Cow’s Life - Thinking Outside Of The Barn

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.

Yes, we squashed the Y2K bug pretty hard, leaving many of us wondering if the billion dollar spending was actually worth while. Although I wasn’t directly involved in any Y2K projects in the late 90’s, every architecture paper I produced back then had to have a Y2K chapter to indicate if we were Y2K compliant.

I just read a technical but very interesting article about the potential 2038 problem. Basically, it is because of the limitation set in a type of a programming language (C to be exact) which does not allow the number of seconds to go beyond 2,147,483,647. Anything written in C language will break on Jan 19, 2038, which is 2,147,483,647 seconds after the beginning of the C time (12 am , Jan 1, 1970).

Based on my knowledge after consulting with 30+ companies in the past 10 years, majority of the companies and the government agencies have at least a portion of their systems written in that language.

However, I don’t think the problem will be nearly as severe as Y2K issue since

A) we still have 33 years before the bomb goes off
B) Unlike Y2K, only a subset of the systems worldwide are written in that language
C) Since everybody is moving to Java or staying put with Cobol, I don’t think C will stick around for too long.

This is definitely a good opportunity to sell “Re-Engineering” proposal to the clients to re-write their legacy systems from C to something else. It looks like someone just found another gold mine for the starving IT consulting industry. Wait, the next line on the proposal would probably say, “In order to reduce the cost and improve efficiency, we will offshore this task to India and China.” Oops! Another lost opportunity for the American IT workers. Well, this is a whole different kind of topic…

Although the physical climbing site was in Golden, Colorado, today was truly a golden day to climb. After the unexpected snow storm and freezing cold temperature in the early week, this weekend’s weather was simply gorgeous.

Ironically, North Table at Golden is where I did my first outdoor climb back in June. I wrote a post after the climb on Mike’s heavywinter site. At that time, I didn’t have my own blog.

I can definitely tell the differences comparing with 4 months ago when I climbed here with Kevin. Back then, it was all about reaching to the top. And now it is about how I reach to the top. I start to purposely ignore some big holds and look for something harder to experiment a few moves. Hey, I am on a top rope! If I fall, so what! I finally have the skill to maintain the balance and stop at a spot to enjoy the view on the vertical surface. North Table is pretty high up there with the views of Golden and Denver under your feet. Although this is no Aspen, North Table beats most of the climbing sites I went to.

I also witnessed a pretty bad accident today. A lady was leading on a quite tough route (We didn’t have the guidebook so we could only observe). First she clipped the quickdraw in a wrong way, and then she placed her leg under the rope. When she missed her clip, she took a hard fall and flipped upside down, knocked her head on the rock and scratched up her leg pretty badly. And, she didn’t wear a helmet. Although she was lucky enough to walk away without serious head injury, that was a plain stupid act. You gotta know your shit when it comes to extreme sports. I am an indoor 5.8 lead climber and I will never attempt an outdoor lead until I feel really comfortable with indoor 5.9. By looking at how she climbed, she was simply not qualified to lead on such a hard route. In my opinion, the people who will most likely get hurt in any extreme sports (climbing included) are either the beginners who are trying to pull some stunts, or the ass-kickers who trust themselves way too much and neglect the safety measurements. So, it’s important to know your limit and believe that shit could happen at anytime to anybody no matter how good you are. My 2 cents.

Anyway, check out the Golden Climb album. There are quite a few cool pictures (Matt’s dog went all the way to the top and gave me an unexpected “job well done” congrats. That was cute!)

Simon Cowell from American Idol moves on to the next project to produce American Inventor for ABC.

Set to premiere in early 2006, the show is auditioning for contestants in 8 city tour.

You could win a million dollars. Although you have to go through the public humiliation since Cowell is the boss, that still beats eating pig’s guts on Fear Factor.

Oh, look!! Denver is on the list!!! Boy, I have only a month and half to come up with something ridiculous so I can get on the “worst audition” list.