The dense fog hugged everything around me, dampening life as it blocked out my ability to sense the surrounding. Giving the day a hint of seriousness and sadness as if life itself was weeping. It’s strange that I am feeling at a loss. Especially so when it is for an object, but I can’t help it. When I thought about the fact that I will no longer see this car ever in my life again, I felt ashamed. I must be cruel for discarding it after it has rendered my family a decade and a half of service.

Its history

It’s had a good life though. Our family took care of it with all the money we can until I became the sole owner of it. Now that I think about it, I am the one who did the most damage to it in its life span. Having crashed it twice throughout its life time, damaging the tires and transmissios severely. It explains why I have so much problems in those areas near the end of its time.

Some statistics to remember it by: Toyota Camry V6 LE gray 1992

• Fuel economy: 17 mpg
• Automatic transmission
• Power window, power doors
• ABS
• Average cost of gas per month: $120
• Traveled 325,000 kilometers
• Onece side impact in Ottawa by a van
• Once rear ended in Ottawa by a van
• V6 engine (still in perfect condition)
• Fed it Premium gasoline all throughout its life except for the last 2 years when gas is above 1.00/liter
• Transmission completely changed when it’s 5 years old
• Air conditioner died from rust due to lack of use
• Tires replaced
• Rear caliper failed and replaced
• All the suspensions died
• Rear load balancer steel beam rusted completely
• Starter died (on the final day to be traded in)

It has been both a mentor and a great reliable ride for me… well as reliable as it liked. Now that I think about it, it has been reliable on occasions that were NOT critical. But I still have to admit that it was there with me on every steps of my life.

• When I was 16 and learning to drive
• The car that was used to transport me and my meager belongings to my dorm
• Drove my first date around in it
• Drove to my first dance competition in it.
• Had my first car accident in it

It did have a habit of failing at the most crucial moment too. A quirk in its personality that is part of its charm

• The hand break locked up on the day of my driver’s license test.
• The battery died when we were ready and packed to go to a competition
• The starter refused to do its job on the last day of its life when I was going to trade it in

Other than these worth mentioning events, it has provided me with reliable services especially during the harsh Canadian winter. Watching it slowly die in the past 2 years has been memorable. Now that it is gone these memories somehow provides me with warmth. I am glad that I get to drive it in its last two years of life. In dying slowly, it forced me to learn the principles of car maintenance and repair so that the next one won’t suffer as badly as it. The most important lesson that it taught me is the relationship between rust and its longevity. When I decided to junk it, its outward appearance is still pristine, however, the underside tells a different story.

The nail in the coffin is of course, the load balancer. Due to record snowfall for the past two years, it was constantly in touch with either snow or salty slush while parked. The compacted snow in the parking lot accelerated the process by grating off the layer of rust proofing material that’s supposed to protect all metals.

Thank you for the services you’ve rendered dear ol’ car. I will remember you.

November 06, 2008

Causalien out.

The revelation came when I thought to myself while analyzing stocks: “Man I can do this all day, not get bored and feel like I have achieved something.”

This revelation is so big that these simple lines deserves a post by itself and is filed under Lifemark.

Reflection

My experience with cold calls shielded me from getting really down because of a failure. I am actually happy that I didn’t feel anything at all throughout all these events that’s supposed to put my ego on the line. Or perhaps I am still numb from the setbacks. Suffice to say that I didn’t feel anything when the possibility of being stood up becomes greater as time goes by. It further strengthened my belief that in the world of venture capitalist and angel investors a “yes” means a no and a “no” means a no while a “definitely yes” still means no. It’s never a yes until what both party agreed on is physically in front of you and you are holding it in your hand.

The facts

I met Surjit at the mall while typing on my Asus eeePC laptop while waiting for my mechanic to change car’s rear wheel mechanisms ($590). He seems generally interested in my small and ultra portable laptop so we chatted. He turns out to be one of my big boss’s classmate in Engineering. With that, we talked even more and the conversation veered into starting my own company and some of the ideas I have. By then, his wife came by having finished with her medical exams and they got ready to leave. So, not wanting to miss any opportunity, I asked for his card. I knew that he was probably just passing time, getting some ego boosts while waiting, but the final comment he dropped encouraged me to go to the next steps. He said: “Call me.”

“What the fuck am I doing? What if I sound stupid? What if he thinks I am stupid? What if my friends find out of this shameful moment? Am I annoying if I call him now? Why would he want to talk to a nobody like me? What am I going to talk about? My ideas are not fully developed yet. What if he laughs at my naive idea? What if he rejects me and tells me I am worthless? What if I start stuttering again? Am I going to say something that makes me sound stupid? Will my mind be blank when I need ideas?” ~Causalien

Two days later, I called and setup a lunch between us at an expensive restaurant across the street. I also promised that I would call him the morning of, to confirm the meeting. Which is why, today I got suspicious when I couldn’t reach him on his cell phone in the morning and get his voice message when I attempt to call his home. The facts are there. Everything seemed so positive until today I even excused myself out of an important in house training to meet him just so that I can tell myself that I’ve done all I can. I waited and waited, indifferent of the prime computation my subconscious spewed out from all the facts. I don’t care either way. This is just another step to get through, I will learn from it no matter what the outcome is.

What I benefited from this

I noticed that I have more confidence in calling up strangers now, a side effect of my current job. It is also better than having things bite me in the behind when it doesn’t go according to plan. At least for this, I only wasted 30 minutes.

The second thing I noticed is that I should trust my gut feeling more. Right away I have this feeling that something is not right. Looking deeper, I noticed it’s because that everything I ever earned up till this point in my life, I had to fight long and hard for it. This is simply too easy.

The third benefit is that I get to sit down and look at my long list of ideas accumulated since year 2000 and filtered through them. Some of them are already in place and some are just outright ridiculous. I managed to narrow it down to 8 ideas in the end. Four that are more mature and four that are wild and unknown. I also took some time to evaluate how their financial modal should be and marked out their potential competitors and niches. And finally, some time to practice pitching it to people.

Goals

I pretty much failed all the new year resolution I’ve set for myself, but a lot of it can be blamed on my naïveté and a general lack of purpose with which I set them. The goal I set for 2008 will be more purposeful and realistic using the knowledges that I have gained about myself and my supposed limits. I am abiding by my established limit in order to charge up on energy reserves until the time when a raison d’être comes to me and I deem it to be worthy of my devotion. I will then, burn myself out like I did when I joined a startup to get it.

Finances

My net worth is in shambles as this year sees the collapse of US financial system. It just happens to be my rookie year in investing. Same bad luck as graduating engineering only to come face to face with the tech bubble. A general observation I made on my own life is that I can always assume the worst outcome on any luck based event. I don’t believe in superstition, but I do believe in management of luck. I should start expecting the worst on my first tries and plan my strategies accordingly. I started the year expecting at most 10% growth of my portfolio. Yet I surprised myself when I reached that goal half way through. So the second half the year sees me adjusting my portfolio into a more aggressive one. I now plan on a 3 year 30% growth and invest with stocks that has that potential.

Some good news on my financial front. It seems to me that my analysis was correct and I have bought in a year where real estate properties saw a 10% growth and is projected to have another 3.8% growth next year. It is slowing down but is not going to die. Last I checked, unless you are a first time home buyer, a 20% down is still necessary for a new house and the bank’s credit check process is still solid enough to drive me to the brink of craziness. I can actually afford this place without needing to take in an extra flat mate to help pay the rent. Very non-frugal of me. How long will my analysis remain correct? I don’t know, but it certainly won’t encounter the same mess as in the US for the near 3 year.

Projects

My site has grown past my expectation in terms of what I wanted it to be. I also acquired a new skill as well as gaining insight in tuning my own body’s schedule when I went through the Triphasic Sleep experiment. I can now go through a day with as little sleep as 3 hours and perform my duties with the same sharpness as if I had a full night’s sleep. Grogginess, is a human concept. Believing in it is a gate that limits your own level of wakefulness. In reality, once the internal gate limiting my conscious control of sleep is opened, I found that consciousness the distribution of energies to different part of your self. You can direct all effort into feeling awake and make you feel refreshed, but that takes energy away from say, analysis. It’s an old concept often discussed in Chinese martial art, except they deal mostly with the physical. What I’ve been talking about is the manipulation of consciousness. It is not, however, a license to ignore sleep all together. The experimental observation is that wakefulness has properties like a battery. You can deplete it, but it must be charged up afterwards.

Conclusions

It’s a good year. I am more and more comfortable with the idea of spending money to get my projects going. I think part of the reason why most of my projects didn’t get completed was because I was too frugal. Then again, I didn’t have these projects in motion at the beginning of the year either. I definitely need to work on my goals, especially the part where I want to get my six pack. The personal goal front seems to be my biggest failure. Finance wise, I am fine, only $7,000 away from equality of assets vs liabilities although most of my stocks tanked.

So when I woke up in front of my monitor at 3AM in the morning looking at the Linux bash shell, I asked myself what I had been working on before I fell asleep.

Linux

But was it for work or myself? I couldn’t tell. Nor could I make a clear cut work efficiency decision like I did before, when I ignored everything else to chase after some strange error message I encountered at work. It didn’t take long from then till I eventually started doing work at home and testing server configurations for my home at work. The thirst for knowledge drives me on each day until I exhaust myself to a point where I can’t keep my eyes open.

Lethe sleeps on my lap in hopes that I’d pay her more attention.

People at work can’t believe I did it. What kind of a loser works till 2AM at home for work? I can see that question in the jaw dropping expression they gave me. I just can and I finally started enjoying it because I don’t want to separate life and work anymore. Once you crossed the line, there’s no more turning back to when it was just two separate events.

This weekend, I added a link to this blog from facebook without any fanfare and marked the final stage of bridging the discrepancies between my pen name “Causalien” and my Canadian name “Peter”. It was a small change, perhaps insignificant to others, but definitely earth shattering for me.

The bridge between my clique, my social contacts, my engineering colleagues and my dancing circle are now one and the same. No more secrets and no more hiding. I am now truth reincarnated and responsible for everything I say/write.

It’s not a big change or anything in my habit. Not that I’ve been lying or delusional in my past posts. The fantasy has been brought down slowly over the year to be integrated with the reality. It the fact that finally, whatever I say on this blog, is exactly what I feel in reality. I am also, not ashamed of it one bit.

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.

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.

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

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.