Success is the result of doing worth while things for people

I throw a large events a few times a year, something sort of a reason to get friends together to hang out. Yesterday, I threw a late post new year's party for friends that haven't gotten together for a while and invited out a few more friends to the party. The event was fun as I had about 30 people attending.

One thing I miss about living back home is the proximity of friends and the ease at which everyone can get together at a moment's notice. One point my old friends and I used to pride ourselves upon, was our ability to get together and do something in a very ad-hoc manner. When living in Tokyo, things are a little different.

I probably mentioned this a few times before, how much of a pain it is to get people in Tokyo together to do something. For a meet up to actually occur, people have to make time usually a week in advance else things either get filled up or people aren't prepared to make the time investment to come out to meet meet up. When a one way commute is only 10~15 minutes to meet up, the time investment is trivial. However, when a one way commute takes from 45~60 minutes, things aren't as trivial anymore. I balk at the idea of an impromptu meet up sometimes because the time investment is quite expensive. The dynamics change when you live closer to the city, of course, but most people are surprised at my ability to coordinate events while living far from the city. It's one of those things that I just have to deal with.

The other idea I was pondering today was "what is the primary factor which allows a person to be able to gather people to events?" I have several friends here that are event promoters, either for clubbing events or musical events. I feel for these guys as they are either mailing through their cell phones, on Facebook or through twitter to encourage friends to come out. I know how tough it can be when it comes to putting an event together. A place needs to be booked, friends need to be contacted, schedules need to be checked and there are questions that need to be responded to. Sometimes the most annoying thing is when you contact everyone and no one gets back to you and you end up scurrying to contact everyone directly to double check if they are coming out or not, or managed to forget about the invitation. Organizing events can be a real pain honestly, it's like doing a PhD-- you really have to like being a host to go through with the issues that comes with the territory. I for one, am happy when people get together.

I mentioned earlier that I have friends that are event coordinators/promoters by profession. The interesting thing I learned through Facebook was about event coordination-- the impact of mass mailing friends about an upcoming event. The general response to a mass invite of people on a friend list is abysmal, I wager that maybe 10% people confirm in advance if you're lucky. Other people are wishy-washy about committing to the event and list themselves as "maybe" and the people that say "no I can't attend" are usually fast to say so because they have prior commitments. Getting people to commit time to an event or anything is a challenging problem. And personally to me, a 10% confirmation percentage is really depressing. Unless you're really popular or have a very big pool of friends, avoid using large group invites.

I've noticed over the years that I am most successful at getting friends together to something was when I contacted small groups of them at a time. My friends generally divided into different circles so I end up contacting each circle directly or even people directly to invite them out. Response rates when you contact people directly are much higher and since they are actually responding to a direct contact from you, the probability of them saying that they'll come is also higher. After switching to this technique of inviting people out, I've felt much more comfortable running events as people are responding to me timely and I have a better idea of the general number of people coming out in advance so I can make things run smoothly.

Another important factor about hosting a successful event is the reason why you're running it. I am quite certain that there are people that we know are promoters of themselves. There have been friends that have sent out mails to invite friends to their musical performances and people in the real estate world that have ran events to promote themselves and spammed their friends to attend. My knee-jerk reaction to these invitations is one of disgust, in the sense that these promoters see me simply as a source of potential revenue and that I value myself more then that.

So I started thinking about what is it that makes my friends want to come out to my events and I've come to the conclusion that my friends want to attend my events because my intentions are different-- I am hosting the event not for myself, but as something for them to enjoy. I also like inviting new friends out to these gatherings so they have opportunities to meet new people and hopefully make new friends. In a sense, I have created a brand for the events that I run which makes my friends want to come out to the events that I host, in that these events are for them, more so than it is for me.

Oddly enough, thinking back at some of my earlier business successes that I've had directly correlated to a desire of me wanting to do things for other people. One of my fondest memories of an event was a donation drive salsa night between the Nursing and Engineering Department. I told the nurses to market the event as a good cause and I told the engineers that the nurses were coming. Suffice to say, that event was a resounding success as we made good money in a single night.

I would go on to start my own exam preparation series that turned out to a resounding hit that made the Engineering Physics student society the richest student society on campus. A story that I look back as one of my biggest successes while in university. I've probably recounted this story more than I should, but my dream was to run my own successful exam preparation business, more than making money. I ended up talking to my physics professors to get old final exams and told other students in my graduating class of my vision and I ended up recruiting a team of 8 people (including myself) to run the thing together.

Putting this event together was a passion for me, I wanted to make the lecture series as cheap as possible so I charged only $15/seminar session. I ended up making $4500 in profits in 2 weeks. I donated the money away and passed on the program to the student group, which resulted in a good recommendation letter from the head of the physics department which helped me get a scholarship to Japan and also would help me through an interview process that would also help me get my current job. What I gave away, came back to me in multiples and in ways that I could never imagine.

I have started reading books about human dynamics recently and about the rise of powerful people. The idea of having power has been defined in a variety of different ways. One definition is the ability to control people to get them to do what you want; another and more subtle version is the ability to have people depend on you. Neither of these 2 definitions sit well with me because they seem very Machiavellian, so I propose a third definition, the impact and the ability of what a person is able to give to others. The framing the concept of power like this make sense to me as it characterizes many of the most influential people I know and even some of the most successful and respected companies in technology that I can think of.

My train of thought stops here, but I feel that this is a strong idea.

Stand close to the edge to prepare for change

There has to be one point in your life where you are willing to put your self on the line and be ready to accept failure as a path to success. To be honest, there are many more things I want now than I have the means to have. I want to be young and successful, (possibly even rich), I want to live in a nice fancy apartment for a while and have the drive and freedom to create a successful venture.

I have looked at my financial numbers for the last few years. They are pretty good, better than most for people in Japan at least, but it isn't sufficient for me. I can do better. Nearly all the successful people I know, the routes to their rise have never been through the traditional paths, there is something different about them. I used to be like that at one point when I was younger, but I fear, that the edge that I once had has become somewhat dull.

I can't say that I blame the system for that, the system is what it is and it really is my choice to go with it or not. To be honest, I've stopped caring about what it is about. It's not a Japanese thing, it's not a North American thing or a corporate thing, the system is simply what everyone else does, which to me is the most eloquent way for me to describe it.

I have to move out of the company dorms within the next few months and from there I can expect my savings rate to decrease, meaning that raising capital for me to do things will be harder in the future... which also reminds me that I still have to look through my data from last year. I've gone through most of it but haven't finished putting a sort of report together.

I also have the issue of time to deal with; where I want to be allocating my time. I do want to get back into investing, but don't have the time to look deeply as I would like to in the market. I also want to pick up on my programming skills to get into the foray into the world of online services, eventually going independent. I also want to take the level 1 Japanese Language Proficiency Test, the highest level Japanese test so I have the piece of paper certifying that I am proficient with my Japanese. At the same time, I do also want to balance my social life, work out and spend time reading too.

I've starting reading a Japanese book about life past 35 in conjunction about the economic conditions in Japan, some ideas of marriage, family, preparation for the future and the state of social security. It's a challenging read, but I am happy that I am actually able to grasp most of what they say. But I think all of the advice is the same though, mainly that you should be prepared to depend on your self as depending on social programs is dubious. One comment the author made in the book is that one's 30's is probably best defined by sacrifices. I turn 30 this year and I can already tell that I just don't have time to do everything and that my time now is incredibly important. More so than I was in my early-mid 20's.

Maybe I never tasted the sweet taste of success the right way when I was younger to push myself like the young entrepreneurs of some of the hot start up companies that are out there right now. But having that hunger now, is terribly important, the sooner that I make time now, the more dividends it pays off in the future.

Time is of the essence.

Dealing with older people and creativity

I've been mulling a thought recently, the company I work is internally looking for people with fresh ideas and that can execute them. I have to be honest, though, there aren't a lot of people where I work that can do that. I don't feel the creative vibe or the fire to get something done. Upper management is preaching that we need more "creative people" that we need to make more "innovative products" and etc etc. Their ideals and the reality of the working environment speak is a world of difference.

I've been reading a lot about start up culture and the most important thing is to hire people that creates the right culture that sets the course of a company, the attitude of people and the things they can do and think about. At one point, when you start hiring and working with mediocre people, the cultural assets of a company is diluted causing trouble for the future. Things that can't be quantified with numbers are often hard to measure, but one does feel it.

The one thing I've realized, recently is how adverse older people are to new ideas, not that they are against them but being able to come up with new ideas or being able to accept them. Once they get used to doing things a certain way, it's all they know. The worst thing for young people is to be infected with that way of thinking. In hierarchical cultures (both social and working) I think this is sort of an infectious poison and the people that end up coming up with and executing revolutionizing ideas are people that aren't cast from the usual social mold.

I've had the some interesting opportunities to talk with HR people within the company to find that the average age of the company is starting to rise quickly, it's probably the result of the Japanese "baby boomers" getting older. In some departments, the average age is hitting close to the 40 year old mark. When you have so many old people at the top, I think it is hard for young people to find other young people with similar ideas to work with. The other thing is social politics and when you are around people with more authority than you, it becomes harder to do your own thing. Which brings me back to the fast paced change I've been seeing in the software industry recently, fueled by youthful people going their own way and creating startups. I am an avid reader of what the people at Y Combinator have been doing and the programming languages they've been using. Most of these guys that build web applications are young, using new languages and software platforms that large corporations have not even come to touching on a large scale. In the programming world, you can pretty much learn a lot about the culture of the company by the programming languages they use, thus looking at job postings is an interesting way of learning about your competitors.

Many of the biggest corporations now have been started up by young people at one point and the question is if the company culture ages well with passing time. The companies that are hot, are generally the relatively young ones, the ones like Facebook, Google, and Twitter as "hot," and we hardly think of companies like Microsoft, Oracle or IBM in the same way.

I've been working for older people for too long with their own ideas for too long and I think it's time for me to cut and move on. What they think isn't the end all and be all, but there are things that you can learn from them. It's just that you have to be good at seeing through some of their out dated thoughts. It's a tricky position to be in politically as a young person, but I've come to appreciate the need to become politically adept in dealing with people.

I've also been watching a lot of youtube recently and have been really amazed with some of the quality work that is being put out there by young people interested in music and video editing. It is a place where hardly older people create good content for. I miss that vibe and I realize more and more that it's time for me to get out of where I work.

Live Deliberately

I made a post earlier about avoiding distractions to improve productivity. Things like youtube and social bookmarking sites can be a total time sink as it is easy to bounce from video to video or link to link. For the most part, not all articles are all that mentally nurturing, but there is a strange addiction to wanting to see or read more. Some call this a sort of "information addiction," others call this a resistance of the mind to change context and do other things, whatever the problem is called, I would be more happy to be rid of this issue.

Of the times that I have been most productive, I've noticed that I had concrete deadlines and my actions were exceptionally deliberate at getting the the tasks to get whatever I needed done. Without that level of focus, it is too easy for the mind to wander around and randomly do unproductive things.

I've started a new habit of shutting down the computer while not using it as it was too easy for me to find myself clicking on firefox and browsing around the internet aimlessly. By shutting down the computer, I am forcing myself to think and define exactly what I want to do before powering the system up. Without a concrete task defined, it is too easy to just start goofing off. So far, I have found that this is effective, though I hope my mind doesn't decide to find work arounds to this habit. I have noticed that I have been turning to my iPhone for some light browsing, but the magnitude of what I can look at is a little more limited compared to reading things on the computer (though the iPhone still does a pretty good job in it self).

By forcing my mind to think about what I want to do before doing something, it has made me realize that many things that I used to do was simply a result of me following random urges to use the computer or do things to kill time. A lot of the bad habits I have gone unnoticed and being more deliberate about my actions is helping me pick up on these habits.

I am also trying to keep track of what I've been spending time on to help me identify on what I am spending my time on to determine if there are more optimal ways of allocating my time. If I can do this with my annual expenditures (of which I still need to publish) then I should be able to track my time as well. As the saying goes, "time is money," thus I should treat is as a valuable resource.

The US's Trusted Identity system?

The US's trusted identity program is picking up some steam recently. Arstechnica has a short article about it, where the gist of it is that you have certain entities that exists to verify your identity using digital authentication. The example they give is of a person using their cell phone as their ID device to get access to medical records, when it some how gets confirmed through some kind of network.

Obviously there are security issues if the cell phone you carry gets stolen, which probably means that you probably should password it... which ironically is sometimes dealt with when the people with access to your medical profile could simply ask about your medical history to verify who you are. What does this additional layer of "security" add? I have no clue.

One other point of contention is that of having a "single point failure" system, where in fact, you could be locked out of society if the network refuses to verify who you are.

A cursory look at web hosting prices

I've been looking at getting my own domain + server space for some tinkering around as I am interested in doing some web based programming work. There are lots of interesting data mining applications out there and one that just caught my attention was Spokeo, which is an online directory of people with information scraped from all sorts of locations. Consider it like a public version of a CIA database of people, which has personal information including you address, phone number and home value. Obviously, there are some privacy concerns by having this kind of information available, but none the less, an interesting application of data mining.

I am quite interested in learning how to create web services, at least for myself and perhaps expand that to other people if there is time for that in the future. One of my favorite cloud services I use is Dropbox, where I have several computer synced to my dropbox account and have file synced between all of them. Integration is seemless and all operations happen as if you were normally manipulating files through your usual file manager.

I am still on their free account (2 GB limit) and they charge you $9.99/month for 10 GB of storage and then $19.99 for 50 GB/month of space. I think that it is a little on the steep side, but they are running on Amazon's servers which is probably driving costs up. For more space and the ability to share files with myself, I decided that it might be a good idea to look at your standard vanilla web hosts to see what were the prices were like. What I found was that using a web hosting solution (those that were based in North America) were vastly cheaper compared to Dropbox and Japanese web hosts.

I've tabulated the results of what I looked at (from sites that had information that was easily accessible):

Table of web hosts

Interestingly, dropbox when compared with other web hosting services is expensive. Japanese web hosts in general, tend to use tiered pricing for their services and don't provide any unlimited plans which seem to have become popular with North American hosting providers (well, the 2 that I listed, there were more but I didn't bother to list them). With this result, I will want to go with a non-Japanese host as I will get the most bang for my buck. Interestingly, these hosts look ideal as an offsite backup of data, in the case of catastrophic damage, which is a good thing if you want to keep data safe.

Pictures of people between 0-100

Found this site just recently, looks like a photo project of pictures of people between 0-100. An interesting look at the progression of aging in people. It is a good reminder of one's own mortality and the value of time.

Search Engine Optimization and Social Networks

Search engine optimization (SEO) has been a trending buzz word on the sites I've been visiting recently. I generally believe that there is a big market for business intelligence related internet work as there are so many people online today searching for so many different things. The key point is to make sure that your website is the most prominent to drive potential customers to your site and convert them into paying customers. In simple terms:

customers = site visitors * conversion rate

and what people in the internet business industry want to do is increase the number of visitors and conversion rate to make a business profitable. The problem itself is very fascinating as it requires a lot of data mining and profiling to determine where your customers are, drive them to your site and convert them into paying customers.

Consider that Amazon it self had $22 billion dollars in revenue for the year ending in 2009, that the whole total of online sales for 2009 is much bigger then that. Meaning that the business for improving online sales is big money.

For those of you have been on the internet since 2000, some of you might have noticed invisible text hidden away at the bottom of a site or in the html of others. The idea of optimizing one's site to rank higher in the index of internet search engines is an old idea. Google had an interesting take of the practice by both rating the number of external links leading into the site in addition to the content of the site it self when determining the ranking of a site thus improving the quality of sites they returned from their searches. I believe with the rise of social networks and social based information exchange sites, that the nature of search will change in the coming years.

I started thinking of first seed of this idea in a former post in June entitled Friends as Filters, where friends based on their interests will filter and pass along useful information within a circle of friends. With the rise of ease of sharing information through social networks, we find that social networks are having a significant impact on how information is passed along. We now have a new class of "viral" videos or webpages that become massively popular by dissemination through social networks instead of being ranked at the top of a search engine.

I find that Facebook is an interesting avenue for sharing information with friends, whether it be through the sharing of things they do or the interesting links they post. I do admit that I need to organize my contact list and start filtering people for interesting content for to improve the quality of information passed to me. But the basic concept is there, which is similar to social linking sites such as Reddit, (the now waining) Digg and more. Unfortunately as the number of users grow at these social sites, degradation in the quality of posting does occur, resulting in meme posts that are popularly voted up as a result to an appeal to the greatest unified demographic; in these cases, it need not be the majority controlling the "main page," assuming the demographics of a site is sufficiently fragmented enough to allow a minority group to have the most control over the popularity of the links posted. It would be akin to allowing a minority governmental party wielding majority like power inside a parliamentary house.

With this problem at hand, online communities have started reorganizing to support sub-communities where relevant information to sub-groups are passed along or posted only in that sub-group. What we are starting to find now is that things are a little different compared to the times of say Usnet when posted information was publicly available compared to the wall-gardened sites such as Facebook. What many spammers used to do was mine Usnet posts for e-mail address and spam everyone with advertisements. With the advent of more modern social networking sites, stronger linking of information is now possible however that information is not publicly available unless you are an app developer or the administrator of these sites themselves. What people are finding is the information in these sites is valuable when mined and summarized correctly. I think this will lead to a change from SEO related work to Social Network Optimization work in the future.

I think this field is still in it's infancy and to get information worth mining you are either going to get access to data in established social networks or create a killer application to create a network of your own, but I think there is good money to be made jumping into the social networking site for business intelligence applications.

Edit: Some typos and had 22 trillion instead of billion. I have a terrible habit with skimming material too quickly it seems.

Mastercard and Visa shouldn't be controlling who you can do business with

There exists file sharing sites that share that contain copyrighted content, but the idea that financial transaction institutions such as Mastercard and Visa working with the MPAA and the RIAA to preemptively block financial transactions with organizations they don't like sets a chilling standard with regards to the freedom of to whom you are allowed to do business with. We are seeing the same thing happen with Mastercard and Visa blocking financial transactions to Wikileaks because of the inconvenient nature of the material they are publishing online. Supporters from around the world are willing and wanting to donate to Julian Assange and his cause through both financial and technical support.

There is nothing more democratic when it comes to people voting with their money, which is exactly something that the US claims to be a staunch supporter and defender of. Unfortunately this simply isn't a battle of ideals, free markets or rights. It's simply organizations trying to change the game to keep other people out of their political/economic turf.

Facebook and more intrusive ads

I generally use Facebook to keep track and stay in touch with friends. The biggest motivations to get into Facebook was to get reconnected with people that I had lost touch with and be able to keep up with them. I believe that the social graphs of people in today's society is simply much larger compared to what it was before as a result of the internet.

I've recently upgraded to their new profile and was aghast with the prominent display of ads on my profile page. To me, it's a terrible eye sore and I am not very happy about having a personal space being used as an advertisement space. That is a digital line that I would much not like to have crossed. I have since installed and enabled the adblock add into firefox and the ads have since disappeared. For now, using ad-block is a viable solution, but there ought to be better ways of maintaining a social graph, content and access instead of using a closed platform. One of those alternatives is Disapora, which is still under development. It will be interesting to see what happens from there.

On Digital Money Usage in Japan

Of of the interesting thing about about Japan is the use of digital money. I used to think that digital money was close to inconceivable because I much prefer the feel and sight of having cash in hand when making payments. The physical and visual queue of using money is that has greatly helped me in keeping my spending in check. After moving to Tokyo, I've become accustomed to the prevalence of using digital money.

The cafeteria at my office operates on a digital money system. We have several thousand employees at the research center so the lunch lines can get pretty long if you get to the cafeteria right at noon. When I was a university student, it would take a while to get your food and then take another long while as everyone fumbles with coins and bills to pay for the food. Credit cards are one solution to that problem, but I believe that digital cash cards are superior compared to credit cards.

One electronic cash card system being used here is called Edy, which is a wireless rechargeable cash card that are also integrated into some cell phones in Japan. These cash cards can be charged using recharge kiosks where you can place your card or cell phone on to and deposit money into the card. Another interesting feature for cell phones is that you can log into your bank account from the cell phone and have money wired into the chip in phone. One point of risk for the system however is hacking of the cards to digitally manipulate the amount of money stored. I am not entirely sure about the security features used in the card to prevent people from tampering with the device, however.

The Edy cards are currently accepted at nearly all convenience stores and some retail chains, so I would not say that market penetration of the cards for consumer usage is not that deep. However for mass transit usage (trains, buses and etc.) pretty everyone uses these cards as you do not need to look up train fairs and pay for it every time you go through the gates. Throughput of people in Japan through the train gates in Tokyo is quite amazing as a result of this.

The one nice thing about these digital money cards, is that they are not necessarily tied to the identity of the user, for example in the case of a credit card. The loss of a credit card usually incurs the headache of contacting the credit card company, deactivating the card and waiting for a new card to be made and sent to you. Without having this identity connection, a card loss is simply equivalent of physical loss of the money, meaning that you could just buy a new card (which is about $10 ish), reload it and start using it immediately.

One of those things I've been getting annoyed about recently is the size of my wallet with the number of cards I carry. Women, in particular, I notice have huge wallets to carry all the point and membership cards they use for shopping. As of recent, I've been thinking about how nice it would be to be able to carry a much less boated wallet with me.

The financial incentives for managing a digital money system is obviously there as money charged into these cards can be placed in a holdings account where the institution can make 1~2% interest in very low risk investments. When it comes to creating digital consumer ID cards, I am not entirely sure that there is sufficient incentive yet to make that jump yet, though I believe that work is trivial.

I would expect that ID information will eventually all become digital and embedded within an ubiquitous device like a cell phone. The interesting thing to ask is what are the risks of digitizing all ID and monetary data? Furthermore, I would wonder what kind of system would manage it? For it to be socially acceptable, I would be willing to venture a guess that the management system would have to be a decentralized one. Maybe we will see that transition in the next 5~10 years after the first "killer application" that drives this transition is created.

Intangibles

I am oft known as a frugal person, in that I don't generally like spending money if I have to. Optimizing/reducing cost is one of those things that I've been good at doing; however there are things that do go missing from the equations, the intangibles.

Tell me that you need a hammer and I'll tell you where you can get a sufficiently cheap and good one. Tell me that you need an affordable computer and I'll set you up with the specs for a system and where to get the parts for the right price.

It has been mentioned to me recently (and repetitively) that apparently, I need to "improve my fashion." Like in this XKCD comic, "my normal approach is useless here." I was dragged out this weekend to shopping in search of new threads. Why is it that one piece of paper scribbled by Vincent Van Gogh is far more valuable than something scribbled upon by a random person? Art, unfortunately is one of those strange realms that numerical analysis is rather useless upon.

The one thing I know is that I spent a lot for shoes, pants, shirts and a jacket. The other interesting question is, what interesting intangible benefits of "looking sharply presentable" have? Apparently, I have feeling that the answer would simply be best described by as "a lot."

Friendship map of the world

I've always been a fan of finding interesting ways of mashing up data from the internet. One project I did was downloading performance ratings of CPUs and combining them with pricing data to calculate price/performance ratios before selecting a part.

Recently, an intern at facebook stripped out friendship data from their servers and made a map of connections between cities, by mapping what city they were from into geological coordinates and drawing lines between the points. After some artistic manipulations of the lines, his work resulted in this.


A very cool map indeed. Some interesting notable dark spots are South America, Russia, Mongolia and China, parts of Japan and along the Canadian and US border. If you're interested in the details of this map, a link to the original facebook article is available here.

What would you pay for a set of games?

The band Radiohead once did this and this is the second time that an indie game developer is doing this. It's the humble indie game bundle, where you get to choose how much you would pay for a set of 5 games and they are posting live information on the how much people are paying and by what platform. The trend seems to be the average "donation" is Linux > Mac > Windows. Where Linux users pay 2.5x more than what people pay on the Windows platform. Ironic that people that use a free OS would pay more for software.

An interesting article on if you should get a PHD

The link to the article is here. It's a good read and I haven't finished reading all of it yet (not that it's long).

Web based programming is the next big thing

Programs used to work in isolation on a single PC somewhere before the internet became prolific. Computer science classes at university used to be all about programming in C or C++ or something like scheme. But now with the advent of the internet, most of the programming skills we learn at universities are obsolete.

The thing I remember the most about my time in programming classes was dealing with how to store data, how to process it and then how to display it to the user. I still think that these things are fundamental to the core of programming, but I think there is a big demand gap when it comes to finding skilled people that are able to get data to feed their programs, process large data sets and come out with meaningful results. This is the stuff that business intelligence is made out of.

Over the last few years, there has been a big transformation in the world of programming, databases and languages have now been developed with the paradigm that given certain data, there are specific functions calculations that you want to run on all the data and summarize them into a single result. This thinking framework is otherwise known as MapReduce. The great benefit of this methodology is that is is also functional programming friendly, meaning that you can define compound functions that you want to run on a specific data set instead of dealing with loops, counters and how you are going to save the data. The basic idea is that you make a list of data, process it and out comes a list of data. Then after that, you reduce that list into a single value or something.

Modern languages languages like Python, Erlang, Lisp and more are designed to handle programming like this (in additional to dealing with the usual procedural type programming and object oriented programming). Older languages like C or C++ can do the same thing, but you have to build the functions and the scaffolding to do this on your own or call libraries to do this kind of programming which make C based programs longer and more error prone to write.

One of the reasons why I was surprised in an earlier post to find some large corporations doing data processing still wanting C++ programmers. The other added benefit of using more recent languages is that they also have libraries to access web based data built in, making it easier to feed applications with more data to process. The of the most famous startup companies are the direct result of this effect. You won't learn most of this stuff from your ordinary university class, the only way to get into this stuff is probably on your own.

Learning how to work with open software projects

I've seen some interview questions and job postings that mentioned that working on open software projects is a nice to have skill over the last few years. I never understood how much of an impact that working on an open software project might have on a person's ability to code until just recently.

I have been following the programming scene in sort of a cursory manner, mainly through reading at hacker news, which is a good site for programming and web development kind of information. What has been coming up repeatedly is the development of a program project hosting site called github, where the collaborative projects are hosted. The ability to code well parallels with learning to write well; in that reading good code helps one write good code.

I have cursory looked at sites like source forge in the past to download code to look at, but one of my biggest problems is trying to figure out how large projects are structured and what code is where, doing what. I used to do most of my coding through a simple text editor before because configuring and trying to figure out these modern fanged integrated development environments (IDEs) would get on my nerves when I wanted to learn and compile something simple. I've used to code through a simple text editor for the last 2.5 years until realizing that the debugging facilities and managing large chunks of code became time consuming and brutal.

I have since switched over to the freely available Eclipse IDE with an integrated debugger and the ability to read locally created libraries and allows for auto code completion. It is a godsend compared to what I was doing before. Commercial packages like Microsoft's Visual Studio probably has functionality like these built in, but learning coding and figuring out IDEs on your own at the same time is a little much. The great thing about Eclipse and some of the new open source IDEs is that they are starting to add functionality to connect and download projects from code repositories from places like github. I have just finished configuring IDE to do just that and downloaded the libraries to a data-mining spider called scrapy. There are other libraries available that does the same thing but I have the intentions of learning how the program was coded, the programming styles used and possibly using the project itself for my own data-mining projects. After looking at some of the code, I can understand how some people would look highly upon people that participate with open source projects as they are exposed to working in an environment with many people, many lines of code and looking at a lot of good and bad code. I will be spending time at looking at more programming projects to further hone my own skills. The idea that companies look at people with open software experience brings up the interesting concept of profiling people and their skills through secondary activities and traits. It's an old idea however, but it would be interesting to see the correlation of coding skills to open source project participation or say a person's affinity to knitting and a (negative correlation) to say, sky diving. Unfortunately, statistics when applied like this is like opening a can of worms.

Can't make heads or tails of silver

Apparently there seems to be a campaign on the way to crash J.P. Morgan via the purchase of silver as they supposedly hold a short position of 3.3 billion ounces of silver and are currently under investigation of silver price manipulation. In the last few months, silver has been trending upwards for the last 3 months with a 47% gain. Gold hasn't seen that much of a price increase.

Silver ETF price for the last 3 month

When it comes to financial information on the internet, there is a lot of garbage out there, especially for a hot topic like gold and silver. The leading argument to buy silver comes from a guy by the name of Max Keiser, in general, I don't trust financial pundits and whatever they start talking about, I generally tend to ignore but make a note to look into on my own.

The burning question that needs to be answered is, "is silver relatively cheap or expensive right now?" I've added to snap shots for the last 10 years on gold and silver prices from kitko.com.

Price of Gold

Price of Silver

Metal prices have gone up significantly over the last 10 years, but I'll skip the commentary on that:

Gold in 2000: $300 (approx), Silver in 2000: $5 (approx) Ratio: 60:1
Gold in 2010: $1414, Silver in 2010: 29.58 (Dec 6 prices) Ratio: 47.8 :1

Historically, it seems that the price of silver has been much lower compared to gold in recent times and I find it hard to believe that this ratio should suddenly change. I've also been looking at the relative production rates and total produced numbers of silver and gold and get wildly different ratios compared to the prices (of course the numbers themselves might not be reliable too).

From gold-eagle.com: I calculate that by 323,476 Tons (by 1999) have been extracted. I guestimate that about 450,000 tons have been mined by 2010.
From wikipedia: They mention that 165,000 Tons have been mined by 2009.

Meaning that there is a 1 : 2.77 availability ratio of gold to silver. I've also looked at the production ratios and the numbers work out to be 1 : 4.8 for gold and silver. I think that stockpile availability might be the key factor and the difference between supply and demand might be causing the price differentials between gold and silver, but I still can't figure out the reason why gold is that much more expensive than silver, presently and historically, unless the numbers I've been looking at are bad (which is a possibility). Personally, for the bigger price differential between gold and silver to be supported, there ought to be a greater differential in availability between the 2 metals.

The other forward looking argument to be made is, suppose that people are buying silver to crash J.P. Morgan and that it does happen. And then what? I would say that eventually everyone would have to sell their stocks of silver to get their money back out of it thus dropping down the price of silver. The question is, when do you start selling? If you can't figure that out then you shouldn't be buying in the first place.

It'll be interesting to see what happens, but I have a feeling that there is a bubble in silver happening right now.

Addendum:

I'll add supply data from kitco.com here since I think the data from here seems a little more reliable and up to date.

Gold supply (2009): 117 Million Ounces, Silver Supply: 810 million Ounces Ratio: 6.9
The ratio is still fairly small compared to price ratio between gold and silver. What is the pricing mechanism for gold and silver? I still don't know.

Reducing distractions and the 10,000 hour rule

I am in the middle of a transition period in life; I've got another 6 months till I turn 30 and the big question of "where do I go from here" that I need to figure out. One of my colleagues turned 40 a few months ago and the only thing he was muttering the whole time was "I just can't believe I'm an old man." The interesting thing about my life is that I get along well with people that are older than I am; it's always been that way when I was young and the best part of having friends that are older than you is that you get a glimpse of the future so I can prepare for it now.

As of recent, I've been thinking much about my future; or at least, a strategy for one. Getting prepared for the future isn't like getting prepared for a trip or a disaster, where you just spend a few days going out and buying what you need. Preparing with skills, knowledge and experience is a different game, where you pay for it in the currency of time.

The sub-prime crisis and the following recession/depression fiasco has wreaked indiscriminate financial catastrophe to all walks of life; the young, the middle aged and the old. What was interesting was how each group was affected by the economic downturn. For example, the young cannot find jobs, the middle aged are have debts to deal with, and the old had their savings hit. What this economic downturn has taught me is that you need to keep a good backup plan to protect yourself from being stuck between a rock and a hard place, especially if you've become old (or transitioning to being old) and had your savings wiped out (naturally, you would have been investing in "secure" investments).

So where does this all fit in with me? At this point in life, I've come to realize that with growing age, the number of options I will have available will start to shrink in then next decade-- the number of new fields I will be able to jump into and get really good at will dramatically shrink. So it is now that I should start looking into explicit skills that I can enjoy and be really good at to make a good living. It has been oft quoted from by Malcom Gladwell's book "Outliers," that the number of hours it takes for a person to become an expert at something is 10,000 hours.

Doing the math, to become a master it will take:

• 27.4 years at 1 hour/day of practice
• 13.7 years at 2 hours/day of practice
• or 6.8 years at 4 hours/day of practice

This calculation also puts a lower bound on how long it takes to be really good at something and also the number of skilled expertise that a person can have over the course of a life time. The other thing is the earlier you have more skills, the more they will pay off in the long run. Meaning, if you start training hard by the time you are 50 years old, you might finally become an expert by the time you are 60, however that doesn't leave a lot of time to put those skills to use.

The other interesting thing about skill sets is that they also come outdated as time goes on. Someone that might have been a really good switchboard operator/manager in the early 50's would find their skills useless in today's modern world. Or perhaps a little differently, some computer gamers might find their skills in Starcraft 1 be outdated by the release of Starcraft 2. You might have some transferable skills, but you won't be an expert off the bat. This brings up the interesting point that transferable skill erosion occurs with every new generation of technology, the further along we go in generation, the number of skills we can transfer will negatively compound. Though it might be a little early for me to start thinking about this, it is something that I should keep on mind.

So here is the thing, suppose that I do practice something at 4 hours/day, it will still probably take me 7 years to be really good at it. What it also means is that if you want to be good at something in a reasonably good time, you really don't have a lot of time to waste.

After coming to this realization. I have decided that I am going to institute a system to reduce the number of unproductive distractions so I can spend more time learning. Mainly less checking of news sites, less youtube, less computer games and etc. This doesn't mean that I will be aiming to live a boring life, far from it actually. What it means is that I should more effectively use my time by doing things that brings me memorable value; which could include picking up skills or spending time traveling to somewhere exotic, learning more about wine or whatnot.

I think there was an Indian saying that went like this:

When you are young, you make your habits.
When you are old, your habits make you.

Time to make some productive habits while I still can.

People still use C++!?

I find it amusing that people still use C++. I am a big python programmer, which was a transition for me from C++. The python programming language is just far more extensible, easy to program and dynamic variable typing is so easy to deal with that I just can't fathom that many people still program in C++. Many of the best startups on the internet don't touch C++ at all. Do I brush up on old skills or keep moving with the new stuff, a bit of a dilemma.

The problem with disclosing income

I've been doing some reading recently about the issue about disclosing one's income during an interview. The problem is that it give the employer an incentive to underpay you knowing your payment threshold. I've been on both sides of fence recently, knowing what pay looks like in the finance world thanks to a few contacts I was able to target for price at par with other people in the industry. Unfortunately things didn't work out as they had someone without a job that was willing to take the job, but that was OK. I would much rather not take a job if I knew I was going to be underpaid -- because one of the reasons for moving to a new position is to leverage your skills for a higher salary.

Since that deal had just recently fell through, I've just been introduced to some recruitment agencies and in the process of sending out applications for new jobs. I decided this time, that I would see what happens if I put something close to my real salary. I was soon contacted by a representative that would pass my resume to a few other positions. The guy quickly asked about my salary inspirations and I gave him my ball park number, he immediately balked at the idea of me looking for a 40%~50% salary increase, citing that I had a much lower salary listed. The moral of the story here is to not disclose your salary or put down a higher number.

I had qualms at first about inflating my salary before, but after seeing this reaction, it is an unfortunate necessity of the negotiation process.

Time to pick up some database skills

I've been dabbling on and off about some data mining work for sometime now. The one thing I am kind of surprised about myself is that I haven't picked up any decent database skills. Some IT related work came by my way, the guys are looking for someone with C++ skills and and database related stuff.

I haven't touched a low level language like that in ages, the last time I did something with C++ was try to write my own poker bot. I actually had a clever system setup as I made a hack into the RAM to find out where the card data was stored and figured how the card data was stored.

I haven't done any sort of enterprise kind of programming before; most of the work I do with programming is scripting and numerical analysis kind of work; I run pretty much everything through the command line to get at data. But IT work for banks and getting into analysis kind of work seems kind of interesting. The problem is that the firms are Japanese and I sort of have doubts on the amount of money they would be paying. I've worked in one Japanese corporation already and I believe that I should be fetching a higher salary, oddly not being paid enough seems to be strong negative incentive to me-- there were times I worked harder as a student than I work in the company.

There are a lot of skills I need/want to pick up right now. I just have to hunker down and pursue a few things with great intensity. I intend to make programming one of my fortes.

JLPT Level 1

The JLPT is the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, basically a bench mark for the language ability of foreign people to comprehend the Japanese language. I don't have any qualifications as I have just picked up everything I needed along the way, but I have since come to the realization that it may come in handy for future employment opportunities. I am debating on picking up a few other qualifications on my own depending on the availability of my time.

I have decided to prepare myself for a move for a new career to better leverage my skills and improve income compared to the work I am doing now; even if it involves me picking up some new skills. The job market in Japan is interesting for people with international skills and I intend on breaking into that market career wise. There are probably other interesting opportunities in other Asian countries like Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong for international talent. One of those requirements to break into this field is a necessity for good multi-lingual skills in addition to either business or technical skills.

The need for international recognition as a baseline for certain skills may play an important role here. I will be looking into at least getting my JLPT level 1 certificate within the next year. I've lived here for 5 years now and I should at least get that certification.

Career planning is tricky

I am now in the process of looking for a new job. People might call me crazy to consider looking for new work with the economic down turn and all, but some how I am confident that I can find something better, that also pays more than what I am getting right now.

The job that I do isn't all that bad, and the working environment compared to other Japanese companies is pretty good, but I believe that I can do better and that I can pick up the skills needed to advance faster.

I finished reading a nook earlier this month called "kitchen confidential" written by Anthony Bourdain, a first hand biographical look into the nitty gritty of the culinary world. One interesting note that he made was that he could have been a better chef if he hadn't spent so much time chasing money, where as another talented chef went from Italian to pastries and through other fields of cooking, starting from close to nothing to learn everything he could. The fusion of knowledge would eventually make him a renowned cook.

Right know, I can admit that I am chasing the money, wanting to pick up the skills to advance into better paid positions. Raising one's income isn't a necessarily a bad thing, but what is it that one unwittingly gives up in this conquest?

Modeled numbers are easy to predict, this is the realm of accountants and mathematicians, but there is also a hidden lie beneath it all, we assume that the model doesn't change.

Accountants cannot account for the power of a technological or cultural vision becoming a reality. Like poker, predicting or creating the future isn't just about a numbers game, though knowing how to crunch the number does help. Are there intangible things that I am neglecting?

And so, I will probably come to a crossroad, there will be jobs that I can pick up skills for that may take me away from my world of research and development that I believe that I want to remain in or do I go into the world of finance or other uncharted territory that may pay better.

There will be more job offers coming my way in the coming months and more skills I will need to pick up to position my self for better opportunities. The question is, to which direction do I walk and why? Assuming that this is the right question to ask in the right place, sometimes it is just nice to just walk in the first place.

If there is a time to do it, it is now; I hear from other people it does get a little harder to find new work the older you get.

The Search for a New Apartment Begins

As mentioned in the previous post, I've been living in the company
dorm for the past 3 years and it's time for me to go. In Japan the
moving season is in March-April because the university year starts and
new hires start work at this period of time.

I've been looking on and off for places to for the past month through
the internet and after living in the dorms for a while, I am ready for
a nicer place to live. Somewhere with at least 2 rooms and a kitchen,
and relatively closer to the city in a nice building. It is going to
be much more expensive to the dorms that I've been living in, but I
will be able to invite friends over and host events, which should cut
down on my entertainment costs significantly.

The added benefit is that I'll be able to dedicate a room to a
study/work out area, meaning that I'll be able to do more activities
at home. I would like to see if the partition between having a study
versus having a bedroom + study will have an impact on my working
habits. Either way, having a new environment will be mentally
stimulating and I am quite certain that the change in environment will
have a positive impact.

At the same time, having increased associated living costs will force
me to keep myself to sharpen my skills, advance and look for new
opportunities. I believe that it's easy to stagnate if one gets too
comfortable-- because if things are pretty secure already, why try
harder? This is a habit that I am going to work on breaking, but I
believe that it requires some external "stress" to be applied to
myself.

Fortunately, I've still been tracking my personal expenses so I have a
general idea of what I can afford. In Japan, compared to North
America, there is a wider selection of places and prices of places to
live in. Where as in Vancouver, the cheapest place that you will be
lucky to find will be in the $800 range, going upwards. Living about 1
hour out of the city by train, you can probably get away with
something in the $500-$600 range if you wanted to save money. I'll be
aiming for something nicer and closer to the city. It'll be more
expensive, but I will be aiming to shoot for a career upgrade within
1.5 years for a respectable increase in salary. I have a general idea
of what other companies might be looking for in an international
candidate now so I will be pushing to get certified in the level 1
Japanese Language Proficiency Test and one other certification.

To accomplish these goals, I will be looking to reduce the number of
hours to focus on personal development. The idea is to invest in
myself and reap compounding rewards the more skilled I get. I think
this is a far better solution compared to working longer hours-- as I
loathe to think of myself as a monkey. Other commitments I'll need to
make is to cut down on the number of hours that I spend unproductively
and I am in the process of setting up a timer system where I focus on
a task for a specific amount of time before giving myself a break to
do whatever. I'll also be looking to find a way to tabulate what I
learned or accomplished during these times to determine if I was
working effectively.

Time to move out of the company dorm

Living in a dorm of international students was great, living in a dorm with co-workers is pretty damn boring. I exist in a different world, even when in Japan with international expats, Japanese people that have lived abroad and came back, I even really like the country folk here as well. The thing is that I just can't connect with the ordinary traditional salary-people here. The just don't jive with me, not that I don't like them; I am just bored around them. I generally do my best to fit in and I am usually pretty good at fitting in, but there are times when you simply just need to put your foot down and get out.

Yeah the rent for the company dorm is really cheap, they charge about $250/month in fees with utilities included. Dirt cheap and thanks to that price, I've saved up a good chunk of money that would have otherwise gone to the landlord. But at the same time, you also pay a price, that you can't invite outside friends and the other thing is that I live away from Tokyo, from where all the cool stuff is happening. I've just started to meet many interesting people and decided that I need to get closer to Tokyo and make more free time to do interesting work and meet interesting people-- the surrounding environment plays a very important influencing factor. You can tell that things are different when you listen to people with interesting ideas and trying to startup a new business, whether it is in silicon valley or in Singapore; you think depending on your environment.

So I've decided that I need to get out and get myself into a more happening place. I'll probably have to deal with a commute to get to work, but it is one of those things I'll probably have to live with. In ideal circumstances, I'll find a new venue of work where it is close to where I live, somewhere happening. I've been living too "defensively" for the last few years by making decisions based on how much it I can "financially save." I want to from "saving" to "making".

A weekend of relaxation

After a wild Halloween and more weekend events (one of which included me dancing in a museum and the curators getting mad at me), I've decided to spend this weekend at home for a change. Most of my friends would have a hard time imagining me spending time at home instead of going out, but yes there are times when it is really nice to just not go out; in this case I had a lot of errands that needed catching up on and I figured that it would be now or never to get them done.

Stuff like cleaning the room a little, changing the battery on my scooter, hitting the hardware store to look for a can of rust remover and finding spray can of grease (interestingly) for my bicycle and such, I remind my self that there are probably a lot of small little maintenance things that I ought to be doing but just haven't really been finding the time to do recently. So sometimes, it is necessary to put time aside to get things done and time to just chill out as well too.

The last week has been marked by a string of food indulgence, as not many people might know, I live without a kitchen so I've created my own little kitchen with a table and a hot plate that lets me fry meats and make all sorts of other dishes. Having good food waiting for me at home is a great incentive to come home early; I often have a hard time staying late at work when given the choice of eating at the company cafeteria (which isn't bad, by the way) versus something home cooked.

It's been a while since I've done any real picture posting-- I still remember that I have more photos of Hakodate that I should have posted and other things that I should have done but haven't gotten around to doing yet. Slacking isn't a really good habit, but there are only so many productive hours in a day that a person has (or so I believe).

So first off, since February of this year, I bought a new cross bike and have been riding it from time to time to the beach on the weekends. Round trip of 30 km makes for great riding. The entire distance can be covered in about 1.5 hours but I like to take a breather at the beach, where I like to buy a can of orange juice and watch the beach goers play volleyball and surf over there. With autumn dawning upon us, the sun sets much earlier and the sky much clearer compared to the hazy humid sky that one would typically see.

The setting sun

The beach center

The other nice thing about autumn in Japan is that it is still relatively warm-- I can still venture out in a t-shirt on a sunny day, which makes doing exercising in warm but cool weather perfect.

I've also been doing a lot of youtube watching recently. My favorite videos to watch on youtube are of the cooking variety. I've already posted recently about one of my favorite youtube chef at foodwishes but in addition I also really enjoy watching Anthony Bourdain's series called No Reservations; a show that I highly recommend for anyone that enjoys both travel and good food. One of his shows aired way back was a "Techniques Special" from which I used as a base to replicate a beef stew.

The recipe is rather simple:

Take a hunk of shoulder cut beef, chop it up, season with salt and pepper.

Fry until brown

Add onions and cook until semi-translucent

Add some red wine.

Simmer for about 1.5 hours

Add carrots and cook until tender

Serve with a side of rice, bread or whatever you have lying around.

I did all this while cleaning the room and gave up on cleaning after the stew was ready. An incredibly easy but tasty dish. Would probably be nice to add some potatoes as well. I've got enough food in the fridge to last several days. Eating leftovers for 1 might get a little repetitious sometimes, but with enough variety it beats eating expensive take out any day.

Stay on your toes

I'll be writing some more later on but for now, there will be a short lull in writing. Work is busy at the moment and a lot of things are going on. Will be back later!

forget the limiting, focus on the enabling

I've posted plenty about my gripes on working in a corporation and doing research in an institution. I've decided that it's time to stop worrying about all the annoying things that bug me about these establishments and free myself of the "me versus them mindset" and become more fluid in dealing with roadblocks.

Perhaps I was naive when I was younger, when I saw a system or an organization that I thought was ineffective, that it would be easy to encourage change. After trying with little real results, I have come to the realization that change is hard and not worth the time. It's more effective to create a pocket in an organization where you can work effectively and if things are not optimal, then it's time to go. When finally getting into the real world, the scale that you deal with things changes, dramatically.

Before, life would revolve around the academic environment, going to elementary school or high school with 1,200 students and only interacting with mostly people in the same grade (say several hundred people) means that you have a really small point of reference. Going to a university of 40,000 people is a little different. When you finally get out of university and into the real world of millions of people the scale of what you deal with changes. When you're dealing with just a few hundred people and you're stuck with them for many years, that was the environment that you're stuck in and it's rather hard to change. You had to live with the things that you liked and didn't like. After getting out of school, the world is a big place and you don't have to put the effort into changing an environment to make it more palatable. If it's something that you don't like then you can easily move on.

And that's the thing when it comes to attracting smart people, keeping them and creating the right environment to getting good work done. I don't have time to fight the system, to convince people that doing things a different way is better and then doing it. Life is too short for that and I just want to find the right people and environment to be successful, because at the end of it, it takes way less effort to fight within a system and do something than to disengage and do it yourself. The strategy is to find the right way to be successful on your own. If the only taught that at school...

Performance review

I just had my performance review yesterday. In 6 months, I did a decent amount of work and at the same time, I also reduced the number of over time hours I've been putting in at work. I was pulling about 55 hours of overtime/month last year and this year, I've brought it down to about 30 hours/month. Having an extra 24 hours/month to yourself does make a difference in quality of life. Don't underestimate the value of time. I'm going off on a tangent however...

After my performance review, I asked my boss what does it take to get a promotion. How things work in a corporation is that you get raises based on the number of years you've been around, on top of that, after a certain number of years you can be recommended for a grade promotion. His response was that I need to take more of a leadership role and that I could be considered to get a promotion after my 4th year. Hearing something like that was shocking and disappointing. Why does it have to take at least 4 years to get considered for a promotion? I believe that promotions should be performance based, depending on the capacity of the person to handle responsibility and their ability to do good work. To be stuck in a position for 4 years and then take say another 5~6 years for another promotion is pretty much career advancement at a snail's pace.

I don't want to be half-way dead by the time I get into middle-upper management.

There has to be a better way at being successful instead of lining up in the seniority queue for a promotion. That way of thinking has to die and if you want to have a successful company, "promotions" shouldn't be limited to the number of upper level vacancies that need to be filled with someone. Instead, I argue that everyone should have a salary that scales with the level of their performance. I would rather have an environment where everyone can be rewarded for excellent performance instead of people waiting for someone to leave to get upgraded.

Real talent can't be kept waiting, because they will find other places to move upwards into and the company will be at a net loss in talent.

When it comes to making a successful company, having the right people is everything. More important than the amount of money that's bankrolled into the company. Smart, resourceful people will usually find a way to succeed. When your most talented members are gone, companies that were once great will be doomed.

Having a backup computer is important

I've had previous experiences with computer hardware failure, namely having a laptop computer dying on me, leaving me without a PC to do any sort work or connection to the internet. Having a single point of failure for tools or equipment I use on a very regular basis can be a severe vulnerability and it is necessary to have a backup.

I learned this lesson through experience, after my first jaunt where my primary computing device was a laptop. It was great for about the first 1.5 years, then it died on me after expiry of my warranty, the extended care package also did not cover additional repairs at 100% and every time that something would fail, it would always be diagnosed as a motherboard "failure" which would cost just enough so I would seriously consider getting a new laptop instead.

After having enough of that experience, I decided that laptops had a too high cost of failure in terms of time (as repairs had a 1 month turn around time) and financial cost (ie. $700~$1000 for a motherboard replacement) to repair. Being experienced with the assembly of desktop computers, I know that I can generally replace damaged computer parts for far, far cheaper. I decided to switch back to having a desktop as my primary working system 3 years ago and put together my own system. The machine was working great until today when the computer started acting up when the power started cutting itself out during use. I am highly suspicious that the power supply needs to be replaced and I just put an order for a new part online for about $40 for a new unit.

The difference between $40 and $700~$1000 is staggering, and in addition, instead of having to wait 3~4 weeks for the repair, I'll have the parts arriving in the next few days to make the replacement.

When it comes to mobile computing, I have opted to have a cheap $400 netbook for use when I am on the road. Equipped with 160 GB in hard drive space and an atom processor with 7~8 hours of battery life, the machine has sufficient enough kick for me to watch movies on the go, digitally enhance and store travel photos, and the usual net browsing and e-mail applications. Should anything should happen to my little netbook, I would be far more comfortable with discarding it and getting a new once for about the same price. I am very happy with the decision to change my computing setup years ago, because it is finally paying off.

The beginnings of a bookmark list

I incredibly happy about the news aggregator sites like slashdot, reddit and now hacker news. With so many articles being posted everyday, and sometimes, degradation of communities with growing number of people, I have decided that I would like to create a bookmark list of good articles that I have read to share with other people. It may simply be a page on this site for now, but I would like to more functionality to create feeds with other peoples bookmark lists to enrich breadth of reading topics and material.

Being with the right peoole is rejuvinating

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of going to a small gathering of Tokyo based programmers working or interested in start ups. Though interaction with everyone wasn't technical in nature, it was great to meet people working to starting their own businesses.

The great part of everyone was how supportive to each other they were. I would have thought that the world of startups be all about competition but it isn't, it is also about people helping each other out. I sense of altruism and community resonates well with me and I want to work in an environment like that.

I talked about being in a place with the right kind of culture in an earlier post, that community is the kind of place where I want to be.

Know your tier 1 friends

Life is short and the things is that you should you know in life is know who you can depend on. When push cones to shove, there aren't a whole lot of people in life that you can depend on in life.

There are people in life that will call upon in you when they need you, and there are people that won't come to help you when it comes time when you need help. Maybe when a person grows up is becomes necessary to separate the wheat from the chaff. It is necessary to know who you can depend on. Those that you can depend on, treasure them. The rest, is a decision call. But if you can't depend on them then there isn't a point to being friends with them, but that us the cold truth. You might as well know who you can depend on now then waste your time on useless people later.

If this sounds cold, then realize that the truth is equally cold, because this is what you must answer to everyday. If you want to have real friends then find real people that you can depend on.

Company culture is important

I went to a company seminar for junior employees of the company I work for today. I was throttled with disappointment and have reservations about the future direction of the corporation that I work at. The environment and the kind of people you hire are essential to create the right kind of culture/atmosphere that makes a successful company. We face a creativity and innovation crisis and I am starting to see that part of the problem is a result of the culture of the company -- there aren't a lot of people with the right kind of creative flare, follow through and leadership to pull off innovative and visionary projects. Hell, I don't even think that there is a real vision at work.

You know when you are in trouble when the executives are telling employees that "we have to be more creative," thinking that just telling people to be a certain way will enact change. When you have executives that can't lead, set good examples or communicate inspirationally throughout the company then there are very fundamental problems. The problem is even worse when there are superiors that don't listen or are stubborn and you have weak subordinates that know when it's time to push against the grain to get things done. We lost 6 months on one project because people weren't able to speak up. But back to the seminar I went to today.

The seminar I attended is a career planning seminar for junior employees (though I would not like to consider myself one). The idea that over the next few years, we are supposed to be preparing a general vision of ourselves, the kind of person that we are to evolve to be and present that vision to our project managers and eventually to the division executives when we get to our 4th year at the company. Feels like being back in high school by the sound of it.

I feel that many managers are in search of an answer for the next big thing. What many of them can do to a certain degree is identify them when they squeeze ideas out of their employees. I also find that so few of them have true visionary ideas of their own. The only difference between them and their employees is that they're subjected to more ideas and can pretend that they know more-- there is know easier way to stick out your chest and look like you are an "alpha" by appearing to know more than your colleagues. It is by nature of their profession that managers act this way. Dilbert comics make a good point about this with the pointy haired boss, know much about buzz words but little behind their meanings. To be a good manager, I believe that there is more to just knowing, but the ability to get things done on your own. If you want to inspire and attract the right kind of people, you have to start off as being the right kind of person.

Changing corporate culture, or culture in general is a tough process. I've tried it to little avail once before when I was a student at a Japanese lab while doing my masters. I've seen and experienced different things as a westerner and people are afraid of trying new things as old habits are hard to break. I talked about how we how it would be a good idea to start having better ways of exchanging ideas between members of the lab, (the lab I was a part of was really big, with 50 researchers) and better initial training to bring new members up to speed instead of fending for themselves. I eventually ran into a brick wall, with insufficient support and with looming deadlines coming up, I gritted my teeth and decided that I wanted to be the best possible person that I could be instead of changing my environment and did my own things.

Sometimes there isn't time to fight the fight and other times, it just isn't worth it. One of the things I learned over the years is to not waste time fighting over small things. If the effort it too much for some small return, then it isn't worth it to waste time over it-- simply moving on and finding better people to deal with is far more rewarding. I think that a lot of smart people are aware of this and when it become too much of a pain to do interesting work, you will start to lose your smartest people. Google, Microsoft and other technology companies know how valuable smart people are that they even had an agreement to not poach each other's company. If you want to be successful, part of it is knowing how to attract and keep the right kind of people to work with. When it comes to success, people and culture is crucial.

Financial Report Aggregation

Started reading some financial reports from Amazon and Apple today. What was interesting about the both of these companies is how they've deployed their capital in international markets to hedge against the declining USD. Amazon, in their 2010 Annual report would stand to lose money if the USD appreciated. Apple seems to be hedging against the declining USD as noted in their July annual report.

It would be interesting to see what kind of economic sentiment one can pickup from aggregating information by reading financial reports to figure out how businesses are positioning themselves for the future. So a question I've started mulling is how does one aggregate financial information from many sources well? The amount of information that I can process is limited, is there a collaborative strategy or a digital processing techniques?

Will need to do more reading to figure out a strategy.

The "Life goes on" Stance

Maybe it's because I think too much, but I am the kind of person that likes making optimal decisions. I wonder if I am using the most optical technique for math problems, I wonder if the data structures and the functional relations are setup to write clean code, and I wonder if moving out to a more lively place, while costing more is better than living cheaper further way from the city.

Decisions, decisions, decisions. The problem is that one doesn't really know the end effects of a decision until having made them. For whatever known or unknown circumstances things may or may not go as according as planned. The question, is it really worth it worrying about all that stuff?

It's been ages since I played any Texas Hold'em poker, but I took away some very important lessons in life from this game. Texas hold'em poker is an incomplete information game, that is the beauty of this game-- the idea that you have to make decisions without knowing every piece of information available. You could still make the "best" decision given the information available and still lose and that is where the "risk management" aspects of the game kicks in. Sure you can have a 90% to win probability, but if you're playing all-in all the time then you are going to have your ass handed to you eventually. The moral of the story is that for whatever decision you make, even if it goes terribly wrong, you ought to be able to take the hits and keep on going (Rocky 6 reference).

An that's sort of the thing with life-- you do things, somethings fail some of them work out. Unforeseen circumstances kick you in the rear and sometimes pleasant unexpected surprises fall from the sky. But that's really all there is to it, no matter what happens, for better or worse, life simply goes on and there isn't much that you worrying can solve.

Being robust is more important than being optimal

There are too many things in life to worry about and worrying takes up precious time. It would be nice to reduce the amount of time worrying and increase productive time and state of mind. The simple solution is to make robust decisions, where the expected value if positive and failure is not catastrophic. That is not to say that one shouldn't make bold decisions; but for the bold decisions that you do make, you ought to be able to take the hit and still be able to stand if things don't work out. The interesting thing though about a lot of optimization mechanics is that risk/robustness analysis is often forgotten and left as a hidden variable-- things work out nicely unless something fails.

Being robust also means that you can set yourself up for some high yield/high risk (relative) situations since you could have a fall back setup should things don't work out. I'll say it here, but knowing how to be robust and knowing how to take chances and succeeding at them is a key ingredient when it comes to being successful (and even sexy).

The point is to not let failures be hangups or crippling and keep moving on. Oddly enough, this almost sounds like an investment strategy.

Goofing off pays off

Richard Feynman, the famous physicist, had mentioned that he had lost the inspiration to find new and useful ideas in physics. He also apparently was in a rut for it, where upon he just gave up on thinking hard about it and decided to let his mind meander to do whatever it felt like. The ends result was that he ended up winning a Nobel prize for his mind meandering when he came across a student in the Cornell cafeteria spinning plates and noticed that the plate had a 2:1 wobble to spin ratio. After performing the physical calculations and being chided by one of his colleagues that the analysis he was doing was "useless," Feynman would go on to win a Nobel Prize for a derivative work from the calculations he did from the wobbling place as it was related to electron spins in quantum electro-dynamics. For those that are interested, a small part of the story can be found here, and if you do have a chance, I highly recommend Feynman's book, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" as a great read.

I too would run into a similar problem these last few weeks after being thrown into the flame of writing simulation scripts using a terrible scripting language. The syntax is strict, variable names are strange and the compiler doesn't accept lowercase letters in the code. The code looks like Perl on bad crack and it's surprising how people can get work done in this language.

I have a colleague working on the simulation project and he's build up a code base over the last 2 years, he's resigned to bashing through this programming language to run simulations. I've tried to read the code and fell asleep multiple times and got several headaches as a result of trying to follow a convoluted path of variables. split across several files to figure out what it going on.

Traumatized, I gave up trying to write code in this language. After 2 days of trying to understand the code, I was pretty much in a rut with this terrible code and resigned myself to clearing my head by working on other projects and taking really long breaks. Nearly a week later, after getting a handle on the fundamentals, I was struck with an idea-- basically, I would write a program to writes the simulation script and I would by pass all the terrible variable handling by natively managing variables in a different language. I managed to clean up the interface considerably, write a main processing loop where I just throw cleanly designed data sets to generate complicated physical structures with simple commands.

What my colleague would need nearly a week to testing and debugging, I could do the same thing in an afternoon. After joining my colleague in the simulation team, we're going to throw out all the old code and redesign everything using my framework.

Perhaps it is an inherent trait in me, that I hate using an inelegant system to do something and my natural instinct is to run away from the problem until I find an elegant way of dealing with the problem. Sure, I may have been goofing off for the past week, but I've figured out to nearly multiply my productivity by a factor of 4~5 over my colleague and will be bringing him up to my speed after I teach him how to my code. Increasing the productivity of 2 people by a factor of 4~5 is huge when it comes to the amount of cost savings the company yields. I will be writing about this in my winter evaluation report no doubt.

Though this story may sound like that it serves a didactic anecdote, that running away from hard problems is a good idea, I assure you that it doesn't and there are times when it is necessary to roll up the sleeves and to the heavy duty grunt work. The question is knowing when to run and look for better solutions vs getting on with it is key. Maybe I'm just lazy, but I generally like attacking problems when I have an idea to make it easy to solve, otherwise, I'll be doing other things.