UltraCrepidate

“Unlike the female version of their first dance with prince charming, the male versions of their first dance tends to be overwhelmingly disastrous. This is due to the fact that the man must lead. Whereby a newbie lady at a ball will often get asked by a very experienced gentleman to dance, a newbie man is left to fend for himself and work up the courage to ask whoever they can find for a dance.”

I remember pumping myself up for the small ball/dance party, getting ready, putting on my best dress shrit, pants and shoes. Little did I know that no preparation could’ve prepared me for the confidence hit associated with this night. Everyone got up and danced… Except for me, I semi danced… Like a zombie.

What’s a good strategy I should’ve done is that I should’ve brought some friends like you’d do when you go out clubbing, but reality says that it’s almost impossible to drag a male friend along to a dance party (at least for me anyway). I wanted to bail out, but I was already too hooked to step down. So instead of a night out with school friends, I opted to sit alone watching people dance.

Back then, I wished that I had someone like the current me who brings me around and be there for my first party. Which is a type of service I am performing for my friends today. It is a stressful environment and like a cat to a new environment, they need a zone of comfort to return to after they get shot down by their new discoveries.

Up until today, I can always tell when it’s a guy’s first time asking a girl to dance. You can see the nervousness in their stance and the constant fiddling with their hair to look perfect. They will stand beside the dance floor like a cactus sticking out from the desert floor, hoping that by proximity along they can accidently ask a girl to dance. But the clearest indication of the guy’s noobness is still the sweaty hand swipe on their pants right before they hold out their hand and tackle a girl from behind to ask her to dance. Too close for comfort and often startling the girl with their invitation out of nowhere. The startling part I kept till today, I enjoy seeing them off balance. The sweaty palm however, I’ve let it go long ago.
Looking back, I think asking a girl to dance is even more Seriously speaking from experience today. I think this is a crucial point in determining whether a guy will stick with dancing, because this feeling will come back time after time as you progress to the next level. You never get rid of this feeling, you just got used to rejection knowing that it is as normal and inconsequential as acceptance.

Next: Miss T.

Dansons Series Index

When asked whether it’s a good idea to re-compile our C library through Ruby’s C extension under linux I answered with a firm NO! They went ahead and did it anyway. This takes dirty coding to a whole new level and debugging skill requirement that of a godlike figure.

Expect random crashes, memory leaks and un-explainable behaviors in unknown states and don’t call me up asking me to take a look at the code. Well… you did anyway. Lucky you because I am in a total boredom mode where I need new information to satiate my cravings. I will study Ruby and solve your unexplainable behavior for you.

Looks like I can’t escape my fateful meeting with Ruby after all Fred.

There seems to be an invisible line you cross after living with a roomate for 2 years. At which time, everything they do will piss you off. I remember crossing that line several times with several different roomates. Others I speak with remember crossing that line too at the 2 to 2.5 year mark.

I believe that this is when people should consider moving out, if not staying put for monetary reasons. Funny thing is, you can finally be friends after you go on your separate ways.

I don’t think anyone can ever accurately define these stages, but 5 roomates after, I think I have more experience than most on this subject.

Phase 1: The honeymoon stage. This is where everything about living together with this new person rocks. Should last for about 6 months. You establish rules to abide by and both side agrees unconditionally because they don’t want to be an ass.

Phase 2: The getting to know each other’s dirty secret stage. The rush of fun and clash of habits subsides and you are settling back into your own routines. This is where you probe each other’s comfort zone carefully and start to discover that something your rommate does is appaling. This should last about 1 year after the honeymoon.

Phase 3: The deterioration stage. By now, you know most of your roomate’s life and it isn’t as cool as you thought it is. No matter how fast the person is growing or changing, it cannot outpast your mind’s ability to get bored of the same shit. This will probably take about 6 months and then you reach phase 4. Rules established in phase 1 stops being observed.

Phase 4: Everything that your roomate does irritates you.

Of course, the phases speed up or slow down depending on other factors. Funny thing is though. You can finally be friends again after you moved away on your own.

Sore throat, blood filled eyes and a nothing is important attitude. This has become an evident result of a rough time had in previous nights. I think caused more from the lack of sleep than to the sudden low in adrenaline.

Regardless of the event, I feel good about this state. It is almost zeny. I always look forward to waking up the next morning after a rough time. The calm as a sharp contrast to the chaos before. A change of state that allows the peace to be felt with more emphasis instead of being brushed aside as boredom.

Uh, waitress, I’ll take life in rough flavor please!

As you’ve probably noticed. I usually post a small chunk of my “Dansons” stories each Friday that is written throughout the week. The reason is for you to read as entertainment over the weekend. It is longer than my usual short lunch posts.

This week though, I decided not to post the one I’ve written. Reason is simple, I discovered that it isn’t as light hearted as I’d like it to be upon a review. Probably  because that I haven’t been in the right mood all throughout this week. Well, I was a few times, but I just didn’t think that my mood will affect the tone of my story.

An important lesson which I will be applying in my life: do the right thing with the right mood.

I’ve wanted to write about this for a while, but refrained from doing so because it sounds cocky. Yet it’s growing more and more puzzling to me how I manage to achieve what I do.

I will have to give a little background on an incident today which means disclosing the fact that I am the Linux specialist in my department… And since I am in the department which I am in, I don’t have access to the source. You all know how important that is from a debugging point of view. Alas, it’s only to settle the fact that, before today, I have never seen any of the codes themselves.

So some two experts were with me and I was just standing there watching them go through codes trying to isolate why any command sent to the shell returns a “Bad Command” error (no more ls, cd, man or anything). They debated, searched and debated again till finally, one of them left because of the futility of the search. This is to set the theme.

So I get this feeling of where the problem is, yet since I am with two experts who know more than me I properly shut my trap and just listened. When it’s just me and the other guy though, I slowly brought him to where I think it is (just a passing glimpse of a few lines of code which he scrolled through while doing page downs) and asked him to change a few things. It worked and we fixed an otherwise disastrous bug (actually, it was 3 bugs in 1). How did I do this?

And this has happened quite a few times now. Is it possible that i can debug by feeling alone?

“You can tell how experienced a dancer is by how much he brags to friends and strangers. As a rule of thumb, the more one brags about it, the worse their skills. Shun away from those who brags and try to demonstrate their moves in public.”

The first dance lesson of my life was a private one-on-one with the teacher (a waste of money if you are just starting out by the way). It sounds ridiculous if I tell you that we spent the whole lesson learning just one box step… if you can call a box step a step. In the world of dancing, a box step is like walking, the most natural things that you have to be able to do and the hardest to master correctly, while the actual steps are that of a fancy back-flip, pretty.

The amount of information you have to absorb to do a proper box step is only overwhelming for a beginner starting dance lessons. In this case, me. I think this is due to the fact that, before this moment in my life, I’ve never thought about stepping sideways, let along doing it in a particular sequence alternating between forward, back, right and left. It was an “idée nouvelle”. If you are having problems imagining this, try writing with your other hand. A suggestion to beginners at this point, is to forget about perfectionism. You will never get it right as a beginner and at this point in your dance career, it’s more important that you go through the flow so your body can get used to it. The next day, you will have sore muscles in places you didn’t know you have muscles and after a week or two, it won’t be as hard. Thanks to my fortunate choice of teacher, I got through this part smoothly.

Contty was patient, beautiful with well toned body and have a six pack stomach. She’s also, 10 years older than me and made her the most experienced teacher in that studio (They usually don’t take noobs like me). I think she’s partially the reason, why years later, I find myself preferring girls with long black curly hair with toned bodies instead of the usual blond skinny girls that composed the western “higher society” which the average Asian prefers.

So, with a private lesson and later a group lesson in my belt, I felt a bit cocky and decided to show up to a dance party…

Next: Would you like to dance with me?

Dansons Series Index

I used to be inefficient at using the tools given to me to do my job. I’d do step by step troubleshooting on phone or beg for mercy over email. With experience, I later tweaked it to their most efficient role. So, in an easy and short 3 point guide, I will show those of you who are going to be joining the work force after the September wave of hiring:

How to use the numerous tools of communications at work:
Email: To send detailed instructions and insult people without sounding insulting

Chat: To hold quick group meetings between parties involved that are at different parts of the world. Things like: Let’s all go and have coffee? Or what do you feel like for lunch?

Phone: To bitch and yell at people, or beg for money and equipment.

It’s rare that I do a product review, but this has caused me so much frustration that I just have to document it.

To give you an idea of my numerous conflicts of interest with rogers, I will have to list out the history I had with them. For one thing, it is the only ISP that I believe is not evil. I used to work for their broad band tech support (as a cheap outsourced support). I also signed up for their broad band offer during my university life. I’ve called their support line twice. Once for my own stupidity.

So, when I looked up their offers in Montreal area, I was saddened to find that there’s no broad band service… but there is this neat new service called Portable Internet. Where you get this book sized modem that can be carried to any major city and just work like that. No need to change services ever. I love the mobile lifestyle and this will be an argument for buying a laptop as my next computer.

So being the explorer that I was, I dipped in without looking. What happened later was… intermittent connectivity. Yes, the hardest one to debug. Somehow, I am not surprised. It seems that everything I do now, I am faced with this intermittent connectivity issue. My whole feels like “intermittent connectivity.”

A frustrating 8 days later with me calling tech support to help them rule out all the possibilities. DNS, DHCP, Gateway… My modem was telling me that it had the best connection to the nearest tower the whole time (5 solid green light). So, the only conclusion that they have is that my computer has something bad on it and they’ve been refusing to do anything else after that but to reiterate that there’s nothing wrong elsewhere.

So I promptly plugged in a second computer, tested it, saw the same intermittent problem and canceled the service. By the way, if you are wondering, cancellation took 45 minutes.

It was a novel concept and one that I’ve been waiting forever to come to Canada. In Asia countries, I’ve already seen this about 4 years ago with a PCMCIA card that can be plugged into a laptop. Not the monstrosity that is the modem they gave me.

I feel… I feel like I am living in some backwater country riding on the butt of technological advancement.

One month after signing up
8 grueling days of dealing with tech support

A cellphone bill of $20

I hung up the phone in frustration and decided to take matters into my own hand and troubleshoot myself.

Seriously, all that tech support can do is ask me to reboot the computer and verify the settings.

Tech support nowadays isn’t what it used to be. Anyone can do it and they just follow the same script.

I fixed the modem

I am now online!!!

Cross my fingers that it stays connected.

“The best dance studio in town spends the least on advertisements. They don’t want beginners and they don’t need the income.”

To those of you concerned with details: no, I’ve never seen dancing live/on stage/show/TV before at this point. So it is only natural that the first image that I saw when I entered the studio was that of a perfect picture . It seemed to me, at that time, to be a grandios ballroom with a crystal chandelier and many beautiful and elegant dancers floating around. I stared in amazement for a minute before the secretary revived my brain from shock and asked if she could help me.

I stuttered, trying to form some words

She couldn’t comprehend

I stuttered again forming some other new words… obviously they don’t exist in the english dictionary.

Having seen this several time before, she led me to a couch to sit down in case I pass out. Then, having ensured that I am still breathing, she proceeded to let me know that someone will be with me shortly to introduce me to the dances.

After a somewhat long wait, the lady that was sitting next to me started chatting to me. Asking me questions about how I found the place to what I am doing now. For your understanding, I must point out the fact that I’ve pretty much been ignored by the female population, let along talking to one who’s actually interested in finding out more about me. It added even more to the whole exhilarating experience of my first encounter with my first dance teacher (Let’s call her… Contty). I was a lamb well marinaded for the slaughtering.

Time passed by in an instant and Contty proceeded to decalre that her student is late and since my assigned teacher is late too, she’s going to teach me instead.

Next: My first lesson

To “Dansons” series Index

I am incorporating my recent findings about human nature into my investment strategies now. Mainly, this and this. How are these important to investing you ask? Everything and nothing.

After realizing that certain part of the population will come to the same conclusion when fed the same stimulus, I begin to understand the wave effect of investment. As I’ve mentioned before, I tackle investment with psychology and analysis. You can’t treat the mass of investors as an infinite number of random people with random thought, but rather a selected few that has different characteristics and reacts in certain way when fed the same stimulus. Which is why, it is very fun to watch the US housing sector’s collapse play out. If you’ve been following it closely as I did, you will notice that each ripple of the collapse are caused by the collapse of a ring of people who think in a similar way.

The new radical thinking in the second article is only beginning to sink in to my daily life and strategies, but already I am seeing the effect it has on my stock picking. I now look at more aspects of a company than its financial statements and its history. It’s more about what the management did during crisis to turn the ship around, their future products, the consumer opinions and all around putting myself in the CEO’s shoes when an event occurs. I ask myself, what are the facts presented during the decision and why am I taking this decision over the other?

Man, a lot happened this quarter. My financial knowledge nearly tripled in this quarter. Check out the summary yourself.

Co-worker pointed out how expertly I passed the puck back to my client and shrugged off an otherwise complex debugging of an intermittent problem which causes the computer to hard reboot. I realized that my work ethics have changed.

I don’t think I am lazy though… just annoyed. Lately, there’s been a flurry of people who just send me a snippet of their code (not even compilable) and tells me that “there’s an intermittent problem, can you debug it for me?”

Well, it was fun at the beginning as it was challenging, but after you’ve done it for a while, the reality of it dawned on you. These people are just delegating it to me to save themselves some time.

I have the know how, I have the mindsets, so it’s time to work smarter. Which is why I started passing the puck back when faced with these type of questions. Not that I am shying away from my own responsibilities but to tell them: “Hey, at least do the most basic of troubleshooting first! Swap some black boxes around to isolate the problem.”

I was lounging contently in my IKEA Karlskrona chair doing nothing and contemplating about the possibilities of multidimensional implications on life, when my mind suddenly opened itself to a new possibility!

I was looking at the 4th dimension, time, in particular and wondering to myself why we can only travel in one direction when it occurred to me that I was thinking linearly. The immediate thoughts that followed are these:

• Why is time only forward and backward?
• What is two dimension?
• How is a dimension defined?
• Is the definition right and include everything that’ll give a clear cut difference between dimensions?
• Our definition of dimensions is limited by our mind
• The time dimension (a.k.a the 4th) can possibly have multiple directions
• Any dimension can possibly have multiple directions
• The concept of direction is a made up concept in the 3d world we live in
• You cannot define direction in a dimensional sense
• Human grow up believing that there are only two directions to everything

A problem is either solved or still causing trouble. You go forward or backward on the road, you enter or exit a door. Yet, there are lots of interactions you can have with each objects, yet it is our own upbringing that put a constraint on our thinking. Limiting the possibilities in the directions of your thoughts.
I feel enlightened as if I found a new hidden muscle in my foot that I’ve never used before, but could possibly have the potential to solve all my balancing problem while spinning and Rumba walking once strengthened.

So many possibilities so free.

My love handle has been a puzzling mystery to me since its first appearance 5 years ago. About the time when I entered my final years of college and started competing seriously.

I was malnourished, dance 3 hours per day and barely keeping up with passing my engineering degree. It was a blast. During that time, I’d always joke about my wish to be fat or fatter consider how skinny I looked.

I didn’t have fat on any part of me except for one area… and that is my love handle. I remember how vigorously I worked my hip muscles and how I grab the fat everyday wondering if they are disappearing. It wasn’t that I have a bad body image or got brainwashed by American TV, it was the fact that it was logically wrong to have a love handle when I was that skinny. So I tried different methods from working the muscles in that region to eating healthy. It became an obsession because it refused to go away.

I got this steady comfy job now and fleshed out all over so it doesn’t look bad when I am naked to have a bit of fat in my love handles. So I completely forgot about it. That is, till this weekend, when I discovered that my pants are falling down on its own and I have to inflate my stomach to keep them on.

I don’t know which is the cause, so I will list the changes that happened in my for the past month.

1. Rearranging furniture for an hour every day.
2. Breakfast: Bacon, egg, bread, hash brown patties, basil leaves.
3. Lunch: Instant noodles
4. Drink 5 cups of tea a day (Green or dark red)
5. Dinner: Spaghetti & sauce with ground beef/pork
6. Go to sleep at 10PM, wakes up at 7AM
7. Lots of water (1L~ 2L a day)

That was it, no work out, no nothing. Moving the furniture wasn’t even physically exhausting. If you ask me what is the direct cause of it. I have to answer: The deprivation of sugar.

A tour of my kitchen will help you understand. There is no sugar in sight. Thus, the logical conclusion that comes to mind is. Different food deposits fat at different locations in the body. Sugar in the love handle and beer in the guts.

It makes sense because I’ve sustained a healthy average of 2 large cups of coffee per day with 3 cream and 3 sugar throughout the most physically exhausting part of my life and still have my love handles while they disappeared when I have an easy life but without sugar (or cream if coffee is the main cause).

If you want to go on a sugar (or cream) free diet to test out the theory, let me know what your result is.

To help myself understand the impact of dancing in my life, I decided to finally put it down in black ink. A method I am using more and more to separate my emotional from my objective view. So far, dancing has had the second biggest impact in my life being only a few steps behind immigrating to Canada.

So, how much money did I exactly burn on this hobby? Here’s a shopping list. For your information. I danced for 8 years and competed seriously for 4 years. Some of these figures are average estimations since I don’t keep track of my spending back then.
First month being ripped off by Arthur Murray:
$3000

Lesson cost (average $40 per week for 8 years):
8×52x50 = $20800

Shoes:
5 * 200 = $1000

Costumes:
$1000(Standard) + $400(Latin) = $1400

Competition (average 12 times a year, $100 per competition for 4 years):
12×100x4 = $4800

Practice (5 times a week for 4 years):
4×52x5 = $1040

Travelling & hotel fees ($150 per competition for 4 years):
150×12x4 = $7200

Tally: $39200
That’s bigger than my investment portfolio, bigger than the down-payment for my house and way bigger than the immigration cost. Perhaps only equal to my university education cost. Not very funny at all.

Have you noticed this trend? You had a great idea for the next blog post and decided to write about it, only to stumble upon the same one while surfing your friend’s blog right before you click on post.  Is it possible that when human read the same articles, they will eventually come up with the same inspiration? Granted there’s always the exception, but in general?

I am considering this possibility after reading researches done on brainstorming sessions. Varied ideas are 50% less likely compared with a virtual group where people are separated from each other.

My own experiments concluded the same thing. Brainstorm sessions are actually better at bringing people to the same conclusion than facilitating new ideas. Is the conclusion then, to become a hermit and ponder the questions by yourself?

With the moving marked the end of a stage between the red head and me. Or to put it in a better word, the end to the entity known as the red head. I had originally tagged her with this name because it suits her personality perfectly: Hot headed, emotional, sloppy and persuasive.

All that ended when she became pregnant: an event that put her life in bas relief. Gone are the hot headiness and emotional character in its place, the patient and zeny mother. The sloppiness and persuasion stayed, although with a different twist.

Having enjoyed getting away with things all her life, she lacked the ability to outright ask for help, in order to avoid being in the debt of another. She is also the type of person who can never bring herself to initiate a call to a friend due to pride. I am fine with all these, except over time, I find that it twisted my good intentions into one that is a result of her manipulation. When I started questioning myself whether I was manipulated into doing things for her or if the good intention came from within, I know the poison had spread.

Which is a good practice for me in detecting and countering these subtle sparring of words. It was fun and games for the past two years, but I can’t bring myself to trust her.

She gave me her ex’s bike, hoping to forget the past relationship. I was grateful of that. I confirmed with her again if the bike is totally mine before I added a total of $150 modification to it (Two really expensive break to accommodate for my habits of going against a one way traffic and running red lights). When both of her other bikes got stolen, I lend her mine to use. I haven’t seen it since and just wrote it off the top of my head. It was hers to begin with. Until I got curious before I moved out and asked her.

“I sold it”

“YOU WHAT?!”

“I sold it”

“Didn’t I told you that I spent a considerable amount of money modding it?”

“Well~ I didn’t know~”

No apologies because she’s too proud. So sloppy because she most likely got it stolen again. Outright lying when she said she didn’t know because I had mentioned it to her twice to make sure of it before I modded (It’s a precaution against the loss of my investment. I am too money savvy to not do it).

It’s not the money that bothered me, but the situation.