Living with the commute and etc

It's been about a month and a few weeks since making the move from the company dorms. I pay a higher rent now but having my own place where I can invite people over is nice. I now live about 20 minutes outside of Tokyo, instead of 1 hour. The trade off, however, is that it now takes me an hour to get to work instead of the 10 minutes I used to spend before. The time delta of 50 minutes times 2 is actually quite significant. The slate has an article on commuting entitled "your commute is killing you," explaining that the further away you live, the more your health, social life, productivity and marriage suffers. Fairly obvious stuff, considering that you have less time to do everything else. 2 hours out of 16 waking hours spent on commuting is more than a 10% of productive time, which is painful.

On the flip side however, I do enjoy living closer to Tokyo and it has made getting out into the city on the weekends far more convenient instead of the 1 hour ride if I wanted to get out there. I can spend more time with friends compared to what I used to be able to do before. Just as important, however, is my ability to network with people in Tokyo will improve as Tokyo is far more accessible to me.

What I'll be looking forward to doing over the course of the next year is to get acquainted with the hacker community in Tokyo, hopefully find some intelligent, driven people to work on some projects and bounce around ideas. I've already found the Tokyo Hacker space where they do meet ups and work on projects and also a Tokyo Startup Weekend event which happened last week. Unfortunately I wasn't aware about it and it ended just a few weeks ago but I'll be looking to become more involved with the entrepreneurial communities here to find cool people to do stuff with.

I've been meeting lots of people recently, but there aren't a lot of people that are interested in doing business or have a business like mind so I'll be spending this year searching for entrepreneurial communities.

Am alive, just been busy moving

Completed the move to the new place just last month. Will have some more details about it in a bit. Been quite busy getting the furniture and unpacked. Normal semi regular posting will resume in a bit.

Financial wealth vs physical wealth

Been reading about the commodity bubble and crash of 2008. It is interesting to try to understand how the motion of money that causes the commodity bubble. At first, I was thinking that money can move into a commodity class (as in be stored) but in reality, someone is exchanging a commodity for that money, which breaks that model. I wanted to model a change in price as a function of the amount of money that goes into an equity, but that doesn't seem to be the case. What basically happens is that the money is exchanged for a commodity or equity and the transaction ends there.

The value associated with an equity is the result of it's instantaneous trading price and there is a disconnect when the value of the equity is tied directly into the "real" money supply and the physical commodity.

Assume a closed system of $1 billion dollars and 100,000,000 tonnes of copper:

• Let the price of copper be $10/tonne, the total value of this market is $2 Billion
• Let the price of copper be $30/tonne, the total value of this market is $4 Billion

Just because the price of copper was more expensive in the second case at $30/tonne vs $10/tonne does not necessairly mean that one economy is more "rich" when the amount of physical resources remain the same. I would be much happier to if I (and others could) a good $100,000 house versus a terrible $500,000 bad (top of the line) one.

I think that there is a gap if the measurement of "wealth" is "money."

The balance of living in a one room apartment

Another 3 days to move into the apartment and packing is underway. The number of belongings are less than expected; I regret not haggling with the moving company for an even cheaper price. I looked up the weather this weekend and there is a 50% chance of rain. I've never had to move in the rain before and it will be interesting to see how the moving company deals with it.

I did some more research last weekend and found out that renting a truck for a day was 8000 yen compared to the moving fee of 40,000 yen that I am paying. The only catch is though my driver’s license in Japan allows me to drive stick shift, I have little experience at it (perhaps 2~3 times). I would be interested in renting a manual car and learning stick because saving 30,000 yen for a single day's work is worth the effort.

I spent the last weekend looking at furniture for the new room as it will be a much bigger compared to what I have now. I can fit a sofa, bed, a desk and my weight training machine and the question is, do I really want to buy so many things? One of the things that I really liked about living light on belongings is that it is easy for move around (though I haven't been taking advantage of that).

Though it has been tempting to buy furniture in advance and have everything arrive on the same day, I have decided that it would be better to live in an empty space first to get a feel for the room before loading it up with stuff; I would rather have bought things to realize that it doesn't fit in well with the room. I'll be pretty happy with moving as it'll be really nice to be able to invite friends over.

On preparing to move

There are hidden costs (and benefits) to everything. I've been living in the company dorms for the past 3 years and by virtue of the age limit I am moving out by the end of the week to my own place. Leaving is a blessing because despite the savings in rent ($200 monthly), I probably have incurred plenty of social costs by living in the dorms. As a result of living in the company dorms, I am far away from Tokyo and can't invite guests over because of the building rules. As a result, I only see friends when invited to an event or when I host something elsewhere.

One part to living is the social aspects of living is knowing people and being able to do things/interact with them. The living conditions up until now have prevented me from doing as much as I would like to have done. Though in retrospect, I did end up doing more traveling around Japan from the savings from really cheap rent.

I have managed to find an apartment just outside of Tokyo, a brand new building and I will be the first tenant into my apartment. It is a fairly spacious 1 room apartment with an insulated floor and I have managed to select a corner room, where to one side is a wall shared with the outside and the other wall is shared with an elevator, meaning that I have free reign to play music and watch movies as loud as I would like and am incredibly happy about this.

I face one other dilemma; in that the room is really spacious and I would like to buy some nice furniture go into where I live. The problem I fear is having too many large belongings that eventually tie me down to a place.

The best solution I can come up with so far is to make more money to make the costs of buying the furniture insignificant to my income, making what I buy "disposable."

 

The post earthquake situation in Tokyo

For the large part, life in Tokyo has largely returned to normal. There are still some noticeable after effects of the earthquake still lingering in the city however. Since the shutdown of the Fukushima reactors, the entire Kanto region (the region surrounding Tokyo) is running at reduced power capacity and the entire region has managed to cut power consumption by at least 25% since the earthquake, alleviating the need for rolling blackouts through the region.

A link to the power charts for the Kanto region is provided here. The blue dotted line represent's last year's power consumption, the small blue bar is the total peak power available and the pinkish line represents yesterday's power consumption and the blue bars represents power consumption for the for the current day.

It's rather fascinating to see how much more power people and companies are able to cut and still maintain fairly "normal" operation. I doubt that you will see this level of power consumption elsewhere in the world however, as the attention to detail and the character to voluntarily reduce consumption is the same with other countries. The above graph could be a representation of the amount of "disposable power" Japan has.

In more detail, office buildings have reduced power to lighting, reduced the number of elevators and escalators operating. The trains have turned off the air conditioning and turned off lights inside the cabins during the days (it gets incredibly dark when going through short tunnels and really shaded regions). I expect power consumption to slowly rise as industrial regions will slowly rise as companies start brining more equipment and facilities online.

We have yet to determine if the power shortages will continue through the summer as one additional power plant is scheduled (since before the earthquake) to be taken offline for inspection through the summer, possibly bringing back the blackouts. There have been talks through the news that this might be not necessary as we have been seeing unprecedented levels of power conservation.

Supermarkets are currently short on food products as the shelves for certain products are either empty or only half full; coupling that with the current dim lightning resulting from power conservation, it presents a rather dreary atmosphere. The supermarkets are short on certain vegetables, milk, soy bean products and bottled water (which were quickly snapped up because of fears of water contamination).

The schedule for the current project that I am working on is being pushed back by about 6 months (and we are really rushing it at this rate). I expect that much production in Japan be significantly reduced and research delayed. Since the currency jump after the earthquake, I have decided to move some of my funds out of yen and into other currencies as I expect the yen to weaken throughout the year. Already in less than a month, the yen has dropped significantly.

I expect the earthquake will send slow shockwaves throughout many technology companies throughout the world as Japan produces many high tech components in many electronic devices. This might be an opportunity for other emerging market players to pick up the slack for reduced production from Japan. Right now, this probably is a very big opportunity for other Asian countries like Korea and China to play technological catch up with Japan. I expect competition to be fierce once Japan gets back on its feet.

Macbook

So I managed to get my hands on a macbook recently and started learning how to use it. There are obvious differences when it comes to using one of these machines compared to a Windows or Linux machine. One thing that drives me up the wall is that I still haven't figured out how folder navigation works other than double clicking on icons to open them; the standard "hitting enter" on files or folders doesn't work here.

There are other notable differences; for example, the function (F1~F12 keys) are actually mapped primairly to notebook functions (like screen brightness, volume control and etc) and you have to use a function key to activate their "normal" behaviors (ie function-F5 for refresh). There are, of course more things that I need to get used to, like how applications are installed and removed (things work slightly differently compared to usual Linux machines) so it'll take some time to figure those things out.

I still remember my first venture into the linux world after buying the first version of the EEE-PC. It took a good week of tinkering to really figure out how to do software installation and figure out what packages I needed for things like multi-lingual support (I also ended up killing the OS a few times by deleting the wrong things too). I suspect that I'll probably fall through similar pitfalls while learning how to use the mac.

One thing that I do like about using the mac, however is the polished multimedia editing tools, which are leaps and bounds superior compared to the open source alternatives. I guess when it comes to software that you pay for, it is what you get.

Interms of the interface, I like it because it has a cleaner look compared to the usual windows interface and the applications look pretty good. Still haven't had a lot of time to tinker with things but will be looking forward to playing around with the computer some more when I have time. After pretty much graduating from playing games on Windows, there really isn't much of a reason to stick around to a single platform anymore.

The effects of radiation being felt in Tokyo

A friend of mine posted that the "air tasted like metal," though unaware of it, those are signs of elevated radiation. The government had reported elevated levels (though not physically damaging [yeah right?]) of radiation in Tokyo this afternoon. Work has been cancelled for tomorrow and the day after so I am making plans to relocate out of Tokyo for at least until this weekend.

CNN's coverage of the Earthquate is crapy

I generally abhor news reporting just because they always focus on disaster, scandal and damage all the time. Maybe it is an American thing, but for the first time in a long while, I am currently at a friend's house watching the news with a Japanese news feed and CNN's news feed side by side. And I have to say, I am in awe of how shoddy CNN's reporting is. Nothing but the same clips of the Fukushima explosion over and over again, exceptionally dumbed down explanation (read, elementary level?) explanation of a nuclear power plant and more. I am surprised that they do not have any bilingual reporters translating and reporting on the direct press conferences from the Japanese government.

Though the Japanese news stations, through do replay some clips of the damage out here, I am far more aware of the evacuation process and the condition of people around the Sendai area; which I think is far more important compared to just talking about the "massive damage" from the earthquake.

News organizations have too much power over the way people form their opinions about the world and I don't think they are good enough to handle that kind of responsibility.

Backing up data as a precaution

Going to be leaving the home for a bit to meet up with some family. Decided to backup some critical data to the cloud, just incase I won't be able to return. In disaster, the internet is incredibly handy.

More info from a friend in Sendai

More people are coming online on Facebook reporting that they are ok. Seems like shelters are taking care of people there. One friend was able to cook several days worth of food. My friend reports that there is no power or electricity. Seems like power is up and down depending on location.

People tweeting real time on the news

Been watching the news online and there is an integrated tweet feed. Most tweets are pretty useless and I wish there was a way to block them.

Note to self: look at sources of reliable and unreliable tweets.

From the Sendai City webpage

For those that are interested. Sendai city home page is up:

http://www.city.sendai.jp/

-Bus service is intermittent in some places, operational in others
-Hospitals accepting patients in severe conditions
-People are recommended to stay home
-Natural gas service is intermittent
-People without water can have access through sources at schools
-Garbage collection not in service

Hitting the supermarket in the morning was smart

The super markets and convienance stores were busy today. People have been stocking up on food since the quake. I now have about 1 weeks worth of food cooked and prepared. Other friends have mentioned that some stores are empty of food that can be immediately consumed.

Japanese reporters on radiation levels and evacuation distances

Looks like the reporters are seeding panic by wondering if the evacuations distances are sufficient. They are worried about the government covering up information and if the evacuation distances are sufficient. Exceptionally pissed off at the talking heads that they aren't doing any research.

I wish there was some kind of market to force them into a bet... where I can bet against them.

Sendai Status via Twitter

For those that know Japanese:

Via Tetu on Twitter: http://twitter.com/mahhya94/status/46425985838620672

青葉区五橋の姉と連絡つきました。13：22現在 避難はしていない様子。街中は建物もそんなに壊れてないと。 30分前13時ごろ電気復旧。水も復旧

Translation:

Go in touch with sister in Aobaku-Itsutsubashi. As of 13:22 does not seem to be evacuated. Buildings do not seem to be that damaged. At about 13:00, power restored, water running

Via Tetu on twitter: http://twitter.com/tetumemo/status/46476055724298240

【追加情報仙台市の友人から】仙台市役所前のみ電力供給あり、取引先の会社へ避難中。　長町南から長町駅、商店街付近は建物の倒壊は無いものの道路がうねり、交通が困難

Translation:

(Further information from friend in Sendai)Power only available in front of city hall, taken refuge in company building. At south Naga-machi, objects on streets not from fallen buildings on streets. Traffic is hard.

I've heard further reports that water isn't running in some areas...

Fukushima Nuclear plant explosion:

Calculations on the radiation levels:
Current reported dosage levels @ 1000*normal.
Normal radiation dosage @ 2.4 mSv/year
need 1~2 Sv dosage to start to feel nausea or vomiting -> time to that occurs is about 5 ~10 months assuming that you are *at* the power plant.

Dosage levels will probably drop in an inverse squared power law away from the power plant. Meaning we've got plenty of time to react.

Sources:

Radiation rate @ 1000 x normal: http://bit.ly/eGht2S
Radiation poisoning levels: http://bit.ly/bRheP6

Quake notes

Random news articles:

• Fukushima Evacuation
• Japanese Strict Building codes
• Quake warning system

News Streams:

• TBS TV
• NHK TV
• Al Jazerra

Facebook, faster in disasters

Spent most of the evening and night yesterday on Facebook reading from friends reporting in that their families are ok in Sendai. SMS and cell phone contact is really slow and I thought it was ironic that it was faster for me to Skype home and contact people through facebook. I'll make a mental note of that for the future. So much information just came so fast that I hadn't the chance to organize it into a post... the damage in Sendai is extensive and we are still having aftershocks.

I think I am going to take it easy today... wonder if the grocery stores still have food.

Earthquake, I am ok

Incredibly sad the earthquake hit Sendai. I've been to some of the places they've shown on TV with damage. I am ok at least. Lots of information going through Facebook right now. Checking with friends in Sendai to see if they are ok.

Thinking about the Monkey Portfolio

In the old days of high school we used to have multiple choice scantron tests and we used to call the monkey score the score you would get if you just randomly started choosing answers. We used to have 5 possible choices on these tests so the monkey score would be 20%.

I was having a conversation with a friend recently about financial planning and the guy is a financial planner actually. During the discussion my friend proclaimed to me that he could structure a portfolio for clients with different risk characteristics with averaged annual returns ranging between 6%~12% and that he would recommend a 12% portfolio for young people for fast growth. His reasoning behind that was that you could take any 10 year window of the stock market and find that the market compounds at an average of 10%. Since he worked at a financial institution, they had better tools to get better returns which warranted that they could get that 12%. I decided to take his statements to task to really see if this was the case... unfortunately it wasn't.

To be generous, I decided to take a nearly 30 year span of the stock market starting in June 1981 until Feb 2011 (chosen at random) to calculate compounding rate. As of June 6 1981 the Dow Jones index was at 976.88 compared to Feb 1 2011 value of 12130.45, which is a 12.4x increase. Calulating for the compounding interest rate, all I would have to do it take the root of this between the time span to find that the compounding rate to be approximately 8.86% over a 30 year period. The result is striking to me that a 10% compounding rate is optimistic at best and 12% is a bit out there.

The Dow Jones Index since June 1981 to Feb 2011

So next, I decided to do take this a step further and assumed that I invested into the market at a constant rate of $1000/month for whatever the price the Dow Jones Index was going for until the beginning of Feb 2011, what would the annual compounding rate be after ~ 30 years? The result is illustrated in the graph below:

 

Compounding rate calculated while making constant contributions

Sure there is a lot of movement in the compounding rate in the initial few months but as time slogs along the compounding rate begins to stabilize at 6% but drops down to 4.7% after the recent economic crash. From the results we are nowhere close to achieving the 10% compounding rate that was initially proposed. Just as a note, the graph bottom axis is in months but has the same time span as the above Dow Jones plot, I was just too lazy to change the axis.

The gains however are still significant even at a lower compounding rate though, assuming a $1000 contribution into the fun over 356 months, the total contribution turns out to be $357k (assuming +$1000 at month 0) with a portfolio value of  $1.38 million after nearly 30 years of constant investing. Sure the market might have had compound growth in the upper 8% range, but the dollar cost averaged purchases of stocks over the past 30 years tells a different story. The guy was obviously making a pitch at me and setting reference points is a common sales tactic, but the reality of the matter is that a 10% continual compounding rate is optimistic. When it comes to financial advice and products, keep your wits about you.

 

Some notes on web programming

It seems to be taking forever for my web domain to get registered. After registering for a webhost on Sunday, 2 days have passed and my application to get a web domain is still pending. Not particularly happy about that but there isn't much else I can do except wait, though 2 days seems like an eternity to me.

While doing the waiting, I am looking into the following things:

• How to setup an Apache server and get CGI includes for Python working
• How to create interactive applications for webpages
• How to manage data using a SQL type database
• How to create web applications on infrastructure on the Google App Engine or Amazon's EC2
• How to program websites with AJAX (since I don't like web pages reloading on me after doing a query)
• How to use Python to generate html templates or generate CSS templates through Python
• How to create menus, buttons and images through programs since I am too lazy to use things like Photoshop to do tasks like these manually

I have a feeling that we are going to see a trend away from desktop data management happening as online servers will be dealing with data management and home computers will become more like clients in the future.

I need to certify myself as fluent in Japanese

Learning a second language is a pain in the ass, especially when you have access to internet in English. It's a terrible habit of mine, that I exist in a bubble of English and use my Japanese only when necessary. For being here for 5 years, I should be able to do better.

I've also been looking at new job opportunities, people that speak both English and Japanese fluently have a leg up, there are lots of interesting opportunities out here to work in a multinational firm or setup new businesses, especially when foreign companies need people that understand the culture and want to setup base here. I have had my nose buried too deep in work and haven't been working on my Japanese as seriously as I should. My bad.

I want to raise my salary by 25~50% by the end of this year by improving my Japanese skills and picking up some marketable skills for use in different environments. One thing I have learned about working in a corporate environment is that you'll get nowhere if you're a bad communicator.

Foray into web publishing

I've finally broken down and bought an account at a webhost today. The site I chose was iPage, which allowed me to register with them, get a free domain name and hosting for a year for $54. Not bad considering that I now want to learn the basics of hosting web content on the net. I've done this kind of stuff before, but on my personal machine in the past. If I am to create more intricate web pages and possibly applications, I should learn how to host them on the internet, which means learning how to use a webhost.

I made one mistake with registering with these guys however, the problem being that they do not have SSH access into their servers, meaning that I cannot run command line related stuff to check the version of the software they have, but they seem to have a large repository of interesting packages to play around with. Later on, I may see about using Google's app engine or Amazon's EC2 frameworks for scalable software. It will take me time to learn things but I think there is interesting work to be done in this field. This blog may or may not move, but I am in the process of registering my own domain name and interested in developing my own web presence.

Contemplating getting a macbook

The last time I was in Canada, I was back home to be the best-man for a friend's wedding. My dad, being a Mac convert had a few Macs lying around the house and I found out that their iMovie software was pretty damn good and made a slideshow movie through using the software. I was thoroughly impressed with the bundle of good media software with the Mac. It is as if the Macs were specifically designed for media kind of work. I never thought twice about getting a Mac since I switched over to Ubuntu-Linux, which is a packaged version of Linux. For free, it's pretty damn good and has nearly all of the basic functionality I need.

I've noticed, recently there are some rough edges that need some smoothing out, mainly in the section of professional software. The great thing about linux software is that it is free and they work pretty well-- I can pretty much do nearly just as much, if not more on a linux machine compared to a windows box, for free and even better. I really like how fast Ubuntu boots up, how quickly I can log in and how responsive the machine is even right after logging in (there isn't very heavy background software loading after you log in). It's pretty tight software. The only thing that is lacking, perhaps is a really good video editing suite or media management editing suite. The one thing that I liked about Apple software is the level of polish that goes into the software available for the Macs-- they simply work and usually are quite cutting edge.

Compared with the Microsoft ecosystem of software, I've found that looking for windows based software on the internet to be rather spammy and sometimes the software sites on the net can sometimes even seem a little dubious. Perhaps it is a result of a smaller and tighter-knit Apple perhaps? I am not entirely sure, but we are starting to see something similar happening to the iPhone/iTouch app store where sometimes dubious software sometimes does pop up (though putting software up there is done through an approval process which has wrought ire from some people).

Anyways, there is a bit of a premium when it comes to buying Mac hardware, but since the base of their software is Linux based, it shouldn't be too hard for me to pick up. The question is if I want to start off with a laptop or just an iMac mini (which I think it kind of pricy at $799!).

Keep a spare keyboard

The keyboard managed to die out on me while doing some administrative stuff on the computer. I've been working on a wireless keyboard and mouse since the summer and have been really enjoying it. Sure the battery dies once every 3 months but it wasn't much of a big deal, until the keyboard died on me that is.

After wondering if the keyboard was in a bad position, the receiver was in a strange location and wondering if the battery was dead, I have pronounced the keyboard dead. Generally, indicator LEDs aren't standard with wireless keyboards because they shorten battery life, making debugging rather tricky. I eventually had to dig out an cabled keyboard to connect to the desktop... only to find that the keys were rather sticky. Then it struck me... I spilled some really sticky liquor on the keyboard since the last time I used it and quickly took it to the shower where I doused it in hot water.

Suffice to say, I won't be able to use my desktop computer today and am currently using the internet through my netbook. I've put an order for a new wireless keyboard online and the total cost for a new one is about $25 bucks, including free shipping. Not bad, it's something that I can live with.

Sometimes, you have to entice people to commit

Working alone is tough, there is only so much memory, attention and knowledge that a single person has. Not to mention that the cutting edge of technology is a moving target-- what you don't release this year might be outdated by the next. If you want to make a killer product of service, you have to make something good and do it quickly. My best analogy to this would be like learning to ski well-- learn to lean forward, even to the point that you think you might do a barrel roll, do that.... and lean forward some more.

I've been in a recruitment phase for finding a community of smart people to work on projects with and eventually turn those into a viable service or product and there are great opportunities out there for data mining/business intelligence type applications. There is so much on the internet that we have just begun to scratch the surface, but people know that the market is there and there are many startups that are moving into this realm.

There is only so much that I can do on my own and that has been one of the biggest realizations for me. Yes, it is true that I could probably learn what I needed to know to do something, but it takes time to be a master at sometime. If you truly want to do something big, you're going to need a team of people to do it, a tight group of smart people.

I've been making some programmer friends recently and I've made several pitches to try and get a project off the ground. Yes, I can convince them that some of my ideas are interesting, I also enjoy bouncing ideas to find new avenues of use. I have some code written and some proof of concept, but I need to learn how to make people to commit. I tend to generally be soft on people, like when I tell them "spare whatever time you have" or "get things done whenever you can," to be honest going easy on people like that is a mistake and you'll get no real commitment from them; unless of course, that the people you are talking to implicitly feel strongly that you are going to succeed with or without them (but still, it is a weak play).

If you want people to commit to working on a project with you, you do have to entice them. Show them that the project has momentum, that you are strong willed and believe that it is a good idea and that if they want to join up that they have a short but reasonable time to do so, because people usually don't do things unless there is a deadline to for decision; it is simply human nature (oddly enough, I think it is similar to dating and that you shouldn't give a person that you really like the opportunity to go out with you whenever they feel like it because you are implicitly saying that you don't value yourself that highly... but I digress).

In short, you have to act with urgency and find ways of making what you do a priority for other people if you want them to join up or else things will happen "whenever," which translates to "never."

Now a fan of audio books

I had an American friend when I was back at university in Sendai that loved his audio books. While working in the clean room and processing his devices, he'd be in his own world listening to whatever audio book in his iPod. I never really understood audio books back then because I read much faster compared to then I could listen and I would get irritated by listening at the pace of the speaker.

Fast forward 3 years, I started listening to a few audio books while exercising, riding my bike and while on the train. The lack of having a (sometimes) large, heavy book with me was definitely a good thing, because I had less heavy things to carry around with me and I'd be learning during times when I had nothing else to do, which means time productively spent.

An audio book can take about 6 hours to listen to (about 1 hour/chapter) but it isn't bad considering that for a normal commute to Tokyo takes about 1 hour one way meaning that I can finish 1/3 of a book just on a trip out to Tokyo and that doesn't include the time for me while walking around. The other nice thing about listening to audio books is that I find the information content from books to be much more nourishing as the topics covered in books are covered with greater depth compared to what you generally find on the internet. The only disadvantage for audio books is that books discussing complicated math or needs graphs to explain ideas becomes very hard to comprehend, so topics that do not require a lot of "rigor" are usually good to listen to. Hopefully I'll find some good Japanese audio books to further develop my Japanese skills.

Updating the resume

It's been a long while since the last time I updated the resume. The last time I had updated it was nearly 3 years ago, after graduating from my masters program. I am (un)offically in the hunt for a career adventure. I believe that I can earn more and grow faster than what the managers think that the average person can over here.

I mentioned earlier that I wasn't so hot about waiting 4~6 years for a promotion. I think that one of the biggest faults of an organization is limiting the speed at which a person can climb the ranks is a fatal mistake, since no one will have an incentive to take on more responsibility than they have right now. But hey, that's bureaucracy and politics for you.

Interestingly for the past 3~4 months, I have been looking at other opportunities in different organizations, the pay is dramatically better and pretty good for even a young person like me. I've started sending out applications... no real bites for positions just yet.

It's been a long while since I did any real work hunting, preferably, this time in a more "Western" organization as I find my mental capacities are much sharper when I work and communicate in English. Good Japanese skills here are very important and can even improve the value of a worker too and I intend to work on that as well... I just don't have an incentive to do anything at the place where I am currently employed. But I digress...

What I realized after getting into the working world again (since the last time I did any kind of job hunting when I was graduating from my undergrad studies) is that the nature of the resume has changed. I was good at marketing myself as a student with my resume, which was padded with a lot of good academic achievements, what I realize now is that I can't play those up as much any more and have had to chance the format of my resume to reflect the kind of work and my new work interests.

Not in all cases, can one send a cover letter out for each application as for the recruitment sites that I've been working through now only use the resume to evaluate a candidate, to which I realize my resume is too engineering heavy for the positions that I've been looking at.

The other thing about looking at job postings, especially at recruitment sites is that they have concrete job descriptions and approximate salary ranges for the kinds of people they are looking to hire, which is really different compared to the standard Japanese system where you just apply, then they accept you and then figure out where in the company they want to send you. I am far more comfortable with the normal western hiring practices.

I've made the mistake of sending out too poorly tailored resumes to too many job openings that there aren't any new good ones at the moment so I am going to have to slow down and think of strategies of improving my skills set to get a good position elsewhere. It is an interesting experience to be back in the work search world again.

Giving myself no choice but to succeed was a very strong motivator

[no text]

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.