Cow’s Life - Thinking Outside Of The Barn

The best part of Halloween is to dress up in anything you want. The even better part is to watch other people dressing up like freaks.

Picking out a costume could be pain in the ass sometimes. Last year, I was quite into the Geisha idea so I worn a Yukata (a Japanese bathrobe I bought from Japan), tied a Chinese red pillow case on my back, and I did my own makeup with a $1.00 paint. Well, it turned out to be quite a disaster. This year, I spent about 15 mins picking out a wizard lady dress in the store and headed over to a private Halloween costume party a few hours later.

Very interestingly, I only saw 2 people out of 1000 wearing scary masks to cover their faces. There were quite a lot nurses, French maids, police officers in mini shorts and butterflies with their G strings exposed. A few guys even made their own “one night stand” costumes with paper made boxes wrapped around them and lamps on their heads. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw one guy carrying a backpack with a battery in it to supply the watts for his lamp hat. If I were not running around so much, I could have taken a few more photos. But hey!! With all the free beer, free wine, great music and an interesting crowd to amuse my eyes, trying to concentrate on snapping photos was a real challenge.

Check out the Halloween party photo album.

Ok, Sept 30 is the real National Ask A Stupid Question Day. So I am declaring today as National Ask A Dumb Question Day.

Some random dumb questions I dare you to answer:

1. Assume I can live forever, say 1 million years. How would I look like? Would I need Viagra?
2. Why the toilet seat protection paper is so thin and non water-proof? What is it protecting us from?
3. How do we describe numbers that are bigger than trillions?
4. What happened to JarJarBing? I don’t see him around anymore.
5. Should I call a Chairman if my chair breaks? If not, why do we call someone who doesn’t fix chairs a Chairman?
6. What is the shortest yet the hardest sentence a man will ever say?
7. Why am I handed a piece of plastic card when I am a diamond member with the hotel chain? Where are my rubies, sapphires and platinum that I deserve?
8. Why do we use word “restroom” to describe a “toilet” room?
9. What do dead eat that the living would die if they ate it?
10. When cheese gets its picture taken, what does it say?
11. Why 11 is not pronounced as onety-one?
12. Do you think elephant indeed believes that a man uses his penis to breathe?
13. Would you like to ask me a dumb question?
14. What?
15. How do you know you just asked a dumb question but not a stupid question?
16. Do you have more dumb questions for me?
17. Why?

I am going to submit a few of these questions to Ask Yahoo or other sites. If I get answers, I will post them here. Stay tuned… Oh by the way, why did I ask 17… sorry.. 18 questions on “Ask A Dumb Questoin Day”?

ComputerWorld just published their newest 2005 IT salary survey results. I thought we were overpaid back in the 90’s and the market had done the self correction to adjust the ridiculous IT folks’ salaries in the recent years. Turns out, the young ones who entered the market recently got screwed. Oh, and the poor webmasters and technical trainers are getting nothing comparing with others.

Here are some numbers

• Besides those CIO and CTO jobs, here are the top 5 high paying positions:
  Director of networks: $126,734
  Director of systems development: $142,558
  IT director: $108,227
  Internet technology architect/strategist: $112,027
  Data warehousing manager: $110,626

• Other than the operator and help desk positions, lowest paying IT positions are:
  Network admin: $54,284
  Webmaster: $57,184
  Web developer: $61,078
  Technical trainer: $55,412

• 69% had a salary increase in 2005. 22% no change; 9% took salary cuts.
• How stressful is the IT job?
  A whopping 86% selected “very stressful”, “stressful” and “somewhat stressful” . Only 14% of IT folks feel pretty relaxed on the jobs.
• 81% are happy to be in the IT field
• IT workers work 47 hours a week on average. Only 29% work 40 hours or less a week. 16% work more than 51 hours a week.
• Which factor would mostly influence your decisions to change jobs?
  81% would change jobs if offered more money. Only 45% answered yes if the new job offers better work/life balance.
• What matters most to the IT folks about their jobs?
  Base pay 52%
  Stock options 44%
  Potential for career advancement and development 37%
  Vacation time/paid time off 33%
  Skill development/educational or training opportunity 30%

Here is the full report if you are interested in seeing all the data.

My thoughts

• Although I don’t see my exact job title on the list, I am one of those high paying architects who sit in the meetings drawing sequence diagrams all day long. Honestly speaking, this is relatively a more exciting job than project management or programming. The money is good (relatively) and the designing part could be somewhat fun. However, when politics kick in (which happens all the time by the way), being an IT architect could be pain in the ass. If I am going to name the best IT job, I’d say video game designer. Does it qualify as an IT job?
• Remember the three things a woman shouldn’t joke about a guy? His hair, his penis size and his wallet size. So I am not surprised to see so many people are willing to put in extra hours and deal with the stress in exchange of bigger paychecks. I am an older woman (relatively) so I have different priority. But to a lot of younger guys, 6 figure pay is the ultimate goal. I am not saying money isn’t important. It surely gives me a lot of freedom. However, I believe we need to protect ourselves from being overly stressed so there is a fine line to draw as how much we are willing to take. After all, health is the most important asset we have.
• I feel that the webmasters and the trainers’ low paychecks are not justified; especially the programmers are getting 50% more pay. I have prepared and taught corporate classes and it was a lot of work. For a lot of webmasters, the job involves not only the creativity but also heavy coding. I guess there are just too many of these guys out there to compete for the finite amount of money.

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.

Just when I was talking about coming up with cool ideas on the Internet and experiment with them, Jim from www.krazydad.com (he is also a frequent visitor here) got BoingBoing’ d with his latest invention – a book browser wallpaper that he calls “the Graphical Cover Explorer”. He puts thousands of Sci-Fi book covers on a wallpaper. Move your mouse around and the book cover shows up. Click on any books, the site takes you right to the spot where you can purchase it.

Now that’s a brilliant idea as a book browser/explorer, an Ad page, a piece of coolest wallpaper, background, screen saver, etc… I think Jim should take this idea to the next level to make real dollars. Patent it, get advertisers, and sell books while having fun by stacking up anything visual on one piece of digital paper.

There is no limit when it comes to human creativity. Like I said earlier, have an idea and experiment with it, ‘cause there is also no limit of what you can do on the open Internet.

There are many ways to make money on the Internet. Blogging is one of them. However, to make close to 200K a year, Darren Rowse probably puts in 15+ hours a day to write on 20 blogs. I put in 30 hours a week trying to get my feet wet. But D’Angelo puts in an hour a day to make $150,000 annual profits. He sells chairs on the internet. Here is his story.

The late 90’s Internet boom and burst is still pretty fresh in my memory. At that time, the concept is : build a site or so-called Internet business, get venture capital, sell it for millions. We know the reason why the bubble busted. There was no business model or foundation built into these sites to simply bring in any profits. 10 years after the first boom, the Internet is revisiting itself and I think we are now in a much more mature stage to launch real businesses on the Internet to make real money.

One of my observations is that no matter what Internet business you are in, it is still based on a traditional form. Take amzon.com as an example, the concept is based on the traditional retail. Blogging is a new form of magazine or media business. Ebay takes the traditional Auction online and makes it available to massive audiences. Bottom line, today’s Internet businesses have a clear model how they can bring in the dollars.

I believe anybody can make money on the Internet. And if you are persistent enough and dare to experiment, you can eventually quit your job and make a living by selling products (or advertisements) online. A few keys here:

1. A good idea matters the most. We need to have an idea of a product (products) we want to sell. D’Angelo experimented for a while to find out the chair was a good business. Alex Tew is half million richer because of an idea.
2. Do it! A lot of us sit around dreaming about making 100K a year with our brilliant ideas but never put that idea into reality. Then, opportunities are lost in our busy daily schedules when dealing with our bosses and our kids. Get the site up, sign up on eBay. Whatever…Just Do It! Thanks to today’s technology that wasn’t available a few years back, you can pretty much get a site up in a few hours. I got mine up in 2 hours.
3. Experiment. Don’t be afraid to experiment. There are going to be a few failures before you hit a home run. Keep trying and keep tweaking. Eventually you will find your star product or an idea that works.

As of me, yes I have big plans on the Internet. I will start with blogging and give myself a year to experiment. I am hoping to expand beyond blogging horizon and start a new form of business on the Internet. Well, the rest is a secret…

It took long 4, 5 months for Google to update the PageRank for the new sites. I just noticed that Yunasville.com got 5 out of 10 ranking and so did a lot of other new blog sites that got started around the same time. I am very thrilled to see this since that empty bar with 0/10 had me feeling frustrated for a long time.

When I first started blogging, I thought it would take many months to get a decent ranking and a good number of incoming links. But the reality proved that the hard work did pay off. To summarize what I have learned so far, I made a list of the things we can do to improve PageRank and invite incoming links:

1. Write star posts. Most of my highly linked posts are the ones that got featured on other blogs or dug out by larger sites. And almost all of my star posts took me a significant time to complete. Recent example is the MillionDollar page copycats.
2. Blogger networking. Talk to other bloggers, communicate and build communities. Eventually, we will start to link back and forth to comment on each other’s posts or take other bloggers’ projects a little further.
3. Read the blogs that interest you and leave quality comments.
4. Submit your posts to the bigger sites and email the bigger sites about something you wrote that they may seem to be interested in. I submitted almost 10 posts before one made to digg.com’s homepage.
5. At last, write quality original contents that we all find fun and informative. Personality is also important since that’s how we distinguish our sites from others. I have noticed a lot of sites blogrolled me and I am truly flattered.

Happy blogging everyone!

Author’s note: I just exhanged an email with Darren about his Problogger.net’s low PageRank (6/10). According to the Windexl tool, his site gets a whole lot more links than mine. His opinion is not to take too much weight on Google’s PageRank. Another example is that a new b5 site suddently received ranking of 7. Now that’s a real screwed up algorithem from Google to give a 4 week old site 7 out of 10.

If you are lucky enough to have a laptop and Internet connection in the conference room, here is a list of things you could do to kill some time while looking like heads down taking heavy notes:

• Play the Google game. Come up with a word or a phrase that generates most Google hits. Ok, this game is old, but I still like to play it. For example, “me” generates 1.18 billion matches, but “love” only generates 478 million. Are people selfish? “Christine Zheng” generates 265K and “Yuna” has 2.9 million!
• If you own a blog site, search happy words such as “laugh”, “happy”, “cheer” and write down the number of posts containing these words. Then search “sucks”, “crap”, and “damn”. Compare the results. I have 24 laughs/happy/cheer and 17 sucks/crap/damn. I guess I am generally a happy person who doesn’t whine too much? (idea inspired by Liz’s “The Searching For Joy”)
• Take the quiz and find out which fantasy/Sci-Fi character you are. I am Aragorn! Wow, no wonder he is my most favorite character in LOTR!
• Check out high resolution hurricane Wilma satellite image.

If you are unfortunately sitting in a conference room with neither computer nor internet connection, there are still amusing things to do with absolutely no resource. I shamelessly admit that I have done these things before:

Pretend to be Nemo who wants to date the Shark
(Amusement Potential: 1-3 minutes)
A while ago when I was heavily playing Finding Nemo and constantly trying to run away from the chasing shark, I did try to pretend to be Nemo and imagine how it would be if I could date my shark friend and how this whole size thing works.

Holding your breath
(Amusement Potential: 5 seconds-20 minutes)
Not that much fun, but it sure passes the time. Some tips: hyperventilate before hand, and stay as still as possible. My personal best is less than a minute. No wonder I can’t swim that well. But be prepare to answer the project manager’s question, “Christine, why is your face turning blue?”

Use your secret mind power
(Amusement Potential: 5-10 minutes)
Pick the most annoying person in the room and try to use your mind power to command him/her tp do something, like drop the computer or slap the person right next to him/her. The law of averages dictates that sooner or later one of your mind commands will come true, so you can convince yourself that you really have super human powers and waste even more time trying them out. I tried to use my secret mind power to instruct the PM to say, “Ok, this is it for the day. Thanks for coming.”

Honestly speaking, after working for my company for more than 9 years, “Diversity Education” or related phone calls are the ones I always ignore. Although it is mandatory for every employee to go through such a training, I normally dial into the conference call just so that my manager can check me off the list and leave me alone.

So, when I was approached by a Denver University professor from the Education Department whom asked me to give a speech about corporate diversity and organization, I was scratching my head, “Coporate Diversity?! What the heck am I going to talk about?”

Well, I have to talk about something. So I figured it would be fun to see how these Ph.D and Master students react to the real world scenario. This is the slide I put on the projector tonight in the classroom:

The votes? Gay project manager and the Japanese born sales guy got the most votes followed by the female stock broker and the one arm technical writer. Only one student voted for the white straight male slacker who shows up late at work.

The purpose of the slide is that I want to make a point:

At the end of the day, it is not about who you are. It’s about what you can do and what value you bring into the room.

We will let go of the slacker regardless of the person’s skin color. My gay project manager absolutely kicks ass, so who cares if he plays on another team. Apparently, this concept is pretty foreign to the academic world. At the end of the class, I got the sense that the black students are indeed concerned about being black. And everybody is worried about gay guy’s fate out there in the jungle. Is this a perception disconnection between the academic and corporate worlds? Maybe .

I sometimes feel that the diversity thing is way over done in Corporate America. As a young female Asian engineer who has funky mixed Chinese and southern accent, discrimination is the last thing I worry about. But on the other hand, is that because we have done such a fine job in Corporate America to teach everybody to walk on the egg shells so that an “extreme-minority” such as myself doesn’t really notice being a minority? Hmm, again, this question is too deep for my little head to think about…

I know ins and outs about the computing industry, and I can tell you exactly how much you need for retirement down to the penny. But when it comes to poems or any forms of structured expressions, I can be as dumb as a sheep with a pea sized brain.

I go to Liz’s site to read her beautiful writings that sound like flowing water. I envy my old neighbor’s daughter who can perform Shakespeare plays. I learned my A,B,C and that was all the literature education I had.

The first poem I wrote was to answer Mike’s question when I was ready to be his June author, “In Haiku form, ” he asked, “Please tell us your impression of Denver…”

“Haiku? What the heck are you talking about?!!” I had to google the word, read Haiku 101 and put down these 3 lines:

Snow falls in May
Beggars from 16th St Mall don’t want my apples
Mike runs HeavyWinter

Ok, that doesn’t exactly qualify as haiku, but 3-sentences-with-different-lengths-on-3-lines is as good as it gets.

Now, the haiku lover Mike put out a haiku contest. The best snowboarding related haiku writer wins a ticket to see Warren Miller’s film. There are a few entries submitted already, including mine. Check it out. If you have a few ideas, help me out here and put yours in. I can have a use of your ticket if you win the contest.