I tend to believe I know what I’m doing, where I’m going, I’m in the control of my life, but that’s not the truth and it’s really easy to derail from the path you committed to go by living with a demanding work and all sorts of unknown encounters.

The most dangerous thought you can have as a creative person is to think you know what you’re doing. - Alan Key

I think I found a good way to organize and regain the control of it.

Review For Yourself

If you work on a corporate company you must be familiar with the annual or quarterly performance review and evaluation, often times it’s mandatory, and it’s officially scheduled in your and your organization’s calendar. Process varies but I always feel that’s not really reflecting myself, that’s only a tiny part of the professional work, why don’t I do it for myself not for anyone else, to tru?

So last Friday I took one day off for this “Personal Quarterly Off-site”, to review my last 90 days of personal and professional life and set goals and plans for next 90 days. The end result was so great, I got way more than I expected, never thought I could get that much out of myself. Besides the basic concept, I’ll also share the process and tips I found that works for me.

What Is Personal Quarterly Off-site

I heard it from the podcast, Greg McKeown the author of the best selling Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, which is one of my favorite, introduced his idea of it.

Every 90 days, you take a day. You evaluate what you’ve been doing during the last 90 days. You have what I call the most important hour of your life, which is when you go through a set of questions. Then you set your (very few) goals for the next 90 days to make sure you’re in alignment with what you really want to do ultimately with your life. This is it.

Strategy 1: Schedule it

This is the first step and perhaps the most important step. I didn’t do it immediately after I heard the idea, even though I felt interesting. I intentionally scheduled it for 1 week later, and told my boss I’m gonna that day off in advance.

Until that day I chose some of my favorite podcasts, book highlights and articles to read related to the topic, by consciously telling myself, that day is coming and I’m gonna do some serious work, I was able to let my brain be prepared subsconciously. It builds up the right mindset in the downtime too. I also shared that schedule to get some peer pressure.

One thing needs to mention, very soon there’s a deadline in my current project, it wasn’t easy to bring it up in this season and I did feel somehow guilty about being absent while others working hard to meet the deadline. But let’s admit there’s no perfect time you could work less, there’s always something that needs you to look at, but only you can be responsible for yourself, in professional and personal. So this time I was bold enough to take the chance.

Strategy 2: Set the Environment Right

How many notifications do you get every single day? It’s so easy to “connect” to something that doesn’t really matter at that time but “disconnect” to something you really want to focus. So strategy No.2 is to turn off your phone. It’s easy to turn on the “Do Not Disturb” mode in iPhone.

Then go to somewhere you’re familiar with, where you won’t be disturbed by new “discoveries”, like the big SALE label in the store, or completely lost that you have to look up your phone to locate yourself. Maybe one of your favorite cafe would be the best at first. I found it’s easy for me to concerntrate and get serious work(thinking) done when I’m in the place where I’m really familiar with. It helps me to build up the routine and get into the “zone” so be conscious about the place would be helpful next time.

Strategy 3: Be a Journalist

The key point is to become a journalist, to ask good questions to yourself that drive you to focus on the essential area of your life, and don’t rush to answer them first.

Often times as an engineer when I hear a concern, issue or trouble I tend to quickly response with a possible solution. But this time I need to shut down that if-then thinking, to allow myself to dig deeper, pause and think more. I think you’ll be surprised too how much you could get just by pausing for a while.

Here are the questions I asked to myself:

• For the last 90 days, What is the news in your life?
• What are the top 3 things bothering you the most?
• Where are you spending your time and resource?
• What is essential to you?
  • Identify your roles
• If you have full control of a weekday, what would you do?
• What is your main focus and goal for the next 90 days? List 3.
• What are the top 3 things you know for sure those are gonna improve you, make you grow, but you aren’t doing? What’s holding you back?

I had some blur images but I definitely didn’t prepare all questions, most of them were improvised at the time, or should I say I plant the idea 1 week ago and had exactly what I expected.

Strategy 4: Set A Timer

I set a timer for 2 hours before I started writing the first question. When I finished I was right on time and I felt that’s the right amount of time needed.

It’s not a competition, it’s not more you write/ask/answer the more you gain. The process and experience is sharable but the end result is not, it’s for yourself, so don’t try to get more done during the process. Remember the “Less But Better” principle.

Strategy 5 Digital-less

I did this with a real pen and notebook. Even though I turned on “Do Not Disturb” on my phone, and I did bring an iPad with me, I still like the feeling of writing on physical paper.

It’s easy to get distracted on digital devices. For me I always care about the styling, spelling and using the right tool, which really doesn’t matter that much.

Plus the physical note has a limitation, you can’t write endlessly on one page, which conversely set a boundary to keep you on the right course. I brought a B5 size kinda small notebook in which I tend to answer each question within 1 page, that limitation forces me to describe more precisely and not to bring up everything. Compare to that digital note is border-less and “cheap”, even though it shows Page 1 and Page 2, navigation is so “effortless” that it won’t occur to you that you have written “too much”.

Strategy 6: Reschedule It for the next time

After I finished it I felt much better, I’ve dumped lots of concerns and worries, set only few goals for the next 90 days, moved some of the actionable items to OmniFocus(my GTD/TODO app). The next thing I did was to schedule the next Personal Quarterly Off-site on my calendar, to reinforce the benefits of Strategy 1 and be more aware the importance of having such kind of self retrospective day.

Final Thoughts

Although whole thinking and writing process only took 2 hours to finish, I still think utilizing that whole day to build up the mindset, to allow yourself to pause, to wander is critical for creativity. If you feel like you’ve got lots of tasks done but not moving towards your goal, maybe it’s time to do something good for yourself.

“Sorry I failed to give you a complete family”. I heard it from both my mom and dad, from time to time.

Every time I go back China, I’m actually scared in some level to spend nights with either of them. I could sense it, “Oh my god he/she is gonna bring that again…”, then we all drowned in the emotional flood.

Although I do refer to them as a convenient “excuse”(joke) for my inappropriate behavior or inability of communication, in my heart I never ever blame them for anything. But as parents with good will and intention, I guess they may never forgive themselves, I don’t like to see that kind of face…

Writing these because I had a dream this morning, for the 30 years in my life it is the first time to have such a dream seeing them being together, happy, smiling, doing things together, worrying about my marriage(this part is so real hah), I just can’t forget that warm feeling. If one day human technology is developed enough to make a machine that could control your dream, I might surrender to that.

Phew, what an emotional morning! And I won’t surrender! I was just being weak for now. And no such thing as a “functional family” so take it easy :)

2014 has passed, this is the perfect season to write a personal review post. This one is organized in the perspective of family, relationship, friends work and self development.

Family

At the end of 2014 I took some day off and came back to China to visit my mom and dad. Probably 3 years since our last met.

As always my mom prepared everything for me: new clothes and coat, cloves, shoes(-20 degree in my hometown), good foods, money for me to use here… She kept all the gifts in the perfect shape I gave her before, always seek to connect, always support me… Amazingly I really can’t find any flaws from her as a mother, she’s perfect.

My dad is the same, so unique in his own way… I’m not a good talker just like him, we don’t talk that much, and don’t feel the urge to, which made me really relaxed, felt home. Sometimes I take the initiative and tell him my life in Tokyo, and after my talk he either suddenly leaves without a comment or change the subject completely to something he wants to talk about… And we’re totally fine about spending the time separately even though we’re in the same room, he checks his computer while I write blog, just like the old days.

Strangely for one moment I dreamed about, what if, what if they didn’t get divorced, how would it look like now? What if I look at the left there’s my mom, and turn right there’s dad? I know it’s 200% impossible already, but this is the first time for the last 10+ years I imagined such scene and I kinda want to say, “please don’t wake me up”.

Relationship

I remember early 2014 we were sitting at the dining table in our brand new house, having afternoon tea and cakes, enjoying the beautiful view from 27th floor and sharing stories to each other. That was such a peaceful picture in my memory, I wish I could freeze the time forever, I thought after all these years we finally managed to get the harmony moment, but we didn’t.

After that our relationship hit the bottom, it was the darkest time for me. I suffered a lot from distrust, every couple have fights and may even say some harsh words too, but nothing hurt more than distrust. I felt my character, loyalty and integrity was doubted, it made me feel all the things I had been fighting for was nothing, worthless. I started to ask the wrong questions. “Why me? Why shit things always happen to me? Why I can’t have a peaceful day? I’m not a perfect boyfriend but also not a bad guy shouldn’t I deserve a little better? Why I did nothing but is treated like I was cheating on her? It’s so unfair why?”

Question shifts focus. Asking the wrong questions could only drive you crazy, making all possible negative impacts, so stop. Pain is a powerful tool, if you can make good use of it. There’s a technique introduced in the book “Awaken the Giant Within”, saying if you want to quit your bad habit, you should link massive pain to that. In my case this trust issue was such a huge pain for me I don’t want to experience it anymore, ever. So I tweaked the questions like this:

“What’s the root cause? Am I misbehaved? Or lack of communication makes me appear suspicious? Is it related to our past issue? Is it her issue? Is it fixable? What could I do now on my side? What are my choices?”

Immediately my focus shifted to the present, and helped me made a big decision then. I’ll leave all that pain to 2014, 2015 I will have a better, brighter life.

Friends

I like to hang out with friends, but not doing good job at inviting them. Always reluctant to send the message. 8:00 AM, maybe they’re on the train. 10:00 AM they must be working. 12:00 AM they’re probably having lunch with colleagues. 6:00 PM, hmm maybe working hard to get things done. 8:00 PM maybe they’re enjoying dinner with family/friends. 10:00 PM maybe too late… I’m such a genius to find no good time to contact during a whole day lol!

And even though I’ve been living in Tokyo for 7 years, I still don’t get the distance with Japanese friends(not those have experience abroad). I consider some are good friends, but not sure how they feel about me, the distance is still there. Don’t get me wrong they’re good people, polite and kind, but that also confused me about where we are, and how to develop it to the next level.

On the contrary, I’m glad the “gaijin” group get together regularly. BBQ, Chicago Pizza, fireworks, Bounenkai. The psychological guard is low, people are more open, more casual, easier to talk to.

Also appreciate my friends in China. Every time I come back, they all manage to come no matter how busy they’re, give me the welcome party and farewell party within 1 week, I’m flattered. I’ve known each other for over 10 years, I’ve seen them from slim to fat hah, from a boy to a father, yet we still drink like a teenage, talk in the same way, as if time never passed us.

Work

One big challenge was building Cooksnaps widget which is integrated to food blogs with fancy features like user login, browse and like cooksnaps, leave comments, auto post to facebook wall, admin tools to manage visibilities, etc. I did heavy javascript project before but this time is different. It’s a 3rd party javascript widget running on the food bloggers blog, the code is part of a rails project. Challenging but fun! Third-Party Javascript, this book written by Disqus engineers helped a lot!

Another big project is Cookpad global, it’s like a database-less rails app, we’re using API to transfer all the data we needed. At first we were using a gem called Her to let the model have ActiveRecord like interface, but due to performance problems and lack of maintenance we shifted to spyke.

Oh and almost forgot that I switched to VIM from Sublime Text, felt like long long time ago :) The transition phase didn’t take long, I used janus for a quick bootstrap then tweaked the parts one by one everyday. Love it so much.

Self

Some achievements on personal development:

• Established the habit of going to gym 3 times a week
• Established the habit of writing a journal every day
• Challenging Audible audio book(“challenge” because of my English skill is still not enough to catch all the audio)
• Shifting to principle centered person, made first draft of personal mission statement
• Become an amateur Youtuber: published a gaming channel now have 566 subscribers, 500k views, generated about $277 income, estimated watched time is 3 years 280 days in total.

The Number of 2015

2015 = 1024 + 512 + 256 + 128 + 64 + 16 + 8 + 4 + 2 + 1. Such a beautiful number isn’t it!? Happy new year~!

This year August I turned into 30, I wasn’t happy at all. In fact I was quite desperate. I felt I accomplished nothing, far away from who I expected to be. Now 4 months later, I finally managed to see the bright side, accepted myself and got physical and mental positive changes in life.

Gap Between Dreams and Realities

Turning into 30 is quite a big thing in China. There is a saying “三十而立”, directly translated to “a man should be independent [steadfast] at the age of 30”, nowadays it’s interpreted as financially independent, emotionally mature, have a good family to take care of. I was born and raised in that culture and unavoidably affected by it. When I was in high school, I dreamed about the day when I’m 30 I’d be mature for sure like a real adult, disciplined and principled, knowing everything about life, handle any tough situations well, have a lovely wife, a happy family, maybe even with 2 children, a boy and a girl, and doing my best job to protect them. Sadly none of these happened.

Goals are dreams with deadlines. Even though I had been working hard these years, but I didn’t make it like a real goal with concrete steps to make it happen. That explains why I ended up like this.

I didn’t celebrate that day, I wanted to write a post but couldn’t finish it because of the dark energy. Part of me was still refusing to accept the fact that I’m 30, I felt not young anymore.

Everything Has To Become Worse Before It’s Getting Better

So what would you do if you’re not happy about the situation? You simply change it. One thing I know for sure that if I take the action it would definitely make a positive impact but I’ve never done it yet, is exercise.

Unlike early 20s when I could play intense games 12 hours straight overnight then still manage to finish a whole day lesson in college, nowadays even 1 hour Starcraft II game would make me feel exhausted. Sleeping 7-8 hours is supposed to be enough but I still have to drag myself out of bed each day. I know there must be so many rooms for improvement.

I’ve read it many times in different places that exercise regularly will generate more energy and boost your creativity. Understand it is one thing, but taking actions is another thing. This time I showed no mercy to myself. I went to the gym near my place, asked the staff to give me a tour and immediately signed the paper for the membership. They was suggesting there’s a program will be available soon that I could use a coupon to join with relatively cheaper price, only thing I have to do is wait for it, but I turned it down said I want to do it now, today, I commit to do it, don’t wanna give myself any other chance to make any excuses. I know taking the actions now is way more valuable than the extra percentage of the price for me.

My goal is not getting big muscles to make myself looking better to attract any females, I want to regain control of my life, to know that I’m capable of improving myself, to have more energies to accomplish the essential things in the future. I have the clarity, I’m absolutely sure about the direction, everything else just naturally happened without any resistance. It was as simple as that.

I am planning to write another post about my routines about going to the gym and some extra benefits.

Keep The Ball Rolling

Another side effect of having physical exercise is paying more attention to health. I became more conscious about what and when to eat, not like before I ate whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted without limitation. Have vegetables regularly, try to have dinner at least 3 hours before sleep, push dishes away even though there’s some left if I know it’s enough already, etc. I’m still have little knowledge in this area so I’m also gonna take a cooking lesson to learn more systemically.

Also found myself have more time to read books. Reading is such an effective way to learn great thoughts from great people, asynchronously. It allows me to constantly revisit my past and recognize which part could have been done differently to have better result. One great thing for getting older is that you could find so many references from your past when reading, to fully explore the idea in your context, in your real experience.

By reading “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” I realized I had been living with impulse not correct principles, and that was why I was so weak to temptations, made several bad decisions and hurt the people around me. I followed the suggestions from the book and got my first draft of personal mission statement done. Whenever I have to make tough decisions it’s the reference for me to look up, who I want to be, who should I put first, what’s my responsibility. Decisions are never easy, but having correct principles guide me, it makes me look from the big picture, be more determined to my choice and commit to the result no matter it turns out good or bad at that time.

Willing to Think About Life Plan

I was never a fan of making long term plan. Even just think about it made me headache. “I just want to enjoy everyday and forget those complex things”, I said to myself.

But now I’m really willing to take the challenge. I know I actually like to plan things, like for a trip, for Christmas, even plans in games. What stopped me from planning my life, was the fear of the future. Family issues, relationship issues, unresolved conflicts, fear of the unknown… Made me feel stressed and overwhelming, so I ran away, used “just enjoy everyday” as the excuse.

Every family has a issue, so does relationship. You can’t run forever. I started to explore the options and possibilities, it wasn’t as hard as I expected. I could still breathe, it didn’t kill me. Be proactive, take the initiative also applies here. It has to be me to handle these things.

At Last

None of these changes require you to physically be the age of 30, but I surrendered to the fear of the future before and was unable to see things clearly, unwilling to deal with them, until now. For what it’s worth, I’m glad I overcame all the internal struggles, it’s never too late to make a meaningful life.

I’ll end with some of my favorite quotes:

Life is a gift, go make it count. - Michael Hyatt

The only true security in life comes from knowing that every single day you are improving yourself in some way, that you are increasing the caliber of who you are and that you are valuable to your company, your friends, and your family. - Anthony Robbins

When I was reading book this afternoon, not directly related to the its content but somehow it inspired me to realize some of self improvements I’ve accomplished through past couple of months or the past year. Most of them were changed subconsciously, like a good “by-product” thing.

Improvements

• Taking stairs(mentioned before)
• No more junk food, do more cooking
• Sleep earlier, resist to temptation
• Reading more often(thanks to Kindle Paperwhite)
• No games at all(I’d like to have some)

No More Junk Food

I can’t remember the last time I grabbed a burger at McDonalds. Maybe for you it doesn’t sound like a big deal, but for me it’s totally a different story.

When I was still a poor student in China, having a McDonalds burger is like a “highs in the month” event. It was quite expensive compared to the salary, or the pin money I could get from my dad. Plus it was, and still is so so delicious, way better than Japan. So at that time, my image of an ideal life was I can at least afford to have McDonalds every day.

Then after graduated from university, I came to Japan to work as a full-time software engineer. My salary was good enough to have as many burgers as I want. Even though I knew people call it junk food, but for me it was not. I could eat McDonalds for one week straight.

I enjoyed it, I was happy. It seemed like that this was one thing impossible to change, not to mention I was not willing to change at all.

But what really changed me was after I joined cookpad, my current company. The company’s goal is to make cooking more fun, make people healthier. So more or less I got the point of why processed food is bad, then one day my boss sent me a link to Jamie Oliver’s talk in TED. That 20 minutes talk was amazing. Then I searched him in Youtube about his “Food Revolution”, and I watched all of them. That thing really changed my mind.

So from that moment, I started to review my pst, I found myself willing to change the habit of eating junk food.

Do More Cooking

But change is never easy. Even though I wanted to do more cooking, work fatigue, working overtime and a failed relationship made me feel extremely drained, exhausted and frustrated. Every time I got home I felt so powerless that I’d rather just skip the dinner. Shopping ingredients, looking for a simple enough newbie friendly recipe and cook it felt so unreal.

But thanks to some good books I’ve read, I adjusted my attitudes toward work and relationships, I managed to keep myself stay positive and made some changes in working environment. Now I go home earlier than before, rarely any overtime, I’m still a little tired after I open the door but I get the energy to go shopping and cook. Even though my cooking skill is not good, I can only cook several recipes and sometimes the taste is awful, I enjoyed it, I’m happy to serve myself, understand more about foods, balance diet nutritions from various ingredients, try out some new recipes in the weekend, etc. I feel content.

And what amazed me is that this change was much easier than I expected, especially judging from my past diet habit and “dreams”. I didn’t track my activities and mark them on a calendar. More like happened subconsciously, so, congret to myself! (But I’m still uncomfortable to cook with someones else cuz I’m clumsy and slow in the kitchen >_<)

A Must Watch Video

OK I’ll stop here today but I want to share a very touching video with you. I’m 100% sure it’s worth watching so don’t miss it! You won’t regret! No spoiler here~

Recently I added photo uploading feature to quoty.me, then yesterday after I watched a Chinese movie 一代宗师(The Grandmaster) I uploaded some quotes with photos. It looks pretty good!

Here is a screenshot of it.

The movie is directed by 王家卫(Kar Wai Wong), my favorite director, his movies are always full of deep, inspiring words. It’s a movie, but taste like a novel. I’m so glad that I read Chinese so that I could fully enjoy the good work.

Another thing is, I was a little confused about how to make quoty, what it is, where it goes. But this experience, after watching a great movie then upload those quotes and photos, I can really recapture all the great moments in the movie, feels so good. Besides, be capable to improve the tool I’m using is another way to enjoy the life.

Taking the Stairs

Around 1 month ago I started this new habit: Taking the stairs instead of elevators. A simple habit to help me at least have some “exercise” every day, I’ve been “sitting” too long. With only 2 exceptions:

• when on the way to work, always feel sleepy and powerless in the morning, maybe that’s an execuse or lack of motivation
• when with other people, just trying to fit in, although I raise my hand for tea or juice in a drinking party…

I use Lift app to track my progress, even though it was not a 30-day streak(forgot to check-in some days or had no out-door activities on the weekends), still I’m happy for the last 1 month. Feel stronger than before, wouldn’t be out of breath after climbing a long long stairs, and most important thing is I’ve established this mindset to always seek and choose stairs rather than elevators, this “choosing” process never occurs actually, since I’ve repeated so many times my initial response is just to find the stairs.

Tiny Achievement

This habit doesn’t require many efforts like other activities such as reading, running or practicing an instrument. But still I consider this a tiny achievement for myself. When I look back the past days or months, I can’t see myself making progress in neither professional nor personal life. I’m still kind of struggling with life. Compared with my past I spent less time on learning new things, writing blogs or even playing games.

Been thinking a lot recently and just like everyone I want to improve myself in various aspects but never really put them into actions. Thus I’m glad at least this habit made me realize there’s still things I can accomplish.

Next Habit

I want to commit myself to create a new habit every week, and if it works for me I’ll keep doing it. By “works for me” I mean like “get up early” can work for somebody but not for everyone.

I think this 1 week interval should work for me. It reminds me of the “1 percent improvement per day” method but finding out what improvement should I do today could be difficult, and what I’ve learned is repetition really matters. Define it, do it, repeat it. Your body would reflect that way without going through your brain.

So my new habit will be: Getting up at 8 am every weekdays and before 9 am on weekends. Ever since high school I’ve never made it, and I still have this thought or ‘fantasy’ that by getting up early I can make a difference in some aspects of my life. Every morning is in a rush now, sometimes I have to drop breakfast and dash into the station to catch up the train. I do not memorize many peaceful mornings in my life.

Time to reread some parts of the book: The Two-Minute Challenge: How to Reach Goals and Finish What You Start written by my friend Charles, it has very good strategies of making and keeping your goals.

I found this video from my old hard drive, thought it would be nice to write something about it.

About World of Warcraft

WOW - World of Warcraft, a MMORPG created by famous game company Blizzard. I had played it for maybe 4~5 years in total, had a very successful “career” there. Heh anyway I’m already AFK(away from keyboard, also means stop playing the game) but from time to from I still miss it, it may sounds stupid to you but I really learned some important life lessons there, no matter in what “world” only consistent efforts and practices that can make you progress. I’ll cut off here otherwise there is no end of this story.

About This Movie

The video was made at 2008, 4 years ago, contains some World of Warcraft Arena PVP games I recorded at that time. It was my first and last “product”, besides this one there are also some clips in my hard drive but I never made the second one.

I assume no one here(if there is any) knows about World of Warcraft PVP, it seems impossible for me to find a way to entertain you with this video. I think I can only share some stories and experiences behind it.

Such Fun to Make a Movie

Record each game, categorise the clips, pick up songs, add transition animations, add subtitles, figure out a story line, add slow motion to fit the songs tempo… Everything was new to me but I really enjoyed, it was very different from the daily programming work, a good relax and exercise. The software I used was Adobe Premiere I think, not very sure.

Slow PC, Slow Internet

I was still using a quite low spec PC at that time. To record the game and don’t affect the play I have to turn off lots of graphic effects to lower down the overall resource consume. And exporting the movie normally took over 1 hour, if I found any tiny mistakes, damn I had to go through it again…

Low Quality As A PVP Movie

If let me rate my movie I will give it 4 out of 10, completely a failure. There are several aspects I don’t like:

1. Network Lag. I was playing in the Taiwan server from Japan and normally the latency was 200-300 ms. That’s sooooooo critical in a high level game, even though I have 100% confidence about my reflection speed, that 200-300ms usually just sentence me and my teammate to death.

2. Bad Team Player. The Arena games are team plays, even if you are a genius most of the time you have to corporate with your teammates, communicate and adjust the strategy against your opponents. As you can see in the movie most of the time I was just chasing my opponent and totally ignored my teammate, his position, his vision, his life point… So recording your game and watching later is a very good way to improve your skills, you can find so many flaws of yourself.

Enjoy the Movie

Enough talking, hope you can enjoy the movie. It’s around 24 minutes I don’t think anyone of you can finish it :)

Video on Vimeo

风七 - Battle Memories from fantasyday on Vimeo.

At Last

The 2 teammates in the movie are my college friends, they are both married now and one guy will soon be a father. It’s nearly impossible to play this game or any game with them anymore. Just like in a romantic relationships normally people will take lots of photos and videos, if you ever really into a game, I suggest you make yourself a movie as well.

I think I should be proud of myself to resist any alcohol in today’s party. It’s almost a month since I started this habit.

I never consider myself as a alcoholic, even though in certain sences I do want a beer. Like when meeting with friends, when exausted from work, when in friends’ welcome/farewell/whatever party, when feel weak and lonely during the middle of the night. I thought it would be quite easy for me to stop drinking, but the reality told me I was too naive. I did feel the threaten and temptation. Alcohol is a very foundamental thing for socialization, as an adualt sometimes it’s hard to say no. Especially like today, “All beers!”, “Sorry please give me tea…”.

But I survived, for whatever the reason I started it, I don’t wanna give up, I’m gonna try my best to keep the records.

This is the README file of this quoty project in github, so if you already knows about it you can totally ignore this post. I just want to mention it once in my blog.

What is Quoty?

http://quoty.me

Quoty - A place where people can share and save the most touching and inspiring quotes or words, in a modern way.

One of my hobby projects build with Rails, deployed on Heroku, try it.

The Vision

The Problems

If you search for any famous quotes on google, you may find lots of sites with disturbing ads, messy layouts, unreadable fonts. Once you looked, closed the tab, and that’s it. Nothing more happens.

What I want to create

Quoty, well it’s still a temporary name, doesn’t aim to be the biggest quotes website. Instead, I want to create a community who loves the essence of human intelligence, which I believe is our language, the words, quotes, conversations, or even jokes. Besides those quotes from some “Big Giants”, not trying to deny them here but they are not a MUST condition to make a quote classic and lasts forever, our parents, friends, wife/husband, anyone can say something very touching, warming words. If there is a story about it, if it means something to you and you really want to “save” that moment, I hope you can find here is the right place. At least that’s what I’m trying to build.

So the general/traditional quotes are really not everything here. Tweets, video clips, lines from some movies, words from friends or family members, just post it. I’ll try to find the right way to keep the original taste and flavour. And that’s why I said Quoty is a temporary name, because it emphasize “quotes” too much.

Oh I won’t put any ads on it. Try to make it clean and simple. A peaceful place. (I may need some design help to really create the visual feelings about it.)

Requirements

• Rails 3.2+
• Ruby 1.9.3+
• RVM

Installation

In most cases:

git clone git@github.com:kinopyo/quoty.git
cd quoty
bundle
rake db:setup
rails s
open "http://localhost:3000"

If you need twitter or facebook integration, you have to setup your own keys to config/initializers/omniauth.rb.

TODO

https://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/697543

Also I’m using github issues as a diary or blog tool, when building any mentionable features I’ll sent a pull request to my self, write down the timestamp and upload a very cute emoji. Please take a look :)

Contributing

Currently Quoty is still under construction, it lacks of many very basic stuff(UI design and functions). Although I bought a domain and told some frinds about it, I still consider it’s a alhpa version website. If you found something you want to have, please open an issue to tell me, with your pull requests would make it perfect. Thanks in advance for your help!

I’ll put your name into the contributors list ^_^

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request

Contributors

• Designed and built by @kinopyo
• First pull request sent by @gueorgui

License

MIT License. Copyright (c) 2012 Qihuan Piao

These days work is extremly boring.

Before our team had dark era, after that it seemed going well for a moment but I’m not sure what specific things caused this feeling again.

I sit down and tried to think logically to find out the reason, why I’m not motivated, why I feel boring, why I get so tired everyday? Is it related to my personal life? Or is it because I’m already in the holiday mood? Is it because the evaluation? I kept asking myself questions to break down the negtive feelings into separate parts so that I can find each solution. But I couldn’t make it, I found myself hard to stay rational, because the more I asked myself, the more cleary I can see the answer.

The answer is simple, I don’t believe the guy. I don’t believe we’re gonna make it, to be specifically, his goal, his ambition, judging by the way how we worked. I don’t know every detail stories about it, but I think I’ve made the judgement subconsiously. My friend mentioned the same thing at yesterday’s lunch, totally different story but I think it inspired me somehow, “I’ve made the judgement”. The feeling from subconsious is hard to deal with, hard to change, it’s based on the self expierences and observations in quite a log time.

The project itself of course has potential, I never doubt that. I’m not saying he is a bad person neither. And I absolutely have resoponsibilities, how I participated the project, how I interacted with the team, etc. It just he as a leader, I’ve found myself hard to follow him.

We use our phones every day. They have a modern name “Smart Phone”, as it can do much more tasks compared to the old one. I’ve been using iPhone for over 3 years now. And since yesterday, I started not to use it, you probably wonder why but I got some personal issues so maybe this is one of the actions I have to take.

Anyway, here is the interesting things I found that I can’t do without a phone based on these 2 days of experience. So many surprises.

• I have to find a clock alarm, the physical item, to get myself up at morning.
• I feel so boring when I’m on a train. I can’t check Twitter, Facebook or any RSS newsletters. I can’t read my kindle book either.
• I was in the mood of cooking, and I realized, “Oh, I don’t have a kitchen timer.” Then after I cooked, I couldn’t take a picture.
• Yes I can’t take a picture whenever and wherever I want like before, my phone is the only camera.
• I can’t check-in in foursquare when I enter a cafe or restaurant, to keep log of my life.
• I can’t track my running records, although I have a fixed route so I know exactly how many kilometers I’ve run but still I can’t keep those data.
• I can’t block the noise by putting earphone, to be specific here, a noisy child cries loudly, rolled on the floor said to his parents that he wants juice, right in the center of a shopping center, he is totally guilty and not innocent. I have to say the f**k words and hold myself try not to kill him.
• I don’t know the time when I’m out. I have a watch but I don’t have the habit to wear it…
• I can’t access to the Internet, when I want to search a place, I have to do the research in my laptop before moving.
• I can’t keep tracking my expenses. I’m using an app to do that, now if I really want to continue, maybe I have to input the amounts in some kind of Excel-like interface…
• I can’t take a note, I don’t carry a notebook and a pen with me, I was using Evernote or Apple’s native Notes app to do this thing.
• And of course, I can’t contact to any friends by calling or sending text messages.
• And at work, when my boss asked, “hey, this thing seems not work in smartphone browser, go check it”, “OK, damn it! I don’t have a phone…”. Really funny.

I’m not sure where I’m going, but there was not just negative “findings” about this. I found myself have time to think about something normally I would not to because I must be checking not-that-important tweets or just trying to use the phone to kill the time. Any tasks/ideas/todos comes to my mind, I have to keep it there, into my mind stack. And trust myself if this thing is important I won’t forget about it.

I wrote this post doesn’t mean I like this idea and try to convince any of you to do the same crazy-seems-nonsense thing. But by doing this, it reminds me how my social/technical life has changed within 3 years, how great iPhone it is to make life easier.

I’m sure I can go back, live without a phone completely if I really want to. I can find lots of alternative tools, I still miss paperback books, sometimes I still want to grab a pen to take notes or just skitch some ideas to the paper. But when it comes to keep connections with friends or family, it’s still very convenient when we keep our phones in our pockets.

My “Thank You” Mails

Yesterday was my one year anniversary at Cookpad, and I came up with an idea to send a couple of mails to my friends inside and outside the company, who have helped me to join it, just want to say thanks to them in person.

I wrote in the order of the people I’ve met. First starts with my headhunter who introduced cookpad to me, then my first and second interviewer, etc. I didn’t write to everyone I’ve met in the company, that will be too overwhelming and lose the point.

It ended up with 13 mails, since yesterday was Saturday and I sent to our company email address, I didn’t expect any replies until next business day. But surprisingly someone already replied and seems like they love this idea, and many positive feedbacks!

WOW your friends

Since one of my purpose is to WOW(a verb I learned from the book: Delivering Happiness) those my friends so to be honest, if everything works fine, and it should, I wouldn’t be surprised by these positive feedbacks. But still, after reading their sweet words, it made me feel very very happy.I’m so glad that I made it. In my daily life I never feel lack of ideas to WOW someone but I never really execute in actions.

When I was reading the book, one story is about how Tony enjoyed organising a party and make a WOW experience to his friends. At that time I didn’t quite understand why he thought that way, but now I think I get it. It’s really a very amazing experience. It also reminded me that back in the days when I setup or prepared a surprise for my girlfriend, no need to go expensive or fancy, just something that a little bit weird and out of the box, then I will see the most beautiful smile in the world. This is a mindset and life style which I’ve decided to follow up. To make this world a better place, first step is to ensure you make your family and friends around you happier, right?

So this is my way to say thank you to my friends, some of the mails maybe even contain less than 10 phrases but it’s important to do it, and say it loud.

Reconnecting, A Really Unrelated Story

Oh, one more thing need to be mentioned. Yesterday I also got a message from my Senpai(先輩, Japanese, like one’s mentor) which I lost his contact 3 years ago. Every time when I reconnect with someone through Internet, I really appreciate what a good job it has done to make our life better. He was my first Senpai when I graduated and step into the whole adult society, even at that time he seemed really strict to me, it turns out it was worthwhile and I’d learned a lot from him. Not like how to write down each code, but in a much higher “Macro” point of view how to work, how to think. Sometimes I’m very surprised by this Japanese Senpai and kōhai connection. This is really a word you have to self experience in Japanese society.

Delivering Happiness

Sample Interview Questions at Zappos

The applicant is willing to think and act outside the box.

• Give me an example from your previous job(s) where you had to think and act outside the box.
• What was the best mistake you made on the job? Why was it the best?
• Tell me about a time you recognised a problem/area to improve that was outside of your job duties and solved without being asked to. What was it, how did you do it？

The applicant is more creative than the average person.

• Would you say you are more or less creative than the average person? Can you give me an example?
• If it was your first day on the job at Zappos and your task was to make the interview/recruiting process more fun, what would you do for those eight hours?

The applicant is willing to take risk in trying to solve a problem.

• What’s an example of a risk you took in a previous job? What was the outcome?
• When was the last time you brke the rules/policy to get the job done?

Here is the video of Amazon Kindle Press Conference, hold on September 6, 2012. This article does not intend to cover all the hardware details but just something worth for me to write down.

Why video?

I really don’t like just check the new hardware’s specs and see the numbers bumped up from this level to that level. I’d always like to watch the press videos, to enjoy the process, to feel the revolutionary stories behind this. Of course part of it kind of depends on how the CEO did the presentation.

KDP - Kindle Direct Publishing

During watching the viode I found something new, something amazed me. That is KDP - Kindle Direct Publishing

With Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) you can self-publish your books on the Amazon Kindle Store. It’s free, fast, and easy. Books self-published through KDP can participate in the 70% royalty program and are available for purchase on Kindle devices and Kindle apps for iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, PC, Mac, BlackBerry, and Android-based devices. With KDP, you can self-publish books in many languages and specify pricing in US Dollars, Pounds Sterling, and Euros.

I really think it’s a good job, good job Amazon. There is a also a video clip interviewing the authors who have published and succeeded through KDP. Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, also mentioned some numbers about this business, apparently it’s going well and actually helping people. To be honest, suddenly it occurs to me that maybe one day I can publish my own book, if it’s really just a matter of whether I can finish it, and no need to consider about the publisher.

Audio books

I bought Steven Job’s biography audio book last year, which is the first time I ever tried an audio book. Despite my English skill it was still a pretty good experience. I really encourage you to try at least once. If you keep saying, “Oh no I can never understand those English” and stop trying or improving yourself, you can never get that place. Just my opinion.

Narration

I never cared about who was narrating the book to me, until I heard this:

They’re getting people like Susan Sarandon, Colin Firth Anne Hathaway to narrate these books.

So what’s the big deal? I think it’s better to know it’s not someone who is cold heart just do his/her jobs to READ the book, but it’s someone you know like big movie stars, narrating the story, vividly. I want to know the details behind the scenes if I’m really into something. So it’s different for me.

Whispersync for Voice

Listen to your audio book on the way home, when you get home, pick up the “book” and start reading. Keep the place between the two media formats. I love this idea, and it becomes true.

Reading time

I almost forgot about this. Now kindle can show you how many times do you need to finish the current chapter, or the entire book. And it’s based on your speed. Isn’t that amazing!?

When We Make Money?

In the end, Jeff also mentioned about alignment of amazon.

We want to make money when people use our devices, not when they buy our devices.

I appreciate this. I’m sure we all know that it is the place where you are supposed to say something beautiful to the public. But I still love it, and I bought it.

It let me look back the “common” flow of my daily work. There was a time when we were told like this: “We need to make xxx money by the end of xxx, so we have to release the product before xxx! So do it and do it harder!”. Ok I may extragerate too much but you got the point. I admit it’s neccessary to have a business plan, including numbers, to run a business. But it would be thankful if we and our managers and BOSS stop talking about how many money we’re gonna make or should make, and think about how much it’s gonna be helpful and valuable to our users. You don’t need to say it loud every single day, but at least consider about this in your heart.

I want to make money when people use my products, although I’m just an employee now.

Finally migrated all my posts from Wordpress to Octopress. I think it’s quite popular among hackers and geeks these days, if you don’t know it just google it, tons of results.

There’re still a lot of works to do, like some posts with messy format or broken links, Disqus comments need to be migrated, categories are nonsense etc, but I’ll announce this anyway. Done is better than perfect right?

I’m not gonna mention any migration details here, I’d like to look back and have a summary or something now.

Over 300 posts since 2009/10/07

I’m really surprised by myself. I was not aware of that I’ve done so many writings, and these’re only published ones(I have a lot of drafts). Even though many of them are just simple code gist and programming related.

It’s so easy now to “execute” an action to a resource. Like a photo, favourite a tweet or even +1 a youtube movie. So our foot prints or activities are spread everywhere and some of them might be important or meaningful to you, that just a light-single-built-in action is not enough. I want to keep those non-physical, intangible but essential “things” here, as part of my life.

Japanese, English and Chinese

There was a time I was trying to write down every single post in these 3 languages. I believe the plugin I used in Wordpress is called qTranslate, which let you write with each language or all of them.

After a while I noticed it was too hard for me. Translating same contents into a different language is boring and wasting of time, at least I tried and found out it doesn’t work for me. So this time, I want this blog to be an English mainly blog, with occasional different language posts. My plan is writing emotional feelings in Chinese, and social activities or something related to Japan in Japanese.

I’m still keeping those language mixed posts here even though I think it’s not useful to my “readers”, not sure how many I got, I’d like to take those posts as old-days foot prints. “あの時がんばったな！ー” hehe.

About the priority or weight of each language

I want to be a top player in this programming field. In order to achieve that English is a MUST condition. I still remember when I first time read a programming book in English, it was so difficult that I hardly understood the meanings. But I keep trying and trying, now I’m very comfortable with it and believe it’s more natural than any other language in programming field.

Besides the effort I put in English, I also want to start writing in my native language, Chinese. Although English is more friendly to me than before, it’s still difficult to describe my feelings and emotions precisely. I need more vocabularies. I need to look back to think about if there is a grammar mistake. So when I think about some topics such as meanings of life, or what I want to left to the world, am I making this world a little bit better, etc. In these cases I need to grab my most familiar weapon :)

For Japanese, hmmm.. I’ll leave it for now :)

Google Adsense

If you’re an old readers of me, I hope you are, you may notice that there’s no ads anymore. Yeah I used to put those ads for experiment. With 500-600 daily PVs, it gave me around 4,000￥ every month. Not that much but it’s better than nothing, so I kept ads for a long time. But to be honest, as a personal blog it’s just annoying. I didn’t like it personally, and it’s for sure it gives people bad impression, I don’t like to miss a job opportunity if some head hunters open my blog and leave with a “WTF?!..”.

Let’s just be simple and clean.

That’s it~ see you next time.