Cow’s Life - Thinking Outside Of The Barn

After soaking my machine in water last week and losing two replacements in a week by the carriers (talking about a lottery winning probability), I will be offline starting tomorrow until Thursday. Let’s just hope my next shipment will peacefully make it to the destination.

In the meantime, I will go to work with pen and paper and play some Lottery. If I managed to lose that many machines in a week, I may hit a home run .. You never know…

I left my mother’s house this morning with a broken laptop, my only computer. The thought of not having connection for a week frightens me. As soon as I landed in Denver, I went directly to the Apple store and got those:

With wireless keyboard, mouse and a copy of Microsoft Office software, I paid $1600+ for this top line mini plus the 20 inch display. (Yes, my sweet smile got me nearly 200 dollar student + corporate discounts) Buying an Apple is on my New Year Resolution List. I am glad I get to scratch off an item on the list on the 2nd day!

Here I am, blogging at you from my brand new Apple system!

I owned an Apple back in 1993. It’s been so long and things have changed so much that I have no idea how to use this new Operating System. It took me a while to figure out how to create a new folder and download pictures from my digital camera. I still have no clue how Firefox got installed since all I did was clicking on the “Download” button while I was on Firefox’s website through Safari.

As Apple-dumb as I am right now, I can tell you one thing: Apple rocks! The setup and install procedures so far flow so smoothly. The bluetooth technology instantly recognized my wireless keyboard and mouse. As soon as I put in a DVD, the display turns into a LCD TV and starts playing the movie.

It’d be nice if my Apple-die-hard friend from Heavywinter can give me a Tiger crash course… Mike? Where are you?

Mike from Heavywinter did a post discussing his traffic and stats. I figured I’d do the same for the “Documentary” purpose.

This picture actually says it all about the traffic (click to enlarge):

The stats software I use measures both unique visitors and unique visits. My guts feeling is that my regular readers should be a small subset of the 37000+ unique visitors.

I can pretty much explain the traffic surges from month to month (i.e. I got dugg by digg.com in Aug, etc..) except December. I had neither outstanding posts nor major external links coming in. All the sudden, I am getting tons of Google image search hits in Dec. As you can see in the following tow pictures, the Google image hits brought in major traffic in Dec and the traffic exploded this week with 800 to 900 unique visits per day from the image hunters. I can’t explain why all the sudden my PhotoBlog became so popular, especially the Thongs Must Die Album I came up by myself. I guess people dig original stuff? Or was it because “Bare Butt Sells”?

Dec traffic distribution (click to enlarge):

Jan 1 - Jan 4 daily traffic:

I am definitely feeling a bit lazy about blogging in the past a few weeks. I guess it’s a cycle every blogger has to go through. Once I pick up some more energy, I am going to co-author two more b5 blogs: I will be answering dating burning questions for the older and professional singles; and another one is a console game gadget blog.

Now, I must sleep…

I watched a few movies on my new video iPod and wasn’t impressed until I viewed the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VII – Advent Children (see images below) last night. Initially, I was really worried about the tiny screen with tiny English subtitle. It gotta be no more than font size 2. How the hell can I read it?!

I ripped a high resolution version and surprisingly, I could read every letter! The graphical detail is so impressive even with the screens filled with all dark gray lines. The resolution and contrast are good enough for the human eyes to differentiate objects in super dark scenes.

Cloud with Tifa:

All computer graphcis images, baby!

This is by far the best iPod yet. Although it takes me about 2 hours to burn a movie, it is well worth the effort…

Jason, my good friend and my loyal reader dropped a note today asking if I were still alive. I feel that I own a short post just to explain what’s going on lately. Actually, if you read the posts I did on my professional blog, you may already figure it out.

The project I am working on recently has taken its toll on me. I can rarely find time to breathe, sleep or eat. Maybe I forgot how to say No again. Maybe I am no longer the 20 some year old who can think 15 hours non stop. Maybe I am just too tired to keep going with this job. I am absolutely feeling frightened when I’ve learned that I have to work overtime at night and on weekend again. I started to make critical mistakes on the job which resulted in serious consequences and caused my company some damages.

I have sold my soul to this company in the last 10 years by working overtime year after year. I was ill for 2 years; I lost half of my right eye’s sight; and I lost my family because of this job. I kept going because this is all I know and I like my manager who gives me big bucks.

I finally decided that it’s time for me to retire from the consulting life, retire from the travel job and start to focus on having a normal life. I am 32, yet, I am still trying to figure out where my home is. That’s just plain sad.

I do feel being defeated and I do feel that I am sort of kind of running away from my problems by quitting what I do. But I know one thing though: my current job is the source of my unhappiness and I gotta do something to get my life back.

Stay tuned…

I took my first step today by submitting a informal resignation letter to my manager. Informal meaning that I didn’t state the exact quitting date… Here are a few paragraphs:

I am considering quitting ABC Company and this job because I can tell that I am physically and mentally tired. And I feel that without a break, my current condition does not allow me to take on the challenge as a senior IT consultant regardless how much I want to perform. As my long term manager, you know all the history in the past including my medical issues and lost eye sight.

I truly think that in order to be responsible to myself, I need some time to manage my health and person life so that I can continue the next phase of my career. I also think this is the right thing to do to step down from consulting career right now before I start to under perform or jeopardize the projects.

I have already talked to my project manager and gave him a heads up that he needs to look for replacement so we can still deliver the project on time.

….

You can tell that I don’t want to burn the bridge. But I am very clear on making the point that I can’t do this anymore. Since this a public website, I can’t disclose too much more information. I can tell you this much: I had a conversation with my manager after this letter is submitted. And he is trying his best to work out a couple of exit options to reduce my financial burden.

Just a few hours before I had the conversation with my boss, I was called into another management meeting to receive a cash reward for all the weekends I worked last year in Denver. It’s funny how these two events happened on the same day. The extra cash I received is very nice, however, my life is worth a whole lot more than that check.

I will stop traveling and leaving my current project in 2 and half weeks. Soon, I will have my life back! Yeeeeha!!

I just posted the newest development on my professional site. Yes, I have a new job now. Check it out:

A New Job A New Life