Success, is measured in happiness

I wonder about the purpose of money and work sometimes, why is it that so many people decide to get stuck into the rat race of earning money to buy that house, raise kids and then look back after they're old to have survived such a tough obstacle course. I really do wonder if this is the way that people were really meant to live. To be honest, measuring success and happiness by the metrics of income, how much you've saved and the things you've bought are meaningless if you aren't happy. And if there is one thing that many modern cultures are short of, it is exactly that.

I find it ironic that in so many developed countries, that are so efficient, clean and prosperous end up having so many people that are over-worked and stressed out surviving the daily grind. Why is it that so many people are sent through so many years of grueling education, rack up so much debt and have to work like crazy to raise a family. Why is it that finding solace, peace and comfort are considered as luxuries. I cannot understand that mentality.

What is the purpose of life anyways? To each their own answers, but the only answer for me is to do the things that make me happy. I measure my quality of life by joys from the things I do and experience. And I've come to the realization that everything that is worth doing are the things that either brings or helps me attain those happy moments. And when I start viewing the world and everything I've been doing though this outlook, things start to make a lot of sense.

Real value, real happiness. The things worth doing.

There is so much needless stuff in the world today, sometimes I wonder if our culture has some how become fixated that it is necessary to produce more and more for us to consume and use is a good thing. I hear this all the time on the news and on economic reports, how a growing economy is a good thing, how people spending more money and how there are more jobs for people is supposed to be a good thing. I don't know about you, I'd rather not be working if I can help it.

We are obsessed with making and selling things, like somehow we need these things to survive. I've backpacked throughout SE asia once and it is quite amazing at how little one really needs to survive. All I really needed to survive for 3 months was contained in a single suitcase that I dragged around with me. When I look around in my room right now, with all the things in my room, I know that I could be happy with less. Some of my best experiences in life was when I was living as a backpacker, with nearly no possessions. As least for me, I know that I don't need a lot of possessions to be happy and as a result, I sometimes wonder why do we spend so much time and effort making things that we probably don't need. I can't say that the way that I want to live and the values I have might not be right for everyone, but at least from this perspective, we shouldn't be wasting time doing needless things.

If we are caught up with so many things that are superficial, what are the things worth doing then? To which I would answer "whatever makes you happy, in the long run." I add that caveat because there are activities that can bring short-term happiness while trading off long-term happiness, but like a lazy professor writing a university text book, I leave that as an exercise for the reader to figure out. If finding happiness to me and to others are the things really worth doing, it would be obvious that basing a business that offers something tangible to the quality of life to others is a recipe for success.

Time flies

Didn't have a time to relax tonight. I just never realized that things have gotten a little busy and that time is a very valuable.

Finished work at 7:15 pm, dashed out to the super market to buy some groceries, wanted to pick up some new clothes and hangars but the stores were closed, came home to cook, eat and cleaned. Unpacked a bunch of new clothing (26 pieces, a hell of a shopping spree!), removed old clothing from the wardrobe and spent about an hour organizing my internet bookmarks and testing out an online syncing program.

It's already 2:00 am and I still got work tomorrow.

Life feels like a battle against time now. Gotta try and make the best use of what time I have to get things done.

Long weekend in Hakodate (mainly food pics)

We had a long weekend in Japan this week, so I took the liberty of taking an extra day off to do some traveling in the southern part of Hokkaido (the most northern island of Japan). A good friend of mine goes out there quite often and offered to show me around; so of course, I accepted.

Hakodate, located fairly south of Hokkaido

Hokkaido was one of the last developed island in Japan and has a lot of European influence after the opening of the Japanese ports to the rest of the world. Hokkaido itself is a fairly sparse island, rich with forests and nature. The seafood out there is also exceptionally good and I was fortunate to have had first hand experience to verify this.

I spent 4 days traveling around Hakodate. I considered going to Hakodate via plane but unfortunately all the cheap flights were booked up so quick that I didn't have a chance, so I arranged to take a train out there. A 1 way trip from Yokohama to Hokkaido spanning 850 km covered in about 7 hours over land. Meaning I had an average speed of over 100 km/h, the train network in Japan is pretty amazing.

Unfortunately, I was so busy traveling, eating and driving around that I didn't have much time to take a lot of pictures but I'll post the few that I have.

Hakodate isn't particularly huge city but has a population of close to 290,000 people. There aren't many tall buildings which added a country side feeling to the city. The city itself is located right by the ocean bringing in a variety of good seafood to the city and I had the chance to go visit one of their seafood markets.

One shot of the fish market

The huge scallops they had for sale

I can personally attest to the greatness of eating fresh seafood in Hakodate compared to Tokyo-- the seafood in Hakodate tastes as fresh as it is good.

Seafood bought at the local market and eaten as Sashimi for dinner

Hokke (a type of mackerel) baked with salt in an oven
You'd never guess that grilled shitake mushrooms could look so good

I'd write so much more about the trip and the great nature out there too, but there's only so much time I have tonight. The seafood was one of the best highlights of Hakodate. More pictures can be found on my online album here.

Changing the recipe and learning to do things better

The project is starting to stall. One of the teams is having a hell of a time getting the device working. They changed too many things too quickly and the boss wasn't expecting so many problems. But what else do you expect?

I worked on a different project and just finding a replacement material and then actually using it took about a year to get things to where they are now. The team wants to change the entire design and keep all the previous good characteristics of the old design and have the whole thing done in half a year. Unfortunately that didn't work out. The lead time to make something and then have things tested is much longer then that.

The problem with semiconductor processing is that it is a long drawn out process to make something. When things do work, however, it can be quite amazing. I think there are possibilities for big changes in the industry if the R&D aspects of developing new devices can be
significantly sped up.

The problem with semiconductor device R&D is that a lot of expensive, manual and slow machines are used. Washing and making sample surfaces clean is a 30 minute process and even then, sometimes we have to redo it if some large dust particle falls upon the surface. The patterning
process takes at least 45 mins to 1 hour, depositing metal contact takes about 2 hours. Removing unwanted metal takes probably about another 30 minutes...

Each processing step takes about 1 ~ 3 hours depending on the step and to create a single device, there are at least 40~50 steps. While processing the semiconductor material, it is also important to check the wafers as they go through the machines to make sure nothing goes
wrong, and if strange does happen, it is important to figure out the causes. With all the checking and debugging steps going on, it easily takes 3~4 weeks to finish a batch of devices and then send them into evaluation. After evaluation, the results are fed back into the process team and the cycle restarts. It takes about 2 months to feed back data and have new results. The catch is also that for the devices that I am making, the process is relatively short.

A crucial part to commercializing new technology is to have a R&D department that can rapidly carry out new experiments and get results with blazing fast speed, because in research it is a race to see who is the first able to develop something new for commercialization. The problem about working in R&D is that people exist in a bubble. In order to prevent leaks, there isn't a whole lot of cross talking going on unless you have friends in different departments that know what is going on. When it comes to knowing what is going on in other companies, you are going to have no clue because of strict secrecy.

The interesting thing is that there are big surprises to be had when it comes to corporations competing against each other in research. Basically the ones that are the most creative, the best equipped (and by this, I do not mean by having the most expensive equipment) and the fastest are the ones that will win when it comes to coming to market with new technology. The thing is that both party will have no idea how each group goes about doing their work.

The good thing about working in the R&D department of a large corporation is that they have a lot of money to throw around (as an aside, materials for use in R&D is generally 2~3x more expensive, the mark up via suppliers must be huge) and that they can spent plenty of cash for new equipment. The problem is that most of the equipment is pretty standard stuff and there is a lot of room for improvement to make the machines we use more efficient at getting things done.

I believe that my biggest gripe about the R&D process that I know so far is that companies are willing to invest in equipment to get things done, but there isn't a lot of people in the field that consider how to do things better. If there are companies out there that can make tools to do semiconductor R&D better then there is good money to be made here.

The problem however, is knowing how to get your foot into the door. As an outsider, most companies are too secreteive about their research projects to let anyone else know what is going on to develop things that might be useful, but at the same time, not knowledgeable enough to
develop equipment to do research better. It's a catch-22 problem and one of these conditions have to give before faster advancements in semiconductor technology can be achieved.

The only solution I can think of now is for a company to hold their own R&D semiconductor processing line and invest actively in improving how it is used internally for research, because without more openness, it is going to be hard to innovate in this field. The only company actively doing this that I can think of is Intel.

There is always the academic route (universities), the problem however, is that universities are usually underfunded when it comes to wanting to innovate in this area.

A fascinating but obvious idea

I don't know how you might feel about wearing used jewelry but with economic times the way they are right now, the concept of renting jewelry sounds like a very reasonable idea to me. An online company called Adorn is doing exactly that with an online catalog and where they just ship the jewelry to you and then you mail it back when you are done. It make perfect sense because most people don't usually wear really fancy jewelry on regular occasions and after a while, wearing the same thing over and over again might get a little boring.

So what if you or your significant other could wear something nice but different everytime? I think this is a brilliant idea, especially in the current economic times. If this really does catch on, I really wonder what impact will it have on companies like De Beers and Tiffany's.

Keep up with the right new things

When it comes to getting older, we build up a lot of habits. Not all of these habits are bad things, but it's just how we get used to getting particular things done-- why do something new when the usual method works? And thus, is the recipe for a long and gradual transformation from tech savvy wiz kid to grand-pa trying to figure out how the internet works.

I've been living in a bit of a bubble for the past few years as I've been doing my best to keep my expenses low and spend my time out on the weekends enjoying the outdoors.

I've started looking back into the venture business and technological world to see what's been going on, and I am starting to see a lot of what I have been predicting in the past starting to take shape: advanced information filtering and automation of tedious tasks (mainly in the e-commerce sector). The companies that are starting up are doing a good job of making good user interfaces and bringing down the barrier to making e-commerce sites to allow people to sell goods online. The business models for these online companies providing these design and hosting tools are also making good money utilizing server farms as their infrastructure bases.

Brilliant moves, I should have seen this coming earlier. There is good money to be made with "software as a service" and online content distribution. You won't see big IPOs for these start ups just yet-- they don't need that much money to get off the ground. If you want in on this market, you're going to have to do it on your own or the right group of friends.

Pick a few things and be good at them

There is nothing wrong with having a broad skill set, I probably have one that is overly too broad. I know a lot about a lot of general topics but not enough to be really good at most of the things that I do. Some of the things that I excel at are teaching and summarizing information (which sort of go hand in hand) so I have that.

The rest, I just kind of pick things up as I go along and usually get good enough to do something with it. Now when it comes to throwing money on the table and asking someone to pay me to do something, maybe, I don't have enough of what it takes just yet to do things at the level that I want to do.

Nobody wants to pay for something mediocre, even if it is something cheap-- they want the best of whatever for that price range. When it comes to the free market, you have 2 options, either be the best or hope/make sure that no one finds finds anyone better than you (the two are totally different).

In ideal circumstances, the free market would be a meritocratic animal, but in reality it isn't. All I can say is do pick something that you can be really good at, you might end up enjoying it or you'll get the freedom to what you really want through using it.

Goal: Generate $500 in passive income/month

For some reason, I was feeling kind of tired and bored at work today. I usually end up spending atleast 2~3 hours in over time at work, but decided to go home early. It's 6:15 pm right now and it feels great to be home early-- it actually feels like I have an evening to do something on my own now.

The truth is that I get paid fairly decently for doing over time work and with my boss's permission I am able to log up to 55 hours/month, which is a great help financially, since it significantly increases my savings rate. Though I haven't written about it, I would argue that a person's savings rate is a very strong indicator of a person's financial health.

Though working hard and saving lots of money is a good thing, I am paying for this feat in time and right now, I am starting to value my time more and more over money. So what I would like to do is to start supplementing my main income with a passive income stream to cut down on my overtime hours so I can have my evenings to myself and allow me to work less.

My goals are to find ways of attaining this with a minimal investment cost so I will be looking toward either financial tools or producing something in the software domain that I can sell passively online.