Cow’s Life - Thinking Outside Of The Barn

Don’t get me wrong. I love Christmas! It’s the best time of the year to relax and spend some precious time with my family for a week or two. But this whole gift exchange thing really sucks!

I am so stuck with the following questions and have no idea what the heck I should do..

• My parents don’t really care about material stuff. It burns my brain every year to figure out what the heck to give to them. They don’t need much and they don’t really know how to play with the hot techie toys on the market. I once bought a USB flash memory for my Dad when that thing just came out. It cost me nearly 100 bucks in 2003 and last Thanksgiving when I went home, it was still sitting in a box. It’s Dec 17, and I am still scratching my head…
• My guy is a very simple man who is living in a simple life. He loves high tech gadgets but is very careful with his money. If I buy an expensive toy, he’d feel he would disappoint me if he wasn’t prepared to do the same. If I buy him something simple but useful, then I’d feel bad if he shows up with a big nice super trendy toy. So… Video iPod? Camera? Tool box? Basketball? Or a big nice kiss??!! It hurts my brain when I think about this…
• I am going to a friend’s Christmas holiday dinner. I am close to only one girl but a few others will be there too. Should I just not care and bring one gift only or be polite to buy everyone a gift?

Valentine ’s Day is even worse. Those people who don’t have Valentines feel sad with no gifts while those ones who do have Valentines have to go through another round of the find-that-perfect-gift exercise without having enough time to recover from the Christmas brain and wallet damage.

It’s nice to give and receive gifts when we need to, such as on a BIG and SPECIAL occasion. But if we have to buy nice gifts 6 times a year to cover Valentine’s day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Anniversary, Birthday and Christmas, that’s just getting way too much.

For those of you who don’t know the East part of the World War II history, Japan invaded China in 1937, ruined the entire country for nearly 8 years. My grandparents escaped from the village in Canton and migrated to Shanghai, which at that time was under the ruling of several Western countries. I was born in the old French district of Shanghai where my grandparents settled down in early 40’s. 60 years have gone by but the hate for the Japanese are still in the blood of majority of the Chinese including the younger generations like myself who were born way after the War was over. I can’t forgive them for slaughtering my three aunts like pigs by cutting their stomachs open. And I am still deeply insulted by the fact that they killed 300,000 people in Nanjing in one night and destroyed nearly every city they had touched from 1937 - 1945. If you dare to see some most disturbing killing and raping pictures, you can click the following link. Take my warning seriously; they are VERY DISTURBING because I CAN’T finish viewing them. I went through page 2 and I was about to vomit.

Nanjing Massacre Exhibit

As much as the hatred I have carried ever since I’ve learned the history, it never prevents me from falling for the beautiful Japanese culture and the arts. The stunning wood architecture, floral arrangement and the traditional painting have always captured my heart.

Although I can read only half of the Japanese characters, I would still spend hours wandering in a Japanese bookstore admiring the visual arts they have created. I watch Japanese anime and I play mostly Japan made console games such as my favorite Final Fantasy series. When Aeon Flux came out last weekend, I went to see it twice because of its anime background and the Japanese influenced architectural production settings.

I sometimes do feel guilty but I also feel that I have the freedom to appreciate whatever I appreciate. The love and hate conflict runs so deeply in my vein that I don’t think I will ever forget or forgive. But I do hope such battle can end in my generation. After all, we all need to move on and let the history become history.

I didn’t know Netflix got sued until I received a case settlement email from the company. Apparently, Netflix was sued by lying about “unlimited rental” and “one day delivery promise” in the marketing materials. The case is now settled and you can read about the benefits you can collect if you signed up before Jan 15, 2005.

I will not collect the benefits simply because I don’t think Netflix can do anything better than what they have been doing. You get “unlimited rental” as long as you sign up for their 2 or 3 DVD program and it is a one day delivery service in most of the metro areas.

I think this country has gone mad when it comes to lawsuit. “Just sue it” was printed on Tulane University’s Law school T-shirt a few years back when I visited the campus. Everybody can get sued by virtually doing or saying anything. If some people don’t like the way you look, they can sue you for “public appearance disturbance” and ask you to pay for their mental damage.

Just over a year ago, some students made cookies for the neighbors. They unfortunately rang the door bell of a professional suer’s house and got sued for scaring her. I don’t remember the details, but the students were fined around 900 bucks for the hospital fees the bitch claimed that she had spend on “calming down”.

If there are people who work full time to figure out the lottery wining algorithms, I am sure there are people out there who are doing absolutely noting but trying to figure out how to screw other people for money. Sick bastards!

Update:
Coincidentally, RJ pinged me this morning and sent me a story happened a few miles away from me. A home depot shopper sued Home Depot after he got stuck to a restroom toilet seat because a prankster had smeared it with glue.

Bob Dougherty, 57, accused employees of ignoring his cries for help for about 15 minutes because they thought he was kidding. …This is not Home Depot’s fault,” Dougherty said. “But I am blaming them for letting me hang in there and just ignoring me.”

Here is the full story.

A few weeks ago, I saw an article on Newsweek about being a Type D personality (the kind that easily gets stressed out) and its relation to the heart disease. Today, I saw another article about how a stressful working environment and an unfair boss can slowly eat our health away.

Researchers in Finland who did the study found that workers who felt they were being treated fairly had a much lower incidence of coronary heart disease, the leading cause of death in all Western societies. Most people care deeply about just treatment by authorities…Lack of justice may be a source of oppression, deprivation and stress.

Somehow, majority of us are mentally trained to be good employees. We believe that climbing the corporate ladder is the way to go. So we work hard. We sometimes put our careers ahead of our families and our health. When I was in my 20’s, I gave everything I could give to my job and the only thing I wanted in return was my boss’s approval that Christine did a good job. I ended up having an immunity disorder disease caused by stress/depression and suffered for 2 years. I am glad I am cured now; otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to have kids.

Ever since then, I start to ask the “What’s for” question. Why are we working so hard? A 3% pay raise? An email from the boss which says “job well done”? Or a long waited promotion which adds more stresses and responsibilities?

if you put what we give vs. what we receive on the two sides of the equation, things just don’t add up:

Stress + long hours + health threats + work/life conflicts + unhappiness = “Good job” from the boss + a wimpy paycheck

If it were not because of the responsibility I have for my co-workers and the projects, I’d be a total slacker right now. And that’s probably why many of us work so hard - a sense of responsibility.

The ultimate goal for me is to get out of Corporate America. I don’t want to be here until my hair turns grey and get kicked out at age 60 for being “too old to work”. However, money is a real issue. We all want to do something we love and be our own bosses. The real question is how we are going to cope with the transition from a secure paycheck to something uncertain. I have always been thinking about this scenario. Well, this post is about stress and health. So I will run another post sometimes later on this topic.

Additional Readings:
Are you stressed out and worried all the time? Take the quiz to find out if you are a type D personality. After the test, you may read the health impact of being a Type D and what you can do.

I worked my butt off in the late 90’s to climb to the Advisory Architect/Designer position. Then, I was crashed and burned on a very high profile project in 2002 so I stepped back to be a happy system engineer. Despite a few complains and long hours, I was pretty happy to stay away from the politics most of the time.

After my Denver project, I decided to give my old job another shot. So, to brush up on my Archtiect/Designer skills, my manager sent me to attend an industry leading IT Architecture class.

Today, I spent 10 hours in the classroom and learned one thing. That is, in order to win the customers, make things sound and seem as complicated as possible. Here is an example:

Instead of saying, “Let’s figure out a way to help our clients to make some money. “
We’d put out a dozen slides that look like this:

So, if you are interested in becoming a high paying smart ass consultant, take an English vocabulary class and learn some real big words such as Market Strategy, Framework, Methodology, Competency, Integration, Governance, Industry-Focused, Line Of Business, etc.. Then, try to answer every question with no less than 250 words, the longer the better. The ultimate goal is to make your audiences’ heads spinning. If you are producing a diagram, make sure to use Microsoft Visio and the final product should look like a meatball spaghetti dish stirred by a baby. Finally, remember to provide a “Six Flag Great America” sized bill even if the client is asking for a swing set. If you are lucky, you can make $200K a year, thanks to the higher-than-prostitution rate we are charging.

Want some more tips and tricks? Read the following fantastic tips and examples:

• How IBM answers client’s question: Why did the chicken cross the road?
  (This is my modified version based on the old Anderson Consulting’s Value-Added Chicken Architecture)
• In order to become a consultant, you need to first have the prostitute’s mentality. Use this check list to make sure you are ready for the job.
• Case study: Consulting Sheep

Now, buy a BMW M5 and good luck!

When half of LA was shut down earlier this afternoon, so did Yuna’s Village which unfortunately lives on a server by the Santa Monica beach. Ironically, I didn’t know my website’s physical location until this afternoon when Cyco Miko and I were banging our heads against the wall trying to figure out what the heck went wrong.

It’s kind of scary that one wrongly cut wire can shut down half of our 2nd biggest city and caused such kind of chaos. Some major sites got knocked out as well along with millions of other small ones like mine and my friend Mike’s heavywinter.com. The thoughts of how fragile and vulnerable we are really brought chills to my spine, especially realizing how heavily we are relying on the information technology to run our daily lives.

I don’t know if you have seen Fox’s TV show “Dark Angel” starring Jessica Alba a few years back. The story is set in Seattle, Wasington, in the year 2019, “The Pulse,” an electromagnetic bomb basically wiped out our computing and electronic information and sent us straight back to the third world. Although it is a sci-fi story created by James Cameron, the scenario seems awefully possible. I just hope we will never go through that in real life.

Ok, I am done bitching. Here is an update about the site other than revealing its true location:
Many thanks to Cyco Miko’s super PHP coding ability and overtime-no-pay weekend hours, Yuna’s Village now has an additional playground on the left side. As an experiment, I have updated this newly acquired “real estate” to list some readings that interest me. I hope I have the time to update both Serious and Hilarious reading lists a few times a week if not daily. I will also add some more useful resource links under the “Blog Resource” category. So, besides the crap I write, you guys can read a few more things and get a few more laughs… Hopefully, it’s not going to cause “information overflow” problem. We’ll see how it goes…

Yep, you heard me alright. Finally, I was personally attacked by the blog readers today. Well… Ok… I admit this is not the first time since I started Yuna’s Village. The first encounter was when I published the “Apple missing one bite” joke. It was just something I wrote to have a laugh at Microsoft. Someone left a comment to inform me that I was stupid. My first reaction was to delete it and so I did (a nice incentive for being the blog system admin )

When Darren Rowse published his Disclaimer, he sadly wrote in the “What Does Blog Cost Me” section:

Personal Attack - This is all sounding rather heavy here and I don’t want to get too gloomy but another cost of this site is that at times the response that people have to my writing here is to attack. I guess I’m writing about topics that people have strong feelings on (money and blogging) and people feel they want to have their say. Unfortunately the internet can be a pretty impersonal medium and people feel they have the right to write things that they would probably not say to the face of a human being. I try to respond graciously to such emails, comments and instant messaging interactions and don’t let them get to me too much - but at times it all gets a bit too much and takes its toll on me.

At that time, I really couldn’t understand who the hell would attack Darren, a guy who spent 12+ hours a day writing and collecting blog tips to share with everybody. So to support him, I wrote back in the comment section:

…
But like you said, the web is a brutal place and sometimes our best intentions are not always being appreciated by a few people who don’t think on the same line. I guess that’s something a blogger has to deal with, just like every other person who holds a profile in the public.
…

It was fairly easy for me to say that to Darren at that time. After all, I wasn’t the one who’s being attacked… until now.

The post and research I did on the “Elite blog” topic got picked up by digg.com’s homepage (you can see some of the aggressive comments through the link) around lunch time today. By the time when dinner was cooking, I’ve had about 2700 visitors on site. Along with the excitements, the publicity also brought me some comments like, “shitty blog”, “I hate all bloggers” and the one that really got me angry: “Fuck off”, a rude no point comment left on my own site.

It was easy for me to tell Darren to laugh it off. But when it really happened, I couldn’t help but wonder, “Why would people do that? What did I say?”

But think about it, did I ever say anything mean to anyone I have never met? Heck yeah! I bitched about Reese Witherspoon’s ridiculous chin and thought her Legally Blonde was cheesy. I remember seeing her in one of the interviews telling the host how hurt she was when she got on the Internet and seeing so many people hating her and her movies. Oops… I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings Reese… I just said whatever I felt like saying…

So, the comment I wrote to Darren is something I could have a use myself. After all, we are the ones who choose to put ourselves out there for the world to read. And the world has its rights to say whatever back to us… some of the stuff may not be pretty… So… what can I do? Consider it as the growing pain of a baby blogger and laugh it off I guess…

On the bright side, out of today’s 3300 visitors so far (still counting), the attack ratio is only 0.24%. I should really consider myself lucky then.

Blog on!

If you’ve missed “What’s up with the male DNA part I – Man is always right”, check it out.

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I have dated a few guys in the past and they all share the same characteristics. That is, they either tossed their socks around and never picked them up, or I would find those annoying dirty dishes pilling up with left over lettuce and tomato skins in their sinks all the time. The worst part is that my efforts of trying to persuade/teach them to pick up their socks usually went no where. It seems that getting guys to do cleaning and homemaking stuff is harder than pushing an elephant’s butt. Or I should say, when the guys are sitting on the couches after the dinner, their butts are bigger and heavier than the elephant’s. I start to wonder whether this is another symptom caused by the limitation of the male’s DNA.

After a few digs in hoping of finding some scientific evidences to explain the men-don’t-pick-up-socks symptom, I have concluded that the male DNA has an absolute different perspective on the meanings of “clean” and “neat”. Here is a list of my research results:

1. Men are usually not scared of dangerous things such as death, guns, fights and blood. However, soiled diaper and an iron could cause them to flee the ground as fast as they can.
2. Male’s DNA only recognizes a few places that need to be kept clean and neat, such as the garage with zillions different kind of tools. Sorry, the house where the girlfriend/wife keeps her sanitary products is not on the list.
3. Male DNA takes “casual glance” approach while hunting for the dust bunny, while the Female DNA usually takes the “Gorilla” method. That explains the 30 second vs. 300 minute vacuuming speed difference between male and female.
4. Male DNA has very low standard while evaluating the neatness of a house, that is, as long as they don’t trip over anything, work is done.
5. Male DNA shares a very intimate relationship with the couch and the TV. That explains the difficulty of getting men to clean the dishes after the dinner.

So, after understanding the root cause, I was wondering if there would be any ways to shrink the gap so we can finally share the duties together. After all, there are a lot of working ladies out there who desperately need their men’s help to keep the things in order. Matter of the fact, the issues is so common that there are a few books out there to teach women how to get guys’ help to share the domestic responsibility. Here is a good article to start with: “How to get your mate to help on the home front”. If you need serious heavy duty advice, check out this book “Lazy Husband”.

But seriously, don’t you think it is sad that ladies have to study books and papers to get guys to help?

If you’ve played any games, I mean ANY, the chances of finding some small chest female characters is probably next to zero. Most of the time, you have to deal with those girls showing up with little cloth wrapped around their triple F digital assets, like this Ivy girl on the left. It got so bad that it started hurting my eyes… When I was playing Soul Calibur II, I started with Takki, a real fast Ninja girl who can jump sky high. But check out her size… Daaaamn! I knew it didn’t matter since the programs are set and done behind the scene. But psychologically, I was really afraid those bouncing “watermelons” would drag her ass down. And you know how important speed is when it comes to fighting game. So I gave up on her and switched to Cassandra. At least this Roman warrior is somewhat normal.

I am a gal gamer, so I can’t really speak for the male gamers out there. But if I had a spot to express my wishes to the game makers, fixing boob size is definitely one of them. So finally the gals and boys can concentrate on the game plays….

For the console gamers out there, check out this AWESOME “Gamer’s Manifesto” . The guy really nailed a few “wants” and “bullshits” in the current game industry.

Just a few more wishes on my list:

• Need motion capture sensors so we can finally play the real snowboarding games at home! Don’t tell me it’s not possible, I have seen it in SigGraph two years ago! Why hiding the technology?!
• Give me Virtual Reality!!! if VR can be here, imagine how fun that is to play the first person shooter games!!!
• Random fiends in RPG games MUST DIE
• Oh, and don’t forget to shrink a couple of watermelons for me, will ya?

Thanks to Heavywinter for the manifesto link.

I wrote first two parts of the story in July. Check them out if you want to know the background.
Part I : Dealing With 500 Pages On One Weekend
Part II: Still Got Hammered

Now, here is part III:
During meetings round 2, I sat down with the operational manager for 3 hours trying to convince him that there are ways to arrange the schedules more effectively so people can have at least 2 weekends off before they need to work another weekend. I showed him my proposal, sample schedules to prove my point. But the guy just wouldn’t get it. My team lead even stepped in to express his support of my ideas. After 3 hours, there was still no agreement. I had to drop the ball and told him that I am not going to work more than 2 weekends in any given month.

I went up another level in the food chain with my proposal the next day. Finally, the guy agreed to part of my proposal and suggested his idea to the other. I find that if you want to convince managers to change something, complaining won’t get you anywhere. Always have a Plan A or Plan B to suggest to the managers. If they like what they see, you get what you want. Most of the time they would like to show off their authority, so they will add or delete a bit from your original plan, but that’s not a big deal, you still get most of what you want. The point here is that, have a solution before you negotiate.

I finally got the Aug on-call schedule last week. Guess what, I am only working two weekends and 4 nights. In July, I was on call every weekend and had to work on 15 night shifts in addition to the regular day job I have. I don’t know if it was because of the big loud noise I made in July or they simply don’t want to deal with me anymore. I got myself off the hook from the heavy duty oncall crap.

Want a work/life balance? You have to fight it yourself because when the employers tell you they can help, they are just doing it to beautify the HR newsletter.

Oh, one more note, you also have to make damn sure that you are indeed in demand by your employer. If they have been thinking about cutting you loose, the best strategy is definitely to lay low and shut up if you still want the job…