on the high side and with all my years of working on the computer, it still hasn't improved one bit. The question is that do I keep working with the current system that I have right now or do I throw it out and go with standard typing practices.

When I have some more time, I'll try my hand at transcribing written works and see if that helps. If it doesn't then I will consider learning a new typing style. With computers being such an integral part of a person's life it would make sense to have excellent typing skills.

My hand positions are also not fixed as they tend to glide around the keyboard depending on the words that I am using. For example, it would be standard to use just the ring finger to press for the letter "O." In my case, the finger that presses the letter "O" is generally my middle finger as my ring finger tends to be a little hard for me to control and when I do use it, I generally use my ring mainly for the backspace key or the return button.

Secret Projects and Politics

It is so interesting what people start doing without knowing the full details of what is going on. The project at work is coming to an interesting head with some of the managers worrying if we can pull this thing off as some new obstacles have come into play that may cause some problems with us meeting our deadlines.

Right now, we are relying on another group to go into mass production of parts we need for our project. We have done the initial R&D, but the problem with this other group is that there are still many remaining issues to getting the parts we need at a high enough quality. A deadline will be coming up and some people are uncertain that they will be able to produce the parts, within spec, by the required time.

The development process will be passed onto this other group and we will move on to a different phase of the project and it seems that one of the managers and a few of my colleagues are uncertain about this other group pulling through and they want a risk hedge. The interesting thing is that development of this part, after some internal shuffling has been passed onto me and there has already been some underground improvements and design changes made to a prototype to solve some problems and the new design has been presented. Unfortunately for the new part to be put into the system, we need cooperation with other groups, meaning that the development of this new part cannot be kept secret.

Since there hasn't been too much upper level communication about this project and the real objective of this new design wasn't entirely clear as many people had different objectives in mind, I decided to try and clear things up by going public with the project. Upper management responded that we should halt work on it and save our resources for something else. Personally, I think they are right as a new version of this prototype is coming out and the project is going to switch over to that, but some people are still smacking for some kind of risk hedge and want to continue this current project "underground" and I would have to work on it.

My visibility on the whole project is not broad enough to understand everything that is going on at the moment, but given that we are transferring production to another group and we are close to the end run of production on this end, I don't see how we can produce these new parts, test them and perform feed back in a meaningful way if the design is going to change and we are close to finishing up here. People are worried that the other group may fail and we may have to fall back to the original design and hence we should continue work.

As there are too many unknowns at this point, I think it is kind of imprudent to start pouring resources into a separate project where we do not know the outcome or if it will be needed in the future, especially if I have to do it "underground" and it will cost me additional time out of my evenings to work on this. I also probably will not be able to report on this project and thus when I can't talk about it during my performance review, my efforts cannot really thrown into discussion. There is no incentive for me for in this project and there are to many unknowns that I cannot justify myself into working on this project.

On a second note, if you want to really do an underground project, you also need to have access to all the necessary resources on your own without requiring support of management to pull it off. I am pretty good at running "shoe string" experiments/projects but considering I need resources from other groups and need to schedule things into different lines, it would be hard to keep this project a secret. If someone wants to really do it, I am going to have to tell them to do it themselves.

If I were to give myself advice from the future

It would be this: "Don't Destroy Your Sex Rank By Stupid Educational Choices"

Not to say that I'm not sexy by all means, it just means that I wished I was at my full potential a little earlier ;)

Being complacent is not a good thing

Perhaps it is the natural cycle of going from a new recruit in the company to getting used to the surrounding. I used to have a lot of ideas when I first got into the company I was working in. I believed that the R&D process could be sped up immensely by using semi-automation techniques and let the machines we use work through the night producing results that we could evaluate through the day.

I had dreams that I wanted to semi-automate many of the measurement systems and processing systems to make unattended batch processing feasible. Things like that shouldn't be too hard to make, all you need is a sample loader and a mechanism to program in a batch recipe and some error handling (the assumption part is the "all you need" part).

The problem is that with all these ideas, I would have needed the time and resources to put this into action and the problem is that getting the required level of funding and support would have been a pain in the rear. So I but the bullet and decided to work with the system to get the job done like everyone else did.

I personally think that this is the way that many good ideas die, just because people don't have the finding, time or the freedom to give it a shot, because we are stuck work that "needs" to be done and have to little time to do find ways that the current job could be done better or new things to try.

Most of the best ideas and biggest successes came out of skunkworks project, were people were able to make things out of shoe string budgets, putting in their own time to make something. Not everything worked, but some of the biggest successes have been huge. For example, a company like Sony's first venture into the gaming world was not the result of the playstation but by Ken Kutaragi underground working with Nintendo on using the the SPC700 chip that sony developed as Nintendo's sound chip. It was after that that (and must scolding from Sony's executive, that Ken would eventually fire) that Sony got into the console business.

There are probably many examples in history where employees have come up with great ideas that would turn out to be money makers that the executives would never understand. Xerox also had the same problem with the development with the graphical OS and the mouse which Apple and Microsoft would steal for their own computers.

Not all ideas have been good, but so long as the required funds and time is small enough that shouldn't be too much of a problem. If you keep trying, eventually, you'll make a hit. The most important part is the trying, and I believe that companies that don't foster that will probably end up dying.

12 Days of Vacation coming to an end

My vacation is winding down to an end with today being my last day off. It's been a busy vacation, heading out to Sendai, spending time at the hot springs, drinking till the morning, going for lunch, catching the bullet train back, then having drinks with other friends after arriving in Tokyo and then a home party the next day. I've also rode done 3x30 km bike rides out to the beach and back, coupling that with some exercising at home. The body isn't picking up as much muscle as I would like, but I managed to luck out just today with a friend that had a big exercise machine that he wanted to unload.

A shot of the machine from the front

A shot from the side, also exposing my messy room
(yes, I keep an oscilloscope in the room)

The machine retails for about $550 and I managed to get this machine used off a friend for about $275. I just finished moving the machine in to my room and it was plenty of work to heave about. The exercise machine can be completely disassembled but we decided to try and move it around largely in one piece. Buying this machine is a great investment as I used to spend about $60/month for a gym subscription that I could only use once a week because of my late working hours.

Now that I have an exercise machine at home, I should be able to squeeze in a 30~45 min round of exercise, then hitting the showers before going to bed. If you are planning to do muscular training for more than a year, then an exercise machine is well worth the investment. Hopefully, I will have some nice muscular development happening over the next few months.

Going off on another tangent, I've been spending a lot of time out recently, that I've found myself to be a lot more productive while spending time out of the home, or away from the computer. There just seems to be too many distractions on the net keeping me from doing productive activities. I will be looking into trying to cut down the amount of time surfing the net and doing productive work in my spare time.

I've found that it helps for me to have a list of things that I should to and pick something from there to do, else I end up vegging out reading webpages instead.

The information playing field

The average person is generally at a disadvantage when it comes to good information. Financial institutions, insurance companies, real estate agents, credit card companies are exceptionally keen on getting financial information from the average Joe. Armed with statistical information, one can statistically profile people based on their income, gender and purchasing habits. When it comes to dealing with loans and insurance I believe that the relationship between the institution and the average person is asymmetric.

It would be an interesting experiment to see if this playing field could be leveled though the creation of a database with anonymous (and reliable?) information. The people at Glassdoor have managed to do something similar but different with salary information, though I am not sure how sexy a person's spending data would be.

Surviving is hedging against the stupidity of other people

What you would you do if you had to pick up the tab for someone else's mistake? I would naturally would not be happy about it. In the last few years, we have already seen this happen with both Iceland and now probably Greece. Germany is obviously unhappy with the prospect of having to spend the most money on Greece to bail them out, nor are the Greeks happy that they are going to be on the line for tax increases and pay cuts to pay off a debt that their government managed to hide for so long.

I generally don't really care/mind what other people do so long as it does not negatively affect the well being of other people. I generally try to live by that rule, but what annoys me is when other people start screwing things up for other people and leaving them on the hook for it. As much as I would like people/organizations/politicians to take responsibility for their own mistakes, they usually don't or they can't, especially in the case of a major catastrophe.

I once remarked that for a democracy to work well, you need an educated population. Unfortunately, there are too many uneducated people voting for and getting things that might not be good for them. Changing the ways that people think about anything (finance, politics, etc.) is a hard problem and sometimes it just isn't worth the time and effort to change them. It would be more productive for me to hedge and isolate myself from them whenever I think I am right and they are wrong, in other words "put my money where my mouth is" instead of arguing about "where we should put our money."

The diet continues

Golden week started as of last week in Japan. It's basically like 3 days of holidays in a row and if you throw in some paid holidays, it can be nicely extended. I managed to do that and turned my golden week holiday into a 12 day string of off time. And it's been great not going to work.

I spent most of golden week meeting up with friends in Tokyo and then heading out to Sendai to hit some hot springs and meet up with friend over there. The last 4 days for me pretty much centered around eating, drinking and sitting hot water. It was pretty good. After getting back to Tokyo I finally managed to weigh myself for the first time in 4 days to find my self rather relieved that I haven't gained any weight.

Interestingly, I have found that my body weight does swing in about a 1.0 kg range depeneding on if I weigh myself right after some vigorous exercise or after taking in a big meal with plenty of fluids. I spent about 1.5 hours riding out and back from where I live to a beach, with a round trip total distance of 30 km. After the ride I weighed 66.7 kg and then after taking in some dinner and fluids throughout the day, I currently weigh 67.6 kg. I need to take a look at my body weight trend for a little longer to decide on what I need to do next to bring myself further into shape. Attached below is the most recent body weight trend data.

I have also decided to do some calculations about my caloric intake since I have just been eyeballing things recently using the calculator provided at nutrition data. As of recent, I've been eating mostly a combination of a home brew of chili, a soup based on sole fish, assorted vegetables (broccoli, spinach, cabbage, corn, carrots, peas and seaweed) and rice. I've approximated my portion sizes and according to the calculator, I am consuming bout 1052 Calories, of which 149 Calories come from fat as shown in the summary below.

I believe that the real value for my caloric intake is probably a little higher since I do tend to eat 1 extra meal in the day as I usually feel hunger pangs since going on this diet. My caloric intake is significantly lower compared to my 1600 Calorie goal, though I believe that my real caloric intake is higher, it should be in the 1300~1500 Calorie range as I am sneaking in some fruits and servings of vegetables to deal with the hunger pangs.

If my caloric intake remains too low, I might switch over from consuming white rice to brown(ish) rice, which is a kind of rice without the outer husk polished off. It is often said to be more healthy but I am not entirely sure why most rice producers like to polish off the brown outer layers from the rice.