2.5 Months into Crossfit

One thing that I've been doing for the last 2 years is trying to work out. Now working out is an interestingly challenging thing. It's already tough enough to get the motivation to do on your own and the second punch to the puzzle is trying to figure out if you are doing the right things to get the results that you want.

After floundering for the last 2 years among a variety of different exercises, I've decided to start cross fit. Though the program is quite pricey, I am quite happy with what I have learned so far from the program and from the people that I have managed to meet through it. I've started learning a variety of barbell exercises which I have learned to do with proper form which I would have never been able to learn without the assistance of a decent trainer. The other aspect of this training is that it is intense and will push you to hit your limits frequently, which is quite different from what most people would do on their own.

All in all it has been a good experience. I also have a membership to a 24 hour gym that I use in my off hours when I am not going to cross fit to exercise on my own at my own pace. The results so far have been pretty good and hopefully things will pick up even more the more I go at it.

A correlation of effort vs likes on facebook

Not that I care much about likes on facebook, but I've noticed a strong correlation to personal accomplishments vs simply posting interesting content onto facebook. Good narratives also tends to garner more attention to posts and it would be interesting to see it's impact onto marketing.

Been ultra busy with work among other things lately and hadn't had time to do any posting or even think about posting. And the feeling of having too many things to do simply just kills the brain cycles.

I thought that working for a French company that I'd have more time off, but apparently I am working just as hard as I did at my last place of employment. Looking forward to the winter holidays indeed!

Arbitrage Opportunity

One stock I've been following had just announced a secondary public offering of stock recently. They'd been trading at $65 in the morning and the offering would be at $62 on Friday. Within an hour the price had dropped to $63 by the time I noticed.

I am a fan of the company and invested in this company at a good price, unfortunately the price won't be going up for the next few days so I've dumped my position and taken a short to take advantage of this arbitrage opportunity. Come Friday, the price of this stock should be at $62 at which my limit buy will kick in to turn my position around.

Within 15 minutes of taking the short position, the price has already dropped below the $63 I shorted it at. I've already setup a stop limit at $63 and a buy at $62 to make a tidy profit, it'll be interesting to see how things go.

Building an Application is a Hard Problem

I've been interested in application design recently. I used to always crunch data using code and then spit it out in some excel friendly format, but I've come to the appreciation of the amount of data organization that is possible by using an application.

But the question is how does one organize data and what is the best way to display it? This is also not a trivial problem either as it takes a considerable amount of time to make the data interface interactive, meaning when you click on something somewhere, you will need to fill fields with whatever you selected. Then throwing left vs right click, multiple selections and menu based selections and things can get very busy very fast.

I've started to understand the use of using a database and using queries to get information out, then on top of that once can use data models to make data manipulation more native to the language that one programs in.

How to make a good application design is a tricky question, since I cannot fully imagine how I would want to manipulate / interact with the data just yet because the user's relationship with the data is defined by the interface.

I've been interested in building stock pricing models recently and have been building a database of stock instruments and data. Sure it would be ok to spend a considerable amount of time to create an interface to do something, but I am quite not sure if what I would be doing is the right thing just yet and programming with that kind of fear is simply not productive.

For now, I'll be more than happy to stick with excel to figure out how I really want to interact with my data first.

How not to get Pigeon Holed

An interesting problem facing many people with specialized knowledge is pigeonholing. The problem is pervasive especially in engineering. Why is that? and how does one avoid it?

I get contacted from recruiters from once in a while and that prompts me to look into what different jobs are out there (and for fun, what kind of skills are in demand for high paying jobs). From the engineering perspective, the number of different jobs as an engineer is nearly countless, all of them looking for specialized skills requiring 'X+' number of years of experience.

These job descriptions are misleading, which is the problem-- they lead the reader to believe that if you worked in a field for X number of years, they'll eventually have these kinds of skills. If you're lucky and so happened to work in a manner that led you to have exactly those skills after X years, then you'd have to be really lucky, but for the rest of us we likely won't have that kind of experience.


Keeping yourself relevant in the job market as an employee or as the kind of person that would start a business is a tricky game, and the most important thing is to not believe everything that you read about a job posting. You don't have to be a perfect match, or even an 80% match. You just have to be ahead of other applicants and the better choice than what they could have transferred into that position internally.

I have seen what an internal transfer in a large company looks like; it could be a person from a very different field that they'll be training from 30% to get them started up. Not all engineering jobs are so specialized that they are impossible to train yourself to do. I've seen this in both engineering and financial companies, all that is the most important for you to be is to look like the kind of person that can execute in the position.

Getting through the through the resume filtering process and acing the interview is less about talking about what you have done in the past, but more about the challenges you expect to face in the new position. The more you're able to imagine the challenges that you'd expect to face and the solutions that you can come up with, you've pretty much hacked the pigeonholing problem-- instead of using your skills to do the same thing over again, you're finding new ways of applying them.

Many interesting people with fascinating/successful careers never took the b-line that would eventually lead them to what they are doing as they've changed tack multiple times through out their lives (do a search you will find plenty enough). The challenge is to always be looking forward, look to create value somewhere new and ignore the 'X' number of years in the job description.

Tesla: Incredibly over valued

I've been following Tesla for the last few months. Reading about the company and Elon Musk has been great reading. I believe that the technology is there and the company is a technology darling.

The only problem is that the shares are grossly over valued. I've put the numbers through several different models and the valuation of the company just doesn't add up, unless everyone else that is investing in the company is expecting some kind of hyper growth which I have yet to ever see.

In Tesla's Q1 report, they report 4,900 in Model S sales and expect 21,000 cars to be sold by the end of 2013. Quarter by quarter, this is a 5% growth rate and an annual growth rate of 25%. Being generous and allowing for 50% growth and calculating against multiples of EBITDA it will take 5~6 years for the operating profits to reach anything near what the stock prices are right now. Based on PE multiple calculations, maybe after 4~5 years for the multiple to EPS will be in sync with it's current stock price of ~$125

TSLA is a great company but it's is grossly over priced and it's valuation is overly optimistic. I have no idea how long prices will continue to rise and holding a short position against the company seems risky because it is tough to tell how long the irrationality of price will continue to go.

When will the price come back down to something reasonable? I have no clue, but the next big event for Tesla is next month during the 2nd week of August when they report on their Q2 results. 

Predicting Future Stock Performance using Historical Data

For the lack of a better word, signal bias; the one thing that everyone is looking for which appears to be a recurring truth, or is it? I decided to put it to the test today with a stock picking game that I decided to make. I've gone into Yahoo finance and picked up historical stock prices for over 5000 companies and decided to work on the premise that if the price of a company is growing now, what is the probability of a company growing in the next time frame in the future?

My motivation for this experiment was to determine how would it be possible to select stocks that given growth in a certain time frame would continue to grow in the future. It is a naive question to ask, but every stock that has gone through a meteoric rise in share price over many years would appear to show growth over an initial period of time and then continue to grow. Those examples that would illustrate this would be companies like Apple, Google and Amazon. What company would be the next to follow in their pattern and how would one be able to recognize it?

Initial testing has been dismal and yet humbling as I have run the most simple test of filtering for stocks that have increased by 25%, looked at the chart and told the computer either a thumbs up or down signal and then calculated my average performance using the next 6 months of historical data. The results say that I'm in the market average based on that strategy. It just goes to say that I am not (yet?) a very good technical trader or the concept of technical trading is not very useful.

I figure that if one is going to be putting money into investments into the long term, that they should really dive into how things work and optimize to see if this is really the right place to be putting my capital or be doing other things. I may release a game based on this principle later on, but for now, this experiment was very educational.

Time to start reading what the quant people are doing and what does the academic field look like in this area.

Pay goes nowhere after 40

I have a personal salary goal for myself, in that I want to break 6 figures in my early 30's. And I've been doing some research to determine what my numbers are against other people in my age group and profession. While doing that research I've also found a rather depressing article, laying out that salary caps out in your 40's. More so now than ever, I find new ways of pushing my boundaries and climbing up faster and getting in a position to where that salary cap does not apply to me in my 40's.

CME Margins go up thus gold prices down

I've been looking at my portfolio account recently. Been doing a little bit of rebalancing because I've just had no time at all to do some real investing. Oddly enough, the date I did my rebalancing was on April 16th, right after the big drop in gold prices and parked some cash in gold because of the terrible tail spin that the yen was going through. I suggest that you don't do what I did but I noticed a mail that came in a while back on April 15th; margin requirements for commodities would be going up by about 18.5% effective April 16th.

And now there is this huge chatter about gold being cheap and all the ordinary folks are jumping into buying gold. Gold prices are up about 7% since the bottom. I am going to set a target to get a little more out of this position, get out and put cash back into equities.

Digitizing documents

One thing I've grown to have a liking for are document scanners. When I was a university student, the only kinds of documents that I ever needed to worry about keeping were my study notes.

Growing up had required me to keep track of letters of employment, rent contracts, insurance policies and more. One thing that I've noticed is that every 2.5 years, I tend to move to somewhere new to live and with that, my heaviest objects to move around are books and paper documents.

I still have my university notebooks and binders of research papers. I keep them around as a link to my past and inside them are all sorts of ideas that I've scrawled upon my notes while in class. Even though I nearly never look at my notes, I take comfort that they are with me, though I do feel that they do take up a lot of space. I've been lugging around the same book case that I've bought since living in Sendai for the last 7~8 years and the book case has become full for quite some time. I've not started stacking more documents on the very top of the book case and sometimes on flat on top of my books and binders.

Rather than solving a systemic problem by buying a second book case, I've decided to go a different route and bought a scanner with an auto-document feeder. I'll finally be able to scan volumes of documents and have multiple digital backups of these documents.

One thing that has surprised me though is that even with being able to scan so many documents is that I have yet to find a decent reader that is able to allow me to go through digital documents with equivalent or greater ease than my paper documents (going through different pages is still sometimes slow).

I think there ought to be something out there for this.

Weak links in the chain of command

It is quite famous for where I work, that our IT systems are pretty bad. We have an insane number of applications supporting a large variety of different business processes. I've never seen so many in my life. In Paris, they have a single team supporting a single application. In Tokyo, we have no such luxury and we need to support the entire business chain while Paris sleeps.

For a guy that worked in R&D in Sony, one of the miraculous things that I never had to deal with were business applications. Perhaps the only things I ever used were in house sites for procurement, holiday booking systems and career reviews. That was about it.

For where I work now, there is a system for referential data, booking, position keeping, making deals, risk management and more. If anyone of them breaks, our traders could be in for a bad time.

But from software chains there are also chains of command. The global head of IT came out from our Paris HQ and had a Tokyo onsite visit on Monday. I am part of the non-infrastructure IT team in Tokyo and we are not particularly big team-- a team of 5 people supporting over 100 people in their daily operations.

For once in a long time, this is actually the first time I met or spoke with a global boss that I was actually impressed with. Most other bosses are true management types (ie the pointy haired boss), but with this person, you could tell that there was things that were different about. He could look in your way and already understand the kinds of struggles that you'd have to deal with in great detail and we'd also listen to him and find out that even with great power, that he isn't super human and the struggles for change he is working for (which are worthy goals), are real challenges. I don't envy him but he certainly does have the right plan in mind.

I would have thought that an organization with a good leader would have great positive impacts, but as I understand now the more I learn about middle management that these people are the weakest links in this company-- because they are the biggest barriers between good people at the top and the people below that really get things done. That and a lot of things that get done at the lower levels can and do get filtered on the way up, because it is in the best interest in middle management to say that things are ok when reporting to the people higher up. It's all pretty standard stuff when you come to think about it.

How is that to change? Well, that is a good question. But the one thing that I really learned from this experience is that getting ahead in organizations like these is only part about getting your job done and knowing how to pick up the phone and convincing other people to help you.

Learning the power of soft skills is incredibly important and probably one of the strongest takeaways from the job that I work in now.

Learn to Build a Team

Everyone at one point in life stops being independent and becomes interdependent. Groups and organizations are born, resources and ideas are pooled, and then boom, off they go in some direction.


After moving from my first post University job to another it just comes dastardly obvious that if you want to really get something accomplished, then you're going to have to be a part of a team; because there is only so much that an individual can do. The worse part is the smarter that you are, the longer that it takes to come to this realization-- ie. because it is the belief that it is a matter of time and effort to make whatever you want to do a reality. The unfortunate realization is that reality is a moving target.

I should know, because I used to do R&D for the next up and coming greatest hit, but the problem is that after every quarter, management keeps on raising the bar on us. So the lesson here (without getting into too much detail) is to learn to get on an stay on the leading edge instead of the trailing edge. And yes, there will be times in life that you will wish that you could stop time simply just to catch up and that is never going to happen (so get on with it).

So instead, I have since moved on to a Financial company where I now am doing IT support. I know it sounds not particularly sexy but in all honesty, I have incredible oversight into what goes on between business and technology in a company. But enough of that and more on teams.

The speed of light is governed by the medium it passes through.

Excuse the light metaphor but it's what I'll work with. Given a beam of light, in the purest vacuum, it will move at it's theoretical fastest-- the speed of light. From there on in, the denser the medium a light beam must pass through (which is also related to it's in index of refraction) the slower the beam will pass through (though not 100% true, there are other material factors do come into play).

I like to also consider the same thing when it comes to getting a task or project done: that between any project start and end, the refractive index of the organization is the density of the paperwork, e-mails and meetings that you need to go through to get anything done. Thus the higher the density of this kind of stuff that you need to deal with, the longer it takes to get something done.

Why I like this metaphor is incidental; because in optical theory you can also talk about things like "group velocity" or the speed that a packet of waves travel (and again, incidentally waves of different frequency travels at different speeds through a medium). Ah yes, the joys of added complexity, the hall mark of being brought into the "real world."

The one thing that I have learned from having the opportunity of working in 2 large corporations is that never, never over estimate the speed of an organization. There was a time that people thought that Microsoft was the elephant in the room. So long as you weren't pushing against the elephant and you were moving like a cheetah in a different direction, you would be perfectly fine (which would be the lessons to from the likes of Google and Apple in recent history).

Because as of this moment, I am 100% convinced that with enough operational freedom, that I could dance circles around in terms of development speed, testing and deployment of new software systems on my own instead of needing 3 teams to get the thing done (possibly more). Yet some how, this organization exists with multiple teams moving at 1/3 of the pace of what I could probably do on my own.

Suppose that I found several other people like me and put us together. The results would be insane and there exists the problem-- where do I find these people and how do we make the opportunity to work together? There are large companies out there that are willing to pay millions for a small capable team and their assets.

I've already finished the "working on my own" part of life. The next stage in the road to success is to be able to build teams. The question is how and how soon can I start doing that.

Saving money for the wrong reasons?

I tend to be frugal. But sometimes I wonder if I am missing out on something intangible by not spending this cash...

Moving and other bits

Since my days, I've lived far away from the city, not until nearly 2 years ago I just lived on the outskirts. I've finally moved downtown Tokyo. Rent is an arm a leg, but I'm in a yuppie part of Tokyo. Plenty of cute girls (and apparently ones that do yoga).

The name of the game will be to start building my connections in downtown Tokyo and see where things go from there. I know I used to save tons of cash by living away from the city, but I decided that quality of life is important and I'd rather not be the richest man in the graveyard. I'll instead focus on learning how to make more money instead.

Of interesting note, the Bank of Japan announced that they are going to gun for 2% inflation. The yen took a beating for the last month (I was happy to sell of a bunch of yen 3 weeks ago) and am learning a bit of currency and fixed income trading. 

I've also got back about 1.5 hours of daily time and I am loving it.

A Quick Reflection of 2012

2012 draws to a close and as of this writing, we've got another few hours to go. 

A Short Tribute to Mr. Aoyama

The last 2 days have reminded me of the preciousness of life. I've had the opportunity to meet a wonderfully kind man in late September for the first time while at my girlfriend's family home. He had recently been released from the hospital from cancer treatments and was in good spirits and shared a bowl of home made chicken stew and wine. 

We would not meet again until yesterday and he had just been bed ridden while at his home. Despite not being able to get out of bed and under a lot of pain medication, he thanked us for coming by to visit and with the strength he had, he smiled and gave us the the "ok" sign and said that he was all right. It was late afternoon by the time we arrived and evening by the time we left. I wouldn't have expected it, but my girlfriend and I would be his last visitors. By the morning he was gone, but the day before he was still able to eat and walk. The last evening would be the second and final time that I would meet him.

Just after being bed ridden we learned through his family that was in attendance that he was wistful that he wished he was able to finish off a few more letters and messages before the worsening of his condition; no one thought that he would deteriorate that quickly. The idea of New Years Resolutions felt shallow because life is short, unpredictable and we've only one to live.

A Transition from Sony

2012 marks the ending of my career as an Engineer at Sony. It was a privilege working with the team where we would show off a break through flat panel display, the world's first 55 inch LED HDTV. Together as a team, we've gone through and solve a number of incredibly challenging engineering problems that would simply be impossible for any other firm to solve on their own. 

I have elected to transition from an R&D position into an IT position in a finance company to get closer to dealing with users, because in the years that I have been working in at Sony before, the biggest missing piece in my working career is getting closer to customers and figuring out what they really want. To me, this is the place where a business is born and money is to be made. I've seen a lot of research projects from academia and industry that would probably not see the light of day as most of them started off as an intellectual curiosity and remained just like that. Attaining success is about finding high impact ideas and executing on them.

Moving to the Big City

As of Jan 19th, I'll be moving into the heart of Tokyo for 2 reasons. The first is to cut down on my commute. Since 2 months ago, I've started working the early morning shift and that means that I need to be at the office by 7:30 am daily to run system checks and then getting on with the day. I've also been hard at work running a variety of other projects and taking on new responsibilities at my new job that I've been pulling 12~14 hour days. Doing the math, 2 hours transport, 12 hours of work, 6 hours of sleep (if I am lucky) leaves me with 4 hours of personal time during the week. If I throw in dinner, getting ready for bed and chores into the mix, I simply means that I don't have a lot of time to do anything else. Time is important and I'll be upping my cash burn rate to recoup time and reinvest that into myself (and so far, reinvesting into myself has had the biggest 

The price I'll pay for this move will be steep, but I hope to recoup the costs through better networking with entrepreneurs in Tokyo and more time to myself to exercise and study. One thing that I am quite certain of, living too far away from Tokyo was a bad thing because it severely limited my ability to network and spend time meeting people that I would like to build working relations with. 

Move Quickly Upwards and Onwards

I'm upping my ante on what I can get out of my career. The good thing about working in finance is good workers get promoted quickly. From what I've heard from my peers is that I've been doing a pretty good job so far, the next thing is that my successes are visible to management and that I'm also personally grow while cranking out hits and growing my own networks while I am at it. 

Will the yen eventually go down?

The yen has to go down and it looks like that it is finally starting to do so with a big drop in the last month. Will it continue or bounce back up? Not so sure and when one is not sure, it's not a good idea to make bets.

Dealing with difficult people

Dealing with difficult people is a pain in the ass. I am sure that everyone has to deal something like this in some point in life.

How does on deal with an incompetent person? Let them sink and take the project with them? Cover for them? Replace them (ideally?)

Or what about people that are just plain assholes? Push back? Tolerate and minimize contact? Be indifferent?

One thing I've noticed so far is that the people that get paid the big bucks are the aggressive but likeable people. How does one become like that? I have much observing to do and the finance industry is the right place to do that.

The impact of social networks on blogging

The last post on this blog was nearly 2 months ago, a lot has occurred since the summer and I've once in a while wondered why have I not been writing as much as I had used to.

I started writing a blog nearly 10 years ago, I still remember the motivation that had me begin writing so many years ago; an essayist by the name of Paul Graham had inspired me by his written articulation to explore the world well written expression of thought. Those writings would inspire me to become a better debater and writer where I would receive top grade in an APSC 261 course entitled "Technology and Society." I would also learn that good writing is paramount for writing good project proposals and application letters, a skill that would also help me get accepted into the Japanese Government Mombusho Scholarship program and find my way to Japan and other students that I helped in writing their application forms for international scholarships and I would end up help sending 2 students to study in foreign countries.

This was all before the era of Facebook and the rise of social networking and the nature of online communication has changed.

I have found myself spending more time on Facebook as a medium communication, it's where most of my friends are and how I keep track of friends around the world. I have about 800 connections, of which, I can say about a few hundred are people that I would like to stay in close contact with, but even with those numbers, it is hard to stay in contact with that many friends. I only have so much memory capacity and it is much easier to have an automatic system that shows me a series of posts from a variety of friends on what they're up to.

But the issue is the shift in online medium, from blog posts to short "status updates," captioned photos and albums or tweets-- the online medium of online communication has changed from paragraph form to short one liners. I am not sure if this is for better or worse, but I have realized that my posting frequency here has dramatically declined compared to the times of before (that and the new work place blocks access to blogger).

But I do wonder, if the medium of current social working sites is somehow dumbing down the level of discourse or whether if it had made posting more accessible to people with to short one line thoughts (or a reduction in original thought through posting of links to articles instead of personal essays).

But there is more, no doubt.

With the advent of Facebook and the lack of portability of data does have me somewhat concerned on my ability to backup content and the ability to consolidate my online presence into a single site instead of simply using a provided platform. People have blogs, their Facebook page, a twitter account and more and we are limited to posting content formatted to the type of medium that we are posting to. I sometimes wonder if that is the right approach, but the way we communicate is obviously impacted by the popularity of the medium (even with all of its flaws). And on an interesting note, this also applies to financial trading too as people like to trade on the largest markets and the design of those platforms can impact the way people do transactions.

Will there be a way to consolidate one's online presence to Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Linked in and etc into a single page? I am not sure, but even if it is only some of those services together, it would seem like something useful to me and it would stop the exodus of people from blogging.

We don't truly understand food

I left Vancouver some 7 years ago (I can't believe that it's been that long) and flew across the ocean to pursue a masters in Japan. One thing led to another and it seems that I am still here. I would tell my friends in Japan that the only other place in the world where people had a longer life span was the place were I was from. Everyone was healthy. In the summers, people would bike, job and roller blade and we have a wonderful selection of food to try out. I would say that west coast food is up there, so long as you know the right places. When I was back home, I knew those places.

No, it didn't have to be super posh, but if it was a small funky little outfit that knew what to knew. I made a point of knowing about it. Ever since I was young, good food was important to me. If it was good, I wanted to eat it and know how to make it.

I don't think of myself as getting older, but if you were to compare me 5 years ago and now, there is a difference. 5 years ago, even people the same age as I wouldn't be able to keep up with me. I still have my spurts of energy, but a good time to me now is sitting down with a few good friends having a good conversation or going out for a long jog or reading a good book on something is something that I enjoy. I still do know a lot of people and I meet a lot too, but there are too few that I would consider wanting to spend quality time with,  but that is for another story. I'm here to talk about getting older and with that, a slowing metabolism.

The nice thing about Facebook is that it's useful to keep up with people and the one thing that I've noticed about friends back in Canada is that many old friends have put on significant weight. Compared to what I see in Japan, where people are generally  thin, many of my friends have simply gotten bigger. I still would like to boast Vancouver as the most healthy city in the world, some how, right now I can't bring myself to do that. This isn't a new topic. It's been well documented. Jamie Oliver does a good job of talking about it.

About 2 years ago, I started actively tracking my weight, wanting to bring down body fat and increase the amount of muscle mass on my body. I can tell you, it is a hard feat to accomplish. Though many of my friends say that I do look like that I've lost weight, my body has changed enough that my old clothing doesn't fit me anymore and I've become much more sensitive about clothing fit when buying new clothes.

Knowing how to eat healthy isn't hard

One thing that I've learned from this project is of what my dietary requirements are and how a variety of foods fit in to accomplishing that goal. I look at food differently now compared to before. Before it was a matter of buying whatever I felt like, now it has become more about "strategic eating" instead of "dieting" and I am glad for it.

What I have learned from this process is that the average person knows too little about food and nutrition; our health is suffering too much from this lack of education. Do you know what your daily caloric requirements are? If you are trying to grow muscle, do you know how much protein you should be taking? If you're trying to gain muscle and lose fast, do you know what kinds of foods should you be eating and avoiding?

I've made charts and gone through plenty of nutritional data on different foods to figure out what to eat and avoid. I know how many calories and fat is in a bag of potato chips, that cola is bad and I've gotten to the point that I've given up drinking much juice for water. I've reduced the frequency of times I eat deep fried and fatty foods and I am conscious about how food is flavored. I avoid excessive butter and oil. I also avoid creamy sauces. But I still have them from time to time.

I know herbs, vinegar and lemon are great and healthy ways of seasoning foods. I also know how to pick flavorful cheeses over processed ones knowing that I'll use less in quantity and make something just as delicious. I also am aware of how chain restaurants and lunch sets have been increasing the amount of cheap carbohydrates to fill people up and cutting down vegetables and meats because those ingredients are more expensive. I avoid some lunch sets because there is too much rice.

But the problem is that too few people understand this. The older we get, the more our metabolism slows down and with the lack of understanding the average person has about dietary requirements, the fatter and unhealither they'll get.

It is unfortunate, I've already seen a person get sent to the hospital because of poor nutrition. The man is 60 but his idea of a good meal is deep fried chicken. There is more to food than strong flavoring, because if that is all that you do know, you will miss out on the more subtle nuanced flavors.

How good is your sense of taste?

 I can tell the difference between a good bag of rice and a normal one. The same goes for vegetables. If you've lived in Vancouver, you'll know what good corn from Abbortsford tastes like, much in the same way I know what good vegetables from the countryside in Japan tastes like.

The average person doesn't understand this, unfortunately. There's too much sugar in candies, too much salt and other flavoring in the usual cooking, but if you know your ingredients, you'll know what is good food. I've been to the seafood markets and some of the best food in Japan and even as a foreigner, I know of the existence of the good stuff and can tell the difference between the regular.

There is a lot of food out there cooked to crap. There's also a lot of hidden flavor hidden stuck to the pan that many people unwittingly wash away. The point is to know how to bring out the best flavors with minimal additives and to few of us understand this. Most of us are addicted to the processed artificial strong flavors in foods produced by companies looking to turn a profit. They really don't care about your health and you as a consumer need to be educated enough to be able to walk away from this faustian bargain.But too few people know about what good food is all about and that to me is unfortunate.


An ounce of prevention...

Is plenty worth more than me pounding some sense in to your head. Too many people die prematurely because of dietary issues. Much of America is obese and more friends in Vancouver are getting fatter as they age. It's sad really. I've already seen one relative in Japan get hospitalized in Japan because of poor nutrition. Less and less people in Japan know how to cook and I believe that health will deteriorate in the next few generations. Men generally don't know how to cook and there is a growing population of girls that don't know how either, especially in the cities.

Perhaps I sound like a nag, reiterating that too few people understand food, but I really mean it. People don't understand. The price of good foods are getting expensive and cheap unhealthy foods are becoming more prevalent. But there is an upside to all this, the more you learn about food the more conscious about the good stuff you'll be. You'll eat more delicious foods, become healthier and look better as a result of it. I guarantee it.

But if you're looking for more nobler reasons; it's a great tool to impress the opposite sex.

Nuff said. I have some vodka-kiwi-honey punch to drink.

Task lists, notes and tickets

Since jumping into the world of back-end IT support for office and financial systems, I've found it interesting that in the IT world that issues/incidents/requests are tracked using a ticketing system. When something needs to get done, a ticket is generated and passed around the appropriate groups/departments and then a person is then assigned to complete the task.

In theory, it looks like a queued system of tasks and a pool of processors (people) working away to keep the queue empty-- a programming esque way of dealing with tasks. Unfortunately, theory and reality diverge in this case.

The particular IT department I work in has the server guys and application/data guys in different teams (and this is still a gross simplification). There are divisions with business analysts and programmers as well... long story short, with many different departments (even located in different regions) things "naturally" take a long time to complete.

When something simple takes 4~6 days to complete:

Since starting the new job, one of the biggest pain in the rear is keeping track of open issues. The longer it takes for an open issue to get done, the more open issues that one needs to keep track of. The process of getting folder access permission between 2 groups and then automatically sending data to folders would generally be as simple task as all you would need to do is setup a share and then allow people with certain class access to the folder.

The problem in this case, a formal e-mail needs to be sent out to get permission to  grant access, then the request needs to be forwarded to the network team where they'll setup the access and then another group needs to be contacted to setup the daily file transfer process. Since each step is dependent on each other, it can take easily 3~4 days if everything goes well. If there are problems along the way or if the request is a little exotic, things can end up taking longer.

Suppose next that requests come in at 4 per day and the turn around time for a single request is 4 days. At any one point, you'll have 16 open requests to deal with on a given day since it takes time to have each case resolved.

When I was working as a researcher, each person might only have 3~4 projects on the go at the most over a 2~3 month period. The number of open projects/tasks that one needs to keep in mind is very different.

I've since started keeping daily logs of what I've been doing to keep up with everything I've been doing and even that has it's limitations.

The perfect todo list is a holy grail:

 Traditional task lists are very primitive devices, but it has been the backbone of semi-structured human being since forever. Either you keep a list of things that needs to be done or you don't and do whatever you feel like. As much as I value unstructured time, keeping a list of things that needs to be done, or even things that I want to get done and executing on them is equally important.

If you've heard that taking notes or jotting down ideas down in a notebook is good for you, the most important thing about keeping track of ideas is that you're hashing out a list of things that you've thought about and want to do.

I value the paraphrased words of Richard Hamming when he said that "you'll travel much further if your steps are planned rather than taking a random walk." The difference in distance travelled is quadratic (and this assumes that you get to the furthest point of your random walk and *stay* there).

Humans are bad at context switching:

The human mind works in a similar way to computers when it comes to context switching (a fancy word for changing tasks). In generally, when a context switch occurs, what was loaded in the CPU get swapped out and the state of the new task gets loaded in and the processed. This is great when the state and knowledge of the task in progress can be accurately stored. For the case of computers, this works fairly decently, for humans, unfortunately, this isn't the case.

The easiest way of mitigating performance hits for context switching in humans is quite simple: reduce the amount of data that needs to be swapped out so that the "loading" and "unloading" of information into the mind is reduced. People serving specialized functions is the obvious reason why many people are given "jobs."

I believe that there are 2 ways of improve one's ability to context switch. The first is to work on a set of inter-related tasks (ie a project) such that you're not need to remember and forget information when you do a new task. The second is to create a "remembering" infrastructure that allows you to store information about a task the last time that you left it.

Assistants:

Powerful people had assistants, whether they were secretaries or otherwise. The point of having assistants is to create an infrastructure where information was automatically catalogued, packaged and available on demand. We are starting to see some great work going in that direction with platforms such as Evernote. As a note taking platform, it is fairly useful, but there needs to be a better link between the gathering of information and correlating that into actionable tasks and the management of those tasks.

I've been reading on and off on productivity and task management, it is an interesting field.