There is a large plethora of blog posts and articles on the internet. The more text I need to go through to figure out what is going on the more of my time that is wasted. The most unfortunate thing about certain websites is that they are starting to read more like magazines instead of good essays. Basically the more text they have, spanned across more pages means more page views and a bigger chance of generating ad revenue.
In short, there is too much long winded crap that gets posted out there and I hate it when my time is wasted by websites with too much filler material. I like succinct and to the point writing. My writing isn't like that and it shows and I think it's pretty bad. I am going to kick this dry spell of writing and poor writing eventually so bear with me.
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Saturday, August 28, 2010
I need to be more demanding of myself
To succeed, you need to be demanding-- there is no doubt of that in my mind. A few days ago I was watching some old reruns of Steve Jobs presenting at the Mac World 1998. This was when he made his return to Apple, lopped out useless products and decided to focus on 4 produced and decided to make them the best in their class. The result of his efforts and vision resulted in the birth of the iMac, the G3 Mac and the powerbook after killing the other branded lines of Apple computers.
It was fascinating to see Jobs in his presentation outlining how his products were the best in their class and how they would not settle for any second best position-- to come this far in the product development cycle to make such compelling products it was obvious at they had a demanding goals and pushed to have them accomplished. After that, they just kept on going, leading to some of the best designed computers and portable electronics devices today, leading to windfalls in profits. They were well respected in their early years because they were humble and demanding... times may have chanced since their climb to the top, however I'll leave that as a different issue to tackle at a later date, because you need to get there first in order to have those kinds of problems.
The first thing about becoming more demanding is to not get too used to anything, because when you get used to something things start to get easy and as a result you get lazy. When that happens, game over. I've found that the most productive times in my life was when I've been out of my natural element, while dealing with interesting and new challenges and I was picking up the skills and knowledge I needed to succeed. There was an element of excitement of doing something new that brought the enthusiasm and the need to push myself to succeed. In order to have the desire to be demanding, I believe that it is necessary to have an element of risk in one's life, where things can either succeed or fail, but the strong desire to succeed is what puts the demands on the person to do what it takes to succeed.
On an interesting aside, I believe that men, in particular, that can succeed in risky situations are considered sexy from the perspective of a female. Sure you could say that "success is sexy," but I would add "consistently succeeding through risky situations is even sexier." And me, being a guy, would have to say that that is plenty enough motivation for me. Now that I've survived my financial fiasco of last year, it's time to start taking some calculated risks and winning at them.
It was fascinating to see Jobs in his presentation outlining how his products were the best in their class and how they would not settle for any second best position-- to come this far in the product development cycle to make such compelling products it was obvious at they had a demanding goals and pushed to have them accomplished. After that, they just kept on going, leading to some of the best designed computers and portable electronics devices today, leading to windfalls in profits. They were well respected in their early years because they were humble and demanding... times may have chanced since their climb to the top, however I'll leave that as a different issue to tackle at a later date, because you need to get there first in order to have those kinds of problems.
The first thing about becoming more demanding is to not get too used to anything, because when you get used to something things start to get easy and as a result you get lazy. When that happens, game over. I've found that the most productive times in my life was when I've been out of my natural element, while dealing with interesting and new challenges and I was picking up the skills and knowledge I needed to succeed. There was an element of excitement of doing something new that brought the enthusiasm and the need to push myself to succeed. In order to have the desire to be demanding, I believe that it is necessary to have an element of risk in one's life, where things can either succeed or fail, but the strong desire to succeed is what puts the demands on the person to do what it takes to succeed.
On an interesting aside, I believe that men, in particular, that can succeed in risky situations are considered sexy from the perspective of a female. Sure you could say that "success is sexy," but I would add "consistently succeeding through risky situations is even sexier." And me, being a guy, would have to say that that is plenty enough motivation for me. Now that I've survived my financial fiasco of last year, it's time to start taking some calculated risks and winning at them.
Friday, August 27, 2010
Considering an upgrade to the iPhone
Over the last few months, my cell phone bill has skyrocketed, nearly doubled because friends have started sending me photos from their cell phones and I don't have a data plan. What would have been a 4,200 yen monthly bill has jumped to close to 9,000 yen (over
On an interesting note, data packets for cell phones are a major ripoff. My carrier, charges 0.2 yen / 128 bytes (1 packet), this pretty much equates to 1638.4 yen for 1 MB (1024^2 for 1 MB), or about $20 for 1 MB on the go. This is astronomically expensive!
Considering that a 400x320 jpeg is about 100 kb, I am paying about $2 for an image being sent to me. Compare that to a $1 song on iTunes. Wireless carriers are making pretty big margins on their data rates. I do have to wonder how much regulation is keeping new people with fresh ideas out from bringing these costs down.
I have considered adding an unlimited data plan to my cell phone, though it would be a nice feature, I would be missing out on the full richness of having the internet available to me on my mobile device because of its limited user interface. While being back home, I had the opportunity to use the iPhone for an entire week, just using the instant messaging and accessing e-mail here and there has me very enthusiastic about the device and I am seriously considering making the switch.
The new 32 GB iPhone 4 would cost me about $700 and a 16 GB version would run me about $600, I've been looking at the one Japanese iPhone carrier softbank and noted that with a data plan alone, I would be spending about 3785 yen/month for an unlimited data plan and I would be billed per 30 sec for phone calls unless I added a voice plan to make calling "cheaper" --> obviously, the name of the game for softbank is to push the iPhone and it's internet abilities and then quietly sneak in a voice plan.
Now that I understand the name of the game here, if I were to use an iPhone, my goal would be simple-- find a way around using the ordinary voice plan for making calls, because it is really expensive. Without a plan, they charge 41 yen/minute and if you pay an additional 980 yen/month the voice charge is 21 yen/min (using something called a "white plan"). The question is, "can I do better?" and the answer is, (unsurprisingly) yes.
Enter Skype
The ironic thing is that I was looking to get an iPhone to lower my data transfer costs but in actuality I can reduce my voice calling costs significantly by purchasing a skype number for Japan. Buying a skype number with a monthly subscription is 200 yen/month and I am looking at a 400 min subscription for about 500 yen/month. The savings are very significant after the number crunching as shown in the table below.
What it means is that for the price of a new iPhone I can reduce my monthly calling costs (and have 2x more minutes) and have an unlimited data plan for the same price as my old plan on my old provider.
I don't know about you, but barring quality of service problems, this looks like a winning plan to me.
$100!). This is clearly unacceptable and I have started looking into getting a data plan for my cell phone.On an interesting note, data packets for cell phones are a major ripoff. My carrier, charges 0.2 yen / 128 bytes (1 packet), this pretty much equates to 1638.4 yen for 1 MB (1024^2 for 1 MB), or about $20 for 1 MB on the go. This is astronomically expensive!
Considering that a 400x320 jpeg is about 100 kb, I am paying about $2 for an image being sent to me. Compare that to a $1 song on iTunes. Wireless carriers are making pretty big margins on their data rates. I do have to wonder how much regulation is keeping new people with fresh ideas out from bringing these costs down.
I have considered adding an unlimited data plan to my cell phone, though it would be a nice feature, I would be missing out on the full richness of having the internet available to me on my mobile device because of its limited user interface. While being back home, I had the opportunity to use the iPhone for an entire week, just using the instant messaging and accessing e-mail here and there has me very enthusiastic about the device and I am seriously considering making the switch.
The new 32 GB iPhone 4 would cost me about $700 and a 16 GB version would run me about $600, I've been looking at the one Japanese iPhone carrier softbank and noted that with a data plan alone, I would be spending about 3785 yen/month for an unlimited data plan and I would be billed per 30 sec for phone calls unless I added a voice plan to make calling "cheaper" --> obviously, the name of the game for softbank is to push the iPhone and it's internet abilities and then quietly sneak in a voice plan.
Now that I understand the name of the game here, if I were to use an iPhone, my goal would be simple-- find a way around using the ordinary voice plan for making calls, because it is really expensive. Without a plan, they charge 41 yen/minute and if you pay an additional 980 yen/month the voice charge is 21 yen/min (using something called a "white plan"). The question is, "can I do better?" and the answer is, (unsurprisingly) yes.
Enter Skype
The ironic thing is that I was looking to get an iPhone to lower my data transfer costs but in actuality I can reduce my voice calling costs significantly by purchasing a skype number for Japan. Buying a skype number with a monthly subscription is 200 yen/month and I am looking at a 400 min subscription for about 500 yen/month. The savings are very significant after the number crunching as shown in the table below.
What it means is that for the price of a new iPhone I can reduce my monthly calling costs (and have 2x more minutes) and have an unlimited data plan for the same price as my old plan on my old provider.I don't know about you, but barring quality of service problems, this looks like a winning plan to me.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
I was there before cloud storage
It's been around for a while, but I've started using cloud storage to get access and sync data between several computers: my desktop and my netbook. The service I use is called dropbox and I use it's free 2 GB account to share files between work, home and on the go.
It should be obvious, like having a web based e-mail account that it is nice to have access to your data where ever you are. I used to do this a long time ago while I was a university student, I ran an FTP server so I could upload/download my assignments from home or store work I did at school instead of having to carry a USB memory stick around all the time. I was doing this nearly 7 years ago... and now, having software that lets people store and share data online seems to be fairly decent business.
Being ahead of the curve is one thing, realizing that you're ahead of it and everyone else might have a use for what you do is another. I would never have thought, 7 years ago that people would be interested in having their data accessible from anywhere, because at the time, laptops weren't so hot.
It should be obvious, like having a web based e-mail account that it is nice to have access to your data where ever you are. I used to do this a long time ago while I was a university student, I ran an FTP server so I could upload/download my assignments from home or store work I did at school instead of having to carry a USB memory stick around all the time. I was doing this nearly 7 years ago... and now, having software that lets people store and share data online seems to be fairly decent business.
Being ahead of the curve is one thing, realizing that you're ahead of it and everyone else might have a use for what you do is another. I would never have thought, 7 years ago that people would be interested in having their data accessible from anywhere, because at the time, laptops weren't so hot.
Wednesday, August 04, 2010
Operation Jailbreak
I've worked in the company for long enough and the project I am working on has gotten delayed for some technical difficulties. Some management level people are giving it about 6 months for a redesign and testing. From my perspective it will take 9 months if we are lucky, easily 1 year if we don't have any problems and possibly longer if something bad happens. After that the technology needs to be commercialized, brought to mass production and etc, which will probably take another year or 2. Meaning that it is going to be at least 3 years until a product gets out the door.
It would be nice to have a notch on the belt if this project succeeds, but I don't have forever to wait for things to work. Given market timing sensitivities, other project challenges and even the risk of the project failing, I don't have time to waste for something like that. I want success and I want it now.
There are something that are worth waiting for, but when it comes to putting your life on hold for something that may or may not materialize, what's the point, seriously? You only live once and I'd rather put my time into something more worth while and thus I have decided to start "operation jailbreak."
I think I am done with the 9-5 work life (which actually is more towards the 9-7 pm) , I can do the job and I am properly equipped for the job but the job isn't inspiring or rewarding enough and I don't think that I am producing something that is tangible to me. It's a nice to have but I really don't care about the thing that we are developing, putting in 3 more years of my life into this project isn't worth it, it means that I need an out.
Moving on, new plans:
A job is like being in a relationship, a friend of mine once mentioned to me that when you start to think that it's over, it probably was... 2 months ago. The job makes me money, but it doesn't bring me a sense of accomplishment, pride or joy. It doesn't add additional tangible value to my life other than money, I want a to be free and happy. If being rich ends up being a side of affect of attaining these goals, so be it... but I am not going to sacrifice being "free and happy" for a secondary objective.
Fortunately for me I've been keeping good track of my finances and I know what I need to be making to survive and generally how much I need to make to meet long term goals. What I have not added to the my life plans is an image of what exactly the kind of life that I want to live. The most important thing to me is to reduce the number of hours and be able to take time off whenever I want instead of being at the whim of some company.
There are other lifestyles out there that are more free and open allowing me to spend time more thinking and studying instead of working at an office all day. To be honest, I don't want to think of "work" as "work" anymore, but rather as "something worth doing, well." For me, (and I do not know for others) when I do something worth doing, I will spend the long hours laboring to do something well. I used to do this when I taught classes while at university, I did find some of the practical applications of what I was learning to be genuinely fascinating and I wanted to bring the same level of interest to inspire my peers. I was usually quite well known for my seminars when I was a graduate student. I miss those, as I haven't had the right kind of environment or people to do these kinds of things to do with anyone anymore, hence forth I've gotten a little rusty with my presentation skills. I've also been slacking with writing on the blog, which has been impacting my writing skills. But I digress...
The new long term goals:
The new goals are to work less and remain financially stable. The idea of working in a company is incongruent with my first goal and thus I will be looking to quit and go my own way in the future. Instead of an abrupt change out from my current working situation, I will be looking to pull a fade out by looking to generate "passive income". The goal will be to start by generating $50/weekday, then move up to $100/day and then to $200/day. I think these are realistic goals. Passive income at about $200/day over a year should equate to about $48k/year. If I can pull something like this off, then I am going to be pretty damn happy.
There are several avenues that I want to explore for this so I'll be dedicating my off hours to cultivating skills to make this a reality.
It would be nice to have a notch on the belt if this project succeeds, but I don't have forever to wait for things to work. Given market timing sensitivities, other project challenges and even the risk of the project failing, I don't have time to waste for something like that. I want success and I want it now.
There are something that are worth waiting for, but when it comes to putting your life on hold for something that may or may not materialize, what's the point, seriously? You only live once and I'd rather put my time into something more worth while and thus I have decided to start "operation jailbreak."
I think I am done with the 9-5 work life (which actually is more towards the 9-7 pm) , I can do the job and I am properly equipped for the job but the job isn't inspiring or rewarding enough and I don't think that I am producing something that is tangible to me. It's a nice to have but I really don't care about the thing that we are developing, putting in 3 more years of my life into this project isn't worth it, it means that I need an out.
Moving on, new plans:
A job is like being in a relationship, a friend of mine once mentioned to me that when you start to think that it's over, it probably was... 2 months ago. The job makes me money, but it doesn't bring me a sense of accomplishment, pride or joy. It doesn't add additional tangible value to my life other than money, I want a to be free and happy. If being rich ends up being a side of affect of attaining these goals, so be it... but I am not going to sacrifice being "free and happy" for a secondary objective.
Fortunately for me I've been keeping good track of my finances and I know what I need to be making to survive and generally how much I need to make to meet long term goals. What I have not added to the my life plans is an image of what exactly the kind of life that I want to live. The most important thing to me is to reduce the number of hours and be able to take time off whenever I want instead of being at the whim of some company.
There are other lifestyles out there that are more free and open allowing me to spend time more thinking and studying instead of working at an office all day. To be honest, I don't want to think of "work" as "work" anymore, but rather as "something worth doing, well." For me, (and I do not know for others) when I do something worth doing, I will spend the long hours laboring to do something well. I used to do this when I taught classes while at university, I did find some of the practical applications of what I was learning to be genuinely fascinating and I wanted to bring the same level of interest to inspire my peers. I was usually quite well known for my seminars when I was a graduate student. I miss those, as I haven't had the right kind of environment or people to do these kinds of things to do with anyone anymore, hence forth I've gotten a little rusty with my presentation skills. I've also been slacking with writing on the blog, which has been impacting my writing skills. But I digress...
The new long term goals:
The new goals are to work less and remain financially stable. The idea of working in a company is incongruent with my first goal and thus I will be looking to quit and go my own way in the future. Instead of an abrupt change out from my current working situation, I will be looking to pull a fade out by looking to generate "passive income". The goal will be to start by generating $50/weekday, then move up to $100/day and then to $200/day. I think these are realistic goals. Passive income at about $200/day over a year should equate to about $48k/year. If I can pull something like this off, then I am going to be pretty damn happy.
There are several avenues that I want to explore for this so I'll be dedicating my off hours to cultivating skills to make this a reality.
Tuesday, August 03, 2010
The Entrepreneur
I don't know if it is a good thing, but it seems like that I've been tagged as the entrepreneur at work due to skills in programming and data mining stuff I've been able to do. Basically I am stuck in a group of experimental researchers and I've got the power to write my own programs to analyze vast amounts of data and run simulations that can help predict the outcomes of their experiments.
It took me 2 days to write a simple program to analyze how light would interact with interfaces using snell's law to predict that they'd have problems as a result of their design-- it took them 2 months to build the device to realize that it has problems and are trying like hell to fix it. They've probably used more than $100k in capital in R&D costs to get these results too. I've been doing a lot of these things on the side so the co-workers to get kind of surprised when I throw out these programs from out of nowhere at them. The result of this has given me a bit of an entrepreneurial reputation-- as in if I see something interesting, I'll go off and make something happen. I've started talking business from time to time, by adding new features to equipment that we already have and compared it to other systems that we would have paid a fair bunch of cash if we were to buy equipment that had the stuff loaded in already. People are starting to catch on about me writing valuable software and are kind of poking at me in the sense that I'd probably be able to pull off a software venture.
In a sense, that is a part of the game plan that I want to be positioning myself in the future as I want to leverage my skills to create a money making machine. I just need some spare time to continue building and completing some side projects, then move them online and make them semi-public. If something catches on, commercialize it by selling a subscription or a license or something.
There are a few ideas bouncing around in my head at the moment and not a whole lot of people over that I've found with the same kind of spirit here. Actually, I should start looking into entrepreneurial gatherings in Japan to see what kind of people in that world exists. The project that I am working on just got delayed for about a year and I don't want to be waiting forever until when this thing ships.
I want results, now!
It took me 2 days to write a simple program to analyze how light would interact with interfaces using snell's law to predict that they'd have problems as a result of their design-- it took them 2 months to build the device to realize that it has problems and are trying like hell to fix it. They've probably used more than $100k in capital in R&D costs to get these results too. I've been doing a lot of these things on the side so the co-workers to get kind of surprised when I throw out these programs from out of nowhere at them. The result of this has given me a bit of an entrepreneurial reputation-- as in if I see something interesting, I'll go off and make something happen. I've started talking business from time to time, by adding new features to equipment that we already have and compared it to other systems that we would have paid a fair bunch of cash if we were to buy equipment that had the stuff loaded in already. People are starting to catch on about me writing valuable software and are kind of poking at me in the sense that I'd probably be able to pull off a software venture.
In a sense, that is a part of the game plan that I want to be positioning myself in the future as I want to leverage my skills to create a money making machine. I just need some spare time to continue building and completing some side projects, then move them online and make them semi-public. If something catches on, commercialize it by selling a subscription or a license or something.
There are a few ideas bouncing around in my head at the moment and not a whole lot of people over that I've found with the same kind of spirit here. Actually, I should start looking into entrepreneurial gatherings in Japan to see what kind of people in that world exists. The project that I am working on just got delayed for about a year and I don't want to be waiting forever until when this thing ships.
I want results, now!
Sunday, August 01, 2010
An experiment with dictation software
Today I am using dictation software to write this next blog post. As of recently, I've been trying to improve my typing skills but so far have not come out with any major gains in typing speed and or accuracy. While reading on the Internet if have come across information about people whom write books using dictation software. I decide to give a program called Dragon Naturally Speaking a shot to see what it would be like to dictate a blog post instead of typing one. To be honest it feels very natural to speak and have a blog post written, however it does take some getting used to when it comes to dictating punctuation.
Another thing that would be useful is to have a good microphone with very little noise as it seems that I have some noise issues when it comes to having my speech converted into text, but I don't think this is a very significant problem as these mistakes can be very easily corrected through the keyboard. All in all I do believe that dictating these blog posts over microphone seem to be significantly faster than my typing speed as paragraphs can easily appear in large blocks as the computer processes through the speech and generates text.
So for the time being I went to give speech to text dictation a shot for my blog posts for now and see how that goes. It would also be an interesting experiment to try is to have a wireless microphone and be able to dictate while lying down in bed which it seems like something fun to do.
I live in a dorm room with one of the walls made of wood which unfortunately limits the volume of my voice at which I can speak, so I will be probably limiting so my blog posting to the early evenings until I move out somewhere where I can speak whenever I feel like; it is one of the unfortunate things about living in Japan but I have come to live with it.
So until next time.
Another thing that would be useful is to have a good microphone with very little noise as it seems that I have some noise issues when it comes to having my speech converted into text, but I don't think this is a very significant problem as these mistakes can be very easily corrected through the keyboard. All in all I do believe that dictating these blog posts over microphone seem to be significantly faster than my typing speed as paragraphs can easily appear in large blocks as the computer processes through the speech and generates text.
So for the time being I went to give speech to text dictation a shot for my blog posts for now and see how that goes. It would also be an interesting experiment to try is to have a wireless microphone and be able to dictate while lying down in bed which it seems like something fun to do.
I live in a dorm room with one of the walls made of wood which unfortunately limits the volume of my voice at which I can speak, so I will be probably limiting so my blog posting to the early evenings until I move out somewhere where I can speak whenever I feel like; it is one of the unfortunate things about living in Japan but I have come to live with it.
So until next time.
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