UltraCrepidate

Somehow, I only managed to work on my stuff for 4 out of the 10 days of holiday. I guess it’s a consequence of getting more socially connected. I still remember my first winter in Montreal alone, what a difference 5 years make.

Most of my vacation were spent making decisions and crunching numbers. I now have a clear set of strategies that I am going to employ next year for my portfolio. Unfortunately, I haven’t fully transitioned to an income generating strategy yet, so I still can’t spend like a trust fund kiddie for the year 2010 and instead will focus on capital growth as well as cash hoarding. I really don’t like to hoard cash because I am tempted to use it every time I see my bank account.

What became really obvious during this short stint is that I now have a hard time understanding how I managed to survive without lengthy researches like these. I have to conclude that I’ve just been lucky till today in my bets and thank god I employed risk protection strategies. The more I analyze, the more time I need to analyze the next target of the domino effect what came out as a surprise for me though is how I enjoyed spending time doing this.

I was supposed to spend the rest of my holidays trying to release my game, now that there’s only one day left, I think I will have to put that aside. Once I get back to working my 9 to 5 job, it’s Taxes until February. I can see the pain like a train heading straight at me. I made at least 100 transactions this year and everyone of them has to be documented.

Following yesterday’s rambling about growing up, I realized that my current definition of what life is have also evolved. The last definition that I thought was a pretty good one revolves around the constancy of change as life. Simply put, to die is for everything to be the same. Looking at it from the point of view of the universe. When every single molecule in the universe degraded to the same one at the same temperature in the same energy state, nothing will happen anymore. We then achieved death in our universe. You can project the same about human lives.

So since that realization, I’ve tried everything I can to live everyday differently. But there’s something else…

At one point in my spiritual growth, I stopped asking people what they thought life is for. I stopped asking when everyone started giving the same answer: “I don’t know.” Then I met a few people who actually have incomplete answers and what they told me was pretty interesting. There is no complete answer to this question, only partial answers. You must have one if you are alive, otherwise, you’d see the pointlessness of living and just die. So I got curious again and started asking the same question in a different way…

Myself, I noticed that life is like an avalanche. Things pile up until it reaches a critical state like in the chaos theory. You see this in traffic patterns, in the stock market, in crowd movements and basically everywhere you go. Our brain probably function the same way as a critical yes vote by all the neurons in our brain decides our action.

It does not completely rebuff the change theory, but acts rather as an evolution that gives more insight into how the “gray” area of life behave. Nothing and nobody is purely bad neither can they be purely good. That’s just your perception.

The idea that companies will pay me while I relax on some remote golden sandy beach sounded too good to be true. Where I was raised, it was just not done. I have never really enjoyed the biggest benefits of having a permanent job until this point in my life. Yes, I had the same opportunity last year, but it was more of an adventure that made me more tired than a vacation where I just sloth around and do absolutely nothing.

I am too industrious for this.

But I am going to do it this year. The idea still hasn’t hit home yet. I still woke up this morning around 9AM thinking that I should be up and about doing something productive. But alas, the stress so far has made me prosper. You can say it’s a culmination of all my efforts since 2003. So this year, I am going to reward and pamper myself. Another idea that I haven’t quite gotten used to.

I will be flying out September 1st. I even gave myself a few day to slowly pack. Hopefully the world wouldn’t change too much and there isn’t any emergency that requires my attention. For once, I want the world to stay boring for a while so that I can come back and jump right into the action again. The fear of opportunity will keep me connected to the net for at least 30 minutes each day. The opportunity cost of missing a major event this year will probably mean getting wiped out or missing that next chance to triple my net worth. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be surprised if something great happened and I ended up totally disconnected from civilization for a few days.

A girlfriend of mine once chided me on my extreme frugal habits. Telling me that I don’t have to prepare and train for an apocalypse all the time. At that time I replied with something that I consider very sexist but something that I truly believed in. “It’s  different for a guy, I can’t rely on getting a rich spouse”. To put you into the context of the exchange, she was commenting on my attempt at training myself to sleep on a plank of wood in order to toughen my back to weather possible life on the street.

I consider that exchange very valuable and it is one of the more enlightening moments of my life because the message and the ensuing internal debates that followed. It was her matter-of-fact way of stating her thoughts that made me realize just how different my basic assumption is from that of the western society.

I was raised in a culture of saving everything you have in preparation for armaggedon, because my previous generation lived in armaggedon scenario and the government isn’t there to ensure that you live a healthy life.  So cost cutting and saving for me is as natural as breathing. Just like bartering and asking for discounts.

What that exchange really drove home is the fact that being cheap here in a western world, is not looked upon as a good trait. It is also not part of the value that the opposite sex look for. No, in a culture where you have a hard time killing yourself even if you want to, we’ve effectively taken away any incentive to cut cost. Instead the focus is on how much you can output and consume.

Trap of saving and cost cutting

At the moment of discovery ( which means when I reached my conclusion of this debate), I realized that saving and being cheap is detrimental to a person’s life in a western society. What you are effectively doing is subsidizing money with more time spent. The poorer you are, the more you pay for things with time. I realized then that I need to spend in order to expand and that I cannot hold back. So the only option for me is to somehow make my cash worth more while not having to waste time bartering and debating about price all the time.

That’s when the concept of automatic cash back hit me. If I can make my money’s buying power worth more than it is, I not only save time, but also money. And if I can do that on the smaller items while leaving bartering purely for the larger items, it will be even more cost effective.

Optimized state

So now that I don’t always practice for armaggedon scenario I started to see what I call the optimized way. The trick to life, is to be able to recover from any disaster and put all my efforts to get back to the optimized way instead of getting caught in a downward spiral in a state where I am at a disadvantage. So it is worth while to evolve a most efficient way of life for myself, based on my personality. I inspected my life closely to discover that there are a few core things that I spend most of my time and money on repeatedly. If I can reduce the cost and time by even 1%, the savings over the span of my whole life is enormous. For me, I concluded the following:

• Transportation
• Cooking/food
• Mortgage/rent
• Electricity

What to consider

There are a lot of other things to optimize, such as phone, internet etc but I usually stops when the calculation shows that I will only be able to reap the benefit after 7 years of usage. The reasoning behind this is that almost every 7 year, something doubles. Whether technology or population, but the effect of doubling is a game changer and will most likely throw whatever plan you have in place out of whack. So I considered my options and determined that there’s absolutely nothing I can do about electricity.

Other things that are easier to change are transportation, cooking food and mortgage. It is important to practice any skills involved so that it take the least amount of time as possible. The skills don’t have to be a physical things, it can be the process of something that you can improve. These are skills that requires an initial investment of time, but don’t need to be constantly honed. I suggest you get it down as soon as possible in your life. The first step is to know the price by scouring and taking inventory of price levels of major items at different places. I realized that I will not be able to do this while moving from city to city all the time. So part of the reason I settled down is so that I can enjoy this benefit. The advantage of knowing the city inside out and having a network of people is required in order to gain the price advantage.

Here are some examples of what I’ve done in terms of skills:

Gas: Figure out the time of the day with the least amount of traffic (50% reduction in time stuck in traffic), observed the price cycle of gas stations (10% cost reduction), figured out the fastest lane of every stretch of a highway (~5% reduction in time)

Cooking/Food: Mapped out 10 dishes that I will constantly cook and improve on (30% reduction in time). Reduced cost by figuring out the cheapest place to acquire ingredients (10% cost reduction) and planted some rarely used spice+plants so I don’t have to buy and discard spoilt food for one time use only.

Mortgage/Rent: This part is very hard to improve on, because it involves a lot of money management and credit arbitrage. Basically doing due diligence in market research and timing the interest rates. The result of these efforts are usually out of my control due to market condition. I did my shopping around, bartering the house price and reduction of the unnecessary services that my bank tries to push onto me. I will say that I have at least reduced the cost by 1% so far due to canceling some double insurances and credit arbitrage.

Increasing the worth of my cash

This part is the no brainer and represent only an initial cost of 1 week’s time. After the research, I am able to improve my money’s buying power overall by at least 3%. The key to this success lies in 6 things.

• MBNA Smart cash credit card
• Starwoods Preferred Guest credit card
• The great canadian rebates
• Visaperks
• Aeroplan
• Gift cards

In order to stay the course and not stir away from the core intent of this post, I will only list the cost reductions I’ve been able to reap in my life.

• Groceries 5%
• Gas 9%
• Home improvement 5%
• Some restaurants 5%
• Clothing 5%
• Everything else 2%

These are in addition to the sales and bartering I do. So real results are significantly better.

I spent 18 years of my early life living with my parents and will need the rest of my life to break free of their influences. Amongst the people who has a sway in shaping who I am, I admit that my dad, with his rigid set of what is good and wrong for me, ranks #1 in influences on me.

Our relationship is getting better now, but from time to time, he still lapse back into his old ways and use that disapproving yet condescending tone on me over the phone. It’d always leave a bad taste on my mouth when I hang up feeling angry of the intrusion. The disrespect on my judgment and most importantly, the lack of support for a decision that I arrived at. It also explains why there’s such a big cultural difference between the races.

It wasn’t until I left home and started dating people from other culture did I understand that there is another type of parental love. Families where parents actually cared and asks about what the children wants instead of having an imaginary “future” shoved down the kids’s throat. I envy most of you and am appalled when I learned about how teenagers lash back. Too much of what dad cared about is saving face. To have an outstanding kid is the reason why Asian parents constantly pressure their kids to fit that image of a professional money making machine. It is shameful when your kids turn out bad and they seem to lose their standing within the family structure if they do.

Often, I’d try to bring up certain interesting people I meet and my dad would harrumph as usual before dismissing those people as the garbage of society or certain hobbies as a waste of time… but really, what on earth isn’t a waste of time in the end? There is no curiosity, no sense of exploration. Just the usual: “You better not do that, because I’ll look down on you.” Till this day, it still have limited effect on me for a short period of time. I’d just end up doing whatever he disapprove of anyway, but because I have to struggle against this long established habit, it leaves me more vulnerable compared to people who never had to.

I hated him when he opposed my first passion in dancing, threatening to cut all financial help for school. I showed him my way by working part time and paying my own bills until I started flunking classes due to lack of sleep and time. He cared more about my education than I did, which was the only reason I won the fight between us. That is probably when I realized that what he wanted me to grow up to be, is very boring. Was he jealous that I did what I wanted without constrain because he couldn’t do it when he was young? Was I threatening his illusion of absolute authority and control that he felt he needed to reassert his position? At one point in time, I realized that I have surpassed him in terms of the evolution of my spirit. Asians, I find, don’t spend much time on improving their spirituality.

Amongst the numerous negative traits passed down to me from our relationship, condescension is the one I am having the most trouble getting rid of. It’s something that I have to struggle in order to hold back. The control slips from time to time when I wasn’t checking and is especially obvious when I drink too much coffee.

Dad has probably realized some of what I wrote also. He is a more humble person now, perhaps through realizing his own mortality, he’s able to see what I see. I forgive him for what he did, but it still hurts. I only wish that I turned back in time so I can still change while I am not too set in my ways yet. I hope in doing so, dad can learn and transcend his own faults through watching me.

I still remember what it feels like to be an extrovert. Coffee mixed with alcohool usually brings that part of me out in the open. I remember thinking to myself in one of these outings that :”How slick and smooth talking I am!” I am so sure of everything and lived only in the moment, never thinking about consequences or what the future will bring. I thrived with each connection and was high on fun all the time. Since then, I’ve been asking myself why I can’t achieve this without any substance abuse?

That leads me to the question that rests on my mind right now. The answer of which has no clear cut winner, probably because I am so detached from my feelings in a normal setting. There are a few things that I’ve been passionate about in my life. Dance, Engineering, Gaming, Finances, Travelling etc. Just like exes, I loved them passionately at certain moments, but in retrospect,  each love is different. None of which says that this is the one and proceeds to overwhelm my senses completely.

The problem, I find,  lies in the fact that none of them has an absolute end goal. I had one, but I achieved it and ended up just going after the next level, and the next, and the next without end in sight. I stop because I can’t see myself married to the passion for the rest of my life. I stop and I move on. So now that I’ve had “an interesting life” according to a few people, I can look back and see, which ones I’d marry for life and which ones I won’t. Now that I am more mature, I am not afraid of admitting the reasons I got into these passions in the first place. First step towards the acceptance of self.

I decided to write this as I reflect them because I believe I over edit some of the more emotional posts. That is not me, I can only be great with words if I am allowed to speak in all 3 languages at the same time. So forgive me for any clunkiness you read.

Dancing is pretty obvious. It’s for serving woman. It’s nice, but a wrong reason to be passionate about something. 99% of the man starts wanting to dance to bed woman and 1% are born into a champion dancer’s womb. After all, that is why dancing is there. Somewhere along the line, I found other reasons to go on and get better. In the end, it can be summed up to wanting to please any woman in my arms. I have achieved that goal long ago and gone way beyond that.

Engineering was just because it was the hardest. Also a bit of goading by my dad who is actuely aware of my competitive nature. By implying and hinting about how difficult and sought after this domain is, he managed to sway me into that direction. I remember that one of my choices of program was an visual art degree when I applied for university. Don’t get me wrong, I got a lot out of this. I can fix anything with a copper wire in it, but I am never passionate about it. Now that I have tamed my competitive nature, it is no longer of important value in my eyes.

Gaming never got serious until I immigrated to New Zeland and then Canada. It is a sort of replacement for friends after I experienced a sudden vacuum in my surroundings. The loneliness compounded my addiction until it became one with my life. I still play it from time to time, but it cannot fulfill me anymore. Real life has gotten very interesting. A game, it seems, is just a dumbed down version of little parts of real life. If you want to show your 1337 skills, do it in real life since it has the “NIGHTMARE” seetings selected. I do however want to improve gamer’s life by making games integrate into social life. I know the addiction, I feel bad for people who are in it and I want to help their lives while keeping the fun of games intact.

Traveling and Finances go hand in hand. I had never knew why I suddenly want to become a millionaire 3 years ago until I realize that I can sustain myself without working. I asked myself what is the first thing I’d do when this is a solid fact instead of a 80% possibility, the answer came back pretty obvious. I’d travel. Getting past $2 million is of no interest to me since you can live off the interest indefinitely with $1 million. (less if you are in a 3rd world country). A fellow backpacker who’s been traveling for 30 years taught me this.

So with this finally figured out. I know what I love now and I have a purpose.

A great way to sum it up. The current politico-financial situation between the government and the banking industry is something like this:

High school educated people who are old and don’t own any current iphones coming down to Apple and telling Steve Job how cheap they should sell the iPhone for and who they need to sell it to. Leaving the design to Apple.

Just my opinion. Not to say that they are only high school educated. But their technological expertise in the field is equivalent to that. Same for Finances.

The whole time you are high you are silly and out of control. You do things without thinking. You can’t sit down and finish anything. You are not productive and you have this huge ADD. But it feels so good when you are in it.

For the past two weeks and for unknown reasons, I’ve been in this punch drunk high state. It usually fades away after two days so I wasn’t worried at first. It’s when it lasted for a week that I started getting worried. The whole time I was in the rush, I have this impending feeling of doom on when it eventually subsides. The higher you climb, the harder you fall so to speak.

And that’s what happened.

How I got to the final concept. Zania’s universe is steampunk heavy hence the style.

And here is my game with a fully functional physics engine with placeholder graphics for now.

zania

A and D to turn

W to move forward S to move backward

Space bar to shoot bullets.

What I especially love to do for now is shooting bullets at the sun and watch it bounce off.

The focus of this game is on gravity so emphasis is placed on making the physics emulator right. I am just now getting into the game play part after learning the ways of game programming. Mainly the aggregator class to prevent inheritance bloating, singletons for rendering engine and how to reduce the load on a computer.

As a challenge, see if you can maneuver the ship into orbit. Or better yet, shoot a bullet at just the right angle to launch it into orbit.

Why I sometimes don’t do what I suggest

I always chuckle inside when someone comes to me 6 months later to tell me that they’ve finally sold everything. I know that I shouldn’t laugh, but these people seems to have missed my point… and the timing. Granted maybe I shouldn’t have thrown them off by stating that I am going to play through this turmoil for experience, giving them the impression that I am trying to rip them off of their profit. No, when I say something, I seriously mean it and it’s their fault for not believing that I state truths (with possibility of exaggerating by 1.5 times). I wanted to know how to invest in a depression like crash. Trial by fire, is the only effective way I know of learning something (and the most adrenaline filled one, feeding my addiction).

How I see things

Forecasting the market for me is a matter of seeing all the possible routes as parallel probabilities and honing my skills at timing when the effects actually reflects in the real world. Simple time lags for example is the 6 month delay of Canadian economy vs that of a US economy and the 2 minute delay in the reaction of TSX S&P vs S&P 500. Over time, the delay should shorten as information gets passed along faster, but you can always count on new groups of people joining the stock market that has slower access to information.

There is one characteristic of my personality that I believe is key to my being able to see the possible outcomes. The fact that I do not judge any event as good or evil tuned my mind to the point that they are today. Take for example the view on God. Since I do not believe that God is the absolute good and that my way is that of seeing both side, I force myself to see the point of view of Satan. This is especially turned on when reality is weighed heavily towards one side. (Some people accused me of being cruel because of this).

All this to show you how I arrive at my conclusions and that I am serious in what I am about to say.

The message

Inflation is coming.

There are $900 billion US dollars in circulation. US GDP is approximately $14.2 trillion. So far, all the agency combined have spent $12.8 trillion to combat this crisis where around $350 billion is what we call Quantitative Easing (printing money) with others that are close, but can’t be categorized as such. Recently, the US PPIP pledged $1 Trillion to buy toxic assets and the IMF pledged $1 Trillion to stimpack the world economy. Finally, interest rate is at or near 0%.

And this inflation is good for you…. Well, some of you.

From the reaction I get when I speak to people, I understand that nobody believes me. I agree. I don’t want to believe it either. BUT! I am at least sure that there won’t be deflation. Which really forces my hand in the strategy department.

At the moment, the economy is completely dictated by the US government and to preserve your capital, you have to be aware of what they are doing.

What does 0% interest mean?

When the interest rate is reduced to 0% or close to 0% it gives the FED and other entities certain power that it does not have before. When interest rate is a non zero value, the FED has to service and pay people who buys their debt issues. However, when it reaches zero, there is no consequence of borrowing anymore. You can literally make money out of thin air for as much as you want. The same thing can be said for other entities that have access to this interest rate. I am pretty sure that they will have some creative ways to take advantage of this and print their own money disguised as something else.

Which leads to…

Inflation

Definition of which means the decrease in the buying power of your cash or increase in the price of anything you buy. Which led ME to…

Fully invest in the stock market

Why am I not trying out how to hold cash over inflation like the way I am investing through depression? Because I already know the outcome of that and there is absolutely nothing I need to learn from it. So I am warning people and also leading by my own action.

Probabilities

There is a possibility that the US government will be able to manage it properly and reduce the amount of money in circulation as the economy recovers. There’s also the possibility that this won’t arrive for some time  and that another severe 50% downturn in stock prices could happen. Still, taking all these cases into account, the benefit of being fully invested severely out weights holding cash or any GIC less than 3% when it does happen. Since I don’t know the time span till it happens, I opt to do it when I see it.

The administration

The US administration seems to want to make a stand at this level. If it falls more, it will be 30 years of pain. They are getting a second chance at managing the depression and they are dead set on doing it the other way around this time. You only have to read the fed chairman Ben Bernanke’s doctorate thesis to know what he’s going to do. The only thing that can stop this, is public outrage. Which, if happens just means that we, as human, are too stupid. However, this does introduce a random dice into the scheme of things. We are in an unknown territory that does not have any example in history. Hence my confusion on what to invest in. What happens when a government throws $13 trillion at the economy? Interesting question.

A quick crash first

For records sake, there is a very big chance that a crash will happen after April’s earnings season. Truth is, factory orders from my sources in the front line of manufacturing have not improved. They have been the same from January to March and consist mainly of emergency orders for one month to replenish depleted inventories. The current rally in the market is due to excessive money that people have saved up, but have nowhere to put. I am not the only person that noticed the fact that bank only gives 1~2% return. There is absolutely no incentive for people to keep it in secure assets and every incentive for people to put it in the stock market.

The crash will most likely be triggered by the bankruptcy of GM in 2 months. Yes people have time to prepare for it, however, just like the Lehman Brothers meltdown people will bet and write CDS against the bankruptcy and ended up having to pay too much again.

If you are fully invested, you don’t necessarily have to sell during the crash. The upcoming effect of all the trillions of dollars invested will be enough to heal anything. Wiping out $800 billion dollars (Total money supply) will not cause a dent in $12 trillion dollars (of future committed government spending).

If you have cash on the sideline. You still have time to invest when you start hearing that factory orders are back to normal. i.e. the bookings are done for 2 to 3 quarters at a time. I will let you know when it happens.

The effects of inflation

Fixed rate vehicles that does not adjust its rate to inflation will take a big hit. Pensioners and people retiring will see their buying power reduced. Debt will be easier to pay off as the national income increases (Probably not this year or next for individuals as it will take time to trickle down). We are screwing over the older generation’s cash hoard and piling debt onto the next generation. It is the perfect time to be a working and contributing adult.

Money changes your relationship with people. At least it changed mine.

As the de facto go to guy on anything financial amongst people who know me, I am starting to feel the weight of my own advices. I am someone who have no grudge taking money from strangers who made the wrong choice in a transaction, but I deeply care about whether or not people whom I give advice to succeed in making money based on what I say. Especially so if they follow my advice closely (Not so much if they don’t). That is why, I don’t usually tell people what to do in detail and instead insist on showing what I can see coming and what the choices are. I also focuses a lot on the strategies. Monetary strategies is just like the strategies in a war, you cannot always commit 100% of your forces.

How my advice work

I advice by building expectations of the problems to come so people don’t sell in panic. I suggest good times to get in based on my own analysis and people’s situation. Which, I believe, is the fairest way I can go about doing this without destroying the friendship.

Why am I being so careful? Because someone did hold me responsible for their losses and the relationship has since soured. The psychology of human is this: You are not going to blame yourself, so you are just going to blame the next person with the most control.

How it happened

It was one of the people I communicated with when I first started out. We were more like investment buddies sharing our findings together, but I am the one who is in control of the direction of our investments. The problem then is I had no idea how much money he has and what kind of tolerance he have on losses. Starting in 2007, I have maneuvered my buys fully expecting a recession and at worst case a deep depression. Thus, I didn’t commit most of my resources until October and am now fully committed except for cash reserves for living (The reason of which is a mystery to some and is something that I will go over in another post). The strategy were not communicated, but the stock buys were circulating freely. Partly because we have reserves on revealing our financial worth. So he sold once his tolerance is reached while I don’t mind a swing of 50% in my net worth.

Jackpot winner

Take the example of the guy who won the 649 Jackpot. The expectation of his friend from him changed dramatically as soon as he won. He is now thrown into the pit of the riches where nobody have sympathy for. I can only imagine the shock that he is experiencing and the adjustments he has to make to people’s expectation of him. After all these are basic human instincts. I’d do the same if someone I know won. And as someone who’ve gradually increased his own net worth over the years, I understand a bit of what he’s going through.

From poor to rich

As an example from my life. When I just graduated, nobody expects me to pay for anything. My relationships with people were more like co-conspirators on getting things for free. It was an adventure. Nowadays they call me cheap when I try to do that. Probably because I mistakenly revealed certain indications that I am well off. It can’t be helped because your habits start to change as you grow wealthier. For starters, pocket change is now $5 instead of $2 and coins of $2 is now pocket change that you don’t mind losing on the street. As these threshold increases, so does the interactions in your life.

Generosity

Generosity is another tag that you get when you are richer. You are not pinched for money so you can actually give without regretting. You can participate in more diverse spectrum of events instead of going for a boring stroll in the park all the time. Well, you can always do that, but my difference from others is that I only want to be able to do that when it doesn’t hurt my wallet.

Three years at the same job and another of my colleague left. Pretty much everyone that I hanged out with at the beginning have disappeared.

I am not really connecting well with the new people that was brought in as replacement. I guess at one point, somebody felt the same way about me. Alas, that is not the deep realization that I want to write about. The experience wall that I believe I felt is that of complete confidence.

In former jobs, I hit it more or less after the first month on the job, but you can’t really compare that with an actual engineering job. Up until this point, there’s at least something that throws me off guard and made me doubt my abilities and skills. Today, or this month. that doubt no longer exists.

The feeling is similar to changing diapers. You know the baby pooped, it’s going to stink and messy to change the diapers and you just have to go through the motion. Yes, just going through the motion. Another bug, another complex issue solved. Where is the sense of pride? Where is MY adrenaline rush???

It doesn’t come without its pluses though. I find that I can pretty much perform my main duties as a low priority task in my brain. While dedicating most of my interests on programming and exploration of some technical stuff. Pissed off customers who calls to yell at somebody used to phase me a bit, making me fear about the security of my job. Now they are just talking to my shit wall. Which makes me wonder, why isn’t my sales guy answering these calls? Isn’t this his job?

I made a lot of big choices from September till now. I guess, I am writing to record the interim emotions. Some of my decisions have panned out well. Some have ended up in disaster. The most nerve destroying moment came when you did all your homework and the only thing left to do is to make that leap of faith in your own abilities.

I made that leap in everything I touched this time. It was despair, desperation, and depression that hit me afterwawrds. What I’ve learned so far is that the leap might be right, but the timing will never be right. The saying goes. You can pick a side or state a time, but you cannot do both.

At the moment of writing. Things are still in a transient state, but have a possibility to come out in my favor. It strengthens my belief in myself. It also made me more aggressive. My feelings are more out of whack and chaotic.

All this from taking my stand and going for it. In everything!

I am always intrigued by the amount of artists living in Montreal. For some reason that I cannot fathom Montreal is their city. It is, therefore, not surprising that I have come to know a lot of artists. Most in name only, but few really stood out in their dedication to the life.

The nature of art usually veered them away from the business of earning money. Hence the often whispered term “Struggling artists”. So when I hear of someone who goes all in, I always get inspired by their courage. Something that I have always lacked from my upbringing. No, my life has always been about having something stable. Going for the less extreme lifestyle to support myself first.

You can only be young for so long before you lose your fire.

Natasha is a singer I met while swing dancing and have been following ever since. She’s a hardcore artist living that life with a great personality to boot. I really want to see her succeed because her dedication is infectious. But there’s nothing much I can do besides spreading the word of her existence. The picture links to her site, hopefully she will get some sample up to help you decide whether to donate to her or not.

In the mean time, check out her blog and follow her adventures.

“Peeeeteeerrrr….”

“Hummm?”

“Do you realize that you are living the dream that all guys dream of?”

I look at her in puzzlement.

“You got 3 girls in your bed you naughty boy.”

It took me a few seconds to reframe my mind to Miriem’s comment.

“Haha, you are right. And I did it rather effortlessly didn’t I?”

Being with her is always interesting because you can never predict the next crazy idea that’s going to come out of her twisted mind. The fact that she doesn’t really have a filter when it comes to the most inappropriate and politically incorrect thing to say doesn’t help. Which is why, we are such a great pair when both of us fire off into one of these strange conversations. For example, a conversation such as this occurred in front of a soon-to-be mom.

“I wonder what other uses there are for the umbilical cord.”

“Oh! I know! ……”

“Know what?”

“….”

“Not telling you, I am way off topic again.”

“Oh… You were thinking about strangling the baby with it?”

“Yeah.”

I have long since given up in hiding myself from her. She’s one of those people that inspires truth in you because she has the uncanny ability to understand your state of mind. Whenever there are arguments in the group, she’d be the one to restate my point of view in someone else’s frame of mind and vice versa. In short, she’s Deanna Troy from Star Trek, but without the schooling which all Psychologist goes through to learn discipline.

My first brush with tower defense type of games is when I was playing Starcraft. Since then, I’ve accumulated quite a bit of experience sitting in front of my computer and staring at these endless waves of lemmings that throw themselves at your super enhanced towers.

It’s some type of guilty pleasure that I never understand. Highly addictive for some reason I can’t grasp and at the same time, the biggest time waster you can ever find. I thought I am over this simplistic type of game until I read this damn review about the 10 best flash games. Which includes the famous Desktop Tower Defense.

Granted, the graphics are crap, but it combines the essences of tower defenses into it. I won’t go into the actual game play in an attempt to spare you this useless addiction. Suffice to say, that I wasted 3 full days mastering the buildings in this game and also completed the hardest challenge: The 100.

Why did I do it? I just can’t let go of a challenge once it started. Here’s a pic of my layout. Notice that there are 3 possible exits. These are used to direct the traffic flow. the whole maze is fluid and changes with the difference placements of towers at key points.

I just realized that I’ve said nothing good about dancing since I started blogging. Most likely because I know the benefits all along and its obviousness is as clear as day and light. The other reason is because I only realized its negative impacts in hindsight while looking back or contemplating on some new habits I gained. The sharp contrast of a normal life against the dance lifestyle brought about some interesting debates.

To prevent boring you guys too much with words, I’ve separated this into several parts. Part I will be focusing on the physiological benefits. So, without further ado I will present my case.

Adrenaline is a natural high

The only reason why my parents haven’t brought their full might upon me to force me to quit (even though it contributed to me almost flunking out of engineering) is because it doesn’t destroy my brain like drugs. The adrenaline high is a natural state and we do take advantage of dancing to bring in the state. Remember the first time you asked a girl out? The sinking feeling before you take your finals? Or The euphoria you felt after bungee jumping? Thats what it feels like every time you walk off the floor. It’s addictive and it cost a lot, but at least it’s healthy.

Health benefits

When you crave to reach the top, or when walking the path towards the top. The athlete is forced to combine a number of different trainings together in order to improve. To compete physically, one needs to do muscle training and cardiovascular training alongside the normal dance training. Just the fact that you do these will ensure that you will have a well proportioned body. If you like that, you’ll enjoy the 8 packs that comes along with dancing as well as never having to worry about your love handles.

Expertise in movement

Unlike body training, dancing helps you build up all the small muscles that are involved in stabilization and teaches you new ways of moving. There are quite a few morning where I wake up with sore muscles in places I didn’t believe had muscles. There are also new brain connections that I have to make which I never knew before. Imagine the frustration when you try to perform, for the first time, Mr Spock’s peace hand signal in Star Trek. Now imagine perfecting it so you can move to the rhythm with that. Then imagine doing the same thing for a couple dozen different places of your body.

You become more aware of the space that your body occupy and you have several options in movements you can use to achieve the same result as one which you were born with. I’ve had girls commenting that even a simple thing as opening door, I look like I am dancing. (I’ve since made an effort not to “dance” when I open doors or do normal things because I don’t want to draw too much attention.) I wasn’t actually dancing, my movements were just ingrained to follow the fluidity of dancing.

Perfect posture

Most dancers I know have the perfect posture. I say most because there are always exceptions. But compared to the general population, there are a higher percentage of people with perfect posture than your average day to day Joe. I am talking about the chin high, chest up, and I am the king of the world type of posture. The reason is very simple, because everyone else in this circle is doing it. And if you show just a slight difference from the expected perfection, you won’t place ever.

Today marked an important day when two departments in our company linked up to play Call of Duty 2 during lunchtime. The culture of gamers built up slowly, I can still remember that there used to be only the 4 of us in the old days.

When we found out that another department was playing as well, we were excited. It took a while to work around all the technical details due to our IT infrastructure, but we did it. Now, we get to enjoy lunch time fragging of ~20 player games every day.

Gaming has come a long way to general acceptance. Now I see it opening up a way to socially connect strangers in the same company. We are all good natured in my department and not crazy enough to want to stab someone when we get killed, don’t know about the other department, I guess we will see in the future.

I started practicing the basics repetitively again as a cheap way to stay fit during the winter.

Don’t know why I didn’t start doing this earlier. Most likely because of the shame I felt from my old dance partner’s passing remark in one of those late night practices that are filled with fights. I sat down, took and deep look and realized that this feeling of shame came from her. From a specific remark where she said dancing is not like a robot, doing repetitive moves like chop-chop. I disagree.

Lots has changed in my body since I last did this and I noticed some added bonus from a more muscular body type. For one, I have muscles to support certain moves now. I also realized that I don’t have enough of them to support more powerful moves. Second thing that I noticed is that I am very out of shape. The cardio I gained from cycling really doesn’t translate into dancing. If you want to know, I used to be able to do this for five minutes straight. Today I lasted for one minute.

From observing my breathing, I noticed that I’d inhale in a quick gasp, hold the breath and than exhale as I perform a power move. Exhaling helps in suddenly tensing up all the muscles in my body, helping me stop the momentum of a powerful step. Which also means that I cannot separate my breathing from my muscles. Letting breathing run with the intensity means  that I’d run out of breath from a lack of oxygen, but keeping it with the rhythm means I’d hyperventilate. Take chacha for example, approximately 4 beats in a second, 4 weight changes, 2 complete breathing cycle.

So the only solution that’s the most probable, is to separate breathing from the actual dance. If my memory serves me correctly, learning to separate my upper body movements from the lower body (and later, disconnecting the mid section as well) was painfully slow. It was like dancing with your brain and not your body and I couldn’t think straight after each practice.

I showed up at the reception early so I have time to setup my camera and test the lighting of the room. It wasn’t too great, comparable to that of a dancesport competition. My focus this day was on people’s reaction since there’s already another photographer with a 10MP camera for the official pictures. (He has 5 of these cameras) My Kodak P850 feels so wimpy beside his. We had a great chat and he let me use his camera for a while to try out the feel of higher end models. I was practically drooling by the end of the night. So smooth, so sweet, and the shutter has no delays. One of those, would improve my pictures dramatically. However, I am still your poor SOB from yesterday and cannot afford one. Unless of course, someone drops it from the sky as a gift.

THE COUPLE

Both Mark and Rui share a trait that I think is the reason that drew me to them in the first place. A hidden wild side beneath their casual conservative appearance. I think the meet outside feeling is created by the underlying maddening attempt at perfectionism. I arrived at this conclusion through their actions, especially on the nights when I took them dancing.

Mark is like me in some ways. When I challenged him to ask three girls for dances he started without hesitation. A feat most newbies chicken out on on their first dance party. His outward appearance of an everyday working white collar is only due to his commitment towards a long term goal. In reality, he only need an excuse before changing into your Indiana Jones. This, I can relate to and even though our friendship is fairly new and there are still some uncomfortable moment when we hang out, I believe the short lived discomfort are caused by the collision of different worlds and expectations. Rui definitely helped ease him into some of the Asian quirks that comes with growing up in such a society.

“Rui is special.” that I agree with. I didn’t believe it in the first place thinking she’s just another meek Chinese, but I believe it now after seeing her dance. By this time, I think some of you must feel incredulous at how I always evaluate a person based on their dancing abilities. I’ve asked myself that same question, but gave up when I realized that any model that is used to judge people will have flaws. I use “the way people dance” because it is the way I have the most experience with. The same mock authority you’d give a person who’ve had sex with hundreds of woman or a middle manager who’ve been working at the same place for 30 years. I have danced with hundreds of woman and believe me when I say I can tell a person’s character from their dance. Certain type of people dance in a certain way, that is just accumulated statistics.

THE FRIENDS

I’ve met Mark’s friends a few times before, Adrian and Dave mostly. Later on, Frankman and Matt. It’s a good group of people who’ve known each other since childhood, been through all the crazes and embarrassments together. It makes me feel like an outsider sometimes and completely miss some of the jokes that they tell each other, but lately, as we meet more and more often, I feel that I am slowly integrating into the group. What they’d do for each other, the comfort in the way they interact together is quite amazing. It feels as though, anything you do is ok. No judgment, no accusations. Just a kind and heart warming feeling of support. I am jealous that I never had this.

THE NIGHT

The wedding took place at Restaurant du Vieux Port located in the tourist part of the old port. Pretty fancy and upper class. Mark booked the room and we had an open bar. I held back a lot because both my manager and the big boss was present at the wedding. Nope, no smashed up Peter for everyone to see. I did, however drank enough to warm up to the idea of dancing in front of all my co-workers of course. I believed that I danced to a Rumba, a Hustle, a Merengue and a Swing for everyone to see. Which made me really self conscious of the fact that I finally did it which in turn made me feel like running away from all the attention. I ended up leaving early around 10:30PM because of that. I don’t like the fact that this made me self conscious and actually didn’t know that this is really, not such a big deal as I made it out to be. Discussing this with Mark has alleviated some of that, but still not enough to make me stay longer. That and the fact that I got a huge headache.

The man in front of me uses a lady’s wallet to hold his money, which surprises me a bit. I mean, I’ve seen big fat wallets filled to the point where it’s just a block of leather, but this guy is the first person who just gave up on the stereotype of what a man’s wallet look like. He spent about a minute or so with his wallet open before deciding which one to use. So, since the opportunity is there, I took a peak inside to gauge the financial world of our Jon Doe.

There are at least 8 credit cards in that wallet and several other points cards which I lost count of. No cash and a driver’s license. It is also made of fake leather. I can only imagine what a cluttered world like that feels like. Every time you buy something, you have to spend the same amount of time deciding which cards with which option to use. I’ve long ago heeded Apple’s design slogan which, incidentally coincides with my dance teacher’s slogan: “Less is more.”

I mean, I am guilty of having several different credit cards as well however, I keep them for complete different reasons. Which also means that they never shows up in my wallet. A quick peek inside my current wallet shows a bank card, a driver’s license, company access key card and one credit card. If possible, I’d like to do away with the bank card and the key card all together, but life lessons taught me two important lessons that made them stay. First, always have a backup source of money. Second, put your keys where your money is, you won’t go far with only one of them anyway.

I don’t collect points or use one of those 2% cash back cards because they are more of a lure to spend than saving money. Add that to the headache of redeeming the points, no thanks. I also, don’t like to switch my primary credit card for credit score reasons. A long history of responsible spending and paying debt is a must in great credit history. If must comes to must, I prefer merging it with a card from the same bank.

Moral of the story? You really only need 1 credit card, a second one as a backup in your life. However, if you are a financially savvy person like me, there are no rules.

Am I having a mid-life crisis? It feels as though my week just zoomed by and I don’t remember whether anything happened at all. It could be because I am settled into a routine again and I admit. The recent stresses of work drains me so much that I do nothing but eat and sleep at home during the weekdays. Weekends! Now thats when life actually happens.

My commitment to excellence has been faltering as well. I think the daily grind of the same thing is getting to me. Originally, I had planned to have several different major project going on at once so that none of my eggs are in the same basket. It’s a sound strategy of diversification, same thing I applied in investment. What I didn’t account for though, is that one major emotion in one project will affect all the others as well. You are essentially still the same person. Just like how the current sub prime mortgage mess is spreading to the major banks.

A week ago, I was in the happiest high. A week later, I can’t really say anything about happiness.

Telling them the exact truth does nothing to clear their suspicion. People are too used to their own personal library of proven statistics that a person cannot get to a certain level of skill without putting in x amount of time. I guess, I can’t blame them since I haven’t told them about my dance background yet.

It was easy for me to copy the correct form used by the best bowlers in vicinity, after all, it’s just one sequence of movement, I am used to copy about 10 in 1 hour when learning new routines.  Which is why, no one believed me when I told them that this is my 3rd time playing bowling, they gave me the same questionable glance when I told them that I only played fuzball about 4 times in my life while blocking some of their extremely fast shots.

What they failed to notice though is that even though I have a perfect form in bowling, my accuracy and ball spin is the equivalent of someone who only played exactly 3 times in their life. My score never reached 100 in bowling. Same thing for fuzball. I simply figured out that the best way to block a shot as defense, is the maximum coverage of space shared between the defense men and goalie.  It’s simple mathematicl calculation. Again, they failed to take into account that I can’t score anything if my life depended on it because I am not attuned to how to shoot hard.

The curse of the dancer gives you perfect form, but no real umph.

Nothing shut a person’s chronic complaining up faster than giving that same person a taste of responsibility. Yes, I am talking about “moi”.

Teaching is different. Right away I started asking: “Are students going to understand these jumble mumbo? I for one, have a hard time grasping it and I live and breathe tech.”

The added responsibility means that I spend all my day Friday in meetings from now on while still being expected to perform my original duty. Which, to my knowledge, is still 60% of the US high tech population. Did I mention that I’d be teaching Engineers?

Thank god for having a documentations department so I don’t have to spend extra hours at work playing with power points or recording short clips of me mouse clicking on various buttons of the interface. I can already see the angry red face of my clients when they call me to find out why certain thing wasn’t done:

“Uhh yes… I was making power point presentations.”

My actual answer at the moment isn’t much better though. The amount of multitasking I am doing is getting insane, I won’t give a number because that’s business secret, but I can confirm that I actually calmly told a client of mine this today:

“Do you mind holding on for a moment while I pull up your file? Sorry, I am in the middle of working on another project and it’s hard to switch just like that.”

It’s my way of saying I remember talking to you about it, but there are so many people calling me to day who greeted me with “Hi, this is so-and-so, do you have an update on that problem we reported last week?” that I just give up. Please, don’t be irritated when I can’t recall the exact details of which variable out of your 2000 line of code within 10 seconds of me hearing your voice. I do attempt to act like a robot sometimes, but I am only human.

I am whining again

In any case, the training requires a lot of planing and because whether or not a training is good or bad depend solely on the presenter I don’t have any wiggle room or scapegoat to blame. I have to make it good. God, I still have flash backs of my oral presentations in French during my first year in a French environmen. I had no idea of what the words mean and I just memorized the sounds. YES the sounds! 5 Minutes of them!!! Thankfully, I’ve grown up to be a modern homo sapient and can now derive meaning from the sound. Except the presentation will run much longer and I have to worry about boring my students to death.

I slack off on updating this site. Don’t despair, it just means that I have more events to write about later. The drafts are piling up and I am having too much fun in the physical world to want to sit down and go over grammars.

In the mean time, I guess I’ll have to refer you to the restaurant review site I am doing with Kirk. It’s his first real website and he’s in charge of the layout and maintenance. I am just a guest blogger. The location is 9to5ers

Just realized that I am a sucker for this hairstyle:

So far, I’ve been attracted to the women I’ve met with this hairstyle. Even those whom I wasn’t interested before.

It all started with seeing first class dancers in them.

“So, yes or no?”

“Well… blah blah blah blah blah blah”

I waited patiently, even nodded and added some sound of agreement, but most of the speech went into my left ear and came straight out. I am not disrespectful or anything, I’ve just experienced this crap too many times. So, since I am the dick that I am and I get a kick out of forcing people to take decisions, I repeated the question.

“I heard what you are saying and what you are implying, but I still need to hear it from you because I work only with truth. So, yes or no?”

Don’t know about you, but I don’t like it when someone avoids making a decision. Sure, I created this question in an otherwise boring day, but it is there and I can’t understand why people have to use implied meaning to answer what was originally a yes or no question. For some, it’s the way they’ve always answered, for others, they feel uncomfortable saying no. For me, the first initial response is always no if I never thought about the question and came to a conclusion.

This situation happens most with woman and I have inquired a few about this aversion to say a definite yes or no. It’s usually to save the guy some pain of being denied or a covert way to leave an opening to later reverse their mind. I guess a colleague put my attitude nicely in his joking remark during one of my forceful questioning of a female colleague:

“Quick, just say yes or no. Peter has no time for this.”

Yes, you can’t hurt my ego by saying no to me. My well being is not dependent on your decision, please don’t diminish me by believing it’ll do anything. So let’s cut the crap please and just answer a simple question.

I’ve been struggling to make my lunch box tastier and have perfected different main dishes suitable for microwave lunch boxes. These are then frozen and stored to survive their 2 week shelf life. I use a lunch box with two divisions so that I can mass cook different dishes on odd nights and later mix/match to my heart’s content. Yet, there’s always one dish that bothered me because they tasted awful after being microwaved: frozen veggies.

My doctor friend and a chance encounter with a food process engineer both confirmed that the nutrients in frozen veggies are kept pretty well. (while my nutritionist contact disagrees, but I prefer to trust doctors and engineers) With this information, I concluded that the most time saving and frugal way of taking my daily consumptions of veggies is in these packages of frozen veggies. Real life is never as good as you think.

The taste was awful.

I finally found the solution last night, after countless times trying to spice it up. I’ve baked, sautee, fried (pretty tasty but takes too long) and boiled to come to the perfect way to cook it. This is what you do.

• Heat the frozen veggies up in a wok.
• Let it melt and don’t drain the water
• After all the ice are melted add olive oil
• Stir fry a bit and later add soy sauce (Make sure you use Kikkoman’s other wise it’ll taste like crap). Don’t add too much that it change the color of your veggies.

That’s it, no salt, no nothing but soy and oil. it’s a great side dish against my sweet and garlic BBQ pork on rice.

I was very satisfied just lying there on the beach while the sun happily roasted my skin as if it’s having me for dinner. She was flat on her stomach looking at me intently, wrapped in silent innoncence. Together we formed an interesting L shape on the sand of observer and observee. I was warm, on a quiet beach and feeling content. It’s the only thing that I do on a beach nowadays. The water’s not as clean as I remembered in my childhood and I can never shake the slimy feeling off of me when my skin moves in the water. It felt oily. Yep, I prefer the clean and dry sand better.

Which explains why, I was completely caught off guard.

“Peter, if your girlfriend feels depressed, what would you do?” Not even pausing to let me respond to my name.

*Very well, I can play pretend

“Well…” I choked on my first word because my reflective response shocked me.

My mind raced for a better solution, but by then, she had already observed my reaction and deducted certain meaning. I know then that there’s no other choice but to tell her the truth. Knowing that she, like me, has perfected the art of behavior observance through dancing.

“First of all, I wouldn’t want to have to deal with a depressed girlfriend. She’d have the confidence and self motivation to get through that type of mood…” I took a breath.

“But not everyone can be confident like that.” She quickly interrupted.

“Oh?… I don’t know then, I never had to deal with that yet.” I replied finally.

She looked away and by that expression, which I’ve come to understand as my failure in some kind of test. That’s when the sudden realization came. Could she be? No way… But ever since I’ve known her, ever since the first time I saw her on stage, I’ve always thought of her as the most fun, random and crazy person out there. I realized then that I don’t know her at all.

“Wow, my opinion of you just changed.” I said sadly

“Me too.”

That was a fond memory and for some reason, the question came back to me today. Actually, it was the answer that came to me today, followed by the memory of this question: “What will I do if my girlfriend is depressed?”

I will show her a better existence.

Economy is a great insight into human nature. Given a set of conditions, the majority of human population will act in certain way while a percentage act in another and in the end, a small group of pioneers will take some radical actions.

I get to analyze a quote from Warren Buffet (He’s the person I quoted the most in my blog posts, for the simple fact that I sincerely believe I can never outdo him in my life. Until I can achieve something close to what he achieved, I won’t even dream about it), from his Toronto visit this week. Warren Buffet said: “The Canadian dollar will continue to climb.” A conclusion that is going to change my economic strategy for the near future.

No, this is not simple Canadian pride, but the result of a look at the big picture. The majority of Canadian economy lies in exporting its products to the US. Because CDN dollar is considered by investors to be a resource/banking based currency. So when a resource crunch occurs, the CDN dollar goes up. It’s the same as buying gold. This should be good news for Canadians right? In a consumer’s view yes, but in my world, NO.

The rest of the industries are in shit, why? Because the price of all Canadian products are now 1/4 times higher than a year ago. The tech sector is hardest hit because people expect hi tech products to go down in price over time due to improvements in process and cheaper components. The tech sector has only seen about one year of good times after the 2000 collapse, this is too soon to be seeing hiring freezes.

Soaring tech stock prices, big companies buying random startup e-businesses, credit crunch, and hiring freezes? Does it sound familiar?

On another side, my stock trading is benefiting from this knowledge greatly. My bet in the tech sector has paid off greatly, which also brought my attention to something else. I am earning more in investment than the maximum pay raise they are allowed to give me for great performance (If they ever do a performance review). Which, by my automatic valuation filter means that I should put the minimum effort into my job so I can keep it and maximize my researches in investing.

I also decided to waste 2% of the money gained on anything I feel like. Which, at this early point in my experiments, isn’t much. I believe that it is very important to have fun while learning about investing. It also brought on another question that I have to think about later. If I multiply the investment capital by 10 (~10 years) and pull off this mediocre performance, I will then earn the same thing investing part time (~1 hour per day) than I am making working full time. No more working for a boss in 10 years!!!

I’ve reached my 1 year of investment as well. Meaning that I am done stretching my wings and is ready to fly and take on more risk. Mind you, my current portfolio is pretty risky already, but they are mostly based on large firms with huge capitals and great fundamental products. The next stage, is to move on to a more frequent trading interval (currently only moving each quarter), focusing on smaller percentage gains (~5% per trade).

So that’s a wrap, for my weekend rambling.

I’ve always wanted to write a cover letter tailored for myself and not the company which I am sending it to. So I thought: “Why not post it here?”

My main strength as a working productive citizen lies in the culmination of knowledge that I acquired in my dealings within different social groups. These, in my best attempt to identify them, are: Engineering, Investing and Performance Art. I agree that these are very different and unrelated fields, but believe me when I say that they all have the same origins: my curiosity and my search for a challenge.

That fact that I get satisfaction and entertainment from finding out how things work makes me naturally inclined to become an Engineer and have since eased my stress through numerous tough periods of product development cycles. It also takes away some of the mythical awes in technology and analyze them dispassionately.

The practice of constantly analyzing from different perspectives evolved naturally into my interest in investing. With that, I was able to learn and appreciate the art product valuation. This venture into the world of investing brought me face to face with my self. The doubts, emotions, losses and decisions all helped in furthering my understanding of the corporate world and most importantly of all: human nature.

To compensate for my technical and analytical interests, I took up ballroom dancing when I turned 18. I find it a great counter balance which improved other areas of my life. Through dancing, I learned how to express myself better as well as reaching a comfort level when performing in front of hundreds of people. Not to mention that it is a great way to stay fit. Because it is so different from the social circle of Engineering, I became more attuned to starting something unusual. which explains why I decided to join a start up chip design house in Taiwan when I graduated in year 2003; the year where high tech bubble is in full bloom.

So, if you are in need of an inquisitive person with technical background that can correctly analyze the market and is not afraid to be in the public spot light. I am your man.

It echoes my experiences in life. Just like love, it happens when you least expects it. I used to care about putting in a good entry, crafting it around the few beliefs that I think will increase readership. Which is why, it is strange to see the traffic increase in the past month where I didn’t particularly pay much attention to my site.

I remember checking in after 3 days only to find that the layout is totally messed up because I left the wrong theme on display. Add that to my less than enthusiastic approach to publish my blog with any technique you’d find on SEO optimization blogs and you understand the exertion I am feeling from all the efforts.

I am only writing about what I am doing everyday, on things that interest me, which is usually some time of experiment. Since we are on the same topic, let me tell you about my finding on trying to manipulate the great search engine: Google.

My two experimental sites are now banned by Google. It’s easy to check that whether or not yours is banned by doing a search with your exact URL. It should show up as the first entry. Both sites were banned because I had some type of link exchange script running, which is fine and I prefer that they do.

I also found out that participating in purchase of links will usually lower your PR by 2 levels. So basically they are starting to address the spam websites that are designed to increase page rank. I want Google to win so we can go back to the old way of simple web designs. What do I mean? Well, today’s internet is like a Microsoft design whereas the old web is either a linux or Ipod. See this video for what I am talking about.

So, I’ll probably continue on what to do. Staying with simplicity while increasing user friendliness. In the mean time, provide you with original content. Original enough to have no other copy because it is about me!

ln -s /shares/internal/PUBLIC /usr/www/lib/
vi /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf
insert dir-listing.activate = “enable”
:wq
reboot

These are the final commands that I sent before a reboot. The purpose was to enable http browsing of the 500GB mybook world edition that I bought for $170 (total after tax and shipping). My heart sank as I see my internet connection die while the reboot takes place. Although they should be completely unrelated events, but when they happened at the same time during hacking, it mean something.

A day later, I am still reflecting on how I bricked the $170 NAS storage device and why it affected me so much. I tried to talk to people at my work place, but all they gave me was that look. The look that the non geek population gives to geek population when they start talking about linux. That look of “Do you have no life? You spend your weekend on what? Computers?”

How can this even affect me? Surely not because of the $170 I spent on it, I’d gladly spend $170 to learn anything and I did learn a lot. I’d say that my knowledge of both linux and networking have increased by two fold after this weekend. It affected me, because I had everything working. I had SSH and FTP access working. Setup my router to link with DynDns to redirect a domain name to my home network’s random IP. The router than direct the SSH and FTP request to myBook World without having my home computer on all the time.

In non tech term. I created a Hard disk that I can access from anywhere in the world anytime I want by entering a domain name (Meaning, no firewall can block this). The beauty of this is, that the IP is random and myBook world runs on Linux with only 4W usage per hour on standby and it only wakes on hard disk access (20W per hour).

I had it, but now it doesn’t work. I want to say FUCK YOU! But there’s no target to say it to.

At least now, I am forced to spend time on other project so I can feel accomplished and get that frustration out. Maybe you’ll see that new layout on this site I’ve been talking about.

Every now and then, I come across something that stimulates new thinking. Whether it is from training my fingers to move in new ways via Guitar Hero or discovering the yin and yang of life while reading the uses of ginger to compliment sushi eating experiences, I log it all here. One, to remember. Two to help others make sense of the world.

Previously, I wrote about the Orange Box, today I am going to write about one of the extra games which came with the box because it changed something inside of me. Portal takes the complex idea of warp gates and went on to implement it in the best way they can.

I have thought about the possibility of gateways before (mainly, black hole theory), but never thought beyond the physics of creating and problems in entering the gate. Portal sets the player in a reality where this is possible, forcing us to accept the reality and deal with just the consequences.

I finished the game in 3 hours wanting more. There isn’t one level in Portal where my mind wasn’t challenged, or my concept of physics got distorted. It changed me because I was forced to rewire part of my brain to understand it. Knowing myself, I welcome any chance I have to do that.

I lived the life! Wasted money! And boy, does it suck to be single. Check out the Q3 report. It’s almost a year since I got serious about investing, after next quarter, I can finally do a review of exactly how well I did in a year. I discovered that Socializing cost about $400 per month if I do it every weekend.

Luckily winter is coming. So I will be staying at home to play video games most of the time. This should reduce the cost of living somewhat. Speaking of cost of living. I am really surprised at how little I use in terms of cleaning supplies. Thinking back, the rate at which my previous roomates and I consumes the supplies are probably 20 times my current rate. Minimalist living style does have its pluses.

The problem I am seeing now, is my food consumption. Whatever savings I gained from smaller supplies, I now made up in groceries. This is the only instances where I regret having my genes. The fact that I have to cook my own meal when I am dead hungry doesn’t help.

I will be reducing the frequency at which I post due to several reasons. The primary reason being the fact that I am still tweaking a new layout made from scratch. The second is due to my current initiative to improve my Engrish. Thinking about taking some basic classes and trying out Livemocha’s free language courses. I don’t have an opinion on the site yet because I only started recently. The fact that this is free is too good to be true.

Ever had a shopping frenzy? Or felt that you must buy something? Don’t feel bad, it’s the great marketing gear in the works. If everyone are as analytical as me, some people would be out of jobs and there’d be no point in persuasion.

Self analysis of my resilience

The establishing of life filters 1 and 2 helped me greatly, but I can’t attribute the great control of my impulses purely to that. It also has a lot to do with the fact that English is the 3rd language I learned in life. Whereas a girl who says fuck in Mandarin will make me think she has no class, the same “fuck” in English, will amuse me more than anything else because it’s rare to hear. As you can see, the emotional impact is different.

It doesn’t mean that I don’t get the impulses to shop. If anything, it is even harder to control the craving when the need to shop comes from within. Because you’ve already convinced yourself on an emotional level that you need something, thinking that it is perfect for your lifestyle, but do you really need it? The hard part is to convince yourself otherwise.

Wait before you buy

First of all, wait before you buy. If you are enticed by certain “deals”, you usually have time to wait it out a bit before the deals are off. I usually wait till 3 days before the end date to exercise that option. Sometimes you can even just tell the sales person that you’ve seen this deal before and ask for it. So a deadline is never a deadline in a sales person’s dictionary. Waiting also gets rid of the heightened emotions that you feel at that moment which compels you to make mistakes in your analysis.

There will always be other great deals

To prove the truthfulness of this, I asked a mattress sales person on the price of the one I am interested in (Of course it’s on sale at that moment and last only for 3 more days.) and checked back after a few weeks. What did I find? The same price on the same 50% off liquidation sale.

Take a test drive

Always test the item against the function which you intend it to do. You might think that it functions in a certain way, but in reality, it doesn’t. Your mind constructed the fantasy. Furthermore, are you buying it with speculation that it might be able to be changed to do something else? Is that method proven with testimonials? This is where Google comes in handy. A quick search on certain items will always land you numerous negative reviews. Don’t take it all as truth, certain people just have no clue, but read those who provide careful analysis of the unit and weight it against your own way of using the item. Things like ergonomically uncomfortable are usually ignored by me since I enjoy adapting to new ways of interaction. But if a hacked Wiimote introduces a 200msec delay in game, that’s a deal breaker for me because I like sniping. So test driving will actually act as a counter balance to the euphoria you are feeling. Have an clear idea of which need the item has to satisfy and think of a few deal breakers where no means no.

Compare prices

Again, how much of a price difference can you ignore? I am up to a point where $20 difference in price can be ignored. I make most of my savings while buying expensive items like fridges and stove. Since the time it takes to find another item of $20 savings is not worth it. Items under the range of $200 are simply bought without comparing prices. (The most basic discount is 10% so 10% of $200 is $20).

End

I hope you enjoyed this and that this will help you in the future in determining what to buy, or to quench your thirst to buy a new iPhone. Below is an example for my reason to ignore all the gadget craze. It is very simple:

UMPC is coming and it won’t be long until Apple comes up with a touchscreen tablet PC. The technologies are already there, just not cheap enough to bring everything together yet. When that time comes, I won’t be needing any gadget at all. What do you need in a gadget? Mine are simple, make phone calls online, connect wirelessly to the net, listening to MP3, touch screen to draw in photoshop. Why waste money?

October 2nd saw the release of a fix. Information in the patch said something about fixing the position prediction algorithm. Curious in nature, I decided to see if I was right. And I was. Immediately, I started dominating the playing field.

“So I am not as rusty as I thought.”

Some of the feelings are coming back now. I just let my hands move by itself. Each shot strengthening the connection between past and present. I say, I have a 25% hit ratio at the moment should be able to get back up 50% once I am more familiar with the new setup. For an improved sniping experience, I have long switched to my own way of holding the mouse. Instead of moving my whole wrist or elbow, I decided to plant the wrist on the mouse pad and rely purely on my fingers to move the mouse. I hold the full weight of my mouse between my thumb so that it slightly float above whatever surface it is on. I figured that my fingers have more precision than my wrist. The gain in precision is thus obtained by decreasing the range of motion. I managed to offset the handicap slightly by increasing the mouse sensitivity to 75% while playing games.

So I kicked people’s ass for two nights straight, the improvement is staggering. I am usually the one with the second most points on the leader board, with the first being a scout of course. So, with that record, I think I can safely say that I am more entitled to judge this sniper class. Here are some interesting tid bits that I discovered.

• When coming out from a wall, enemy snipers who’s already in position can now see your arm first before you can see them. Giving a camping sniper first strike opportunity.
• Fully charge head shot will kill anyone
• Head shot without charge or a fully charged body shot will kill the light armored classes: Sniper, Engineer and scout.
• You can shoot through the cracks between any object. Giving you some very interesting cover.

I also noticed a big difference when playing COD with my co-workers. I seem to have an easier time sniping them off than before. Everything is like slow motion to me, feels like my brain is in a sort of over clocking mode because TF2 is a much faster game and people jumps around more. Maybe my theory was right, if we are forced to take information at a higher rate, we’d think faster. Further reinforcing my belief that, we need to constantly put ourself on the edge in order to improve.

I have gobbled up and filtered through an insane amount of information in the past years now that I have nothing better to do. I still remember being referred to StevePavlina’s personal improvement site and the optimistic view it brought to my life afterwards. That lasted for a good while, but what can I say, junk is junk. I even went as far as trying out a Triphasic Sleep pattern based on his blog posts.

That is when my belief in the truthfulness of that site waned. There’s one major hurdle that he never once mentioned and that everyone else who tried this superhuman sleep pattern has complained about. The problem with sore eyes. It is a fact that our eyes suffers great wear and tear without rest in this superhuman sleep pattern and it is also a fact that he never mentioned anything about it. Add that to the fact that the recent blog posts are filled with fluffs which are designed to generate word counts, not content.

Which brings me to a blog that practices both quality, with real life examples and still manages to keep everything short so your attention don’t wane. Ladies and gentlemen: PickTheBrain

This is one gem out of 6 months of surfing randomly. (The number is so small because blogs exploded in recent years. I often see one author with 2~3 blogs updated regularly). I will continue to read and monitor other similar blogs to see if any contents are copied, but so far, so good and I think it’ll benefit the few people that reads my blog.

I got so addicted that I wasted one full day just playing it. It feels like the game that I used to know, but more fun. It’s not just senseless tossing of grenades or dominations of the snipers anymore. It’s all about strategy.  Let me first go through some of the balancing changes.

Sniper: None

Engineer: None

Pyro: Is now god of closed quarter fighting. I think they increased the flame thrower’s damage by too much. A duel between HWguy and Pyro usually ends in pyro winning. Even if you live, the flame on your body will still kill you.

Soldier: The rocket blast radius is bigger, and the rocket jump is higher now. Basically back to the same level as TFC. Soldier is an exact copy from that game.

Demoman: Grenade damage slightly decreased and are limited to 4 grenades per reload instead of 6. Reason being, that no one will use soldiers because demoman is statistically a better performer.

HWGuy: Minigun is now more accurate and can do critical hit when bullets hit the head.

Spy: None.

Medic: None.

Scout: None.

My best class is now a soldier because its power and controls are exactly the same as TFC, my experience with soldier are usually better than anyone on my team. Using soldier usually land me on the top of the frag list. That is, without capturing anything. A quick check on my kill ration shows me that I do around 6:1.

Tried sniper a bit. I still have a hard time hitting people. Still slowly adjusting to the new sprite 3d model and feel. For instance, I used to aim for the top of an enemy’s head in order to land a head shot in TFC. TF2 moved that spot to somewhere lower. Around the neck area. Moving target is also different now, the net code that calculates a hit is strange and I haven’t figured it out yet. Add all this, to the fact that I’ve been gaming with my alternate hand and I used to play TFC with reverse mouse, my sniping accuracy is comparable to that of a noob. At least I still know some of the strategies.

I can’t really explain it. I hate the fact that snipers are nerfed so much, but I also love the fact that it is very team oriented with its built in voice chat ability. A team with someone who issues commands usually wins against a mob that just want to frag. Except of course, when I decide to be an engineer/soldier to defend. Even so, a good combination of HWguy, medic, soldier and scout will usually destroy my defense.

If I am an overly emotional person, I’d say I was traumatized by the experience. Instead I think I will just laugh it off as a learning experience.

So I walked into my favorite hair salon in downtown to mow the lawn on my head and decided to give the new guy a try when he came over and get me, after all, the last time I let a new guy do my hair, he turned out to be an extreme careful and sharp person. I must’ve bragged about how fast his scissor was moving to all of my friends back then.

Right away, I noticed some warning signs from this newer guy as I watched him make the preparations before the cut. He was constantly checking the line of customers coming in to the saloon instead of focusing on the preparation itself. He has bad hygiene and his interactions with the machineries are very rough. I should have balked right then, but I didn’t want to be rude and make him look bad just because of what I think he might be.

Well, turns out I was right all along. After enduring him constantly pulled my hair off because he raised the scissor too fast and the fact that he had no deodorant on at all, I drew the last straw when I saw the knife.

I didn’t believe he was going to do it first, but when the knife got as near as 1cm to my skin, I begin to understand that we live in two different realities. He had picked up a knife from the counter, without washing and without changing the blade in order to trim my side burns. A glimpse of the blade shows shaving creams and hairs from his previous victim.

This is when things got loud, I shouted stop so all the shop can hear and told him promptly to change the blade. When he started arguing with me, telling me to calm down as if I am a spoilt brat, I just got up and left, without finishing the hair cut. I never returned to that hair salon again. It’s sad that one bad apple change my whole view about that place, but I just don’t want to see that asshole again.

I am in the process of updating the architecture of the blog and revamping the layout. So, torn in between getting the work done and finishing an entry. I opted to write something short and mediocre to show you some daily efficiency calculations that has become second nature for me.

I will talk about those annoying coupons that comes in through the mailbox with flyers. Efficiency 101 says that cutting out and using all the coupons is a waste of your time. If you earn $10 an hour, you should not spend time on a coupon that saves you $0.10 because you can earn more money working in the time you used to cut out the coupon. Later though, I started paying attention to these coupons again. Especially the fast food ones.

Due to the fact that I don’t have any family in the continent of America at the moment and my status as a single bachelor, eating is one of the biggest headache I face everyday. Eating out every meal is expensive, and cooking your food everyday is a waste of time. So what’s one to do when you are in this situation and lead an active outdoor life? This is where these coupons come in handy.

In an active life, the fat you take in can barely keep up with the fat you burn out. So in order to keep the balance and maintain your health, it’s necessary to use these coupons and purchase meals in bulk. Four 6″ subs is a great deal for $12. Anything that equate to $3 per meal is a steal with the current eat out meal averaging at $8. Even if you are stacked for food already, it is worth it to take an extra meal that day just to gain the extra nutritions. When you are burning nutrients at the rate I am talking about, anything helps.

Everyday at lunch, I’d look enviously at the packed boxes that my colleagues bring to the table. Most of them still lives with their parents, or are already married with their own families. It’s something that eats at my heart whenever I sit down with them for lunch. Their multicolored boxes dotting the table, making my single cup of instant noodle stands out like a trench-coated lone gunman.

I am really missing my family, or rather, the comfort of one. Everyday I come home and it’s just myself and the multitude of problems awaiting to be solved. There’s never relaxation, only temporary escapes from reality. It’s true that you get the comfort of being your own boss, but at the same time, you don’t have the cozy feeling that someone’s got your back whatever happens.

There’s never any nice surprises that warms your heart. A nice meal ready after a hard days work, pre-filled gas tank when someone knows that you are driving long distance, or just the simple familiar question: “are you allright” when you have a bad day.

Nope, it’s just me and the world.

Letters from you. Bills from canceled subscriptions and the various document requests that I have to dig up for you because you can’t be bothered to look it up. Life is a pest, an annoying son of biatch.

I always thought that life would be simpler under your care, without all these forms made from black ink and white paper. I signed up for all these extra protection under the pretense that I have a choice when you are just as happy shoving it up my throat if I refuse. What do these serve? When the important time was upon me, where were you and your promises?

Really, I am just pissed off by how greedy you are. Sitting on your arse, not doing anything. Yet you ask for 67%  of the profits. Sure you are smart and sure you’ll be rich. BUT YOU ARE A FUCKING JERK!

A letter to the Canadian government.

Finally after two full night of playing, I can more accurately describe the gameplay experience and how everything balances each other out. If you haven’t read part 1 or part 2, please do so.

For the past year or so, I’ve been playing COD with my non-dominant hand, so the style switch to TF2 has a profound impact on my performance and play style.

Immediately, I noticed that it’s really hard to ambush people unless you are using a spy and the sound of footsteps play less of a role in detecting enemies. The only reason why you’ll need to hear, is when against an invisible spy and I don’t believe they make any noise at all. This fact is perhaps amplified by the maps themselves. Generally speaking, the maps are smaller with tighter quarters and less hiding places. Which brings me to my next point and my favorite class in any game: snipers.

Snipers are basically left out there to dry now, with a shooting hinderance resembling to that of the real world, snipers in TF2 are further toned down because they are stripped of the two other lethal abilities which normal snipers have. Lethal damage and good environmental covers. Spies further complicate the issue with their stealthing abilities and silent footstep. Add that to the fact that spy no longer bleed when disguised and shot by enemies, it is now impossible to do anything against a spy. I noticed that the sniper rifle doesn’t have a crosshair when zoomed out, further indicating the TF2 team’s devotion in making a sniper rifle useless in anything but sniping. To test out that theory, I used two strings and 4 short strips of scotch tape on my monitor as a mock up crosshair and proceeded to headshot people with the rifle zoomed out. I didn’t manage to kill anyone even after shooting them 3 times… if I manage to hit them that is.

If you are a fan of Unreal, or are switching to TF2 from Unreal engine, you’ll love the scout class. They are no longer helpless when caught red handed against an enemy. Its speed combined with its double jump ability makes scout the most maneuverable class I’ve seen in all games. The double jump enables the scout to change jump direction in mid air which means that you can basically kill everything but a sentry with your scattergun. I believe that a nerf needs to be done on the scattergun. It is basically a super double barrelled shotgun that can instantly hit an opponent as long as you press “shoot” when they are in the middle of the your cross-hair. During my short life as a scout in one game, I’ve caputred the flag twice, killed off 2 HWGuy, 1 soldier, 4 snipers, 2 engies, 4 medics and
1 pyro while getting my ass handed to me 7 times by the sentry gun. A good scout who has the good sense to run back home when health is low is basically not possible to be killed. Scouts are annoying as hell, but not as annoying as a demo man.

Facing a demo man made me understand the one biggest change in TF2 valve made. They made the dimensions every projective bigger. Jumping over a demoman’s pipe bomb is no longer a strategy, with the damage increase of their contact pipe bomb, they can score a one shot kill on a HWguy with a direct hit. In a tunnel, demoman is king. I myself is not a good demo, but I’ve come face to face with many and so far, the only reason I managed to kill one, is to take advantage of the intervals when they reload their grenade launcher. Even then, I run the risk of walking into their sticky bomb trap.

I’ve generally stayed away from using the spy class because I really suck at it in this version. I am too used to be able to feign death and throw grenades as a spy that the new abilities turned me off completely at the beginning. However, after seeing some 1337 spy pwnage, I decided that I might give it a try in the future. What eventually happened to the spy class is that they made an engineer/sniper completely vulnerable to the spy. I love using the engy and knows all the strategies of detecting spies, however, I find that often, even when I know the person is a spy, there is no way for me to perform any counter measure, except hoping for my soldier protégé to realize that the team mate I shot at is a spy. Even if they were discovered, they can just use invisibility and vanish out of thin air. This is not your not-so-invisible blurry transparent air invisibility. It is complete invisibility. So any class that finds itself walking alone will usually get picked off by a good spy.

With that, I think I can safely wrap up this review and say that. Although I didn’t like the initial changes, I find that the balance is good way to put all class in back in their shoes and that the game is still as addictive as ever. Be prepared to sacrifice the kill score so that your team can win though, because in this new version, it’s very easy for the other team to win if your team is only focused on fragging.

If you’ve missed Part 1 you should go and read it first. I talk about the history and general impressions on Valve as well as the details of the sniper and the spy. Part 2 will continue with dissecting the rest of the classes.

Soldier :

-Great news, they kept the rocket jumping. Although a bit less powerful than the TFC version. You don’t jump as high and it’s easier to get injured in TF2.

-The rocket’s blast radius and strength is reduced, perhaps as a counter balance to the increased damage of the rocket itself. Also, I don’t know what’s been changed, but it seems that it’s easier for the rocket to do a direct hit on another player compared to TFC. You can no longer kill the lesser classes by just shooting the ground, most classes will survive after 4 shots, except for the scout.

-Out of all the classes, I can say that the soldier is the one that changed the least

-Beware of spies soldiers are very easily stabbed from behind by a cloaked spy.

HWguy:

-The mini-gun is less accurate at longer range. A scout with a shotgun that’s outside of the effective range of the mini-gun will kill you.

-HWguy’s shotgun is the same as everyone else’s in this version. No super shotgun for him.

Pyro:

-Same pyro but with reduced speed and less range on the flame thrower. Say if a soldier is backing away from you, you have a fat chance of killing him.

-Pyro no longer have the fire rocket launcher.

Scout:

-Has double jump to replace the concussion grenade jump

-Scout’s shotgun is as strong as everyone else’s. Probably making the scout the best sniper killer. I noticed that the shotgun’s damage does not decrease as the range increases and is counted as an instant hit. Making a scout with a shotgun a very scary foe.

-Scout’s baseball bat is very powerful. Haven’t measured it scientifically yet, but enough to force you to run away.

Medic:

-Complete overhaul to become a pure healing class.

-The invulnerable ability is very effective against choke points. I can see some great dual player action emerging from this.

Engineer:

-Same sentry gun, same dispenser. The dispenser’s self destruct is no longer strong enough to kill anyone.

-Since the grenades are no longer around, I haven’t seen any team beat 3 engineers with 3 sentry guns together. Even with the spy’s special tool to disable sentry guns.

-Fully charged sniper shot can no longer blow up the sentry gun.

Demo man:

-Very strong grenade launcher. Able to one shot kill a soldier on direct hit. I obviously couldn’t use it very well, but a veteran with expert knowledge of the grenade’s arc can kill almost anything.

That’s it for tonight, I will talk about some game play next time in part 3. In the mean time, if you haven’t already done so, check out part 1.

My history with Valve

Having played the original Half Life and TFC for several years, the word TF2 brings back the memories of a good time. Back then, Valve Corporation released Half Life with TFC and Counter Strike mods. Players were getting the sweet deals of 3 games in one. It was a selfless act on the part of the company and have forever captured my loyalty since the day I heard of the feat.

The deal

TF2 news came and went over the past 7 or 8 years with no release date in view. I’ve heard so many of the possible releases that I brushed away the recent announcement of TF2 as just another fluke… They proved me wrong with The Orange Box. Another selfless act on Valve’s part, packaging 3 different games in one for the price of $49. Half life, episode 1, episode 2, Portal and Team Fortress 2.

I ordered my Orange Box over Steam, which gave me a discount of $5 for the whole box. Steam, is an online sales platform where you can order games digitally and download it when you want to play. It suits a CD-less lifestyle perfectly while keeping the hard drive squeaky clean. I can wipe the game from my system, knowing that Steam has a record of my purchase and I can re-download it whenever I feel like.

The Game

First impression of the game is a mixed feeling. I came back half looking for the game that I enjoyed several years ago, yet half wishing for innovation for more diversity. Well, I got what I was looking for: half half. It was the same style, same feel same classes. They event kept the rocket jumping for the soldiers, however, they also made minor changes that’ll mean a complete overhaul of play style for those of us who specialized to a certain class in TFC. I can understand them though, these changes are made, to facilitate team work. Forcing each class to be limited to doing what they are designed to do. Without further ado, I’ll get on with the classes.

The Sniper:

-You can only charge up and see the dot in scoped view. So no more charged shot without zooming. The scope also limits your periphal vision so you are more vulnerable to sneak attacks when scoped. These effectively render the sniper rifle useless in close to mid range battles.

-You can no longer jump while scoped, forcing sniper wars a pure matter of lag and aim. You also lose your charged dot if you try jumping to avoid a shot.

-Charging is done automatically when scoped and the shot is fired when you press the attack button instead of the moment you release the button. This adds some delay for those of you using keyboards to attack or jitter for those of you who assigned attack to the mouse button.

Spy:

-Secondary attack is assigned permanently to stealth, a very useful functionality to get past security, but also too powerful based on my opinion. The cool down helps nerfing this skill a bit, but not that much.

-Disguise is much improved, as it automatically matches the walking speed of the class you are trying to imitate (except for scouts) as well as allowing your ally know that you are in disguise. Making it an easier to use skill for the normal population.

-Feign death and tranquilizers are gone. Yes, no more playing a convincing death only to back stab people after they walk past your corpse.

I will discuss the rest of the classes in part 2 and maybe online impressions in part 3. Possibly adding grenades later. I don’t know what they plan on doing, but it seems that grenades are completely missing from the game.

Continue on to part 2 and part 3.

If you look at my resume, you’ll never see the word “Multitasking” under the skills section or within the description of any job I had. Multitasking is a modern buzzword created by people on an assumed possibility of the brain to perform in certain way. The assumption is that we never use more than 10% of our brain, but where did that come from? Ask any brain imaging expert and you’ll come to the understanding that, we never use more than 10% of our brain at the same time, but each function takes up a different 10% of our brain. In plain English, if we were to be able to do everything at once with full focus, we’d be using 100% of our brain. If that happens, we’d burn up all the sugar in our body in a short amount of time to eventually suffer a somewhat uninspiring death.

____________________________________

Let’s look at what multitasking is. Here’s a short clip from my life:

Phone rings

“MI department, Causa speaking”

“Hey Causa, it’s D, lead architect from T company speaking. I am on site and am kind of in a jam here. There’s an emergency on the production floor and I was wondering if we can brainstorm together to come up with a solution. If you can sit down for a minute or two to do that that’d help me greatly.”

“Shoot, I am all ears.”

• I cleared my mind of whatever it was that I was working on, took out my notepad and pen.

Long explanation of the problem including hardware specs, wiring, software

30 minutes later

“A few possibilities. If it’s a hardware malfunction, it could be cause by x or y or both, in that case, your best bet is to RMA (Return Merchandise Authorization) the boards. If it’s a software malfunction, then you can try x and y patch or rewrite the code in z ways so that it can go around this possible bug. Based on my experience, a blue screen at this point usually means power up failure.”

“That’s interesting, I thought I’d already made sure that it doesn’t go into that state…..”

Long explanation of how the code works

“That’s true, it can also happen that way. Ok so here’s what we can do for now, you perform x, y and z on the system while I do a, b and c here to check a few thing, I will get back to you with an update if I find something.”

“Sounds good. I’ll give you a call back after my tests are done on this side.”

• I put down the phone and notepad, switching my mind back to my desk with my hand randomly scanning different objects, hoping that some familiar motion will tell me that it is what I was doing before the phone rang. Having failed that, I then looked at my computer screen and read the top most window that’s open to get an idea of the program that was running. The memory of what I was doing smashed me like a thunder, however, the creative thought that was going through a solution didn’t come back, I spent some time staring into the blank trying in vain to remember what the clever solution was. In comes the sales guy.

“Hey Causa, how’s it going!”

“Not bad, just got off the phone with T company, quite a nasty problem.”

“Oh yeah? What was wrong?”

Short explanation of the problem and solution

“I see I see, well, keep it up… Yeah, so , about that problem from Mr.A , have you made any progress on that? What did Mr. A say?”

“Mr. A?”

• Mind goes into deep search mode, repeating the name of the guy till another word surfaced, then I repeated the two names together, hoping to conjure a date, a problem, or a hint of a solution.

“Doesn’t ring a bell, which company or what was the problem?”

“It was company P and the interrupt problem when scanning at 500 fps.”

“Oh that! Well, no concrete solution yet, I am still writing some code to verify the bug.”

“Ok that’s great, keep working on it, oh and when do you think you can have the solution ready?”

“Hmmm, I don’t know, maybe 2 or 3 days. Say… next week?”

“Ok. Can you just email me with the latest correspondence you had with him and let him know that you expect to have something ready by next week?”

“Sure will.”

• Sales guy leaves the area, I sat down in front of my mail PC and checked some email. Answered the few that are quick and easy, flagged the ones that’s going to take a while to think and gets back to writing my program.

Phone rings

“MI department, Causa speaking”

“Hey Causa, this is T from logistics, I am calling concerning the box that you sent last weekend, I am just wondering what the cost of producing the item was and how much we are selling it to the client.”

“Huh?”

“The B brand camera marked here going to company B? It says you are the one shipping it.”

“Oh that! Uhhh, let me bring up my files just a sec…. Ok yeah, it doesn’t cost anything, the client sent to us for interfacing and that’s all done now, so it can be returned to the client.”

“Oh, ok, in that case, here’s the tracking number.”

“What do I do with this tracking number?”

“In case the customer asks for it”

“Oh yeah right…. I thought they’d call you guys.”

• We then bid each other farewell and hung up the phone. Having completely lost track of where I was, I decided to start a chit chat with my co-workers about some new policy or how much my wallet is hurting from attending all these important events for my friends. Half way through, my manager showed up along with my team leader to set a date on how to split the teaching materials for the training class. Then proceeded on to discuss a particular big name client’s development project that fell through the cracks.

20 minutes later

• I looked at the time, 3PM already. I contemplated between logging and organizing everything that happened in the past 2 hours or getting some hot water to boil my tea. I opted for the tea and proceeded on enjoying a 10 minutes tea time, surfing the net and answering questions from random colleagues that popped by.

And the day continued it’s hectic pace

____________________________________

If you just look at the bullet part, you can see the thoughts that went through my mind and further feel the drag that macro-multitasking has on me. With each event fragmenting the previous, rendering it impossible to be reconstructed till eventually, I have to start a thought from the beginning and trace it till the point where I stopped to figure out the next step. The reason why these are so lethal is because they are completely unrelated field to each other: Programming, shipping, training to a few special client cases to recall on the spot without going through my files. Keep in mind, that all this time, I was micro-multitasking, i.e. making use of my mouth to speak, ear to listen, eyes to read and hands to write or type while shaking my leg all the while in nervousness.

In sum, I could’ve finished the program and be done with it if I didn’t have to multi-task. Multi-tasking have a tendency of forcing a person to serve several people at the same time and making promises that the person cannot keep in order to get them away whereas single tasking is the brute force behind working. It’s where real productivity comes from.

Yes, this story is not made up. This happened today and has continued happening since I-don’t-know-when.

I am busy going from place to place and attending different events and taking pictures all the while. Hopefully, the twitter update will keep you happy for now. It’ll be worth it because I am taking the time to format the pictures and spend more time on writing the entries. I will also be rewriting the first few chapters of the Dansons series and change the perspective from which the stories are told.

What do banks get out of all these offers? I looked at all the fine prints in puzzle because I don’t see any benefits for the big financial firms. I trust my judgments and experiences that these are right and the end result is money earned. At the same time, I also trust in the simple fact that, the bank employs several people who are a few hundred times smarter and more experienced than me in this matter which led to the conclusion that they got something to gain from this.

Then everything became crystal clear when I reread the fine prints at the requirements section. An income higher than $35000 annually. If you repackage people in this earning category with those of a high interest, but more risky credit card holders, you can resell the debt in forms of securities and bonds.

So basically, it makes the securities in question appears to be AAA grade to a potential lender because so many people with good credit is in it and the interest return on average is high. What they probably didn’t tell the investors is that the ones with good credit are charged at a low interest, while the ones with bad credits are charged at a higher interest.

Makes me wonder, what type of trigger will cripple these type of transactions. If all the more riskier person with low credit score, which makes up the main part of the interest generated by the package, suddenly bail out. What could trigger a country wide bail out like that? Massive layoff of the basic low wage industries.

It seems that I over estimated my frugalness and underestimated the social activities costs. So, most of my projects are yet again on hold because I don’t have the means to buy the materials. My financials are pretty complicated, but suffice to say that I can’t take money out at the moment and there’s a deadline of paying something. My cash value cannot support the money flow of debt to return.

Photography: $150

I can still take pictures, but I think I’ve pretty much explored most of the possibilities of a Vanilla camera. I’ve ordered the most basic lens hood for my camera for $20, but the rest is going to be on hold. Next item in line is a $110 external zoom flash self adjusts based on zoom level as well as the ISO setting. It is crucial for capturing movement in low lighting condition until the new night sensor comes out in 2009.  I also need about $20 in basic material cost to finish up the DIY photography backdrop for when I have models over…

Longer term, I will be getting a wide angle lens and telephoto lens for architectures and sports.

Home Improvement: $920

I am debating whether or not to finish my couch. It’ll cost about $200 in materials and without it, I only have enough sitting place to invite two people over at a time. $50 for a projector screen, $400 for a projector and $270 for Nintendo Wii. I should be set by then.

Longer term, I’d like to get a full set of kitchen knives and spices with a wide variety of sauces.

Computer: $512

Just bought 2GB of RAM for $60 complimenting the 1GB already in my computer. It’s just in time as my Photoshop usage often exceeds 1GB usage. However, I still don’t feel complete because a few games are coming out that I have to get: Half life Black box (Includes HL2, Episode 1, Episode 2, Portal and TF2)  $60, Spore $50. Probably spend about $100 on graphic card. Oh, and the materials to build my own computer case. Estimated at about $40. Then add a My book world edition to backup all my digital files. $130. Re-register domain $72

Longer term, I want two more computer monitors and eventually upgrade my cpu plus logitec’s airmouse

Self Improvement: $220

Need to finish my German class Level 2. Registration is $220.

Longer term, I’d like to back pack through Africa and take more salsa lessons.

Total: $1802
It’s not much, but I have to find a way to come up with this money. I am hungry and well motivated.

Ever since I started bicycling, I complained about the pot-holes and obstacles on the road with the most dangerous of those being absent-minded people who opens their car door the second before you pass by. People just aren’t aware of their surroundings nowadays, going through their days like a zombie. These difficulties made me dream about the biker’s wet dream: long paved and uninterrupted road without pot holes nor cars. In Montréal, it’s called the Green Line 1

I stumbled upon it 3 weeks ago and have diligently been trying to conquer it every weekend and as a result, I finally did manage on my third try. Let’s take a look at the path from Google map first. (Click here for the Google map location)

My first try was child’s play and I turned back after crossing the Champlain service bridge. It was an exploratory run with light gear, definitely not enough to sustain me through the brutal 42.38km trial now that I look at it with hindsight. But that day, I was happy, I had a smile that stayed on my face for the better part of the week. Co-workers thought I got laid big time. I believe, that you too will understand once you have the sea wind in your face, the sun behind your back and a long straight path going into infinity. Kind of like this panorama.

Here are some more picture on the service bridge.

My second try was another futile attempt because I couldn’t judge how far it actually is and drank most of my water half way through the path. I did however took some good pictures though.

I completed the whole thing on my third try. It was brutal and I was dehydrated by the end because I opted to bring my camera instead of an extra bottle of water. When you are biking such a long distance, a small change in weight can mean a lot. It was twice as long as I imagined and I fool heartedly charged through the end without thinking about the way back. End result? One hour to get there, two hours to get back.

Here is a panorama of the whole path.(This panorama shows the path that I took. It’s not a straight line)

Why did I go through with it? If I must bring it out in words, I can only say that it was the sun, the open endless road and the promise of a heaven at the end that drove me to complete it. I find solace in hearing the winds in my ear on a completely abandoned path where the end cannot be seen. Merged with the quiet noise of nature, there’s almost a mysterious beauty to it. Or perhaps I just love it because it gets me away from people. Too much people that suffocates my mind during the week.

So, if you are in Montréal and enjoys biking. Try it out.

“It’s all a fantasy”

Every movie about dancing has a hot and well established member of the opposite sex. Well, my story is no different, it is just funny when viewed in hindsight.

Miss T has brown skin (she contributed to my illogical preference in brown skin), long wavy hair, skinny and is an engineer. She is probably the only other person that I know who walks in between these two worlds. Try as I may, I never managed to find anyone else like her later in life. It is a proven fact that studying Engineering and studying dancing are mutually exclusive and she is just an anomaly.

I remember seeing her for the first time at the dance party. She was like an angel who descended from heaven with spotlights highlighting her beauty. I was mesmerized and afraid of her at the same time. By this time, I am pretty comfortable in a party setting and considers myself a veteran. But that night, I went home and I practiced like I never practiced before. She was my reason for constantly improving myself so that one day, I can dance with her and not bore her to death.

I thought to myself that night: “Until the day arrives, I will practice with air in my parent’s basement.” It was a valiant effort on my part and helped in getting me hooked to the whole charade of dancing. Later in my dance career, I realized that, I’ve been practicing all the moves wrong and had to spend double the amount of time to unlearn what my muscles takes for granted. Fantasies doesn’t pay.

But time soon ran out and I got accepted to Computer Engineering and must move away from my home town. So, at the last party of the summer, I sheepishly walked up to Miss T. held out my hand, realized that it was sweaty, swiped it on my pants and stuttered slowly:

“Would… would… like to dance?”

Looking away, I waited with thumping hearts for the relief of rejection. So that I could run home and hid myself from this whole dance thing for the rest of my life.

Next: First competition

Dansons Series Index

From the point of view of women, I have a serious flaw which most of them will not be able to overlook. Guys I know can probably brush it aside as free-willed thinking, but for the female species, this flaw is bigger than life itself. Up until the moment of this writing, whenever I mentioned this belief, I always receive the same strong responses from members of the opposite sex. I am, of course, talking about having kids.

It’s not that I am irresponsible or because I treat women only as fuck toys. I just don’t need one for two reasons. The strongest argument being that our sole purpose to live is to have a kid. Or to pass down the responsibility of doing something great to our child. Of putting all the hope for goodness in them because we screwed up our own so badly.
The second reason, is an extension of the first. I don’t have anything interesting to contribute to the future human gene pool. At least, nothing that I can see that’s unique to myself which is in my gene. What’s more important for me to pass on, if anything, would be in the form of ideas and revelations unless it was my genes that facilitated the type of thinking that I achieved. All these, is still conditional to the fact that my mind is worth preserving.

So there you go. Now whenever some girl gasps in surprise at my stance on having babies on a date, I can just refer to this article.

Guess who’s online on a DRY DSL link? Yeah you guessed it. Yours and only bi@tch.

I ended up banging all the numbers at Bell even though I signed up with teksavvy. So, as usual, bell pulled their delaying you for 2 weeks and then schedule you for a dispatch but never show up till the last 15 minutes routine. I took it in stride knowing full well that this is standard procedure at bell.

But having Dry DSL and not having to pay for a land line is awesomeness. Now I just have to get my skype number setup and I am done.

“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.

“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.

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.”

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.

A life sans coffee solved some problems but also introduced a new one. My hypoglycemia is coming back full force now that my daily source of sugar intake has been cut off.

Coffee= sweets in my life. I never had any sweet food without the coffee, so it’s not surprising to go a few month without consuming one bit of sugar. Heck, looking at the cupboards in my new kitchen, I don’t see any sugar.

Which is why, I unable to get up and drive home at this moment, because my hands shake too much to drive. It’s taking more than the usual amount of sugar to stabilize this time.

I think I should start taking candies like I do with vitamins everyday.

Logitech

I am sitting on the floor using my computer. Things got messier after two full weeks of cleaning. I don’t know why, but every piece of item that I pick out of the boxes has to go through a rigorous cleaning ritual. All the plates through the dishwasher, all the cloth through the washer/dryer and all the rest of the crap through my towel.

I guess, I want to scrub off the past and start anew.

Every time they describe how loving their friend’s children are, they represent their love through the amount of money given. Red pouches, presents etc. They describe people they know using their career successes. I never get to know if a person is a loving father or if a girl is a sex fiend.

Hugs are few and far in between while it’s rare that they show up for my soccer games like all the other parents did. I don’t hate them though. They had a harder time to adjust and more to learn than my young self back then.
They suffered more than I did and could not have fulfilled the American love which I desperately needed. They were not bred to show and perceive love in that way. In the culture where we came from, that expression is through the form of money. Because it was so hard to come by and it was through blood and sweat that my parents accumulated them little by little.

To them, giving money is like giving a part of them, although the meaning is slightly eroding through the years due to how easy it is to come up with them. To me though, it’s been just a number on the computer screen.

Which is why, tears welled up when I learned my dad’s eyesight is failing and will eventually become blind when the first feeling that comes through was that of annoyance. Annoyance at the need to take care of him in the future. The tears were for the fact that I am twisted like them.

Of course with the business side of me fully functional and alive, I start to wonder. How can I capitalize my dance experience?

Search on Monsters for jobs with the keyword “Engineer” for Ottawa and Montreal
Today: 150

2003: 5

Amount of profile views:

Today: 66

2003: 3

Head hunter harassments:

Today: 3

2003: 0

Average engineer job experience requirement

Today: 1 year
2003: 5 years

On one hand, I think I should take advantage of the current bubble and jump ship to increase my salary. On the other hand, my resume looks really pitiful without any job lasting longer than a year. The biggest concern my current employer had during the interview was: “Are you going to stay long?”

It’s only a blink of the eye, already 1 year and a half passed by. Another 6 months and my self imposed moral obligation will be up. Then, it’s all up to the economy.

Part of the series Environment upgrade.

I was face down on the ground, hand reaching into the unknown corners underneath the kitchen counter. Twitching muscles screamed while the hand holding the wrench desperately tries to turn a knob with unfamiliar motions. The progress seemed so miniscule that a snail can overtake it easily.

That was how I spent my whole night; installing the dishwasher. A waste of time from some people’s point of view, but not for me. Now that I’ve done this, the knowledge will forever be with me. It’s the result of a decision I’ve made with my life along with other principles I decided to follow when I bought the condo. I will face and learn the unknowns and I will mold the environment around me as I will it.

Which is a transformation I noticed in myself. I am willing to take the challenge of making things happen in the way I want it instead of settling for the mediocre result. More confident that it will work and more defined in the choices I make. I don’t have to think things through as much because I am more in tune with what is “me” and what is not. This definition of the self in turn immunized me from the desire to mimic others and peer pressures while eliminating most of the indecision when presented with a choice. I don’t seek to conform anymore. Now, my inspirations comes from within.

Although the place is still a mess with no furniture in sight, I felt proud and smug now that I installed all the major appliances myself. It’s my place, my rules and there’s no rush.

————Edit—————-

I have to emphasis, that installing a dishwasher is not recommended for the general population. Injuries or death might occur if care is not taken with the electrical system. The whole time I was working on it, there was an imminent feeling of death where I get a huge electrical shock and pass out to die.

First, shut off the circuit at your local breaker. If you don’t know which one it is, shut them all. Second, the most important thing is to test the three wires to see if any is live. I, like any good engineer, used triple redundancy: Voltmeter, electromagnetic live wire testing and a simple LED connected to a fuse that attaches to the ground and the live wire. Add on to that, I used the back of my hand to touch both the ground and live wire at the same time as a real human test. (The electricity will go through your skin instead of passing through you to the ground, it hurt as hell, but you won’t die).

There’s no way to avoid instances where you have to touch all three wires, believe me I tried.

My previous job as a mixed signal audio design engineer messed up my enjoyment of music. Ever since then, I’ve been able to tell, just by listening, the type of problems that a particular music system has. Worst off, I get to understand that nothing we are listening to, is what the original sounds like. That the original, is usually a big disappointment in terms of the high sound quality that audiophiles seek.

My current job, allowed me to examine and play with a few hundred cameras so I know the limits and capabilities of technology on the sensor part. That is fine and dandy, at least I get to enjoy stunning pictures… That is, until a certain medical device maker forced me to work on a complete system from image capturing to the display on the monitor.

These doctors are able to tell a 1/4 of a frame’s delay (on a 60Hz refresh rate) along with a whole army of video glitches that they’ve experienced in their 30 years of experience. I, on the receiving end of their complaints, had to reproduce them and see it. Now that the veil is off and the knowledge is in me, it’s harder and harder to freely enjoy anything on TV because of all the glitches I am now able to see.

As I gobbled down a hastily prepared food à la barbarian style, the answer to my previous question answered in an instant. Home is where I get fed. Up until now, I didn’t feel compelled to live in this new nest until I finally moved all the stored food and cookwares.

Sitting in the midst of chaos and mini towers of boxes, my senses tried desperately to adjust to a wold devoid of sentient beings while simultaneously calculating the new most efficient way of living after the microwave was plugged in. When it comes down to the most basic, being able to feed oneself and sleeping under a roof is what makes a home home.

I fell sick in the middle of moving. Half of my stuff is there, half is still here. Tis a very inconvenient arrangement. Thus it has been revealed to me, how much I depend on things to stay the way they are in order to wake up feeling prepared.

As a reflection of this disturbance in my spirit, my body has reflected my condition with a pleroma of different problems. Allergy reactions and the feeling of the beginning of a cold (Antibiotics does not kill viruses). It make some wicked sense in some way. I am living in a mess, it’s only reasonable that my health is a mess. The environment and the spirit provides an everlasting feedback loop.

So how the hell do I get out of this shithole?

I look at healthy people with envy now. Imagining myself in a runner’s shoes or remembering the wind brush against me on my bike. How good it felt to be fit and out there. I feel more mortal now. More dependent on people and perhaps less wild. Would this stick when I get better? I don’t know, what I am sure of now, is that there’s no way in hell I am going to a free pool with lots of kids around sneezing and peeing into the pool.

The requirement to pay on the weekend seem to block out certain types of people.

I have too much time to think whilst being sick and weak. Not much to do when my physical fitness matches that of a 80 year old overweight chronic smoker while my immune system remains almost non existent after the gruesome fight with the virus.

I found out what I lack in life right now. That is a hobby which requires constant improvement and discussion amongst peers with the most prominent need on the discussions. I think I’ll go try break-dancing as my next dance research subject.

3 days, delusional

Splitting migraine grade headache

High fever

Plus the usual sickness symptoms.

It all started with a girl sneezing into the same swimming pool I was in. Great way to spend the holidays

Part of the series Environment upgrade.

The change wasn’t some foster child of a sudden revelation, but rather, a habit adapted as a way to retain values of objects. I am talking about my new condo. I feel more considerate as a whole. Thinking through the consequences of my actions instead of jumping into the moment. “Will it cause any damage?” became permanently embedded in my awareness.

I realized that it is the situation which puts me in this state and not my own evolution as a humble human seeking enlightenment. This is not something I can achieve by myself because I never had anything precious enough that I need to protect. The lifestyle to this point has been geared towards a worry free existence. I never purchase anything that can’t be replaced instantly to maximize the efficiency of my pursuits. I didn’t care when I practiced dancing on the wooden floor at the rental apartments nor did I care when the corck pot might be too heavy for the cupboards. They are all replaceable.

Even though I am impatient at having to put life on hold for the move, I am, at the same time, grateful of the unforseen learning experiences and changes. I look forward to the next lesson.

Part of the series Environment upgrade.

I wasn’t infuriated or anything. I just felt let down by people and sad at the fact that it’ll be even harder for me to trust strangers in the future. Part of the reason why I decided to take this place was because she works for the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police), the Canadian equivalent of the FBI agency. I figured that I could trust her word more given her status as the public’s protector. So the deal went through despite the nagging sensation at the back of my head.
The deal was, she leaves the washer, dryer, dish washer, stove and fridge. The reality is that the key opened a door that led to a completely empty condo. I expected normal people to be this sneaky, but not an RCMP. She just destroyed my trust in any fucking authority figure in the world. Thanks a lot, now I have to figure out what legal course I can take and if the cost in time is worth the few items that are gone. Which, I am sure, she is counting on.

What a great way to come back to my vacation, no? That and the fact that during my few days of absence, despite my warning that I am on vacation. People still sent me 89 emails (16 of which are some kind of new malfunctions in their development/manufacturing/processing equipment). PEOPLE! VACATION means I AM NOT HERE!

————————–Edit—————————–

That was the heat talking. I am missing BC’s heavenly temperature. I later combed through the deed of sale and realized how badly my ass got owned. The trick is in cluases 7.4, 7.5 and 8.1 where the Inclusions and Exclusions are mentioned. The moment I realized it, I sat still for a long time remembering the techniques which both my agent and the seller used to distract me from noticing the details. I noticed how my agent quickly flipped through that page to preventing me from reading too much in detail, to the way she presents the place. Able to say something without actually confirming it, to talk, as if the items are mine without actually saying so.

It goes to show how young I am in this world of hidden daggers and suggestive wordings. I am glad this happened on my first house, when the stakes are lower and not during an exchange for a million dollar home.

Nuit blanche sur tableau noir is an annually recurring festival on the first weekend of June. Located on the famous Mont-Royal avenue, the mixture of drunk party goers, sober/stoned artists along with in-your-face photographers present visitors with a most interesting twist.Organizers of this event changes the theme every year so it’s never the same. This year’s comic book take is one of the harder ones to do on asphalt. Some of the artists struggled to supersize their comic cells, but most are just happy to draw. I am content with watching.

The night gave me with a second try at low light photography, which in turn, netted me a very important lesson. NEVER use zoom unless you have a tripod and never use tripod unless you are taking a static scenic shot. It explains why, the other more experienced photographers at the event are taking the shots just inches from the artists themselves. My jaw dropped at the invasion of private space at first, then slowly, I started to see like their ways. It is the only way to get a full spectrum high resolution unblurred image.

The event lasted 3 days and you get street performers alongside a big street-wide sale of wares on Mont-Royal Avenue.

I’ve been reading and following the smith maneuver strategy ever since I read about it on the site: milliondollarjourney. I had my suspicion at first so I followed all the debates on the pros and cons of this maneuver. In the end, it all comes down to whether or not your investment can outperform a certain percentage point or if you have enough cash flow to initiate it. So I decided to do a spreadsheet analysis to see exactly how much I am gaining or losing.

Exhibit 1 shows the loan’s principle plus interest. In the smith maneuver, I will be paying the interest with cash first and then take out a loan of the same amount. This is provided that I have enough initial cash to pay the initial interest.

Exhibit 2 shows the result if I use this loan to invest in a dividend paying stock which has a special tax rule. The lower your tax bracket, the better your tax deduction.

Exhibit 3 shows the result if I use this loan to invest in a pure capital gain stock which is 50% taxable.

Exhibit 4 simulates the path where if I were to invest just with my money (same amount as the loan interest), what I will get out of it in the same amount of time.

I am still half believing it, but since full belief requires an actual success, I am going to go ahead and try this maneuver with the new condo I bought. If you see some asian guy begging on the streets of Montreal in 3 years, you know that’s me.

Alexandra will be the first person in my circle of friends to have a baby. Being a single mom with no family in Canada to fall back to, her future seems very uncertain. This is the reason that the bunch of us immigrants who are better positioned in life decided to throw this baby shower for her. At least she won’t have to worry about buying all the tools that the baby need. Nordia reunited for a final get together before everyone heads off to chase after their own dreams.

The shots are time lapsed every 5 minutes. The event started from 10AM in the morning and ended at 4AM the next day for me. It’s a day of firsts, so it’s only fair that I present it as my first video production. Done with the simple windows movie maker.

Finally have a weekend that isn’t booked a month ahead… I will sit down and do some good writing.  Then again, there’s Nuit blanche sur tableau noir and Formula one festivals to attend, so I might not have the time.

I am caught in a strange predicament. That is, the long wait to taking over my condo. Most of my projects are on hold because whatever I accomplish will have to be reassembled at the new place. Procurements of tools for projects and financial maneuvering are on hold because I am waiting to see if I can actually shoulder the bi-monthly payment without too much modification to my lifestyle. Applications and any activities that requires an address is also put on hold because I will soon change that. Basically I am stuck in the mud in terms of improving my life.

The upside is that it forces me to amuse myself with everything BUT improving my life. Here are some of the things that I did or will do to keep the boredom away.

• Throw a baby shower
• Rearrange my digital files
• Exercise a lot
• Attend parties
• Attend city events
• Camping
• Watch movies
• Fix my bike
• Take a vacation

They may sound ordinary, but these are the things that usually I put at the bottom of the list so I can streamline them with another event.

November 1st is the deadline for DARPA urban challenge. I’ve probably spent my last 3 weeks dedicated to getting the kinks out of their hardware. Hopefully the team can pass the preliminary run starting June 11th. I only wish that I can be more directly involved in the actual challenge. I guess, my job is done. The rest is up to them.

Our journey often brings us back to where we started, to show us that where we started is actually the end of the journey that we’ve always wanted. The only difference lies in the fact that we’ve gained the ability to see what we want to see because of the journey. While writing a previous entry, I felt a bit of a surprise at how it didn’t affect me as much as I thought it would.

This is when I realized that I have created a 3rd filter in order to facilitate the lifestyle I want to have. It can be seen as an answer to my 1st and 2nd filters in terms of the why. The third filter is to ensure the most diverse life experience possible. This, actually eliminates the need to constantly prove and make sure that I am better in terms of any particular skills. Making losing as good as winning and changes a lot of my previous positions on life because they are irrelevant.

I wish you can feel what I feel.

One hour this time…

This is how long I sat there listening to someone else swearing and cursing at me, my company and my ability to do any meaningful work on the phone. The first five minute was fairly scary, as scary as any angry person swearing on the other side of the phone can get. It caught me off guard because I was in an Engineering mode that promotes exchange of ideas between geeks and brainiacs.
So, after an initial flutter and stutter, my memory kicked in and I switched into what I refer as call management mode. This is when, I really appreciate the skills I gained when dealing with Yo Mama’s is a daily routine. So, how do you calm a cussing and swearing person down? This is what I did.

• Listen, or if unable to, the lack of talking is enough. On extreme cases when the swearing gets too repetitive and lack any new vocabulary, turn on your mp3 player. I suggest buying a creative zen stone for $40 and load it with heavy metal music for this purpose.
• It’s nothing personal, contemplate on the grammatical structure of the swearing if you have to. For some people, this is their style of getting things done and communicating. Treat it like any other customer.
• They are swearing for a reason and usually they are right. However, there’s usually nothing you can do to speed things up because part of your responsibility is to take this kind of shit. So tell them you understand their position which is why you are doing everything you can to speed up whatever process. (Everything you can meaning everything you can within the alloted time/effort to this particular client. This decision is up to sales and marketing)
• Tell them:”I am sorry that this has caused you so much inconvenience.” and repeat what measures you’ve already taken to make sure it doesn’t happen again. (These, of course hasn’t happened, but you will do it after you hang up the phone, I call this time shifting. It’s true and false, but won’t make you feel like a liar)
• Repeat what they are asking you to complete to confirm with them. This will force their logical side to kick in and answer a yes or no. If they say you are stupid for not understanding them, blame the phone line for being too noisy and that you can’t make out some of the (swear) words they are using.
• Apologize. It is your fault. Be a man and deal with it.

It’s getting so impersonal now that I am starting to doubt my ability to actually feel sorry for the wrong I did. I find that my actions doesn’t really correspond with what I feel sometimes.

Bartering. It is the oldest form of trading since the beginning of human civilization and is often viewed as a lower form of transaction by people in the civilized society (Don’t know about you, but I feel that way.) Which is why, I am surprised to find, that something as important as buying a house, in an advanced society that is Canada is still reduced to the rules of basic bartering when it comes down to the gist of it.
All the documents I signed, all the bullshit process that I went through, was so that I can finally write a number down and call the seller’s buff. I chose not to buy a new condo because they usually don’t barter on prices. You either buy it or you don’t. So I resolved to buying second hand homes that’s only been there for one or two years, so I don’t have to pay that extra tax and can play some well received psychological game with people.

Here are some tips for others that might be following this path soon. Although good bartering skill is important, it still can’t beat the right timing which you decides to buy. These are good when there are more sellers than buyers.

• Start the bid 20% lower then the advertised price
• There’s a reason they are selling the house, find out about it
• A final offer is never final, you can always come back with a higher bid. It’s called a shit test
• Don’t let your agent understand you too much, they exchange informations with seller’s agent
• Be ruthless, you won’t see the person again.

As mentioned before, I didn’t start my bid on my dream house. Instead, I started my bid on the condo which will generate the best investment return. Since I don’t care about losing this bid, I was able to offer a ridiculous price (Bid down from $194 to $160). It sends two messages: “I think your place is worth shit.” and “I am ruthless” to my agent.

Of course, because it’s new on the market, the owner turned it down even after I raised it higher a few times. (They get to have their ego for a while) In any case, their final offer was $184 000 and wouldn’t budge. I later found out that the father of the girl who’s selling is staying in montreal to help sell the house, so I gave up because they don’t have any time pressure.

The next one accepted a low offer before I can bid on it so I decided to move on to the dream house which I wanted.

This whole bartering experience goes against my conscious and my belief in how business should be done. I believe that a good partnership has to be formed on a basis of mutual benefit so it can last long and reap benefits. Add that, to the fact that I like the current owner as a person. You can say, I am buying this place because I trust the owner. Yet still, I couldn’t believe my own ears when I bid a ridiculous price and she responded by lowering her offer. I was tempted to go lower, but since it is already very close to what I was aiming for and I like the person, I didn’t. (I did the calculation of their bottom line by getting the purchase price from the agent and adding the mortgage interest plus tax etc to the equation).

So I closed the deal with her on May 10th for $179 500 to buy the condo and this is the previously password protected information.

A total reversal from my previous white and simple layout.

This was designed to represent the previous stage of my life. To show the raw feelings and the roughness that I felt was the central part of that stage. There are no links because the site was designed to focus only on one post at a time. Also, another oddity of that stage. The decision to go with a 1000 pixel width was made after I realized that not many people look at my page in 800×600, with the future veering towards wide screen, I figured I’d try a wide layout to see how the visual effects of text changes. To my surprise, it changed quite a bit.

For example, one lines of text looks really sad in a wide screen setting. It might be better to have a bigger block with two empty lines in order to simulate the feeling before.

The part I spent the longest time on designing this layout? I’d say it’s the background. The interesting fact about the background is that no matter how you crop it. You will always be able to perform a repeat x or repeat y on it without showing any visual artifacts that catch a visitor’s eye. It’s made to repeat, but with enough randomness so that you don’t really register that it is repeated. The feel also differs depending on the size of your cropping. It’s hard to imagine that the background imagine started out as one simple dot doesn’t it? It is my first attempt at texturing the background and I will be playing around with this new way of spanning mashable backgrounds like this in my future layout as well. It ads a certain complexity to an otherwise minimalist design.
I feel like I have to present this to you now before it becomes outdated. I find that the dark and angry scheme unfitting for my personality. It was a temporary mood that spurred some creativity.

We are a mixture of 60 pros and newbies this time and the sun was out shining brightly compared with a rainy day like last year. My squad all decided to spend an extra $90 on top of the $20 entry fee in order to upgrade our package with a more accurate gun, more paint balls, anti fog mask and extra neck + hand protections.

The result of this upgrade netted me 6 kills in the first two games. The better gun allowed me to finally understand the correlation between aiming and hitting the target. I can’t imagine how I managed to do even one kill in my last game with a gun that shoots paint balls everywhere but towards the target. But if you ask me which equipment out of all these did I benefit the most from. I’d say the anti fog mask.

With that I am able to peek around the tree with one eye to quickly assess the situation and devise a path to flank the entrenched enemies which ended up in several enemies getting their ass shot from behind. I thoroughly enjoyed this second match because my squad charged and outsmarted the enemy (With a little help from the guy with an awesome machine gun that sprayed a wall of paint into a guy hiding behind a rock).

The rest of the matches are trickier as the objective changed from simple annihilation to a more logistical one. Objectives included: drug trades, capture the flag and storm the castle. It allowed me to temporarily experience what it might feel like to be in the middle of all these mayhem. The difficulty in communication in a gun fight and the frustration of being pinned down by one well positioned sharp shooter.

I am quite content of my style of play. I am not the type to charge towards the front line and spray bullets at whatever comes. Instead, I stay behind at first to analyzes the situation, assert the weak points and moves towards surprising the enemy entrenched there. Not blind bravado, but still brave enough to rush at the right place at the right time. Makes me wonder, if I can still be this brave when real bullets are in play.

Best moment of the day? Out sniping a pro who has better equipments. I did so by applying my FPS sniping experiences on the battleground. Which involved changing positions after each burst and hiding my head as soon as I see the gun pointing my way. This is way much more satisfying than a head shot in computer games. The real sniping involves a lot of crawling around unseen by enemies, using one eye to peak around the tree and waiting for the enemy to feel safe. It’s all about the possible rewards of patience, of when you catch a group of them unprepared and without cover, then spraying all the bullets at them with your gun.

All in all, great fun. Not to mention all the well endowed women at this particular paint ball battleground. We were all surprised to see a ration of 1 to 5 women to men that can handle a gun well. The full body sore muscles are well worth it too.

Part of the series Environment upgrade.

For several months which followed, my days and weekends were filled with actions. If I was not out driving around with my agent, then I was catching up with some friend somewhere. Add that, to organizing a camping trip, a paint ball outing and you get the typical messy room with discarded clothings everywhere. I can’t believe I lived and am still living in this dump, but it makes sense now that I look back. I am only in my room to either sleep, or use my computer.

“In my mind, nothing matters anymore, there’s nothing bigger or more important.”

After the first round of visits, I came back starry eyed and wanting to buy everything. To think that I can own one of these beautifully decorated condo is something that I never imagined doing. Most importantly, I realized that my views and idea changed as I visited and inspected more and more places. These condos, are a peek into the owner’s mind, a very intimate place where they are completely vulnerable. Vulnerable because you can understand a person from observing the place they own.

The original plan was to buy something really cheap, below $150 000 so I can take advantage of the government’s free $7000 cash aid while paying only about $400 per month on mortgage. It’s like renting a place with the intention to own. The reality of the market taught me a good lesson. You get what you pay for. The places that I saw with the criteria that I set, all had major flaws that will one way or another make living annoying. This is when my dad pitched in, after he got word I am hunting for a house.

The deal is this. He will handle the 20% down payment, in exchange, he owns 20% of the house. When the house sells, 20% of the proceeds belongs to him. He wins by having his money in a very stable real estate market with someone he can trust and I win because it reduced my mortgage payment while increasing my buying power. Of course, I get to pay all the notary fee, tax, maintenance etc. So he gets more out of the deal.

This is when the second round of visit began and I met the current owner of my would be condo.

I believe in the concept where a business deal is the relationship with the person with whom you are signing the contract, not the legal papers that accompanies the transaction. Both Guy Kawasaki and Warren Buffet are backers of this important concept so am I. This is probably why, I believed that this particular condo is the place I should settle in. Because the owner is just awesome. I am the type of person who’s on the suspicious and careful side. So trusting strangers is out of the question and when things are going perfectly, I will always wonder secretly, what’s the hidden catch.

Yet I don’t have any of those feeling towards this woman, who’s so well spoken and confident in her demeanor. I was suspicious of the fact that 3 condos in the same building are on sale, she moved in last year and is selling the condo a year later and the fact that her presentation of the place is flawless. I cannot find anything wrong.

I think I am in love with that place, but I did not start my bid with this place…

Part of the Environment upgrade series

Two things in business: Timing and location. If business is the modern ground in which we wage war, then Sun Tzu’s “Art of war” further emphasis their importance. Timing was taken cared of in my previous post. Now, we take a look at the location.

Please take a look at the map. Red circles the area where population is increasing while the green lines are the area that the metro covers. It is rudimentary, but it shows approximately where they are to you. When I did the triangulation, I actually used a google map mashup of Montreal metro stations and superimposed that with the Thermatic map in photoshop.

Montréal is an island city, therefore the rules of real estate for Taiwan can apply more or less. Land will get scarcer as more and more people want the convenience of living closer to downtown. The problem is accentuated by the increase in car owners each year while the outdated road layout struggles to keep up. This is the first condition: on the island.

It was about two years ago when I rented my current apartment I met my landlord at his house. It was a huge mansion on top of a hill. The inside was filled with exotic artifacts that he had acquired from different parts of the world. These aren’t your flea market bargains off the side of the road.

So I asked him, what’s his secret to success. He told me: “Selling real estates.” Which I was very interested in at the time but had no money to even think about it. So I humbly requested for one tip for real estates in Montréal if that is the only tip he can give for the rest of his life. He told me:

“Buy near metro stations.”

I agree with him whole heartedly and made this is my second criteria.

Combined with the thematic map that Census Canada release, my agent and I started our 2 months journey of house hunting…

These are pictures taken with 1/80 sec shutter speed at focal length of 3.6 and ISO 400. Out of 500 images, only these 15 are presentable. I did not attempt to modify anything because the originals are so grainy that any kind of retouching risks further exposing the defects. To truly capture the fastest movements without blurring in a low light condition present the biggest challenge to the equipment, I think I need a shutter of 1/100 to 1/130 while lowering the ISO to 320. I am hoping that adding an external flash will help remove the noise problem I am seeing so I can capture that ever so elusive perfection in dancesport. I believe I can do it because of my own experience in the sport. Compared with an outside hired agency, I can better predict where the power moves are and when people will likely to pose for a shot.

The thing that posed a challenge to me me at this particular competition was the spotlights they used: very dim orange and pink which forces me to use flash. Perhaps south Korea’s new solution will help me in the future. Having been a competitor myself, I understand the hatred towards getting blinded by the flashes while I dance. Especially the photographers who stands only a foot away and flash you when you dance in front of them. We still need our eyesight intact you know?

Without further ado here are the pictures:

Part of the series: Environment upgrade

Like any good investor worth being called such, I spent a sizable amount of time analyzing the market before I proceed to the actual hunt. Analyzing of the data helps in the overall understanding of the factors in play. It is the part that is the most boring for most, but satisfying when done right. While most people jump straight to contacting a real estate agent after getting their mortgage pre-approved, I silently sat in front of my computer night after night to simply browse. This serves two purpose. One to cool down the initial rush of euphoria, two to give me time to be better informed.

I first waited for the Census Canada’s population density data to release to determine if the island of Montreal’s population is growing or not. A growing population ensures that house prices will go up and that the current slump in the housing market is only temporary as demand increases. I find their 10 year thematic map very useful in determine where the hot spots are to buy.

In a December 2006 post, I predicted a decrease in housing prices around the middle of 2007 and have religiously checked MLS housing prices ever since and read the GMREB report on the housing market to determine that the condition is right and the home prices are indeed decreasing. My findings were that for the first quarter of 2007, the average condo prices in the greater Montreal area decreased by ~3%. Combine this with the US housing market meltdown around June 2006 that added a little to the panic and you see a sudden surge of homes for sale (Canada economic usually respond to US economic changes after 6 months.)

Based on my graphical analysis of historical data on home prices and etc, the housing cycle lasts around 10 years with 2003 being the peak bottom and should see another slight dip in middle of 2007 (this is purely from the graphs.)

Perhaps it is not clear to you in this as the price is in a continuous rise. So I transformed this into a percentage difference graph which made everything clear.

All of these told me that the right conditions have been met and a quick glance at Canada’s mortgage static pushed me to get the pre-approval right away to lock in the interest rate. Why? You asked? Because of China’s exploding economic paired with the rising demand of oil and energy. You see, Canada’s economy is that of a pure exporter of natural resources. 50% of the enterprises that exists here are about Natural resources so the Canadian currency is seen in the world as a natural resources currency. With China going full out growth and development, rising demand of nuclear energy and the forever decreasing “easy” oil. Canada exports copper, uranium and oil sand in response.

The result is a CDN dollar that increases in value and with that, comes inflation. As a result, the central bank of Canada will have to increase the interest rate to balance and along it, the mortgage rate. With this maneuver, I am betting that the dollar will keep on increasing value and that the value of houses will not drop for more than 5%. (11% is the worst case scenario.)

I finally contacted an agent around March 2007 after I began my observation around October 2006…

Part of the series: Environment upgrade

This is my third move in the city of Montréal. And, as a believer in the “3 times is a charm” motto, I was motivated to make this final move more permanent. Which is when I chanced upon a mortgage calculator that told me the monthly payment for $100 000 is around $500. I thought “Great, it’s just like paying rent except I can sell the condo and take my money back.” This is the hook that got me digging more into the concept of owning my own condo.

At first, I surfed around and used available calculators online to compare the great theory of rent vs own. www.canadamortgage.com is the site I went to. However, I found some strange bug in the calculator when I try to compare best and worst scenarios where my investment can bring in 10% annual return. The result isn’t that much different from that of a 5.25% annual return. So I gave up using the premade calculator. It is either bullshitting, trying to push for people to buy home or crappy coding.

In any case, I can’t trust these calculator so I made my own excel spreadsheet. I found and tested most of the formula to calculate mortgages from this website: http://www.hughchou.org/calc/formula.html. Which allowed me to understand a few principles. On average it’ll go up 6%. 10 year cycle and the tendency for the price to bubble in predictable ways.

It is the worst kind of investment possible as I previously calculated. I didn’t believe that buying a house is as shitty as the random calculation I did. But it is true. Agent fee at %6, inflation at 2%, mortgage at 5%, Tax at 2% and condo fees. The tax itself is equal to my current monthly rent. Who are we bullshitting that we are earning money?

In the end, my biological clock won the debate. Add that to the fact that my current growth is stunted by the restriction in space and having to put up with other’s lifestyle. I proceeded with getting a mortgage specialist to have my pre-approval done.

With that, and a new found resolve, I began my research on the housing market…

Part of the series Environment upgrade.

The actual upgrade that took place for tier 2 are the items below

• New computer (from parts): $700

• Picoo palm sized helicopter to play with my cat: Free

• ATI Radeon x800 GTO 256MB PCI Express To support my would be multi monitor setup. $61

• Guitar hero 2 For my dream that was never there: Free

With those settled and short term entertainment ensured, I lived happily ever after and never thought of changing anything more for a while until this happened. We’ve had arguments between the three of us and yes she thinks me stupid for moving away because of the reason I gave, but I disagree. The main point that I used to argue are quite weak and superficial, it is true because they ARE weak and superficial to hide my true reasoning.

• I can’t stand the child wailing every two hours throughout the night. Especially at this point in my career.

• The poo will stink up the apartment

• It’s only going to get dirtier with a kid in here

What I actually took into consideration is what will happen as the kid grows up. Since I am the only male in the apartment and the fact that the dad doesn’t seem to want to put in any money or effort in raising the kid beside having his last name forever imprinted on the kid’s birth certificate, I will naturally take on the role of the father due to situation and close proximity. My nature and personality dictates that I will put in the effort and help out on raising the kid.

Those things combined adding the fact that I have nothing more to learn from the two flat mates. I made the third most important decision in my life. With the first being to start dancing and the second to stop.

So I am moving out…

Last weekend, I mentioned meeting some interesting people and today I finally get to sit down and compile everything together.

The one I would like to discuss is Brian, a self made millionaire who’s having a blast every moment of his life. He is the first millionaire I met and talked with and I have always enjoyed his presence. He is the type of people who, on his birthday, receives Jaguar(the car, not the animal) as present and hold an annual banquet like the ones you see in movies.

Impressive money aside, Brian stood out by being very free with his possessions. When you visit his house, he freely shares whatever delicacies and discoveries as well as stories of his days as a reckless young lad. I am more impressed by his open mindedness towards everything and willingness to try anything. The younger Brian is the type of person that you’d find sitting alongside you in some shit hole in Africa while backpacking through the continent.

The secret to his success is knowing the right people. One important person in each domain so he never run out of expert opinions and never had to pay for them. When asked how he got so many good friends like that, he replied with: “I earned it.”

There are so much more to say about my encounter, but they are just details of a starry eyed young adult not worth wasting your time on. Things like the two port cigar and a frozen package of deer meat I received just because I happened to mention enjoying them during a casual conversation.

This weekend is less restricting. Spending the time with Mark, Rui and their cat Decimal. I really like their presence because I can be my ugliest self and it won’t matter. I don’t feel self conscious nor do I need to control my behavior around them.

Lethaeus finally get to meet another adult cat for the first time in her life. The encounter was tense at the beginning with everyone ready to jump in and throw the blanket on them if they start fighting and clawing at each other. Dec’s behavior is that of a disinterested ADD cat who can’t keep his attention on the encounter itself while Lethe focused her whole attention on this new moving animal that’s like her. She followed Dec around the whole house, everywhere without taking a break. Yet when Dec turns around and try to approach her, Lethe hissed and crouched into attack position. We are just baffled at the two contrasting behavior.

We went out for some food and hanging out at some unknown place.

When we came back, Lethe was hiding under the bed while Dec is around and about doing his own thing. Lethe turned to life when humen are back in the equation and continued stalking Dec all over the place. By the end of the night, she strut about the place as if it belongs to her. If the behavior of the animal is any indication of its owner’s, I am speechless. At least, I can take comfort in knowing that Lethe is very friendly and open towards strange human.

Part of the series Environment upgrade

Today, I bought my first house from owner Genviève St-Jean at the price of $179500 cdn. Bid down from the original offer of $189000

I think an emphasis needs to be put into developing a hobby for engineers. Yes, it’s good that they can be l33t at what they do, however having a hobby will increase the chance of the engineer finding a new way to integrate two areas of life together. Even if they failed to do so, someone with an interest in the area will make the integration easier as the terminology, techniques and etc that belongs in the niche group can be understood by such a hybrid person.

As technology develops, co processing with a specialized processor that accelerate certain hobbyist’s functions, you can bet that there are going to be more and more two guys in a garage, dreaming and realizing new hardware. You can expect everyone who knows how to program an FPGA (Which is all engineering graduate nowadays) to try and attempt it at least once in their lifetime.

For this to happen, there needs to be a port used for I/O communication(Which most machien already has, just not enough pins). Hot swappable cpu like the SD card nowadays. Some hardware interconnection technology needs to be developed to ensure that the pin contacts are secure.

I decided to write down the time whenever I feel a coffee craving.

8:30Am

9:25AM

11:16AM

11:52AM

12:29PM

12:58PM

I think I am safely past the withdrawal phase and can say that there are no caffeine in my system left. Therefore, whatever I do now are not affected by the substance.

Immediately I noticed three physiological differences. My muscles get sore after a work out 12 hours later compared to 24 hours later. It could be from my higher water intake or it could be from the absence of caffeine.

The second one is quite surprising. I kept on waking up naturally at 6:30 AM instead of the designated 7:30AM refreshed with less grogginess.

The third impact is that I am gaining weight, especially around the stomach area. To quote a certain person:” You now have a man’s body.” This is most likely because caffeine kept my metabolism at a higher rate than normal.

Compared to others, I think I had it easy. I searched the web and compared the caffeine content of each of the coffee chains and found that Timmy’s only contain 200mg while Starbucks and etc. go as high as 300~400mg. With the standard safe daily intake at 300mg, I am lucky that I never went beyond that with only one cup of Tim Hortons. They might be the most health conscious one out there.

It was the weekend, so things were more bearable. Gee, I must’ve been on coffee for… ugh sudden flash of my first cup of Tim Hortons. I must’ve been on coffee for the past 8 years of my life. That is, on average one large cup double double per day with the record at 5 cups on the last day of my 4 year university project presentation. Maybe more, I remember constantly having a cup in my hand like Julian with his whisky in trailer park boys.

My weekend were filled with activity and I get to meet quite a few interesting people who I will most likely write about later. The activity itself will have to remain a secret for now since my site is getting more and more views from Montreal, I don’t want blogging to mess up my chances.

Which is why, I am not sure if falling into my bed and sleeping like a baby every night is due to the withdrawal or not. Overall, I’d say I am more sociable and more interested in conversations. The feeling of tiredness is also different. It’s harder to describe except by the level of drowsiness. And I feel like I spend less time contemplating about how tired I am. Waking up is easier and my sleep pattern has stabilized. We’ll see how this pan out.

By the 3rd day, I must’ve flushed all the caffeine out of my system.  I started feeling drowsy at around 10 AM and there’s generally no enthusiasm to anything. Total utter rejection.

I went home and immediately fell asleep on my bed till the next morning. Which explained the equally short post long after it happened. I frankly can’t remember much of what happened.

There are times for contemplation where I hide myself from the world to review my past actions. To sit down and lick my wound in the comfort of my own nest, protected from outside criticism. I read, I absorb information and make adjustments in myself for the “supposed” next stage. During these times, I enjoy socializing with friends and picking their brains on some abstract unheard of issues. I read, blog and exchange with fellow bloggers.

Then there comes the time for action, where everyday is a uphill sprint. Timing is of the essence and opportunity would be lost if I don’t haul my ass towards the goal. It’s a time for risk taking and putting myself on the line. During these time, things all have to be scheduled and I am in a constant flux filled with anxiety and adrenaline. I feel guilty for denying my friends the usual meetings in order to indulge in my own pursuit. I only have time to write and record the process.

It feels good to know people that understand this and still stick with me.

The second day felt like a long drawn out war.

I couldn’t focus on anything mundane so I spent most of my time reading. Hard to stay awake and my eyes are sore for the most of the day.

4PM arrived and I noticed some random perspiration. I am also drinking more water than pissing them out. The caffeinated lifestyle must’ve lowered my cell’s water retention capacity and I am just making up for it now. That’s a big deal because water is the key to any physical activity. Perhaps I’ve been performing in a suboptimal condition.

By the end of the night when I have to attend a business social engagement, I was in a better mood and am generally more pleasant and interested in people. An emotion that I haven’t felt in a while. I enjoyed conversations for conversation’s sake.

I never thought stopping coffee could create this much withdrawal and it’s supposed to last from 2~7 days depending on your addiction level. It is not healthy at all.

What a nasty day.

I decided to wear my best shirt, pants and suit to work in order to hide any withdrawal symptoms. I felt the cravings while driving in to work. It came in the form of am image, image of a brown mug with the logo of Tim Horton. As I come to understand later, this is the form that the devil have decided to take on to exercise its option to torment me.

Another craving in the form of that image came and went during lunch. I was really tempted to take my usual hike across the overpass to get my Timmy’s coffee. This walk had been part of my self cleansing journey for the past year whenever I have the need for a focused mind. The reward is the coffee. The journey, a walk on top of the freezing windy highway to be drowned in traffic noise and cool down my hyperactive brain.

Which is why today, I gladly joined my colleagues for a quick lunch at a faraway cambodian restaurant. It saved me from my daily lunchtime cravings.

4PM came and went, I felt extremely withdrawan and struggled to stay awake. The rest was a blur and with a very irritable me getting pissed off by everything.

The night was spent watching DVD and eating junk food. I have a hard time motivating myself to do anything. Not even the prospect of getting money excites me. Everything looks bleak and I questioned my motivation for the things I do. Conversation with roomates seem to alleviate some of the withdrawal, but it didn’t relieve the outlook I have on my life at this moment. The main question being why I am not happy with my achievements and the conclusion is that I am drawing peace from a shaky fundation which rely on having achievements. The peace needs to be drawn from somewhere more solid. Question is, where?

Another question is, why am I drawing happiness from achievements?

Before:

13 Layers, 4 filters and 2 alpha channels later:

I hesitated and gave up twice on this picture, but decided to go back for a 3rd attempt to extract Lethe from the background. The look she gave the camera is too good to let it go to waste.

Lethe’s gene is a cross between a cat with short hair and another with long hair to better adapt to the wet and cold eastern Canada. Great for survival, but a pain for extraction. It is hard to extract hair, period. Let along extracting it against a random background in my room that has color ranges from pretty much all of the spectrum.

I simply picked up and left and ever since then I’ve only been able to talk to a few about it. A topic that I usually change quickly. I am afraid of thinking about dancing, afraid that I will start comparing my current self to what I was before. That part of me which is like a rebel against the rest, speaking bluntly of passion and fire while I slowly extinguish its life force. The music had already died in my room.

Every time I hear others at work bragging about dancing, or caught a glimpse of a great custom at the dry cleaners my mind races in a whirlwind before I can restrain myself. The effort usually leave me emotionally vulnerable for the rest of the day. I had left because I realized that my life’s flaw is preventing me from improving. Without equalizing these flaws, the dance will be jagged. Now there are only two goals left to reach before I can allow myself to indulge in that so close yet so far away.
A simple inquiry from an acquaintance sent my heart soaring with excitement. Not happy, nor sad, just excitement.

Then I turned on the music again… my heart choked in my throat.

I never fully understood the Chinese business mentality until I talked with a clerk who works for one of the signature Chinese restaurant chain. While I am still weighing in the pros and cons of starting my own business they charge fearlessly ahead right after they immigrated to Canada. Opening a business and earning your own living is as natural as eating rice for breakfast.

“We are instructed to talk less with the clients to achieve a higher efficiency in serving as much client as possible.” A mentality that will most likely achieve success in China which will not work here. This discrepancy is caused by population density. And because we charge more per client in Canada, the need to retain your client to ensure a steady flow is essential.

The Chinese entrepreneur adapted by being super friendly towards new clients till they are hooked and become regular, upon which point the clients will receive smiles that are only skin deep and the uneasy feeling of “NEXT” in the owner’s body language. It is an effective strategy. Once people become regulars, they need to receive a lot of shit before they decide to switch.

So the best way for consumers to get the best service is to make sure they know you are not a regular. Of course, this is only a general model. There are times you’ll get people who are raised in Canada with a different mentality in which case, the normal Canadian way applies.

“5 minutes”
Was how long it took me to finally pull the handle and open the door. If you’ve seen Richard Gere in “Shall we dance” you can then use that to visualize what happened

Inside, I was swearing and cursing and I don’t know what. The most prominent thought that dominated was :”What the fuck am I doing here?” But wait, I knew exactly what I was doing there. A week ago, I had deliberately opened the yellow pages and searched for an activity that I can never imagine doing which will scare the shit out of me.

Didn’t take me long to find “Ballroom dancing”. To give you an idea of why it was scary you have to get an idea of what my situation was like then. I was scared shitless of girls and had them up on a pedestal like some sort of goddess because my life had been devoid of them.

I spend the first 3~4 years learning how to speak French, then the next 2 learning how to speak English, so being interesting or flirting is out of the question and all contact with female can be summed up to a few simple sentences that I I knew in advance. I am your equivalent of a “tapette” A plank of wood if I were rated on my interesting factor.

The next hour that followed can probably be seen as my most intimate experience ever with the female species. I mean I held hand with a woman! Luckily, that enthusiasm met the hands of one who’s held thousands of hands in her life time and doesn’t consider that experience as life changing as I was. For I think if that were the case, we’d be having orgasms on the dance floor.

Next: meet my first teacher…

To “Dansons” series index

There seems to be an inherent resistance within the circle of any industry against monopoly. Take Intel’s short foray into the motherboard market for example. It infuriated all the manufacturers and also gave them a wake up call as to the reality of Intel. If the rival AMD is not kept alive, Intel can and will enter another market with the goal to take over. They can because they control the information on the most relevant information for any motherboard manufacturer: the chipset information.

People are willing to put up with inconvenience of the underdog so as to not give the giant any more fuel to increase its power. Any computer integrator’s fear is that of Intel integrating everything together. Imaging a PC with CPU, RAM, Graphic, sound and motherboard all fitting into a single chip. The trend is certainly pointing into that direction. In the past month, Intel has unvailed its plan on a new type of RAM and on the new possible graphic processing power, there’s only the reviving of Intel’s old motherboard division left to do for Intel to provide the complete solution. Just like Microsoft has slowly done with the general software market.

The rival must be kept alive, just as the spice must be kept flowing.

That aside, one starts to wonder. Why is Intel moving towards being a complete solution? Market share? Profit? Or is it just “the next thing to do” with a corporation that big? Did they foresee the saturation of the CPU market?

My favorite clerk at Tim Horton’s is having a bad day. Waiting in line, I can see that her frown is affecting the people she interact with. Which is why I decided to flash her one of my genuine smile when I ordered my standard large coffee double double.

I’ve long ago discovered how to infect another with a smile. It’s the transition from non smile to smile.

The understanding came when my dance teacher was lecturing us about our frozen smile on the floor which eventually led to the question “What should we do when we can’t smile all the time?” The answer was quite simple: “Flirt”.

Thus was the reason I spent a few days walking down the street, staring down women in an attempt to make them smile. Can’t say I perfected the art, but on occasions like the present, I am comforted by the knowledge that I can make the clerk smile.

I am having problems finding cheap dancesport events closeby which I can attend and practice taking pictures. It is saddening that the IDSF (International DanceSport Federation) have succeeded in squalshing all the local organizers.

In a coup to hoard wealth and squalsh their money generating competitors, a war was waged between the IDSF and CDTA (Canadian Dance Teachers Association) where IDSF forbids any of their registered members to participate in any CDTA. It is safe to assume that similar rule was handed down in other countries against the local competition organisers. The result of this can be felt when you look at the dminished amount of competitions listed this year.

For a competitor, this means that the entrance prices are higher and travelling costs more. At the same time, the costs are reduced because there are less competitions to go to and less politics to play. IDSF assign their own officials. i.e. You only have to suck up to the selected few judges whereas before, almost all teachers judge at a competion at one point or another and you get marked down if they don’t like you.

I prefer it this way. Then the dancers can have more time perfecting their art instead of rushing from competitions to competitions every two weak. If I remember correctly, the logistics and planning of having to travel every 2 week caused more problems and grief than the dancing itself.

I’ve been afraid of writing in the business category for a while mainly because of the confidentiality and NDA problems that things might create, but the more I write, the more I understand what I can write about… Basically, nothing about the company I work for and just the industry in general. There’s still plenty of topics.
With the coming of DirectX 10 and the scalable programmable floating point GPU which both Nvidia and ATI are pushing out, an interesting dilemma presented itself to numerous people at different jobs. The biggest question on most people’s mind are: what can we do with this?

For the scientific community (Matlab for example), it means that you now have a very powerful processor at your disposable to do number crunching. Codes doesn’t need as much optimization and rounding because the floating point processor can take care of that. So less development time in figuring out the best way to write a program.

But more interestingly of a dilemma is the fact that each computer has two places to do processing now. One on the graphic card for math and one on the CPU for IO and decision making. I say SETI and FOLD@HOME should start taking advantage of these idle mflops that’s going to sit on everyone’s home computer, idling most of the time.

With that in mind, people in the industry like me will be the first ones to start hacking and writing programs that runs and manages both processors. Once it gets big enough someone will create a standard API for the communication process between them. Motherboard manufacturers are best situated to do so since hardware arbitrage should prove to be the most efficient. That or Intel acquires Nvidia merging GPU and CPU together forever.

When Tim expressed his wide eye disbelief in the show “Office”, he did so with the perfect body language. The wide eye, the blinking and the hand pushing against his mouth. Today, I experienced just such a moment caught in between my extremely lax and sway with the wind red headed flatmate and the perfectionist alpha female who continues to have anxiety attacks so long as the lease remains unsigned.

I am just a messenger caught in between having to endure the mess created by both overtly stressed out and overly relaxed people. At least one of them aren’t telling the truth, or most likely bending reality to such a distorted proportion that any static truth will seem like a lie. It is important to understand the motivation behind each person and what will push them to lie.

The red head will lie to appear in control whilst the alpha female will lie to make her appear to be a victim and I will lie to cover any part of me that doesn’t conform to society’s norm and to feel superior compared to others in ability. Since I am dropping the current lease and moving out on my own, whether or not their lease gets renewed on time and without problem has no effect on me appearing superior, I can safely assume that I am not distorting the reality or telling any lies.
Having confirmed that, I took a breather and just decided to say fuck it. Let them sort it out amongst themselves. I was going to help double check that the red head has a place for the future and the cheapest rent possible with a new born coming to the world et all. Fuck it, because it seems to me that these two are intentionally making things harder for themselves in life and seem to thirst for melancholy and self pity.

My life is messed up as is without those, no thank you.

I’ve mentioned several times that the Canadian economy is stagnant. My belief is even firmer after the few weeks I spent figuring out the tax system. Every percentage rate set at just the right price, to prevent any loop hole, or rather, make any loophole non lucrative to take advantage of.

The Canadian economy has matured piggy backing that of its southern neighbor, learning from their rise and falls. Add this to a stable financial industry where a few giants rooted themselves firmly in place to prevent any aggressive new entrants from eating their pie, you get a very boring and controlled ladder system. It is even more obvious when the most discussed and accepted way of getting rich is through tax deferral of an RRSP account. At 40% average income tax rate with a 15% purchase tax on top of that, 49% of your money goes to the government. RRSP please.

It isn’t surprising then, that none of my investments managed to beat the supposed $2900 CDN that I will be getting back from my tax by combining just the right amount of tax credits to lower my tax bracket.

My desk looks like a mess and I just finished reading the booklet of pure accountant gibberish for general tax and another one twice as thick to complement the different kind of investments I have. Foreign, divident, mutual funds, RRSP, GIC. What we need, is to get apple to look at this system and make it into a one button software. I’d be more than willing to put half of my income into having that.

Just my ranting after suffering a 10% decrease in net value. But hey, I wished for it, can’t complain right? See more details in my 2007 Q1 report.

In addition, I opened 3 more accounts this quarter for different purposes. 13 in total now.

Numerous people close to me has brought up this strange trait of mine. I initially discarded this as a minor flaw in my character until today, when Dianne, a recent acquaintance, pointed out that fact.

“Were you in your head measuring the possibilities?” She asked bluntly since she can afford to at her age.

The truth is yes and no. I was measuring some type of possibilities, but nothing pertaining to the topics at hand nor has it to do with anything that is happening. It was just a random thought that occurred and I made no effort on the outside to hide the fact that I am going deep within to explore the possibilities.

A psychology student coined it “Hyperfocus”. A major road block for autistic people which kept them from normal social interaction. People closer to me tells me that they can feel that “your body is here, but you are somewhere else.”

This brings up a question for me. Does it mean that most people can’t do this? That what’s happening in the reality surrounding them forces their thoughts to stick to the sensory inputs? For me, this can happen anywhere at anytime whether at a party, at a dance competition, at work or during conversations ALL THE TIME.

The idea of doing this seems normal to me and I am not self aware or self conscious of how it looks like to others during this process. Following the intrusive train of thought at that moment seem to be more important for me and it takes efforts to tear myself back in order to focus on the present. The range of ideas can be from financial calculations, programming possibilities to how best to measure the taste of certain type of rice.

Are others just more skillful at reining in their thoughts to the present? Or are most people free from these sudden intrusions in their mind?

I didn’t even get to finish my to do list before two colleagues lined up outside my cubicle this morning. I do not enjoy having my flow interrupted yet it’s been happening increasingly lately.

A quick check in my client folders on the current issues I keep track of, I counted a total of 38 folders. My inbox in the morning welcomed me with 17 new emails over the course of the night… none of them junk.

When a customer called to lecture me on proper business conduct to ensure customer satisfaction, I agreed and apologized. My thinking is this: get their money, what is the outcome they want and if the outcome is worth the time/money invested.

About a year ago, I remember thinking that I can never be like this. Looking back, I understand exactly the knowledges that I’ve gained which caused the shift in thinking. To sum it up nicely à la Warren Buffet style: “Act like an owner.”

There are two primary filters that are in effect within me. The first one is the constant calculation of return on cost & value over time. The second is the understanding of the outcome that people are seeking with each sentence they speak. (It’s annoying to arrive at a gain/loss price whenever I think about something, but it does make things easier most of the time)
But why would I want to benefit my employer by thinking for them and acting out of their best interest? My response is, why not? For me, it is a great training in decision making process. I am getting paid to learn and experiment. Of course, when time comes to choose between my own development as a person and benefiting my employer, we all know that my thirst to experience will trump everything else.
More and more, I see myself stepping through all these characters that I swore I can or will never be. Am I descending into hell? Or is this actually evolutionary progress? Either way, I have no regret.

Each year our department plans an outing to sugar shack. And each year, the tray carried by the nice waitresses contains a first class ticket to heart attack. With its plentiful offerings of saturated fat combined with maple syrup based goodies no one will be able to escape.
The turn up is a healthy mix of new faces, been there done that old timers, family and people who are their to enjoy good friends. So much opportunity for a dynamic range of conversations.

Although still uncomfortable, I am sure that years from now, I’ll savor these small talks with my manager. Analyzing whether or not I can understanding what he’s feeling, when the interest of my subordinates are completely out of whack with that which I consider normal. When that anything I said will be politely replied with a small nod.

On the flip side, I get to have fun with my new co-workers. Sending a wide spectrum of different topics and different probes, from giving cold shoulder to out of whack questions. Sadly, the most interesting person always shows up near the end. I guess like me, she’s been working the table so to speak. Danny is the wife of one of our regional sales managers. Despite having given birth to a young boy, she still looked young and athletic, but that’s not the most interesting part about her.

She’s able to hold a long conversation with a wide range of topics. I was especially impressed with her detailed knowledge in them. Showing that she’s not just a good talker, but she actually participates in life.

I think, this is what I want to find.

I watched anxiously as the $12000 check slides into the deposit slot. Waited, gave a sigh and walked out of the bank. I’ve done everything I could to make sure the transaction goes smoothly as planned including that final examination on how many zeros there are in twelve thousand dollars. This is the largest sum of check I’ve ever written in my life.

The plan. To do a balance transfer using introductory rate of 1.9% and deposit it into a money market fund that guarantees a 4.25% return for a period of 6 months. I gain whatever differences in between. Which roughly finalizes into 1% of the total sum. So $120. If I screw up anywhere during the process, a 20% interest fee will apply and I stand to be charged $1200.

Sounds like too much risk and work? Not for me, it’s all for the benefit of education. With each small maneuver, I grow more confident in my abilities to assess the situation and make the right decision. Same thing with this experiment. I stumbled at the beginning and wasted several hours of phone calls plus email exchanges just to get all the facts right.

Later, I found out that this maneuver is called credit arbitrage and that our neighbor down south has it even easier. Several companies offer 0% intro rate for a 12 month period. How I wish to be in the states right now, there are so much more financial opportunities for a young aggressive person like me.

I will write again on the details of the execution once the deal is done and finished.

“A man who is seeking for realization is not only going round searching for his spectacles without realizing that they are on his nose all the time, but also were he not actually looking through them he would not be able to see what he is looking for!” ~Wei Wu Wei

First, the quote exists. A statement resonating with truth and a feeling of elation from the meaning was achieved. Nothing has changed.

Second, comes the practice where imitation and application of the idea’s logic are forced into daily life. Attempted imitation lead to a general sense of success in the understanding. Actions are in tune with the idea.

Last, the state of mind changes and it just is. Physical enforcement and tuning of the behavior is no longer required. It evolves and changes with the person.

This is my first enlightenment.

I finally received my camera, sniped off of ebay for $150 US. I will treasure it and take care of it as its previous owner has obviously done. In return, it’ll baby walk me through the first few steps on the path to mastery with photography.
With the P850 in hand, taking picture has changed its meaning. I stand out from the random crowd as I crouch into position before pulling the trigger. Interaction between strangers increased and intensifies as people inquire about the objective, the weather and whatever they fancy talking about with someone handling a camera. Some of them got angry at me, but most are just curious as to what I am doing.

“Rien, je m’entraîne à prendre des photos.” Une simple vérité.

I can’t really sit down and write because I am at work, so I’ll just attach this email I wrote to a colleague to explain this situation. It’s an attempt at dramatizing and making mundane life fun to read. Notice my continuous struggle with verb tenses of the English language.
I was really looking forward to watching 300 and being able to discuss it with you guys later. That was the predominant thought on my mind when I left work Friday afternoon. Promptly forgetting that my cell phone is still sitting in the charger on my desk at work.

No problem right? I can just call you up and figure out when to meet anyway. Not knowing that the phone was cut off a week ago, because the Internet had been working. Since I know you guys are having a blast at Cat’s, I stuck with the original plan to call you on Saturday morning and left the matter at ease. I wanted to concentrate on playing with the new DSLR camera I sniped off of ebay.

The following morning, to my surprise, I found out that the phone isn’t working, no problem, I’ll just call you from a pay phone right? So I wrote you that email and proceeded to look up my contact list from gmail and I cannot believe that this isn’t some kind of joke that the omnipotent is playing with me.

I am no longer jacked in to the net. At first, I couldn’t believe the most obvious answer because if that’s the case, then it is the second time and it means that this is no longer just a case of abasent-mindness. My mood sank with each negative result returned by my troubleshooting, repeated till I couldn’t stand it anymore. I went to the Red Head and asked the million dollar question.

“Did you pay Bell?”
“No”
“For how many months?”
“Three”
“Again?”
“Again”

Dear readers,

Due to unforeseeable circumstances… Let me rephrase, due to the redhead, my phone line and Internet connection has been cut. I am living the life of a caveman now and enjoying every moment of it.

Until my digital uplink is restored. I’ll see you later

Dear readers,

I am taking an extended leave of absence. I am evolving and I am excited about the change that’s happening.

In the mean time, I suggest reading some short stories I’ve written over at http://causalien.nutang.com

Dear readers

I am taking a small break for a week or so. Life is very shitty at the moment and I am afraid I won’t  be able to write anything decent. When I come back, I will have some extra things for this site. It’s called a Kodak P850 SLR camera.

A recent discussion made me dig deeper into a part of myself that I am unaware of.

It didn’t start out as a discussion about conflict. It started out as a discussion about handling criticism. I stated the fact that I can only handle one per day without feeling precarious emotionaly. The example used to present my case was one where I discovered that I feel condenscending while trying to help a person. It showed that I wasn’t sure which was the dominant motivation. The foregone conclusion was that I haven’t decided which way I want to be yet. This conclusion was as a quick fix and since I am in that rut of having to decide everything about my life. I agreed.

Then it occurred to me that the origin is from something else. I don’t really know how to explain this, so I will attempt to show through incidents that happened.

I remember looking out the window of my highschool classroom, awestruck by how calm and serene the trees are when they sway lazyly to the gentle caresses of the wind. I was gazing at the scene, admiring the moment which mother nature presents to its residents when the girl sitting underneath the window bursted my dream bubble with :”Qu’est-ce que tu regards là?”. Challenging me with a hint of disgust.

I was quickly dragged back to earth to notice that I’ve been staring over the top of her head in order to look out the window. Realizing the implication of such prolongued staring mean, I immediately felt ashamed and looked down in silence. Instead of telling her the truth, that I was enjoying the scenary, I felt ashamed because she put me in the position which she imagined me to be. In my own words, her reality was stronger than my reality.

As for the condenscending accusation? I am very direct and oblivious of consequences most of the time. For me, it’s nothing to fuss over because I expect everyone to want to improve like I do. What I constantly fail to do, is understanding the type of impact that it’ll have on the recipient.

For the condescending scenario, it was a trigged by a short email to someone saying: “The resume looks disorganised, please redo it and I will print it out to give in tomorrow. GTG” At which point the person promptly tells me that this sounded very condenscending and doesn’t make her feel good. I replied by apologizing, which would not have been my reply today. It was a simple truth and I wavered accepting her reality. My reality was that I really wanted to help get her a job and the resume was crap which won’t even get looked at. I am surprised that this came from her and was pissed off that she didn’t take this seriously.

Should I care? Perhaps, but I’d rather not. In the end, it shows what type of thoughts the person tend to linger on. It’ll be a great way to filter out those who lack that confidence as I surround myself more and more with people who can look at the situation and laugh at it instead.
This moment, this short span of few seconds where I find myself completely in tune with a part of myself that the society shun upon. I call this moment my return to apathy.

No love birds I know, have ever survived a dance partnership that they started together. In the few years that I was involved with dancesport, there was only one that I heard of.

I saw the all too familiar symptoms, the mood is gone and the night is going to end in disaster if I don’t suggest that we leave right then. Too bad, I was enjoying catching up with my swing dancing classmates… cute ones too, but alas… friends first.

I was hoping that the nature of swing dancing and the fun setting of Cat’s corner will be a good place for couples to start out together, how I have erred. Basic human emotions still trumps everything else. Jealousy, pride, fear of rejection served with women’s need to feel secure while comparing her man to the others. You will always end up with a nagging girlfriend.

That will happen, if the woman is better than the man. Statistically, women have always excelled at the beginning because they need only learn how to dance, whilst the man have to dance AND lead. You see our specie’s problem?

There was an interview with the only famous couple known to have survived this type of inequality, where the woman was already a top dancer but decided to start fresh with her newbie husband. The lady gave our dance sphere the most important advice ever. “Do not try to teach or correct your husband, leave that job to the coach.” Can you let it slide when you feel righteous? Can you hold your tongue when you think you know more than the other? More importantly, can you educate with the purest intention of helping, without thinking or knowing that you are superior?

Dance constitutes only of passions and feelings, reason and love are only functional when you are not dancing.

It was our first time being this close like this. Thing rubbing against thing with only a very thin layer of clothing between us. I can feel her intimate parts as well as she is feeling mine. Nothing my coach is saying is entering my mind because I was concentrating my efforts into not getting an arousal. It’d be super embarrassing because it’ll show right through the skin tight pants that I was wearing.

Only a week ago, we said our first hello to each other, now we are engaged in the equivalent act of humping each other’s legs… with several people watching including her parents. What is this that we are doing? Waltz.

I stopped worshiping women after I started dancing.
There was complete silence when we entered the small crowded change room. Let me correct that. I was surrounded by complete silence when they realized that I have entered the room and that  I am a guy.

The veterans of shows and performances just continues on in their quiet solitude, floating in their head with rituals before a show. The silence was created by those new to the show scene, who are still uncomfortable changing in front of the presence of men. They are probably thinking: “Is he going to peek?”

The answer is: Yes and No. Being stuffed into the same change room with the ladies are often the result of a hindsight of the organizers. Alas, you cannot blame them because they are not dancers and have no idea that we need to change into our customs, which often require us to get completely naked beforehand. Which was quite exciting in the beginning for me, but the novelty already wore off for me after several years bathed in superbly toned bodies with superbly tanned skins.

It has changed my perception and I have since set that as the minimum requirement of beauty. It’s not the same beauty as the skinny model type though. Dancers are more muscular and fitter, often with a bigger bone structure to withstand the fast switch in gravity direction. The most prominent indication of a good dancer can be observed from the shape of their back and thigh. Which to my surprise, has become an instant turn on/off for me.

I get lost in watching people’s movement now. Seeing and understanding the reason behind each particular gait. I often find myself lost in finding irregularities of a person’s footsteps. A pretty face, no longer hold much meaning to me except for the probability of a spoilt person who expect everyone to hand them anything they wanted for sex.
It’s strange how when beauty is a norm around me, I find myself searching for a face that doesn’t fit the golden standard. Looking at a model’s face, is like looking at a wooden mask made by some faraway African tribe… emotionless.

Equality is an imperfect notion created by our egoistic self to ease the shock brought to our attention by our weakness.
“Why did you change the direction we were facing? You should have stick with what we originally planned to do in the first place and face the side with more audience.” She barked at me as I walked out of the door, fuming with anger at the insulting tone she’s been using. She’s like a kid who grab on to any chance to feel righteous in order to smack me down with the hammer of justice.

I didn’t argue. From the tone she used, she’d already passed the judgement that I am guilty. The truth is, I did it in the heat of the moment; on a hunch. This will sound silly in an argument no matter how I look at it.

The night’s show was a charity event to raise money and we are the spotlight of the night to attract the old widows and divorced millionaires. Which means, I don’t want to fight in front of the people… Nope, the temporary truce didn’t last till the end of the night and the only way I can find to avoid having people hear us fight, is to turn towards the door and get there as fast as I can.

How do I tell her that I changed the routine so she will end up doing the split in front of the smaller crowd, whom I think are more important. How do I tell her that I think flashing some of her skin to them was the intention for that change? Worst of all, how do I justify selling her body to “Dirty old men?”. So instead, I just listened to her quietly and bid her goodnight.

“Dancesport will be the last place in human society where male dominance can be found.” This quote has been repeated and echoed by many of my teachers. Before you get pissed off at the ignorance of this statement and brush everything off as pure male arrogance, hear my next question: “Why do you want to dance with a partner?”

The mistake that most men eventually make in a partnership is by asking a simple and innocuous question during practice: “What do you think?” Like many men before me, I had to learn this lesson the hard way. Yes, I do agree that it is a valiant effort from you to respect the recent rise in equality between sexes, but the nature of the dance will trump whatever improvement we make at that front, stripping all the bullshit down to the core issue: your feelings.

“A partnership will work out when the man is slightly better than the woman, it does not work the other way around.” quoted my teachers directly off dancesport magazines. By asking “What do you think?” you are accessing the wrong side of the brain that makes dancing work and attempting to give woman what they don’t want in dancing: choices.

It is important for the woman to accept what which makes her yearn to be swept off her feet by an experienced gentleman. A woman has to accept it and follow the lead in order for dancing to happen, because not even twins can synchronize their mind well enough so that they both lead the same move. The same principle applies to life, things happen, because one person expressed the desire for some thing and others either accept or reject after the long period of persuasion and cunning foul play.

It doesn’t mean however, that woman should play zombie or pretend she’s watching TV. As important as the man who leads and initiates, the woman shows the glamor and ensure the finish. If a man says he wants to try getting buried alive, the woman makes sure that he’s buried and dead. Do not put all the blame to the guy because “you are only following his lead.” because if you as a couple don’t look beautiful to the audience, it is because the woman aren’t making it beautiful, or if the guy overshadows the girl.

“I am sorry, this other lady already booked me for the next dance.” I said as I grabbed a random girl around me for a dance. I apologized later for the rude behavior explaining that I really wanted to dance with her and didn’t want to lose my chance due to another girl asking me for a dance. Lies and lies, but it was done to promote positive overall experiences to strangers I’ve never met and will probably not meet again. I am more direct with friends from people’s feedback.

I usually don’t resolve to this kind of strategy to avoid dancing with someone, it’s only one dance that lasts for a minute anyway. Easier to go through it than putting the effort to come up with an excuse. So why did I go out of my way to avoid this one? Especially when she asked? The incident happened waaaaay back, back when I first started out.

She was a young, beautiful and skinny teen. With a wrinkle like dimple around the tip of her lips which comes from her French heritage. I was a nerdy chinese boy who’ve never touched hair gel in his life, with a chinese bowl cut as hairstyle sporting big nerdy goggles. Even so, I still spent the night working up enough courage to wipe my hand clean of perspirations and walk up to her to ask for a dance. She rejected me as I imagined she would, but what made this rejection turn into a grudge was the attitude she had. The “I am too good for you” disdain that crushed all but my faint belief that I can dance a 6 beat box step.

Five years after, my frame has fleshed out from lifting and dipping girls, my skills better than anyone in that room and thank god for all the patience from my female friends, I have escaped from the asian bowl cut. What about her?

She got fat and sloppy. Yet it was that snotty attitude she had that turned me away whenever I see her. Lesson? Respect the asian boy with a bowl cut, for he has walked the road of ridicule to get to this point.

If you go to any pages in Nutang, you’ll notice the annoying surf bar at the top and the ads+ad links conveniently located at the bottom with mismatching colors. I had to write a few questionable code to circumvent these problems. It was a great challenge and despite all the restrictions, I am able to represent the page exactly the way I wanted it… and I should stop there.

There are many ideas that came to fruition during the quest and even though I’d like to implement them, I have to make myself understand that there will always be another project another time. To continually adding new ideas will just impede the progress and blur the original plan. So I hereby present you the final layout for Mistressbailey. It is temporary still on my test site. I am under negotiation with Nutang’s owner to work out what’s permitted and what is not. I am pretty sure I violated a bigger part of their license agreement.
In any case Check it out here: causalien.nutang.com

Unfortunately for us, dancesport is a winter sport in Canada and because of the volatile climate, we often encounter snow storms in the open plains between cities.

I decided to stop at a road side hotel and pay the handsome charge of $70 a night instead of trying my luck on a road which I can no longer see. We had both made sacrifices for the weekend in order to travel to Toronto, she had skipped all her Friday classes and I had called in sick from my cellphone. We wanted to arrive at the competition a night before the so the stresses of the road doesn’t affect our performance. It looks like it will anyway.

Already, she’s complaining about the extra money we are spending for the room, add that to the $90 entry fee, $120 gas, $80 hostel fee for two nights and my one day’s paycheck, the weekend is adding up to a hefty sum.

I didn’t mind the complaining at all, it happened so often that I’ve grown numb to it. All that’s going through my mind at that moment was how much gas we have wasted because the tires keep on skidding in the snow. Am I going to have to fork out more money? How early do we have to wake up if we are to arrive and still have ample time to get ready: put on makeups, slip into our custumes, warm up all 10 dances and eat.
At the back of my mind, I registered her complain about the state of the hotel we are in and what a dump it is compared to a real hotel. I made a mental note that I should book an expensive suite next time to fufill her wishes, just so I can watch her reaction when she sees the bill.

The fact that we are sharing the same room always unsettles me. For me, sharing a room usually implies more intimate friendships or romantic relationship. That is not the nature of our relationship. I kept getting the urges to start discussing something profound, yet caught myself before I did because we have to sleep, in order to be ready for tomorrow. So we both went through the preparation for the night in silence, visualizing the routines we will be dancing the next day. Like business.

Holding her thigh with my left hand with my right arm wrapped around her waist, I gently pulled until our pelvis touched and constant connection can be felt. With only a hear beat as the lead we went down into the sexual dip, pausing at the lowest point for the imaginary audience to enjoy.

Without looking, I noticed that we got stuck somewhere because we didn’t end up as low as I thought. Then I said the most innocent of all things: “Huh, why can’t we go lower?” (I use “we” here because this is the most approximate of expression. In Mandarin, there’s a way to address such things without pointing out who or what it is). She got pissed and left, leaving wondering what the heck just happened. Later, I’d find that I insulted her by saying she wasn’t flexible enough.

What did I do back then in my confusion? I just shrugged and waited 20 minutes for the next girl to show up.

When I was first thrown into the classroom with no clue of French, I thought I was dumb. Compared to a few classmates in the immigration class, my progress was slow as snail. When the time came for me to be integrated into the normal world, my French ability was the equivalent to those of primary school, whilst my spanish counterparts were already joking around and mingling well with the rest of the population.

Did I mentioned that I felt dumb? Well, I felt dumber when my teacher publicly humiliated my speaking ability and wrote a letter to the dean that I shouldn’t be in the class.

Fast forward, 10 years later. I am sitting in a German conversation class and having a blast blabbing out incoherent Deutch anyway I can. The people are more mature and I can understand 80% of what my teacher is saying in just two classes. Granted she’s using simple words and speaking slowly, but the knowledge of English and French combined with the experience of getting picked on by “les Québecois français�? has propelled my ability to learn. No wonder those spanish people was able to integrated with the normal population so easily. Spanish and French are pratically the same thing. In asia, it’d probably be classified as another dialect only. I’d say Cantonese and Mandarin has more differences than spanish/french.

Following the same train of thought. I was wondering if one can conquer all the languages in the world and how best to go about doing it. I was thinking that one can tackle the languages that has the biggest differences first and than expand from that to the subsets of the languages.

I’ve created a road map of a hierarchy of languages. Marked in red are languages that are so different that you’ll have to restart from scratch. The lines are supporting languages that will help speed up the learning of the next one significantly.

Wie geht’s? Ich heiße Causa. Es ist kalt draußen heute aben. Ich Wunsch sie warm umgeben.

Danke für ihren besuch

Auf Wiedersehen

Site statistic has increased more than I expected ending the year with 475 unique visitors, with 1/4 of it coming from site promotion tools like blog explosion, blog mad or blog soldiers. I’ve gradually stopped using them since I find that visitors from these usually don’t return. The goal for my site, is not for popularity anyway. Google analytics’s result more or less confirms with awstats.

The weirdest search is: sex with my teachers biatchs

The top content is: fdisk Geek Part I: Hacking the graphic card

Most searched phrase is: Ultracrepidate

Second most searched phrase: Can I use normal rice to make sushi.

Page Rank: 2

Most emotional post: meh

Event that triggered the most changes: Breakup

Amongst the most interesting comment I received is this one. About a girl I once find attractive while working at Nordia. It is worth mentioning because I noticed my strong emotional response to the comment. The post about this comment was downgraded to the comment reply itself. I have evaluated it and deemed it unworthy as a post.
The year passed by like a flash and I am still amazed at how much has happened. Fred’s passing comment on how this year has been the year of change for me ranged true and true as I scroll through the numerous entries. I thought these things had happened 10 years ago.

The holy jihad against any technology in the Dune series started out with a stupid girl smashing medical equipments. Until the idea “thou should not create a machine in the image of god” spread like a virus and resulted in a specialized profession. The Mentat.

A Mentat, is a person trained to function like a computer. He developed abilities to compute massive amount of information in a fraction of a second. We know it can be done because of the idiot savants that lives in mental institutes.

Given training, our body can withstand the most extreme of situations. The current breath holding record is about 9 minutes, that is beyond an accident or freak of nature.

Why did I mention this? Well, as an accident, I discovered a neat way to hold my breath. You see, my average has never surpassed 45 seconds, with the best score at 1 minute on a good day.  The reason is the discomfort and extra effort I spent holding more air than what my lungs are used to.

As I was lying in bed typing an entry yesterday, I watched my stomach rise and fall and wondered if my stomach can hold any air. So I focused on pumping air in there, before I know it, I passed the 2 minute barrier on my first try.

This happened because different muscles were used to hold the air inside and doesn’t trigger a rejection signal. I later experimented filling both my stomach and lungs, but the result is still less than 2 minute.

Try it… just don’t hold it for too long. You might forget to breath afterwards. It almost happened to me.

I was going to write some philosophy meandering, but that was trumped by what happened today.

Today marked the first time that a head hunter initiated contact with me as an attempt to get qualified people to work for them. It is interesting to note that the exchange was very honest and filled with truth. What truth?

I am in a comfortable seat. I am in the position of power. I can choose depending on whether or not your offer goes well with my goal in life.

I originally set out to achieve a blurry dreamy effect to the pictures that I see on Irena’s photo albums. Then, of course, having achieved that, I feel like a boring mimic and remained somewhat unsatisfied with copying someone else, even though reverse engineering someone else’s effect is a little tricky. So, I decided to take it as far as I can based on the image in my mind that I really wanted. The result, as you can see, is an anime like scene that I am quite pleased about.

I don’t know when, but at one point, I reached a tipping point and just understands photoshop. I don’t know how others do it, but I seem to be able to know the approximate result that comes out of a certain action before I apply it. Could be that I am just so used to make custom hardware image filters for clients that associates mathematics to pictures. Or it’s just my ego.

This is my first site design for someone else, based on the criteria that it has to be a rain forest. The final image is out of the 2 others I found on Flickr with deviant art license granted to the general public.

Now that the picture is done, I still have to go through the headache of how to implement this on Nutang while figuring out how I can blend the picture into a dark background. Currently, the wire frame should allow me to blend a granulated background into the picture so the transition seems seamless, but you never know till it’s done and the code is in.

To conclude this, it feels strange designing for someone else. You have to work within the constraints of their criteria which proves to be a great challenge for me. If you know me: challenge = highly sought after. Not only that, it forces me to design in a way that’s different than the norms I abide by, which adds another level of understanding to my skill. One day, it’ll be useful.

Growing up with many different names makes me less susceptible to impressive titles. To seek respect and put others down by showing how wonderful and complex my job title is. Names, used to describe a function and gives meaning about you in other people’s mind. The Causalien you know, is different from the Causalien that the others know.  They are all me, yet not me in entirety.

I usually ignore the person’s title when I first meet them and observe their interaction with others instead. There can only be a few functions that needs to present for a work group to function and the rest is just copying at a larger scale so the command structure can get through. You need the designer, who knows how everything works and the concept of how to design. Then the integrator who pieces all the different elements together for a functional unit. Which is passed on to the robot who will be the grunt of repetitive manufacturing. Once that’s done, the salesman who are in direct contact of the clients and pushes sales. When business is not good, a marketer to create hype and generate publicity. Finally, the manager and the coordinator to keep all the needs of the previous workers filled.

Or more simply put. A creator, an integrator, a salesman and a manager.

Though I do feel some awe when I rethink about the title of the “Sales guy” I’ve been mentioning in my previous posts. Regional sales manager sure conveys an air of importance to that of a greasy sleazy title of salesman. Whilst Engineering Application Specialist create the same amount of confusion to that of the System Integrator to the general public. Heck with it, I am not even sure I know the meaning. So far, I’ve never been interviewed by anyone who understand what my job title is about. The confusion displayed on people’s face is usually worth the effort of telling them that I was an ASIC design engineer. Other than that, in my dance circles. I’d just respond I am in IT.

We now interrupt your Triphasic sleep log with a very normal journal entry. Here I am, at 1:30AM in the morning. Awake automatically.

When asked how one can still bike around Montreal around the winter hills of Mont-Royal with snow the height of your ankle that lays on top of pure solid ice, Jesse promptly replied: “Chains, brakes and anti-freeze lubricants with your chains.” It was my first introduction to the way of frugal living. With a wild eyed disbelief on my face I pondered the implication of such a reponse.

1. Jesse did not have to think before answering

2. This is not considered crazy

Although I’ve biked till way into the winter last year, I was never hard core enough to do the aforementioned modifications and bare the backbone of Montreal winter. Which is why I always salute the bikers that zooms past me when I am holed up in my warm car awaiting the red light to turn.

The business contact that I met today asked me whether or not I like the winter that finally showed up to our door. “Are you kidding me? I love it.” Not only do I have to wake up earlier everyday, to shovel my car out of the snow and ice that accumulated overnight, I also get to freeze to death for 10 minutes while my car warm up. Not to mention all the extra expenses spent in preparation for a tough winter. My car is a virtual bunker filled with extra clothing, emergency kits, shovel, gloves, food, firelog etc. etc. This still doesn’t prepare me for some days when the keyholes are covered with frozen ice, or the door couldn’t be opened because it’s covered in a 3 cm coat of ice, or it’s just too cold for the engine to start. Trucker’s advice is to bring a 50% scotch and pour it into your gas tank to unfreeze your gas. I am contemplating trying this.

“Frozen windshield whilst driving, the anti-freeze wiper fluid isn’t anti-freeze enough to defrost the ice that accumulated on my windshield. I eventually adapted to be able to see even with a deformed view”

In all seriousness, I answered yes and no. No, I don’t like the cold since I am made for a tropical country and has no “extra” fat. Yes I like the cold because I’ve always enjoyed change. It makes life less monotonic and who can miss a chance to give it a good ol’ Quebec swearing: “Crestie de caullise de Tarrrbarrrrnack”. I enjoy the phrase as much as my new found ability to roll my tongue whilst swearing at winter.

I don’t know when this started happening, but I’ve been very trusting on information that I obtained from others and have been jumping straight into things without fear.

Hopping on to a bus as just as it approaches without knowing its schedule or route relying solely on information gathered from another person used to unnerve me throughout the trip. Last night though, the story was different.

I have more faith in my own ability to get out of shitty situation, more trust in the people that I know who I get the information from,  more interest in different things that happens around me and more importantly a stronger feeling that I am where I belong wherever I am.

It is with the utmost curiosity when I discovered the bus stop that passed by Montreal’s acrobatic and circuit school. I’ve been bumping into their students left and right at different dance parties and have been wondering about it forever. The mystery was solved when a troupe of young athletic looking teens hopped on to the semi empty bus and begin doing acrobatics with the bars and handles installed for people standing. Oh Montreal,

This is part twenty one of my Triphasic sleep experiment. Please visit this page for more info.

Wow, It’s almost a month now. It certainly felt shorter. In fact, I didn’t feel the passage of time at all. Life is one big continuous moment. I am not sure if I enjoy living like this. The only separation is between weekdays and weekends.

The Triphasic sleep schedule is a trip in mental discipline as well as an exploration of what one can and cannot do with sleep. I think I have reached a comfortable point with 1 hour naps and a 3~4 hour core sleep in the morning depending on how tired I am. The amount of time saved is amazing, though, I am not sure about its effectiveness since I have to allocate some of them for entertainment and other activities instead of working on my projects.

Still, I am amazed to discover that completing certain projects provided the entertainment and relaxation similar to other forms of relaxing activities. Whereas it presented a drain on me before.

I have posted the summary of Q4 financials for this year in my management of stocks.  I tried a few things this quarter, including day trading and flip flopping. None of them appealed to me yet because I realized that in order to do so, you have to have a bigger capital in general to make a good return on the investment. Even then, the part that you use for flip flopping and day trading should only be a small amount of your whole portfolio, so that the whole process can remain purely cerebral.  Once you get  emotionally involved in the trade, that’s when you start losing money.

I also had a hard time coming up with a consistent way to log my gains, but there is none. The more I research into finances, the more I understand that the value of money is fluid at any given time. There is always someone who want to buy for more than what it’s worth and someone who are selling for less… but are they really? Maybe they’ve gained enough over time and it’s not worth fighting for a few cents for them.

Despite working at a shitty job for the first four month of this year. I still managed to save up enough to reach my 20k target With 7% of it generated from the buying and selling of stocks. It’s a great sense of achievement, yet a little bit surreal. You see, I do not understand the concept of 20k in value. All I see are numbers, day in and day out. One day, I might be 1k less than the previous day and another day, I’ll see a 1k gain from before. It’s a true emotional roller coaster and it has helped me in understanding risk vs opportunity while keeping a cool head above the water to make the right decision.

I have yet experienced any major stock fall yet, so I am crossing my finger that things will continue to be good. It seems like something is bubbling up, but I can’t get my hand on what it is. Maybe it’s the new monetization of the blogsphere, but I fail to understand how it can be related.

Until the next quarter.

This is part twenty of my Triphasic sleep experiment. Please visit this page for more info.

A reset to the normal hours. With 1.5 hours nap time and 3.5 hours of core sleep appears to have worked in increasing my alertness.

Sleep
Today, I’ve decreased my nap times to 1 hours only and it seem to have no affect in the way I function. I will keep the usual 3.5 hour core sleep so I don’t overdo it again like I did on Tuesday.

Activities

Refraining from working on my computer is working on the overall quality of alertness. I think the key here is a well diversified activity schedule. Perhaps I was focusing too much on getting things done with all these extra times I have. I never shut down to relax and have fun.

Nothing else to report. I’ve been hanging out with people and just plain ol relaxing.

This is part ninteen of my Triphasic sleep experiment. Please visit this page for more info.

The effect of a good sleep overdose is quite significant. I am more alert while performing all tasks. Although the grogginess is still being felt, whenever I try to wake up, but they are only physical symptoms.

The devil that I was struggling with for the past 2 days were both mental and physical. It seemed like my brain was invoking the shutdown process while my mind is trying to run an OS.

The eyes are still sore, and the soreness propagates to a few muscles associated with it around the head now. Staying away from the computer today and cook seem to alleviate the strain slightly.

One benefit I am seeing from this, is that I am getting up earlier which means going to work early and in turn resulted in less time stuck in traffic. I went from 2 hours per day to a mere 1 hour. More time!!!

This is part eighteen of my Triphasic sleep experiment. Please visit this page for more info.

The low down
I didn’t update yesterday. Something must’ve happened. Yes. First, I wanted to let my previous post stay up at the front page for a while, second, I decided to say screw it just this once.

I overdid the tweaking and ended up super exhausted. The changes I made yesterday reduced my nap time to 1 hour and core sleep to 3 hours. Which explains my inability to perform any function today. So after waking up from my midnight nap and making sure that I am fully awake, I thought about what I should do. Problem is, the feeling of vertigo never faded while I was weighing in the options. Something is definitely wrong. An extra 30 minute nap didn’t help the matter. So I said screw it, set my alarm for 7 AM and just slept. I wanted to see, how much my body needed before it automatically wakes itself up.
An hour later, I was awake again. Closed my eyes and willed myself back to sleep. This is very strange, as I recall just 2 days ago, I was enjoying a great weekend with plenty of time and fun. The past two day, with work combined, proves to be hell for me. I noticed an extreme deficiency in memory recall and had to rely on notepads to help myself to remember what to do. Imagine only having short term memory for the day, that’s what it felt like. I am beginning to suspect that the amount of sleep you need, is a function of the brain power you used. More specifically, memory recall.

Since I’ve awakened numerous time having dreams and still feeling groggy, the theory of REM sleep being able to refresh you seems far fetched to me.

“Who is this?”

People kept on asking about this picture that I put on one of my many computers at work.

“Is she a model?”

I spent the better part of my weekend helping her establish an online presence as well as experimenting with the power of photoshop. It’s the first time that I get to play with a higher resolution image and a well placed shot like this. Although I’d like to claim some credit, truth is, she took the picture herself. I am still not skillful enough as a camera man to help my subjects get through the uncomfortable stage. The session that we planned together to take pictures ended up being a giggling fest.

It used to be that you only need to create your own site, but since her goal is to become popular, I had to sign her up to numerous social sites, retyping the same info over and over again. Her main page will be on http://mistressbailey.nutang.com and I’ve been doing some modification slowly to achieve the goal we set for this site.

While working on the site, I became more and more aware of an undeniable fact. That people pay way too much attention to a girl with a beautiful face. I created an account a few weeks before her in order to test the layout and editing. I’ve actively participate in the forum for development issues and have generate traffic for the blog network. (Still am one of the top lurker&contributor so far). Her site, in one day, received more comment and replies from a “Hello” post than mine did through the few weeks. I was aware of this phenomenom before, but never in my imagination did I imagine it to be this big of a gap.

Back to the main topic. After my co-worker’s questions, I started to ask the same question myself. Maybe she should become a model, or some type of celebrity with a nice face. We’ll see how far we can push it. So here’s my question:

Do you think she should be a model? Or, make it as one.

I sighed in relief when the rhythmic beat of heavy bass started rumbling my floor. Our new neighbor downstairs enjoys a good song with a bass, I am finally not the only culprit for noise pollution in this apartment building. Oh, how I dreaded the 3 knock on the door.

I remember freshman year in university, whenever Jeff played music at inappropriate hours, we’d get a knock on the door from our next door floor mate to ask us nicely to turn down the music. Since I was never the culprit, I couldn’t understand why Jeff didn’t like the situation. She asked nicely and he did play at inappropriate times. It didn’t occur to me until it happened to me that the knock got associated to a few emotional responses that are related to the fight or flight response. The knock came, you have to deal with talking to your neighbor. Not to mention, terminating the song before you reach the emotional satisfaction you seek from the song.

I am managing most of my online presence after midnight now. My nights are not as lonely as the other soldiers of polyphasic sleep schedule because I have the cat as company. It’s also a good thing that my day job and my hobbies don’t involve the net as much, otherwise I’d drive myself crazy. In cases I do, I’d start experimenting with vegetarian cooking. The recipes I found online often involves a lot of mayonnaise, butter and heavy cream which, by my point of view, seems to defeat the purpose of being vegetarian to begin with. I always chuckle at my flat mate’s excessive use of butter and oil when she makes her meal. Whatever she made up in healthy selection of ingredient is offset by the fat used to spice up the taste.

Since Milo asked a few days ago about a logo (or months, I can’t tell anymore), I’ve been experimenting with different designs to end up with the ones below. Here they are, my first banners and the new favicon now bunkered in to everyone’s bookmarks. These are inspired by my cat’s tail and since this are my virgin designs, suggestions are welcome.