Unthinkable Life

Two goals in 2010

2010-06-03T05:51:00.001-07:00

Goal #1: Sharpen my execution ability - getting things done. Just getting things done.
Goal #2: Get myself close to people who are much much accomplished - people who have proven to be successful in life. Or at least I should get close to people who are smarter than I am.

That's it, for 2010

Why is it so difficult to be crazy?

2010-05-28T07:08:00.001-07:00

Just a little bit more crazy than most of the people in my life. But why is it so difficult to live up to it?
Because I am conservative in thinking? Probably.
Or because I tend to bound myself with perceived constraint such as money? Maybe.
Or because naturally I don't like risk? Yeah.
Or is it because of the face issue that I fear people's gossip? Umm...

The solution?

I have to keep brain washing myself then. Everyday, I have to tell myself, just be a little bit crazy when doing things. Don't be afraid of people's opinions. Be yourself.

It's not easy.

2010-03-30T06:08:00.001-07:00

I just finished booking the air tickets to Xian, China. I am very excited because Xian is a city full of history. For more than a thousand years, Xian had been the capital city of China. People like to say that to see 100 years history of China, you have to go to Shanghai. To see 1000 years of history of China, you have to go to Beijing. To see 2000 years of history of China, you have to go to Xian.

Xian has the world famous Terracotta warriors, the mausoleum of the first emperor of China, the mausoleums of other emperors, and numerous historical sites that hosted events that shaped the Chinese history.

Currently China's reputation is pretty low in world affairs due to the Google, Iran, Copenhagen and Rio Tinto events. But I still have hope that China would one day be a friend of everyone in the world.

At least the trip in Xian would console my sad mood now.

What is leadership?

2010-03-10T08:52:00.000-08:00

Leadership is about making something happen that wasn't going to happen anyway in the default future." -Dave Logan

I like this. This pretty much explains why I have so much more respect on entrepreneurs who created something out of nothing. I still respect those professional managers or management consultants. But entrepreneurs will always have higher status in my mind.

Google fights the dragon

2010-01-15T16:54:00.000-08:00

Three days ago Google dropped a bomb on technology industry that they are planning to quit the China market because they are fed up with helping the Chinese government censoring the search results. They claimed that some organized and politically motivated cyber attacks were originated from China and some IPs are stolen.
I don’t want to talk about the censorship of information or the hackings into human rights activists’ mailboxes. Those are sophisticated subjects by themselves and also very troubling to me.

Well, again, I am not surprised by what had happened. Somehow, as a Chinese, I can always understand why Chinese government would do this, although Google never explicitly pointed out the real hand behind this incident. I was brought up with the mindset that Chinese people are supposed to rule this world. So stealing the IPs from world-class companies like Adobe or Google means the government is also trying to establish the software industry in China, hoping that one day, Chinese companies like Microsoft or Google would also emerge and dominate this industry.

The Communist government is not stupid. Their actions seem evil, but I understand their intentions. Morally I disagree what they have done, but I also realize that doing this would help speeding up the catch up of IT industry of the West. Really, there is no way to stop the Chinese from outpacing the West – they will just do whatever they can just to catch up the West – be it stealing or robbing. As long as there are no human lives at the stake, they will just do everything to achieve the goal they have dreamed about for past 200 years – global dominance.

Google did this somehow shows their true values. “Do No Evils” is their motto and they are sticking to it. I respect their decision and they leadership team. Giving up such huge and potentially highly profitable market takes a lot of courage and determination. Now I have more respect to Google.

Microsoft is playing sneaky here. Again, they are being extremely flexible and pragmatic. They follow Chinese laws and they don’t want o mess around with the Chinese government. This shows Microsoft leaders are smart in another sense. No wonder they are so successful since they started. I cannot say I respect them less, but I feel Google wins my heart this time.

What kind of person I want to be? Google, the brave knight daring to take on the Chinese dragon at the moment they feel they have to; or Microsoft, the foxy business man who knows to lay low key for the long term success?

Man, why is this world so complicated?

college football

2009-12-06T08:33:00.000-08:00

There aren't many things that can affect my mood swings in this world. Even if there are such things, I probably wouldn't admit it. But college football is probably something that I recognized and admit to myself that, sometimes, I am still a very immature person.
For some reasons, the performance of Michigan football team would affect my mood swings significantly no matter what happens to my real life. Just by thinking that Michigan might lose to OSU for a decade of hell, my heart torched and twisted and I didn't want to think about it more than one second.
Last night I was watching the game between Florida and Alabama, NO 1 vs NO 2. More than a thousand times that the notion of "what if it's the Michigan Football team is playing here" appeared in my head. Wishful thinking it is, those thinkings just exercise more pains to my heart and the feelings are real.
Please, can someone come and save the Michigan Football team?

perseverance and execution

2009-12-01T06:38:00.000-08:00

Those two things are so difficult to have. I guess a lot of smart people have the same problems that I have. Many people can think, imagine and talk. Just from the ways they think, imagine and talk, you would think they are intelligent and will be successful. But often, if you look them naked, you can see the problems sometimes. However, the inner qualities of perseverance and execution skills are hard to spot. No wonder the number of smart people outnumbered the number of successful people. I should always look for the inner qualities like these two kinds, and stop paying attention on how people dress and talk. I got to develop these two impeccable skills, else mediocrity would strike me again.

silverlight - Microsoft's next weapon of web dominance?

2009-11-30T23:52:00.000-08:00

Why is Microsoft pushing so hard on the Silverlight technology? It seems that they have moved key people from ASP.NET team to Silverlight. The progress of Silverlight development (in terms of new features and performance enhancement) seems astonishing. Is MSFT thinking of using Silverlight to counter-attack Google? What if MSFT wins the RIA battle? If majority of web developers use Silverlight on web applications, will that mean MSFT will gain control again like they did on Windows as a programming platform? Silverlight is still a closed technology. It means that companies using Silverlight to build their product will face the same problems that all Windows software company have faced - don't get too big else MSFT will kill you on their own platform.
This is scary. How to prevent this from happening? Can Google buy Flash/AIR from Adobe and make it an alternative to Silverlight? I doubt Adobe has the capability and resources to fight with MSFT on this field.

Using the Posterous Bookmarklet - Posterous Help

2009-11-27T13:36:00.001-08:00

via posterous.com

Nice feature

Posted via web from Wayne's posterous

Asana - a bunch of smart people

2009-11-26T20:45:00.000-08:00

I stumbled into their website at www.asana.com. It's a startup focus on some kind of data management and collaboration. What impressed me the most so far is their thoughtful blog and job description. Too bad I couldn't join them, for a variety of reasons. But I want to copy their message here, because that's what I want to have TOO!

The challenge of groups of people working together effectively is fundamental to human endeavor, but the state of the art falls far short of real efficiency. Despite advances like email and wikis, the friction and overhead of communication remain acutely painful to organizations large and small. Group leaders spend an enormous portion of their time trying to keep everyone on the same page, and knowledge workers struggle daily with inadequate, disparate tools to wrangle the information they need to do their jobs.

The technical hurdles to building the right system to address these problems are immense, and the design challenges subtle and complex. The Asana team has thought deeply about these problems for many years, in leadership roles at some of the world's best software companies. We are undertaking an ambitious project to tackle them with a vision that reimagines the way people manage information, to speed up knowledge work and communication by an order of magnitude. This is not another enterprise application suite, nor is it an ajaxification of existing desktop software concepts; it is a new kind of software product, built for the Web from the ground up, with a focus on speed, collaboration, and ease of use.

We are passionate about changing the world through great software, and we're looking for exceptional people to join us. We're taking an unusual approach to building the company: assemble a relatively small, tightly knit collective of extraordinarily talented peers, while pursuing impact and revenue goals typically associated with large hierarchical enterprises. By keeping the company small, communication overhead costs are reduced, individual contributors can have greater ownership and input into decisions than is possible in traditionally-structured corporations, and life is generally more pleasant.
General Requirements:
• Passion
• Earnestness
• Honesty
• Deep care about users and the user experience
• Fearlessness working outside your comfort zone
• Love of work as an end in itself, not just as a means toward an end
• Ability to admit when wrong
• Patience with others
• Impatience with technology
• Meta skills
Generally Desirable:
• Obsessed with systems for personal (and team) productivity
• Renaissance person who can wear many hats
• Intellectual breadth, beyond software
• Eloquence
• Entrepreneurial (we hope Asana will serve as a first-class entrepreneur apprenticeship program)
• Many people would describe you as the best coder/designer/businessperson they know
• Sense of humor
We don't have titles at Asana, but these are roughly the kinds of people for which we're looking:
We aim (in the words of Masaru Ibuka) to "establish a place of work where engineers can feel the joy of technological innovation, be aware of their mission to society, and work to their hearts' content." You should be ready to make Asana the primary focus of your life. We will be working together, eating together, and playing together, so you must be in or willing to relocate to the Bay Area. (We will help cover moving costs.)

As knowledge workers, we and our loved ones spend most of our time living in programs (email, calendar, document editors, IDEs, etc.) that help us move and manage data. This is your opportunity to make that environment better, faster, and more humane.
We're working on hard engineering problems in everything from algorithms to programming languages, compilers, databases, web technologies, sync, human-computer interaction, scalability, and systems architecture. We've worked on challenging projects in the past, but this one has consistently pushed our intellectual capabilities to the limits. We think this makes it more fun to come to work in the morning, and makes a programmer feel more like a craftsman than a mechanic.
We're focused on disciplined application of best practices. We want a codebase and an engineering culture that are a joy to work in. Both founders are engineers, and Asana will remain a product/technology-focused company.
Requirements:
• Capable of "great feats of software"
• Deriving joy from abstracting and refactoring
• Eagerness to roll up your sleeves and tackle the elusive, dirty problems
• Sound judgment for balancing between idealism and pragmatism
Desirable:
• Deep knowledge of front-end Web technologies
• Passion for programming languages, compilers, databases
• Experience with functional or declarative programming languages
• Interest in both the nitty gritty and the big picture
• Interest in both coding and leadership
• Have built task managers before out of fun and/or frustration

At the age of 31, what have I done?

2009-11-20T13:32:00.000-08:00

Why, as a person, we are all similarly smart, in close age, and share some similar experience, that we are light years apart in turns of accomplishment and fortunes?
Why, a team of 9 people in 1999, was able to upset the seemingly-almighty Microsoft?
Why, most of the startups today, won't be able to make $30B a year while those startups are led by yet another bunch of smart people?

What is the key difference between mediocrity and extraordinariness?

2009-11-17T05:59:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I would encounter what I like to call "highly intelligent" people. Usually they can display their "smartness" just after a brief conversation with them. I always think that if people are 1. good in math (Geometry and Vector Calculus) 2. able to sympathize or relate to other people's perspective 3. think in abstract; then they are intelligent people capable of doing great things.
They tend to be highly logical and practical as well. They also like to read and interact with other smart people else they will feel bored.
However, even one person has all the traits described above, it still doesn't guarantee that this person will be successful in the future. Because to be successful, you need much more than just being intelligent.
Luck is one additional thing. But I don't want to elaborate on this one. Because there is nothing much we can do about it.
However, I believe, if the three things below can be incorporated into smart people's life, they will be successful.
1. Risk Tolerance
2. Persistence
3. Generosity

What am I missing here?

It's easy to laugh at the poors in China

2009-11-11T04:47:00.000-08:00

A trip to China enabled me to see the poor people that happened to be in the cities where economic growth is shooting to the sky.
They smelled bad. Their face looked grainy and dark. They rode crappy bicycles on busy streets with senseless drivers. Some even carried gigantic bags filled with agricultural stuff that make you feel so heavy that they might just crush the person and the bicycles.
It's just so easy to laugh at them disdainfully. And actually that's my initial reaction when I was in Beijing and Shanghai.
Somehow after couple days of trip, after seeing more of them on the streets, I started to feel and think differently toward them. They probably take shower only once in couple days. They probably ride bicycles to every place they go. And probably there are 10 billions of them right now in this country. Somehow, I think, if they started to take shower everyday like most of us do who lives in the US; or if they start to buy car and drive to any places they go, our Earth will probably crumble under this heavy consumption of resources (clean water) and pollution.
Thanks to them that they still live frugally and responsibly. They sacrifice their own comfort and convenience so that some fortunate ones like me who can enjoy quality life in the other part of this planet.
We owe them. We are the disdained ones. We consume so much while laughing at them for being cheap. Something is wrong here. I feel shameful about myself.

In control of everything

2009-10-06T07:17:00.000-07:00

Michigan Football team lost to Michigan State on last weekend’s game. It’s somewhat disappointing and somewhat expected. I knew we were going to lose some games because of the wild characteristics that this year’s team has shown so far.
From watching this game, I start to realize the importance of controlling the environment and how not to overreact on anything happened in a process. The first three quarters of offense were pathetic. The rhythm was shacked. The flow was disconnected. It seems Michigan is not worthy a Top 25 team in the nation. But the performance of last quarter was terrific. My friend from OSU even praised Tate Forcier as a clutch player who can be a super star once polished.

My real question is, why so different? It seems that the team played the first three quarters and the team played the last quarter was completely different team. This baffled me.

But when I think deeper, I can realize why. Tate Forcier is still a rookie. He shines in clutch times probably because he enjoyed the hyper intensity atmosphere. His desire to succeed and be a hero has no doubt been shown on several occasions in this season. We should give credit to him because majority of people, including me, would probably crumble under that kind of situation. What he is lacking is the control of a game. He still didn’t realize that everything that comes after is the result of what had happened before. The first part of game will never be exciting because there is still time for anything to happen in later quarters. But that boring part of game is part of the whole thing and it will affect the things happened later. Smart people would realize this. They understand this connected nature of things and they know if you pay too much attention at the “current” context, you lose the whole picture. The danger of losing the whole picture is your emotions or logics tend to divert you into failure. Those reacted emotions in current context would deceive you. But if you are in control of everything from start to finish, whether you haven’t started the process, in the process, or near the end of process, you won’t be rattled on anything that happens during the process. To achieve this you need experience. But most importantly you need a strong mental preparation before anything even started.

If Tate Forcier would start to think this way, then he won’t show up poorly as the Michigan team had performed on this first three quarters. He would elevate his emotions from boring state to somewhat exciting state in the first three quarters. And near the end, he realized the emotions are high, so he would downplay the emotions a little bit thus he won’t lose his head. If he did that, then the last second interception in the end zone probably won’t happen. He can put a game in his complete control and no matter what happened, he can always show his coolness.

Well, can I achieve this myself in my career?

Chinese are industrious and order-loving?

2009-10-02T08:34:00.000-07:00

I stumbled into an article stating why the western countries should worry about China at http://bit.ly/pkSjf. A single paragraph caught my attention:

In 1873 the Victorian explorer Sir Francis Galton suggested that one way to modernise the so-called Dark Continent was to fill it with ‘ industrious, order-loving Chinese’, with Africa becoming a ’semi-detached dependency of China’. Such was the outcry that Galton soon dropped the idea. But more than a century later, he seems to have been ahead of his time.

Okay, I think this is a stereotypical thinking of Galton. Since early 1800s, Chinese people were suffering (and most of them still are) so they had to be industrious. Order-loving is due to thousand years of Confucius teaching and the fact that most Chinese have never tasted the ideology of people are the masters of a nation. The next few generations of Chinese will be spoiled with video games, sports events and fashionable gadgets. I doubt the Chinese will be industrious at that time.

But I can imagine if the contemporary Chinese, who are still industrious and order-loving, can master the skills of innovation, the period of Chinese Century can come much quicker. How to unleash the innovative spirits of hundreds of millions of Chinese? Education?

60 years of liberation

2009-10-01T20:27:00.000-07:00

I watched the People’s Republic of China’s 60^th birthday parade last night using P2P Internet TV. Well, I don’t want to think about the wonder of technologies now. It’s the history and what had happened after history was made that fascinated me.

What a parade! Although it’s a little bit of old fashioned, which reminded me the same style of celebration KMT would hold when I was a child, I still feel entertained by those flashy clothes and melodious music. But I just couldn’t stop thinking about the civil war between KMT and CCP some 60 years ago. CCP’s celebration of 60^th birthday also means the 60^th year of demise of KMT’s rule on China. KMT had to give up the mainland and retreated to the small island of Taiwan. I was brain washed by KTM to hate the CCP when I grew up. CCP were the most hideous and ruthless people in the world and the people in mainland were suffering under their rule. Well, it was probably true during the disastrous period of “Great Leap Forward” and the infamous “Cultural Revolution” in which estimated 30 million people perished. But after Deng Xiao Ping took over the power, CCP has transformed into a complete different political entity that probably no one has seen and expected before. Kudos to the CCP for what they have done to China’s economy in past 30 years.

But sometimes I just couldn’t help to think that – what if Deng was able to rule China starting at 1949 and not 1979. I am sure China will be much richer and stronger and my generation will be able to enjoy much more. Sadly Mao was not a good ruler. All the Far East Asian countries like Japan, Korea and Taiwan had recovered pretty well after World War II and I am fortunate to be born at the generation that could enjoy the result of economic growth achieved by my parent’s generation. KMT was the loser of the civil war, but they did terrific job of ruling Taiwan and make people in Taiwan able to enjoy life 30 years earlier than people on the mainland. Even though KMT brain washed me before, but I still feel very appreciative that they didn’t give up Taiwan to CCP when Mao was still in charge.

Well, history is history. I can just look forward and looking for a day when the Chinese people can contribute greatly to the world like they used to do before. I hope I can live long enough to see that. My only concern now is when the time arrives for CCP to step down and hand over the torch, the process must be peaceful and there must not be any civil wars or revolutions. KMT demonstrated that losing power temporarily is not really a bad thing in year 2000. I think people in CCP are very smart, they definitely see that. It doesn't have to be a democratic system like the west - there is probably an ingenuous political system with Chinese characteristics awaiting to be invented.

Who wins this war? It's a big deal to me

2009-09-29T09:13:00.000-07:00

I always think the market of digital books is immense. Well, I should say the market that can be extended from the digital books is even bigger. Sony released Sony Reader several years ago, then followed by Amazon's Kindle. After the Kindle 2 was released, I bought one to see if this would be a new revolution looming anytime soon. It turned out that I think we human beings still need some more time on changing the way we read that has not changed for couple thousand years after the paper was invented in China. But I can foresee a nasty war between the digital book readers and content providers. This is just like the GPS devices war - one clear cut winner (Garmin) but it's who owns the content that will win out at the end.
Who will win round one? Be it Sony, Amazon, B&N or any other vendors, I have to look beyond the current turf and get read to ride the tide that raises the highest.