Ming’s Wisdom

A little snapshot of us in action!

It amazed me when I opened up this site and looked at my last article, it was a whole month ago! Life has definitely changed in the past couple months now that I look back on it. My decision to leave the corporate world and enter a world of new possibilities almost 3 months ago was definitely the right choice to make. Looking back, these are the things that have changed:

1. There is no longer anyone to tell me what to do. The only things that determine what I do now are what makes sense to me and what inspires me.
2. Work becomes fun. I’ve had moments where I just didn’t want to leave the work I was doing that day, and didn’t want to go to sleep because I wanted to keep working, and jump up at 8am to do work before breakfast.
3. Life becomes a fast-paced craziness. Starting the moment I wake up, ending around 1am, every day is extreme productivity. Not the kind of productivity where you simply get stuff done. It’s the kind of productivity where you make decisions that will affect you for the next two years, on top of getting stuff done. This comes with a side-effect of forgetting what day of the week it is, and sometimes what month it is.
4. I see a future. It feels like the past 4 years of working for others can be summarized as this: neglecting my own development. Moving up in the corporation really doesn’t count as developing your own abilities, it’s just doing more to develop a group of people that has already taken the time to develop themselves. Unlike earning a salary, everything done now to create income sources builds up, where every action taken multiplies your previous effectiveness by some multiplier.

So it’s really crazy how in the past whole month I have not had 20 minutes to update this site. You must be wondering what I’ve been up to. Well I’ve taken a lot of time working with Johnny to improve our ticket-selling automation code, with good results. We’ve sold some tickets already through the new code (e.g. with less manual work), and we’re super excited.

There’s something else up my sleeve though, done in a slightly larger team, that’s going to be exciting for a lot of you. It’s still in the works, so stay tuned for our release announcement in the near future =).

Today we’re launching the Beta of TicketWatchr.com, our first project since I’ve quit Apple. It’s an online store where you can search for and buy event tickets (sporting events, concerts, theater, etc). We have a feature called Watch It that we think is pretty intriguing, so that you can keep track of ticket prices on our site, so that if you think a ticket’s current price is too high, you can keep a watch on it to get notifications if that price drops.

Johnny and I have been working hard on this site for a while now, so we’d love for you all to check it out, and tell us what you want and what you think can be improved. And since the site is fully functional, if you need some tickets, you can use it to buy the tickets to your local concert or game. =)

It’s been two weeks since the last time I’ve written, so what have I been up to in this time? I’ve been reading The 4-hour Workweek. It’s quickly become my favorite book of all time. I feel that the focus of the book is not solely on reducing the amount of work you do, instead this book is a philosophy to live by in order to become more effective in life, in a fun way. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who would like to become very successful in any aspect of life. If you’ve ever wondered why some people are so gifted, and are always more successful at school without much studying, can have more friends than people you’ve met in your life, run a huge corporation while still having time to hang out on the weekends, this book explains exactly how it’s done.

Some examples of techniques described in the book:

• 95% of what you’re doing currently probably doesn’t contribute to your ultimate goals, so stop doing them
• you have more stuff than you need (every one of you). they take up valuable time and mind-space, so get rid of them
• do enough to get the results you need, and stop stressing about the diminishing returns that require 5x the effort
• time is a measurement of wealth just as important as money
• giving others the power to make decisions, so that you don’t need to waste time making them

Many of the ideas introduced take much more involved explanation that I won’t go into here. I felt that some of the concepts have really shown me a new way of thinking. I recommend that everyone read the book and at least give its ideas a chance, and possibility get much more in return.

Let me know if you read it and what you thought of it!

It’s been around 2 months now since I’ve started this site (technically 8 months, with the first 6 months having no time to write in it), and it’s been a pretty good success for being 2 months old, at least to the standards of what I was expecting. I wanted to let everyone see the current state of my site.

Money spent:

• 19.90 domain
• 22.90 hosting

Money earned:

• 0.00

Unfortunately Google hasn’t seemed smart enough to find interesting enough ads to captivate my lovely readers.

But here’s some more encouraging news:

You can see here that in the two months that I started actively writing for the site, the number of page visits has increased to 55 in July, and 124 in August. Since I don’t have data for January through June, an accurate depiction is to just imagine a flat line at zero from January all the way to June, since there was no content on the site yet. I think this is a pretty good growth, especially considering August isn’t even over yet, and already has double the visits of July.

Another achievement I’m pretty proud of is getting bots to crawl the site. Google crawled the site once in May, and it would be another two months before it crawled again in early July. Now, with multiple pages available and updated content every so often, Google comes several times a day, and I also get other sites like AskJeeves, Yahoo, and some blog search bots. It definitely feels like a sense of accomplishment.

To view the site from a different perspective, here’s a map of the world, color-coded for visitors (only readers, bots are not included) to this site:

To my pleasant surprise, I’ve gotten visitors from several countries. The bulk is still in the U.S, but there’s one from Canada, China, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, UK, and Netherlands. That’s very cool. In the U.S, I’ve gotten visits from Florida, Michigan, Georgia, and California. Now drilling down into more detail about the biggest cluster of readers:

There’s 7 visits from San Jose, 7 from Sunnyvale, 8 from Berkeley, 6 from Emeryville, 1 from San Francisco, etc, around the ratio I expected. However, the big surprise here is the big orange dot down south. Orange County apparently is the one largest concentration of readers of this site to date, and they come back repeatedly and stay for enough time to read a few articles. And the interesting thing is, I don’t know of anyone that knows about this site who is currently in Southern California, so I’m very intrigued who the mystery reader(s) are =).

The comparative speed of different components in a computer system is often a source of confusion. For example, a programmer could attempt to optimize their program by reducing the number of processor cycles needed to get something done, in exchange for needing one extra hard drive access, thinking that reducing their loop to one-tenth of its original size would surely provide more speed benefit than the hard drive access takes away.

To put things in perspective, I’ve assigned a number to each process available in a computer, to show their relative speed. (If something has a number of 13, that means in the time it can be performed once, something else with number 1 can be performed 13 times).

• 1                                                             processor instruction (1/3 billionth of a second)
• 2                                                             cache access
• 30                                                           memory access
• 75,000                                                   solid state drive          (1/40,000th of a second (1) )
• 36,000,000                                           hard drive access      (1/100th of a second)
• 480,000,000                                         dvd drive access
• 50,000,000 to 1,500,000,000            internet access          (1/3rd of a second (2) )

This should really put things into perspective. A billion instructions worth of program can be executed before the first communication can be established with another computer on the internet across the globe. Of course, these are just rough numbers representing times to first access, but it should give you an idea how vast these differences are.

What this means for non-programmers is several things (these astounding numbers are the reason behind these common suggestions):

1. if you backup all your pictures and documents to a hard drive or solid state drive, you’ll be able to access it much faster than if you make DVDs or use a backup website.
2. copying commonly used items from cd onto a hard drive will make them open much faster
3. if your computer feels like it’s slow, and you hear lots of hard drive access noises, buy more memory so that programs don’t need to resort to saving overflow from memory to hard disk.
4. if you often work with games or Photoshop, or other programs that might need to access lots of files often, then a solid state drive could make your life a lot easier.

What this means for programmers is that, in the vast majority of programs, being even a little smart about not accessing drive storage or the internet can have more speed benefit than even the most clever hacks to speed up other program code. For example, instead of asking for the same information twice from the internet, save it to memory to re-use later, it will speed up a small portion of your program by at least one hundred million percent .

Notes:

1) solid state drives are much faster at getting to files than hard drives, but sustained copying speed is similar.

2) internet access speeds vary depending on distance to the remote computer, and the quality of the link between the two computers. in general, you never know how long it will take.

People are the most angry at their loved ones. Sometimes, you wonder why your family is always so polite to strangers, while so frustrated at home.

I’ve always been unhappy about this fact, but as I grow up I’ve realized that I can’t seem to escape it either. I would get very angry at my sister for not having good habits to keep her eyes, teeth, and sleeping schedule healthy. Frankly if other people decided to eat candy and not brush their teeth, I wouldn’t say anything, or might mention in passing, not because I’m more polite to the outside, but because I don’t really care about them as much. In the end, the more love and care is involved, the higher the stake involved; that means more hurt when you see that things don’t go as well as they could. And that can cause you to become more angry. And that sucks, for everyone.

I really apologize if you fell victim to me being angry. Sure, I can make the excuse of it’s because I care (and it really is because I care ), but really I think I need to work on not doing this. Anyone has had similar experiences?

I’ve been asked a lot by my friends how I feel about the recent Foxconn iPhone incident, where a Foxconn employee committed suicide after being accused of stealing an iPhone prototype. Having worked at Apple on the iPhone 3G and 3GS, spending almost half my time on Foxconn grounds and working with Foxconn employees in Southern China, I feel obligated to make a few observations.

First of all, I don’t know very much about this incident other than the details revealed by the press, so I can’t draw any conclusions about whether any stealing was going on or whether either company did anything wrong. However, both having seen the front lines of Apple and Foxconn employee relations, and being Chinese American, I can draw a few conclusions from my knowledge of the culture of both.

Apple is, in summary, American. People work hard on a product, driven by consumer demand and holiday shopping. High stress levels and long working hours are what employees have chosen through their own free will, and in return they get salaries, stocks, and the rush of developing the next big thing. People are willing to negotiate and yell at each other over what’s best for the product, and in the end the best solutions are chosen. Foxconn however, as expected, is much more engrained in a Chinese culture. There is a high regard for elders, both age-wise and in company position. Chinese people are very accommodating, to the point of sacrificing themselves. People work hard as well, not so much driven by satisfying shopping seasons, but by the need to please bosses and customers. The customers, in this case, are Apple.

The moment I landed in China I was put into a big VIP van with chauffeur carrying my luggage, given a gigantic VIP badge to hang around my neck, and guards stood up to salute when I walked by. And what did I do to deserve this? I worked for Apple. To this day I’ve felt the VIP badge to be a huge oversized eyesore that brought unnecessary hierarchy to what otherwise could have been a much healthier relationship. We solved engineering problems together, as expected. We worked hard together, as expected. We sat in boring meetings between lots of people from both companies, as expected. But what alarmed me, was where the yelling in those meetings was coming from, and to whom it was going to. Apple people yelled at each other, that was fine, whoever got yelled at, yelled back. But Foxconn never yelled back. The mega-monster VIP card breathed a massive force field to block any criticism aimed at Apple.

Well, to be clear, Foxconn was the one to require those VIP badges. Now why would a group of people choose to limit themselves as NOT EQUAL to another group? I think the Chinese culture of being accommodating and respecting status plays a role in this, and the long history of more hierarchy as well. I’ve definitely seen much less pride in Foxconn employees and more humbleness, which seems to fit my general gut feeling from meeting people in Southern China. One other factor is that Apple is in China, doing work speaking ENGLISH. Everyone at Foxconn needs to speak in their second language to communicate, and this automatically gives an impression that the Apple people are “better”. If you reverse that and Apple people had to learn Chinese, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Apple employees were more often the ones who look dazed and slightly confused, and the raising of the voices would come more from the Foxconn side.

Two experiences of mine really highlight how the two company cultures could come together to cause havoc, despite no one party intending any harm. On a Sunday afternoon, two Apple employees, Byron and I, were at the factory. As we worked, a man wearing a mask sprayed a mystery substance all around the area. We were pretty scared, and emailed some people to find out what it was, and why the guards outside were only provided small masks inadequate to protect from the spray. The two of us were some of few people from both companies who made good friends with the guards, and did not treat them as “subordinates”. To our surprise, the response we got from Foxconn was that Apple employees would be notified when the next spraying would occur. Where was the respect for your own health, for the health of our friends who have to work as guards on Sundays? Do they deserve more deadly bug spray than higher ranking managers? To be frank, they probably deserve much less. Later as I recall, was a comment from an Apple employee about how the bathrooms smelled. Foxconn then closed the bathroom to its own workers and made it “VIP Only”. Despite being a polite gesture to solve a problem of bathroom overcrowding, by coincidence it ended up being rich predominantly white Americans being able to use the bathroom, while all the Chinese kids working for low wages weren’t able to access their own bathroom. I was not willing to tolerate any of this. I emailed a huge group of people, included directors and HR, and caused a huge ruckus. And I loved it, since it sent a bunch of people scrambling, and fixed the situation immediately.

In both the experiences, no one from either Apple or Foxconn intended to do any harm, though the end result wasn’t too good. To apply to the current situation where the Foxconn employee committed suicide, I see these factors at work to cause problems out of something very small. Foxconn tends to treat anything Apple as the most important thing it’s ever touched. And Apple tends to be very anal about keeping track of iPhones so that no information leaks. So a combined culture of a one-sided subordinate relationship between Apple and Foxconn, and the worship of the iPhone’s secrecy as the most important aspect of the job, quickly spirals into what happened recently. My guess is that he didn’t steal the phone, and that it was a simple accident of the phone gone missing. After all, working in our offices in Cupertino phones would often go missing for days when coworkers take them to work on in their own offices. In this way Apple employees and Foxconn employees definitely get different treatment. My personal opinion is that no consumer product should be worth a person’s life, no matter how much money that product launch can make. The two companies will really need to figure out these cultural differences to make their relationship more level. I really don’t think Apple did anything to cause this incident, but I’m not saying that Apple has done too much to make sure they are treating their factories in the most respectful manner either.

Today I stayed at home.

My family is moving to California and living with me. I’m very happy about it, and have been cleaning recently to make room for our truck-load of stuff. Since I no longer work, I have just enough time to go through the things in the garage to “simplify” things a bit.

But today was more than just another day of cleaning. Even though I wasn’t going on an exciting date like Stephen, and wasn’t lounging around in underwear doing nothing like Joseph , and I was simply home scooting furniture around and scooping squirrel poop out of the garage, I spent my day with a feeling of fulfillment, that nothing could have made this day better.

Two people, an older lady with a young man, walked over to the dumpster a short distance from my open garage door. They pushed a cart with them, wearing plastic gloves and immediately started digging through the trash. Being a compulsive recycler, and also being educated in the art of California CRV refunds, I knew exactly what they were doing. I asked if they were looking for bottles and cans to sell for money, and offered to bring mine over. I didn’t have that many to give, but the look of those two making a living off of those cans made me feel so very sorry for them. So I did what I had to do… steal some from Joseph’s pile (no one tell Joseph ). I put it together with mine in a bin and carried it over for them. The young man said thanks in a shy and embarrassed way, then insisted on carrying the bin back for me.

Later a man in a motorcycle outfit walked towards the dumpster. He was very friendly, and started talking to me. He had a Hulk Hogan kind of look, but had trouble lifting up the trash that he was trying to throw away because he broke his wrist. While dumping the trash the weight of the trash can caught his wrist at a wrong angle, and he froze. He called out to me to quickly help him catch the can so that his wrist can stop lifting. We talked for a bit more. He can’t work anymore because of that accident, so he asked if I could let him know if I was throwing out anything useful.

Several hours passed, and to my surprise an older Asian lady walked towards the dumpster. Like the pair that came earlier, she also didn’t look homeless, pushed a cart around, and immediately started digging. Yet again I felt very compelled to give her some bottles and cans. So I took a couple more bags from Joseph’s pile… hey he hasn’t recycled them for half a year and they’ve been taking up precious space, so I consider it public domain now due to negligence . As she saw me walking towards her with two bags in hand, and realized what was in those bags, I could see a deep smile form on her face, a smile that cried relief that today will be a good day, that there will be food to eat. She was recently laid off, and has been coming three times a week. As I started walking back, a small kid ran over with some of his family’s bottles, and yelled that he had more coming as the lady thanked him. I could tell that his family has been saving those bottles regularly for this.

As I continued to clean, thinking about those bottles, my neighbor came home from work. I met him and his wife, talked, realized they’ve been living there for two years now. Apparently, one day during the winter every year, the peak of the rainy season overflows our gutters, which are poorly designed to flow through a hole in the garage, through the length of the garage, to the street, and the overflow goes into the neighbor’s garage, damaging their stuff. He looked very happy that I was cleaning my garage, because he had come over a year ago when his garage got wet because the water passage through the garage was clogged (by the squirrel poop), and no one could unclog it because so much stuff was on top of that passage. There was no more stuff on top of that passage, and boy was he excited. He immediately offered to sweep the passage for me, which was now filled with squirrel poop from the surrounding area, which I was putting off to do later since it was very stinky. He didn’t care it was squirrel poop. He swept that passage full of poop like he just won the lottery, and carrying it all with him in a broom pan, made his way towards the dumpster.

I finished up my cleaning as it got dark. The garage was finally clean, and I could walk from one end to the other. Water could flow from one end to the other. Today has been fruitful. But what will happen to everyone that I met today? They were all amazing people, and I hope that they find what they are looking for, be it bottles, health, or a dry garage. In one day of staying home I got to see the interconnected web of the neighborhood, how people who lost their jobs came over to the dumpster for their income, how one family thinks about them each time there are bottles to throw away, how neighbors ask each other for things and how neighbors can help each other out. My garage door was open today, and during that one day of open doors neighbors from every direction came and talked to me and revealed their biggest secrets that they are probably embarrassed to even tell family and friends about. It was amazing to see how these neighbors lived life, how their lives are intertwined, in this cased through that one dumpster in the middle of it all. This one dumpster showed me so much about how life can be difficult when all you have is someone else’s trash, but as long as you cherish what you have and delight in the relationships surrounding you, your life can be quite an enviable treasure. No longer having to work on a Thursday, and leaving that garage door open, has uncovered for me the neighborhood coming alive, making the scarce goods found in the dumpster their treasure and life. Finally I wrapped up and carried the last of the trash to the dumpster. That was my day.

How are you supposed to thrive without a job? That’s the question I set out to answer exactly one week ago.

I had everything, an exciting job at Apple working on iPhones and iPods that have yet to be released, business travel that took me to 5-star hotels in China having my own private bathroom made of glass, and a nice, reliable paycheck. It was the stereotype of the ideal job, but I wasn’t satisfied. Each hour that passed by trying to make sure Apple’s next product was a hit, I felt that the earth was getting a little warmer, the poor were getting a little poorer, and the injustices in this world established themselves even deeper than before. Where was I while all this happened and passed me by, and how am I contributing to resolving global issues when I was simply putting electronics (albeit very well-designed electronics) into (fairly well-to-do) people’s hands? Sure, some of you might say (and have said to me) that the iPhone revolutionizes the way we communicate with each other and use information. But will it reduce segregation of the poor and rich, or teach kids the fundamental values of the greater good? Sorry, but I think improving the world through adding one more way for the rich to chat with their friends, that’s stretching the definition of philanthropy. Okay okay, to be fully honest, I also thought a lot about the hierarchy of corporations, and how the top of the pyramid was deeply established to keep its supports exactly that: supports. After all, what are the chances of me being able to take the place of Steve Jobs, by climbing the ladder? Heck, what are the chances of ANY of the Senior VPs getting to take the place of Steve Jobs?

Exactly one week ago, was my last day at Apple. What will I do afterwards? Eric insisted that I blog about this experience, so here it is =).

Here’s my plan: I will approach this in a three-pronged attack.

1. First, I need to simplify my life. The working life is complicated; working and commuting add lot of of thoughts and tasks to your daily routine. You make more, you spend more, and have more credit cards and belongings to keep track of. I’m going to be selling or recycling things that I don’t have a use for, and organizing the rest. My end goal is to have my life almost self-sustaining in terms of upkeep (banking, papers, taxes etc). I actually plan on writing a few more articles how simplifying can improve your life.
2. Second, I want to improve my habits. Lots of exercise, eating well, improving my eyesight, spending more time with loved ones. Pollute less, recycle more. Think more and learn more. It makes you feel good and want to be more efficient.
3. Lastly, I’m doing several projects to try my hand at making money. I will definitely make use of my programming skills since not everyone can be a good coder, and that gives me a head start. I also plan on doing some computer science tutoring as a side income. In addition, this blog will definitely be written in often, since it’s my venue to write about things I’m passionate about. All in all, my income will be much less than before at least in the beginning, but this still works because I’m spending my time now to cover the fundamentals in #1 and 2. A simplified life where I always have a clear view of my current state, and good living habits, will make life much less expensive. I believe that the savings accrued from work will last for a good period of time (perhaps six months), and after that the projects should be maturing to generate some income.

There will of course be updates to my situation in the future. Currently who knows what will happen with everything, but as things change I will definitely announce the (good) news .