Success, is measured in happiness

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

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

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

Real value, real happiness. The things worth doing.

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

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

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

Time flies

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

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

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

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

Long weekend in Hakodate (mainly food pics)

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

Hakodate, located fairly south of Hokkaido

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

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

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

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

One shot of the fish market

The huge scallops they had for sale

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

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

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

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

Changing the recipe and learning to do things better

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A fascinating but obvious idea

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

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

Keep up with the right new things

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

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

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

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

Pick a few things and be good at them

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

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

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

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

Goal: Generate $500 in passive income/month

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

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

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

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

Being too comfortable is a bad thing

I have come to the realization that I've been living too much of a cushy life and it is having a bad impact on my "drive." I can't think of the antonym of the word "apathetic" at the moment so I'll use drive for the time being.

Things are just too cushy for me and it is too easy for me to just simply exist. It also having a negative impact on my ambition. Sometimes I used to wonder what is it that continually drives these ultra rich CEOs like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and etc one after making billions of cash. Money simply isn't the motivating factor anymore. It is often confused that ambition is some how linked to making money, but often that it isn't the case-- many ambitions can be accomplished with the help of money. I think it is a concept that gets confused quite often.

Knowing how to follow your heart

My mind works in scientific manner, in that I generally use logic to work things out. Sometimes, some gut feelings are thrown in to the mix when it comes to being creative and coming up to new ideas. But when things are boiled down, we are simply applying these processes and sometimes we forget to ask ourselves what ends are we trying to achieve.

What I have realized after getting into the workforce is that it is easy to forget for what reasons are we working for, or even if we had reasons for getting into what we are doing in the first place. You've graduated and you're on your own now, it's now time to for you to make it on your own now and the problem is that it is too easy to get focused on surviving. Wake up, work, pay the bills, take 2 days off on the weekend-- lather, rinse and repeat. There is more to life to this and after spending a pleasant day chatting with friends and working out at home, I suddenly became pissed off.

My biggest beef is that I should be getting more out of my life and that I should be less tolerant of myself being complacent with just going along with the flow.

What are your deepest wants?

I believe that people are defined by their deepest wants. I get bored meeting new people and when I ask them "so what do you enjoy doing" and they respond with "well, I dunno." I get bored real fast. Seriously then, do you have a reason to exist?

One of my favorite movies is Fight Club. It's a fucking brilliant movie. My favorite scene is where Tyler Durden sticks up the convenience store, simply to scare the shit out of the clerk because he stopped going to vet school because it was too hard.

My favorite quote from the movie was right after the scene with Tyler's monologue:

"Tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of Raymond K. Hessel's life. His breakfast will taste better than any meal you and I have ever tasted. "

Many people who've had a near death experience usually walk away with a new lease on life-- maybe because they've realized that there are many things that they still want to do, but haven't yet. For those of us that haven't had an experience like that, I think that we forget that we all are dying, day by day-- time isn't something that shouldn't be taken for granted.

One of the best experiences of my life is leaving Canada. I find it ironic that I would find leaving one of the livable cities in the world to live somewhere else to be a good thing. But there are things that I have learned on my journeys that I would have never learned by staying at home. The thing about learning how to travel is that you know that your time is limited, thus you make the best of that limited time by doing the most you can. This is how I should be living my life everyday.

When I came to Japan, I ended up being more traveled compared to many of the Japanese that lived here, simply because it felt like I was traveling instead of living here. The ironic thing is that I split an apartment with a Japanese guy that lived in Canada for about a year and he was far more traveled than I was. For the 24 years when I lived in Canada, the furthest I've ever traveled was to Toronto. I've never really seen Banff or Niagra Falls. When I lived in Canada, it just felt like that I could go there whenever I wanted. When you start living like that, you'll end up not doing things.

Your heart will want to take you to strange places

The most ingrained thing of our youths is how our we would be taught to not have dreams off the beaten path. From a survivability point of view and of a parent it makes sense because it is what they are most focused on at the moment. Paying down the mortgage and raising kids is tough work, not that I have kids or a house... I've just done the calculations so I know in advance. But the thing is that values change depending on your age and the conditions you live in, the problem is that people don't do a good job of appreciating this idea--as if values are something unwavering and set in stone. They do change and you've probably not noticed it.

There is more to life than just surviving and it is quite often the part of life that gets forgotten, because sometimes the things that we want are strange... not strange as in weird, but simple different from everyone else. Maybe one person's dream is to be a musician and another's is to travel the world. I cannot answer why we want the things that we do or why you want something different from what I want, but despite wanting different things I can recognize the common things that we share is that happiness is linked to getting what we want.

It's better to try and fail instead of not trying at all

This should be obvious and Shakespeare had his head screwed on straight when it came to love, but this applies to everything else in life as well. I'm not going to make any guarantees that you are going to succeed in everything you do-- you probably are going to fail at something and you will, I guarantee it. The more important thing is if you can keep on going despite failing. If there is a barometer to knowing how/when to take a risk it should simply be that-- for those that have played Texas Hold'em poker, you know what exactly I am talking about.

How much are you willing to lose, how much can you lose?

I think that one thing that isn't really appreciated is knowing how much we can actually afford to lose and still keep on going-- there are so many thing in our lives that simply aren't necessary, but we are still too afraid of losing our so called "creature comforts." After living in Japan for a while, I've already ditched the TV and love living life without it. I can cut back on eating out and bring down my food costs significantly by cooking cheap but healthy meals. I can cut down my expenses further by cutting out expenses for going out for drinks. If I need really cheap housing, sharing an apartment is an option. When push comes to shove, I know I can bring my living expenses way down, bring living expenses down to $800~$1000/month. At this level of income, even a $7/hour job for 8 hours/day can sustain this life at bare minimum, with a university degree, you can easily do better.

So my advice to young adults right now:

Failing isn't the end of the world, success is knowing how to survive failure. While you're unmarried and without kids, these are going to be the freest years of your life. If you want to try something big, this is going to be your only shot. Use it wisely, never be complacent.

Uproar against Oprah

So Opera is running a contest to find the next TV talk show host, though usually I wouldn't care for these things one of the entrants has proposed an excellent idea and seems to be a really honest down to earth guy. His name is Zach Anner, a 20-something year old guy with cerebral palsy and has an enticing video about traveling, his video entry is here.

The contest supposedly began around May 14th, 2010 with a site allowing people to put in submissions for videos and there will be live casting calls involved. But to the heart of the whole issue, is that Zach Anner went viral by June 14th. Interestingly with help by 4chan and social websites like reddit and has hit 3 million votes. Interestingly out comes a unknown entrant going by Dr. Phyllis and her entry is here. Earlier today Dr. Phyllis was leading Zach Anner by a ~200,000 votes, which is odd considering someone with very little web presence. Ironically the people at 4chan, enraged by the whole ordeal has spread news of the vote rigging, started voting campaigns only to find that Dr. Phyllis to continue to lead. In short, what we are seeing right now is blatant vote rigging by Oprah's website, and I have a feeling that Dr. Phyllis was Oprah's favorite from the beginning to have her own show.

Democracy against totalitarianism at it's best. Apparently 4chan is pissed and has started "Operation SyPhyllis", involving macros to start auto-voting but it seems their votes are going elsewhere. They are, exceptionally pissed. I am really curious to see where this drama goes. One of the reasons why, it is hypothesized that Zach might not be the "right candidate" for a show hosted by Oprah is that he wouldn't cater to the demographics of her brand (housewives) as opposed to people like Dr. Phyllis, whom is a black lady in her middle ages. Seriously, 5 million votes for Dr. Phyllis over 1 month!? That would be at least 170,000 votes/day and Zach is at 4.7 million now. For those 2 alone Oprah's site would need at least 300k visitors/day, just for those 2 contestants alone and assuming a 100% voting rate. There is no way that Oprah's website would naturally generate that much traffic and I would honestly call bullshit on the whole thing.

Personally, I stand with Zach Anner because I liked his video think that he would be awesome on a show. For a guy with cerebral palsy to come so far is admirable and I am not a huge fan of Oprah right now. So I hope things play out like this:

1. Zach Anner loses to an Oprah "favorite"
2. The internet, news and tabloids go into an uproar
3. Oprah is ridiculed
4. Some other network seeing the value of Zach picks him up
5. Zach's show rocks
6. Oprah selected favorite starts her show and bombs

Justice is served.

Updated the blogger template

I've updated the blogger template from the old version that I was using. I was somewhat shy of updating since there were a bunch of custom changes I made to the old template to make it more viewer friendly on wider screens. The defaults for the older templates had the blog rather narrow, so I changed the parameters to make things wider. I also have a hit counter installed just for kicks though I don't really care about the volume I get to this site, I wasn't sure that things would still work after the upgrade.

While writing the last post, I thought it would be nice to embed some mathematical equations and I did manage to find an applet that would let me do that my interpreting LaTeX code to do the formatting. Previously, I used to do the writing in the MS Equation Editor in Word. The problem now is that I don't use Word at home so that option was out. I did find something nice here that I installed and it worked decently. I've never used LaTeX before, but it seemed rather easy to figure out and I had it going after a little bit of testing.

I am not much of a front end webpage designer so I do kind of shy away from that kind of stuff, but if I am to dive into the database programming stuff and consider interfacing that to webpages, it is something to look into in the future.

A plot of Yield vs Bond Prices

Been sick for the last week so I've decided to take the weekend off from social activities and spend it at home. There is only so much time one can spend in bed so I've gotten out of bed and decided to get back into some programming and study some finance. I decided to do some basic study in bonds since it seemed simple enough, at least compared to learning options and Black-Scholes equation (I have a basic understanding of the formula, it's just an implementation and testing problem and writing software to make calculations easier).

The mathematics of modeling bond prices is fairly simple using a discounted cash flow (DCF) model based on some internal rate of return (IRR). Basically, a bond is a security with (or without) a fixed interest payment at some interval (annually, semi-annually or quarterly) and finally the redemption of the bond at the end of the term. Calculating and comparing the value of one bond against others requires the comparison of yield to decide if you want to select one bond over another.

In mathematical notation the DCF for the present value of cash flow is summarized as:

$\color{white}PV =\sum_{t}P_t(1+IRR)^-^t$

Where:

• $\color{white}P_t$ is the cash flow at some point in time $\color{white}t$
  
• $\color{white}IRR$ is the internal rate of return
• $\color{white}PV$ is the present value of all future cash flows

The pricing of the bond represents its present value and what is required to be done is the calculation of the IRR, resulting in the determination of the yield of the bond. Unfortunately, calculation of the yield is not a simple process-- the PV equation is often a problem of multiple polynomial order. To find the solution to this problem a solver is required, which basically is a glorified "guess and checker" to find the right solution to the yield that satisfies the present value of the bond.

This is of course is possible to do in Excel with the use of its solver module. The problem, however is tedious when you want to calculate over a range of possible bond prices to understand the sensitives of yield vs bond prices as the solver needs to be rerun for every bond price and every IRR needs to be saved and then plotted for.

With a bit of some spare time on my hands, I decided to write a simple solver and plot over a range of different bond prices to understand the relationship of yield vs bond price over 3 different bond interest (coupon?) rates for a 5 year bond. The result is illustrated in the graph below (click for a larger view):

What this graph illustrates is the inverse relationship between yield and price of a bond. The higher the cost of a bond, the lower the yield, which of course should be obvious when you think about it since you get less return when you pay more to buy a bond.

The graph also explains the cursory impact of Federal Bank interest rates on the bond market-- what it means is that increasing interest rates will generally force bond prices lower because future cash flows are valued less with higher interest rates. The reverse is also true when interest rates are decreased, bringing bond prices upwards.

Though quantitative valuation of bond pricing can be done mathematically to get nice numbers, investors must also be confident with the company to repay its bonds. Confidence or risk is also a factor affects the yield of a bond. Companies that are considered low risk, generally garner lower yields as there is stronger demand for their bonds thus pushing the price of the bond upwards. Companies that are considered riskier generally have less demand and their bond prices tend to be lower. The market in this sense sets the interest rate at which a company borrow cash as the yields for newly written bonds must be at least equal or greater than the bonds being currently traded-- if yields are lower than currently traded bonds, then there is no incentive to buy the new bonds.

There are inherent dangers of relying strictly on mathematical models for bond pricing as the qualitative aspects of bond pricing, mainly the confidence factor is not well represented in the numerical analysis and this is a source of significant risk. The recent economic crisis had also caused a crash in the bond market as confidence for many companies to continually repay their debt dropped, leading to depressed bond prices and an opportunity to acquire bonds with very high yields, so long as you were able to pick the correct companies.

Though it would be smart to sell of bond assets before an economic crash, bonds appear to be fairly safe so long as the underlying company does not go bankrupt or default. Supposing that you bought a 5 year bond just before for a decent yield at 7% or something before an economic crash and assume that the company is well off enough to survive for at least the next 5 years, you are guaranteed to get your money back with interest when the bond matures. For the matter of equities, you have no guarantees if stock prices will recover within that time span. In this regard, bonds are fairly stable when compared to buying stock equity.

The next step will be to find sources of data on where I can look up the specific details of bonds on the market, in addition to their payment schedule to refine and develop more accurate pricing calculations. I assume that many quants have done this already since the bond pricing is time sensitive as a result of the DCF model. The birth of "snatching nickels from under a steam roller" was a result of quants trying to pick up small profits through arbitration in the bond markets... however the amount of capital that had to be moved around to pick up these small "nickels" was immense, meaning that sudden large movements in the bond market would be catastrophic if an institution was caught. Some of the details of this can be found in Black Swan, a book by Taleb.

The Database is King

Databases are a pain to manage. Follow this guy, I he's a good guy and has plenty of good ideas. It's a breath of fresh air from most of the chaff I've been reading on the net recently.

I have been working on a database problem for quite some time now, I just never realized it when it came to building a simple stock market analysis program. I pretty much wrote a simple database system to store my data and run queries against it. It came apparent after I started separating my query code from the data to make analyzing data cleaner.

I started reading more and more about new startups coming online on the net, the kind that the guy I like to follow, Paul Graham seems to like to write about. He doesn't post as much as he used to on his website anymore, he seems to have gone underground into different networks, instead of appearing to the net as a whole, but to a more targeted audience of hackers instead. He posts more regularly here instead.

Many of the growing start ups he has been funding recently has been oriented on providing services through a amazon's server network. The more I think about it, it seems to be a hot bed for many new information management systems built specifically for many different niches and I am starting to see a big variation of similar themes.

You don't need a huge server farm anymore and you pay for whatever you need when you need it. The setup is amazingly simple. The database is pretty damn amazing stuff and it had pretty good applications in social online products.

I need to pick up some database skills, for 2 reasons:

1. The company I work for could use a hand in databasing their experimental data and tracking

2. I could spin off my skills to dive into the world of online data management and figure out to monetize my skills.

Jason L Bapteste, an excellent writer with good brains on his head mentions that Excel is the world's more used "Database." I agree with him after seeing how we (as researchers) manage our data, that is plenty of room for improvement here, especially when it comes to querying data. Recent versions of excel has brought in more and more databasing functionality on sort of a "lite" kind of scale, but there is most definitely a demand for it.

Friends as filters

The same cycle repeats itself. First you have a small community of smart people, then it gets noticed and then the quality of the community drops like a rock after too many people want to join it. The same thing happens for real life communities, real-estate and online communities.

I frequent many socially aggregated websites, mainly places like reddit and slashdot. I've been hanging around there since the beginning of reddit and I have to admit that the quality of postings over there during the first few years was great. Now after the 4th or 5th year of the site being live and it catering to a very wide audience, there is a whole lot of uninteresting crap that gets posted out there. If you know anything about the LOL cat meme, then you know what I mean.

Digg, another social link aggregation site suffers the same problem and started which ironically, caused more of the "intelligent" users to move over to reddit, (there are sources out there on the net and I don't feel like doing the linking at the moment since I just want to get this post done).

The web 2.0 phenomenon was a great hit at first, as it got the social web started. I would venture a bet that it was first the technologically savvy and intelligent people that caught on first that that created the valuable communities which spured this movement; and now everyone and their dog can get into these communities which has changed the dynamics considerably.

What I believe next to happen is the anti-thesis of web 2.0, which is the creation of the filtered internet, and ideally it is you that decides what to filter, most notably, the golden needle from the hay.

This is an idea, which I believe will outlive the open, aggregated websites like Digg, Reddit and Slashdot, which is also open to corruption by people gaming these sites (ie with vote bots and etc).

Instead, I propose/expect to see vetted communities of people that can aggregate for good information. I believe that this phenomenon is also being (had been) repeated on Facebook, where the community used to be only university students and now, even your boss might be able to see what you've been up to... the vetting begins with the privacy controls to other people.

I think we will eventually start to move away from these sites and develop our own aggregation systems... starting with our friends.

Midnight already

This is post 500. Over the last 5 years of doing this blog, I average about 1 post every 3 days.

I will admit that the writing quality and the depth of analysis that I've been doing recently has gone down significantly recently. It is sometimes said that the productive prime of one's life is when you're at 27. I am now 2 years past that prime and perhaps we might be seeing this effect occurring. Maybe it's also the lack of time that I have to do any significant writing/thinking either. I used to be able to get away with making blog posts from my desk at university, now making blog posts from work is kind of sketchy... but anyways, I digress.

Today, I finished work about 8:30 ish and came home where I did my usual exercise routine, took a shower, organized some photos and cleaned off my computer desk. By the time I had everything done, it's already midnight. It's amazing how quickly time flies, the passage of time is really different now that I've gotten older- it is a peculiar thing.

It just means that I am going to have to work harder to make every second count. After getting my room all cleaned up, I'll be looking into cutting out activities where I end up wasting my time doing nothing productive.

S3, The scalable platform

I got interested about how other large websites host data on the internet a few days ago and started poking around... eventually I found myself at Amazon's S3 website. It is Amazon's cloud computing service which basically allows anyone to sign up and use Amazon's scalable storage and computing clusters.

The idea of cloud computing hit a chord with me. Basically without much capital investment, it is possible to have a fairly formidable online web presence at somewhat of a decent price. Storage at $0.15/GB month for the first 50 TB, $0.15 /GB out and $0.10/GB. Suppose that you store 1 GB and transfer it in and out during a single month. That movement of data would have cost you $0.40 and subsequently $0.15 more for every time the data is shipped out.

Let's ignore costs for storing data and incoming data (because I will assume that you are a data distributor), the question is can you make more than $0.15/GB that you dish out? If you can, then you've got a money making machine.

The next question is, what kind of data would someone want to pay for?

A simple playlist generator?

I talked before about liking the iTunes genius playlist generator. It's a step in the right direction, but it is still kind of unwieldy when it comes to making music lists. Sometimes, the exact same group of music is always played together all the time and that doesn't add much musical variety to the playlists generated. I would like playlists automatically generated for whatever the occasion that I am feeling like. Something fast? Acoustic? Folk? Whatever?

The interesting thing is that music selection can be sort of dealt with using a markov chain kind of analysis. The computations might be really intensive since the transition matrix does tend to get really big, but it is a really simple "dumb" way of figuring out what kind of music that should be played together without directly analyzing the content of the music itself.

The point about the Genius playlist generator is that you send all your music data to apple, where it sorts through the ID tags of the music you have and then generates some kind of connection tree back for your iPod and then playlists are automatically generated based on that data. There are several problems with this since not all music might be listed in their database, thus certain songs will be forever left out of your automatically generated music mix. The other problem is since that I am on a linux based machine, I can't use iTunes and I don't want to use iTunes through a virtual machine because it is slow.

The open source music playlist generators right now are OK, but I still find them lacking a little still. I've started using a plug in for Banshee that does the playlist generation. I just use an initial song for the things to start. Sometimes it is tricky to pick something and I don't really like that. If I could pick from a mood or a genre, that would be nice.

There is room for improvement here and it might be an interesting problem to work on.

Must reduce clutter

I have come to the conclusion that I have way to much junk in my room and life in general, thus leading to way too much management overhead. Having too much overhead gets in the way of making decisions and getting things done, so I have decided to start by slowly getting rid of things that I don't use so that I can focus on the essentials better.

The first thing I am going to do is start getting rid of junk in my room, clear off the tables and organize for only the essentials. After that, I'll be going through the computer to organize my data and start trashing things that I don't need.

Finally, I need to go through my cell phone contact list and start organizing it and get rid of contacts that I never contact and keep a list of people that I regularly want to contact.

I'll be trying to do this over the span of a week so I'll see how this goes.

2 months into the diet

Been about 2 months into the exercise thing I've been doing and I am finally starting to see some results. For the first month, I've been focused on losing excess fat by changing up the diet, basically cutting out all junk foods and focused my food consumption to lean meats, lots of vegetables and complex carbohydrates. I've basically switched over from white rice to brown rice. Right now, I kind of like brown rice because of the texture and it has some more flavor over plain white rice.

Starting from the beginning of May, I bought an exercise machine which I use every other day for upper body strength training. It's been nearly 1 month of training using that machine and I am now starting to see some muscle development in my shoulders and chest. Growth in the forearms are a little slow texture of my arms have started to become firmer compared to before. I've also lost weight around the waist, which means my pants have started to feel considerably looser and I now require a belt as my pants will start to slide slowly down through the entire day during any walking activity.

The graph below kind of explains my current situation:



I lost about 2 kg (about 4.5 pounds) over the first month, where most of the weight loss occurred during the first 2 weeks of the diet. I was rather surprised at how quickly my body responded to the change in what I've been eating. After the first month, I started weigh training and there has been some fluctuations in body mass and somewhat of a continued downward trend in body mass until day 50, where after there has been an up tick in weight past day 60 and another sharp decline in mass as I close in on day 70. What might be going on is an increase in muscle mass that might be driving the body mass upwards.

On an interesting note, my physical change is having an interesting affect on how I navigate through crowded corridors in downtown Tokyo, especially in the train station. I used to spend time avoiding people around people while walking and now after exercising and getting a little bigger, people have started getting out of my way. I find this rather fascinating.

Been busy

Would like to do more writing but been kind of busy recently. I do come home earlier now a these days but don't spend as much time thinking as I would like. Too many internet distractions to be honest.

Been keeping up with the exercise routine, putting on some muscles now. Pretty happy with the progress.

Also saw a great movie today called Into the wild. released in 2007, but I had just found it recently. Been a long time since I saw a movie that made me stop and pause at the end.

It's past midnight now... had an early day and need sleep. Will get back into writing eventually.