2008 year of character forming

I realized that I can express most of what I want to say in my tweets. So, the blog is reserved and reorganized for longer streams of thoughts. Categorize wise, you will see:

• Hooked on a feeling: For emotional posts
• Scrawl: This is where I consolidate all the stories and mini series that I am writing.
• Showcases: Where I report on progresses of certain thing or show some digital artwork
• Zen Enlightenment: Sharing the revelations of my meditation and Eureka moments.

Because of Twitter and because I am focusing on achieving projects, posts are going to be fewer, but longer. It is the only way I can go, to have more time for projects while outputting texts of quality and consideration. I suggest reading this in parts if you are interested. Mostly, this is for personal record keeping so that I can point back in the future and say: “HA! I am right” or “What a dumbass idea!”

The year in general

Rough edges need to be polished and year 2008 is that process for me. This year, I went after what I want. With that, came failure. With failure, growth can be achieved. More prominent than these events are the realizations and understandings that opened up to me. As I stumble and fall on the road of life, I begin to understand why I stumbled in the first place. Put another way, I’ve always been able to see, but I was never able to accept as truth. Here I am listing some of the more notable ones.

• GROWTH: I found the answer that I asked myself at the beginning of the year: What is wrong with my character?
• I am finally in tune with what I love and what I don’t love.
• I understand that what might seem obvious and easy to others will not be necessarily the same for me. We did not start out with the same advantages.
• I have decided to single task.
• I questioned the humble way at the beginning of the year and found a balance between humbleness and aggression.

Growth

The trigger to the biggest growth is probably from me selecting the few role models that I can respect and worship. Once I decided that they are successful, I then actively pursued information on their life. Finding out the road that they took and the decision that they had to take is key. At one point or another in their life, these people had all realized that they lack a certain ability, either social or technical and embarked on a constant journey to improve and balance it out. These ideas were shoved down my throat and reeks of “adult bullshit”. They contradicted all the past belief to “be myself and to be unique”.  But however I look at it, I don’t get why wanting to improve and wanting to be something else, something better is considered “fake”.

So personality wise I have undergone these changes.

• Never criticize
• Understand the other person’s interests
• Make people feel important
• Always give the best logical answer, no matter what I feel about the person.
• Self effacing

These traits were considered “weak” by me, but in retrospect I realized that it is because I tried to apply it to everyone I meet. I am a better person at detecting bullshit because I realized that for most people: “Not everyone is honest” and “Honesty is only present when interests are aligned”. I have pursued and attempted the total equal honesty with everyone I met, but I realized that even I failed to achieve it.

Today, I understand that only certain people deserve it.

Major Events

Where do I begin, this one part of my life made up about 80% of the personal growth I experienced this year. By itself, I probably wouldn’t have learned as much, but the sequence of events as well as the intensity of each shot me through to another layer of consciousness. The sequence goes something like this: Morocco, Financial crisis, Secret project.

“I like what you just said. After analyzing and weighing my own skills. Shows that you are making a conscious effort to think about how to improve and develop your future.” unnamed Intel director.

It’s through the constant struggle against other people’s visions that I have grown during these three trials. I no longer just follow along someone else’s dream. Instead, I go after what I want and clash with those who want something else. Sometimes I give in and sometimes I stand my ground. Either way, I grow.

Business

I have done numerous optimizations for business. Resulting in a huge increase in productivity. The result can be seen clearly in the reduction in the amount of issues that are waiting for me to complete. At the same time, I am not just offloading my work to other people. That, for me, would be the most devious way of doing work and I see this behavior running rampant all around me.

First, I finalized an email organization scheme for conducting large volume businesses exchanges and second, I have worked out a way to selectively single task on one issue at a time. As can be seen in this email analytic graph. I have attached a few graphs of the results of my email optimization. For RSS readers, I suggest visiting the site since the explanations does not show up in feeds.

Integration of my social network and business work is slowly happening. Mainly in the forms of leaks and accidental discoveries. I made an effort to never use my online pen name offline nor my offline real name online, but there are place that I have no control over and searches that I did not consider. Until I have fully weighted all the sides, I will keep it as is. The biggest argument against is the fact that I don’t want to be contacted by clients when I am off.

One thing I learned about good reputation is that people will be increasingly dependent on you when it is so much easier to ask you a question than to figure things out themselves. I don’t want to have to face the dilemma of telling clients “sorry, I am off work at the moment”

Web Site

Since I cannot show google analytics data, I’ll show my site tracker’s data. Please note that there’s a huge discrepancy between this and what google analytics reported. Take November for example, google tells me there are only 740 unique visitors. In any case, when there are two different accounts, I take the more pessimistic story as true. The difference must be from bot and aggregator visits. I am also not sure how RSS readers are measured and tracked.

I have basically neglected my personal website and let it decompose to its own fate, so much so that it took me several month before I noticed that the “similar post” plug-in is broken. It seems too much like an impersonal broadcast medium compared with the one on one conversation that I am engaged in daily. Maybe because I think of it as that. Other than that, I have also shifted most of my attention to the website I am building with Kirk. This year, we brought it from nothing to something that surpassed my own personal blog.

You can’t really compare the two though, since the traffics are completely different. My personal blog is based on returning visitors and people who know me, whereas the restaurant site is based purely on search results. The goal is different too since we often focus solely on reaching page 1 of google’s search on a particular restaurant’s name.

The most popular post: Still Triphasic Sleep. I am pretty much sick of this post.

The most controversial post

I will have to say that my review of “Le piment rouge” is it. Generating quite a lot of furious responses from their long time customers. I agree I was more critical than usual because I can’t justify $100 per person for something I can get for $40 in normal Chinese restaurants. I did try my best to aim for a balance of critique and compliments in my writing, but it seems that all that’s conveyed are the negativity.

The amount of comments isn’t what made it memorable though. It is the fact that someone close to the restaurant actually contacted my employer to make my life harder. The post is still there, with the original text unchanged. The only moderation I had done is removing comments that refers to my real life and comments made by the same person under different names. The reason for removal is my own judgment on law issues. I could remove the negative comments and just leave the one that are reasonable or agrees with me. But that is not my nature.

The most emotional post: Words from the dusty road 3 about Hadar, someone who changed me and made me want something that I didn’t want before.

Materials

Acquired

• Hyundai Accent 2009: $12,000 after tax and everything
• External HDD 500GB: $70
• Razer Lachesis mouse: $80
• Razer Lycosa keyboard: $90
• SATA HDD 500GB: $60
• Radeon HD 2400: $16
• Wacom Bamboo tablet: $70

Sold

• Toyota Camry 1993: $50
• Printer: $35 (bought at $20)

Finances

This is the stock chart that I EXPERIENCED this year. My unrealized loss is in the range of $20,000 which only occurred after the month of October. I thought that my strategy was sound and recession proof, but I had no idea that in a collapse as big as the great depression, nothing survivies. So far, my investing experience is like total despair after a period of fake hopeful gain. This is the market that I lived in during my short time span in investing. It doesn’t mean that I didn’t see this coming though. Ever since 2007, I have selected stocks that I believe are resilient to a recession. Having projected both the best and worst case scenario, I chose stocks that will not go bankrupt while providing services that will be increasingly important in the coming decade. What I did not do though is picking stocks that will shine during bad times or shorting stocks that will obviously go down with the crisis. Shorting is something that I will be participating in once my net worth reaches $100,000 but before that, I will stick with what I know best and improve on that. Which is my technical skills and long term investing. A sharp contrast to my former belief in trying everything and adapt to the changing world.

My net worth is in shambles as this year sees the collapse of US financial system.  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. The warning signs were all there. I just don’t have the experience in an recession environment.

Projects

If you look at my list of projects and list of resolution, I am either midway to achieving them or had experienced complete failure.

Primary resolution:

• 6 packs stomach: (In progress & buffing chest at the same time)
• Bench press 160 lbs: (3 sets 12 reps @ 140 lbs)
  
• Achieve secret objective: (Failed completely)
  
• Win one photography contest with my Kodak P850 (11th place)
  
• One month backpacking through Africa (done!!!)
  

Secondary resolution:

• Double absolute unique visitors to 1000/month (Achieved for 1 month)
  
• Learn to pick generic locks (Materials acquired, picking lock)
  
• Finish furnishing my condo (In progress)
  
• Research and create 10 secret dishes that I can cook (5 created)
  
• Finish organizing all digital data (Not done, got more crap)

Projects

• Repair of forever flashlight: (Done)
• Backpacking through Africa: (The conclusion of this project can be found here)
• Tax optimizer: (Abandoned, irrelevant)
• Mobile personal server: (Implementing port knocking and HDD spin down optimization to conserve energy)
• Digital filing: (Sorting, files getting bigger)
• Home improvement: (In the execution phase, making furniture from wood)
• Making a game with Ruby language: (Abandoned and switching to Actionscript 3)

Review of past predictions

• Groceries: (I predicted that Walmart will beat Loblaws. According to their respective price, walmart(+10%) did beat Loblaws (-29%) from their peak.)
• Connected life: Hasn’t happened yet. Laptop IS getting more popular though.
• Switch to 3d movies: (Cannot draw a conclusion yet)
• Design focus: (Apple’s iPhone and Nintendo Wii’s success comes to mind, AMD’s CEO also mentioning that simply increasing GigaHertz and Core counts won’t make as much difference in the future)
• Blog Libel in full effect: (Lots of people getting sued, I also stopped expressing my opinion on things that’s not about me)
• Chinese as the official language: (We are not there yet, but from the look of things, China will emerge from this depression as the dominant winner)

Conclusions

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 knowledge 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 years ago.

Overall, a very bad and rough year for me.