Scribbles

Been knee deep in some interesting SEO work lately and couldn’t help draw the parallel to the real world. To give some background, SEO means “Search Engine Optimization”. In short, it’s the work behind getting the right webpage to show up for the right search term. For example, to make your personal site show up on top when somebody types “hottest woman alive” into Google, you perform the SEO for it. If you’re smart and persistent enough, it’ll happen. Unless you happen to be Tricia Helfer then you don’t need to do anything.
 
The thing about SEO that I want to talk about though, is the concept of link juice. Don’t worry, this isn’t a technical discourse on Google’s secret sauce. Simply put, it’s a way to measure each website on the Internet relative to each other. The more link juice a site receives, the more important it becomes and therefore it shows up higher on the search results page. This is known as page rank. Examples of high page rank with lots of juice: the NY Times being referenced by millions of blogs and other news sites, or the popular TV host who has over a million followers on Twitter. Both the NY Times and this Twitter page have been voted by others, given props, bestowed by legions with link juice. And the more of it you have, the higher your page rank. See, just like high school.
 
So that was the receiving end. What about the giving end? Google (or Yahoo or Bing) figures that each website has a certain amount of link juice to give. (No worries though, linking out doesn’t hurt a page, after all, a page with no links at all is pretty isolated and boring.) Each outbound link from that site siphons a portion of that allotted link juice. So the more links going out, the less each is worth. In contrast, the fewer the links, the more each is worth, sorta like the difference between sleeping around and getting hitched. Oh, and the higher your page rank, the more valuable your outbound links become. After all, suppose a million people are following Jimmy Kimmel, and he points out so and so website, then that must draw more attention than the same from a blog that nobody reads. Pretty simple concept right?
 
Finally to my point. Recently I can’t stop observing the real world in these terms. Link juice exists in real life, even though it’s much harder to measure than a website. Each person only has so much attention and energy. While some have more than others, the total amount will always be finite. That’s why one must acknowledge that limit and be stingy in sharing his love and attention. Hopefully, some of that link juice comes back. Because if you’re not selective in giving it, not only do you receive very little in return (thus dropping your life rank), what’s given to the people who really matter in your life gets diluted.
 
Life shouldn’t and cannot be based on exchanges. Besides, it’s impossible to measure and therefore can never be equitable. But the quality of attention given and received still matter, all the while affected by the givers and recipients. You don’t want to waste your precious attention on low quality people and you don’t need a million spammy cousins constantly knocking on your door, giving you low quality attention you don’t need. You want to raise the value of yourself and network by keeping your energy closely guarded, to form that powerful ring of quality people.
 
So if you’re no longer getting any link juice from me, either evaluate your own life rank or consider how much juice you’ve given me lately. It’s not personal, life priorities change and geography makes the heart go yonder. You simply don’t show up on my front page anymore, and vice versa. And that’s okay.

I’ve nursed this nagging thought in my mind for a while now, the question of where to place liberal arts in our society. My challenge in even raising that question was that I couldn’t resolve what liberal arts – English, History, Languages, Philosophy – actually stood for, and whether they were indeed subjects that propel us in the areas I find sorely lacking: critical thinking and its articulation. And while they remain difficult to categorize generically, two articles (linked below) I read recently clarified for me what I believe to be missing in either practice or the value we grant them. Reading Seth Godin’s recent Linchpin pushed me to the conclusion that we need these essential skills to live as humans instead of merely surviving as drones.
 
For those of you who know my academic/mercenary background may point out the contradiction. I am after all a student of engineering and computer science, topped off with additional degrees in CS and business. And for those who go further back to my undergraduate days, you may remind me of my belittling of liberal arts majors and their lack of post-graduate earning potential. That sentiment, while incorrect, did reflect my immigrant background and the general environment at the time. A large motivation in my developing years was to make a better life for myself and family. And I didn’t have parents or mentors who ever stressed the value of liberal arts. That coupled with a desire to make something “real” (and cool), made engineering a natural career choice. This quote from William Chace’s Decline of the English Department sums up my situation nicely and puts the attitude of my time in perspective with that of a few generations ago (emphasis mine):
 

Finding pleasure in such reading, and indeed in majoring in English, was a declaration at the time that education was not at all about getting a job or securing one’s future. In comparison with the pre-professional ambitions that dominate the lives of American undergraduates today, the psychological condition of students of the time was defined by self-reflection, innocence, and a casual irresponsibility about what was coming next.
 
Also visible in the late 1940s and early 1950s were thousands of GIs returning from World War II with a desire to establish for themselves lives as similar as possible to those they imagined had been led by the college generation before their own. For these veterans, college implied security and tradition, a world unlike the one they had left behind in Europe and the Pacific. So they did what they thought one always did in college: study, reflect, and learn. They would reconnect, they thought, with the cultural traditions the war had been fought to defend.

 
My attitude in college was study, learn, and earn. After all, there were student loans to pay back and family to take care of. There wasn’t much room for self-reflection. It took a decade after personally experiencing the dot-com bubble, global outsourcing, and the worse financial crisis since the Great Depression, for me to see how we arrived in the age of white collar slavery through that very system I came out of. Today corporations dole out deliverables and its accompanying script to follow. Every output is measurable. People sit in cubes and use their brains to generate words and numbers instead of sweating under the sun erecting pyramids; yet still no true thinking, deciding, and its associated risk taking are necessary. So are these white collar workers – the accountants, analysts, lawyers, programmers, whatever office person – really valuable, or simply replaceable cogs that can be swapped out for the next cheapest alternative?
 
As the years progressed, I’ve come to realize the value for effectively thinking, communicating those ideas, and acting on them, all things we’ve been deprogrammed to do. I’ve witnessed this through my professional experiences: programmers who generated ideas instead of just pumping out code, or consultants who did those things better than everyone else. These things translated into huge profits for the businesses they were hired by. Ironically, even corporate executives want other people to do the thinking and risk-taking for them. (Hey, we followed the money consultants’ advice and failed, it’s not our fault.)
 
The most valuable people, the ones reaping disproportional rewards are the creative types who bother to reflect, create, and share. The rest are commoditized and weeded out through a slow death of declining salaries and vanishing long term security. This is evident in all forms of businesses and media: technology companies, movies, food production industry, even newspapers. This phenomena is magnified by our information age. There’s little value in sheer quantity (when’s the last time you read anything memorable or even thought-worthy from the AP?), because there’s already too much content on the Internet. The problem is winning people’s limited attention to consume your content. And they won’t unless it’s of value.
 
What does this have to do with the role of liberal arts? Our entire system, from education to corporations to democracy, predicates its existence on making drones out of us, beating us into conforming to non-thinking, not-challenging the status quo. That’s a slippery path and that’s why we should emphasize true thinking in our education and especially in our value system. It may seem inconsequential to producing growth or saving the world. How can dead authors help us today, right? I say it’ll yield a better society, one not soley measured by per capita GDP. Meacham puts up a good argument:
 

… the difficulty of making the case for something so expensive and so seemingly archaic—an undergraduate liberal education—in an economic and cultural climate that favors efficiency and tangibility. It is inarguably hard to monetize a familiarity with Homer or an intimacy with Shakespeare.
 
It is just possible, though, that the traditional understanding of the liberal arts may help us in our search for new innovation and new competitiveness. The next chapter of the nation’s economic life could well be written not only by engineers but by entrepreneurs who, as products of an apparently disparate education, have formed a habit of mind that enables them to connect ideas that might otherwise have gone unconnected.

 
I’m not arguing for everyone to pursue a liberal arts degree. I am saying we should elevate its status and more importantly what it represents: rigorous thinking, reflection, and articulating one’s mind. Demand more of others and yourself. Be picky in what you consume and spend the effort to digest the quality out there. Reward your favorite writers and columnists through buying books or sharing links to their writing. Reward the filmmakers out to generate thought and not mere blockbusters. Subscribe to the blog that makes you think. Pay for the music download that made you feel something. Do all that, incorporate it into you, and give it back in your personal form. Become a producer, not a consumer in the world of thought.
 

To mark the two year anniversary with my Blackberry Curve, and my contractual agreement with ATT, I took the guilt-free liberty of treating myself to a modern smartphone device. Since a few people asked for my thoughts on it, and I had a few interesting discussions on smartphones in the past, I’m posting my experience behind the Nexus One to serve as a launching point for discussion.
 
For the uninitiated, the Nexus One is Google’s new phone, manufactured by my favorite Taiwanese phone maker HTC. It runs on Google’s young mobile platform, the Android, the biggest draw for me towards this phone. Like many, I am uncomfortably locked into Google’s suite of products and services, namely Gmail, Google Voice, and Latitude. Uncomfortable for several reasons, like being so reliant on a single company for something as essential as communications, and the fact that should I spend any meaningful time in China, I’m effectively cut off (but that’s another story). I have been using Blackberry for years and run Google’s suite of mobile apps to access those services. Yet however often companies make their apps available for the Blackberry, these apps usually feel like afterthoughts. As a user, I can feel the lack of passion the developer put into churning out the app to check off the list. What cinched it for me on the Android was the ability to access multiple Google accounts. I run my company’s email backend on Google Apps. Normally I use Blackberry’s native email app to access work stuff, and the Gmail app to access personal communication. Now I can do both seamlessly through the same interface. Oh, and I forgot to mention built-in Google Voice integration, which on the Blackberry is simply a joke.
 
Before I bought the phone, I gave the Apple empire a chance. In full disclosure, I feel quite averse to its world of closed systems and arbitrary app approvals. But try I did. Using my iPod Touch, I thoroughly enjoyed a new world of apps. Also tried very hard to acclimate to a touchscreen only input. And while I love the apps and the sleek device, and coming from a “smartphone” perspective fogged by a 2-year old device sans 3G and Wifi, it still wasn’t convincing enough to make me a card-carrying member of the iPhone club.
 



Onto the Nexus One and T-Mobile: For you ardent RIM loyalists, the phone quality has been great – I’ve spent about 2 hours at home, including several 30+ min conversations, talking on the phone and the voice quality has been fantastic. The next thing is its gorgeous screen. When I got my iPod touch, the screen blew me away. N1’s screen is even better, crisper and more vibrant. Not huge on camera phones, I’m surprisingly digging the 5 megapixel camera with built-in flash. You can expect more twitter photos from now on. Oh, and the first and last pictures on this post were taken with the phone (click to see full sized originals). The other standout is the voice guided navigation system built into Android. Driving around LA this weekend, I spoke a few locations into it and let it system guide me. Its quality was definitely on par with other commercial GPS systems out there, except it’s free. As for data, my unscientific assessment of T-Mo 3G says it feels a lot faster than ATT Edge. All of this running on a zippy processor has made me quite happy. From a hardware perspective, this mini-computer impresses the hell out of me.
 
So what’s not to like? I’m still adjusting to no keyboard, typing nowhere as fast on its touchpad. Swype couldn’t arrive for Andoid soon enough. Still, the auto-complete is functional and I’m reducing the typing by using the voice recognition feature as much as possible. Dictating to the phone web searches and short messages has been satisfactory. My favorite aspect of the voice search is its access to everything, from web to contacts. The nifty little microphone button on the soft keyboard has saved me plenty of times. Battery life is so so, I have to recharge once daily. The good news is the battery is swappable. Oh, and I absolutely love the power allocation status, which indicates the percentage of power spent on each application or service (for me and most people, it’s the screen). I admit it’s only been a few days and I have a lot more to discover, especially in the wild realm of apps. While the verdict isn’t final, I must admit to feeling enamored. Help me with more testing: call me on my GV number if you’d like to try out a voice call. And for my Blackberry Messenger friends, you’ll have to find me via GTalk.
 
On a closing note, I’m ecstatic to see the smartphone market reach this point. Consumers are finally benefiting from having more choices. We’re starting to see the losers of this new market place exposed, from RIM to carriers, now suffering from their complacency afforded by the previous lack of competition. As much as carriers resist becoming utility companies providing bits over the air, their lack of innovation and indifference to customers make me root for their accelerated decline. One of my friends put it best, “Give me T-Mo’s pricing with Verizon’s network reliability.” When I asked if that was possible, he retorted “why not?” Why not indeed.


Sky’s the Limit

I’d like the notion of moving towards a cashless society. Unfortunately the credit card companies aren’t willing to price their fees accurately to reflect true risks. As a result, we all suffer. But right now I don’t want to talk about credit card companies. I found an idea to for small businesses to cope with them.
 
Small businesses often put restrictions for customers who pay with credit card. Most of the time, they tack on an extra fee, not a large fee, somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 cents. Other times, they put a minimum spending limit. They do so to protect their margins; each transaction costs approximately .30 + 3% of the total amount. For the small shops that conduct many small transactions, say a burrito joint selling $7 burrito meals, 50 cents represents about 7% of the total transaction, making it unbearable (note, my small business also has to deal with the credit card fees). As a customer, I don’t like paying the extra fee, but I get it, so I grumble to myself, pay cash and get on with life.
 
But the other day, I encountered an ingenious workaround. This dessert tea shop, Cha for Tea, offered a 5% discount from my total bill if I paid cash. Absolutely brilliant. I felt great about paying cash under the illusion of saving money, as opposed to silently griping about forced to pay cash. Of course this is all psychological. But I felt great and empowered. And the tea shop managed to avoid its margins on a $5 drink getting chipped away by greedy financial oligarchs.
 
So if you’re a small business where credit card fees chip away your margins, adjust the prices to make this option equivalent to the 50 cents surcharge for paying with plastic. Shift your customers’ mindset so they feel smart for paying cash. And for the customers who want convenience and earn Starwood points, they won’t feel bad. It’s win win win. Yes, Mad Burrito and all the taxi drivers out there, this is for you.
 

Time keeps flying. It’s been more than half a year since moving to the west coast and settling into downtown Los Angeles. Whenever people ask about it, I tell them that not only has it way exceeded dreadful expectations, I really enjoy it. Aside from the obvious benefits like work, being closer to loved ones, and the weather, how has my LA experience been so far? Being in NYC right now presents the perfect time and space to reflect on that million dollar question.
 
I didn’t hold any false notions of replicating my previous NYC lifestyle, one requiring a density of people and happenings. Different cities have their own character so it doesn’t make sense to clone an existing lifestyle (that is not completely suburban) from one geography to another. The important thing is getting a feel of LA life and figuring if it could grow on me.
 
I started with the food scene since I enjoy it so much and also am quite picky about what I eat. I began with a simple strategy – follow Yelp recommendations. But soon I found the reviews requiring too much sifting through and the accusations of extortion made me uncomfortable. So I moved on to leveraging social media in full, sweaty embrace. With the indispensable Google Reader, I follow numerous foodie blogs whose authors share similar tastes with, as well as the latest from the LA Times food section. I also access specific news for downtown LA through several excellent local sources. And yes, Twitter has also been a fantastic resource. Who can ignore it, especially after all the attention on the roving, twittering Kogi BBQ trucks that have been all the craze in LA?
 
Back on the topic of my eating habits, I suffer from what the Accordion Guy calls a “socially acceptable eating disorder”, namely a vegan diet. The history of that traces back to about 5 years ago, when I attended a motivational seminar that challenged me to change my diet, with the intent of attaining higher energy to accomplish all of my personal goals. Impossible as it seemed, being the irredeemably hardcore carnivore that I was, I went vegetarian for a while and realized its benefits. The difference in how I felt was night and day. It’s hard to deny the truth once you know it and I couldn’t go back. Still, it was difficult. But since then, through much exploration, my options from a taste perspective have vastly improved, no more bland and nutritionally empty foods. Also the amount of new literature out there supporting this eating philosophy has contributed to further improved health benefits. At the end, the main motivation is to feel better and have more energy for things like reading that book everyone recommends or writing this blog post, things that we never have time for. And it works for me. I will gladly share more on this topic in the future.
 
While I strive to eat healthy, I don’t always; cultural and social obligations often get in the way. And I find that acceptable, since it’s not a religion and I’m not part of PETA. Sometimes there are dishes so wonderful that I simply have to have every so often. As a result, when I do break the routine, I won’t settle for mediocre, run-of-the-mill stuff. That said, access to healthy food choices in LA has been comparable to NY. Not like moving to Dallas or anything like that.
 
It’s reached the point to expand my activities in southern California beyond the food scene towards more social and local events. I still miss tremendously my incredible group of friends in NY. Yet I accept the need to building a new network of friends, through reconnecting with old ones in the area, and putting on that out-going persona to befriend new ones. Expanding my geographic coverage requires venturing out of downtown into the other neighborhoods. And while my curiosity of LA’s myriad pockets has often been tempered by my aversion to driving and parking, my past efforts to get out of the comfort zone have usually paid off. And then there are always more foodie trips.
 

Came across this idea while reading through blogs and thought I’d share it with you. It’s simple, pick 3 independently owned stores that you really like and are local, and spend $50 there every month. Like a pyramid scheme, but without the deceit, by executing the simple plan and getting others to follow, we can all help our local economies. It’s not a lot of money, and it keeps those businesses we love stay afloat. What an elegantly effective idea. Go check out the site and spread the word, the 3/50 project.
 

The following is a snapshot of my FB feed after I complained. (Note I don’t mean to single out Steph and her cute family).
 

 

My family keeps complaining to me that my 10-day detox is too long. They keep cautioning me to be careful. I keep reassuring them that I had done the Master Cleanse just a few months ago, and there’s nothing to worry about. To review on what the duration is supposed to accomplish, I re-read the book today. It opened up at a chapter titled, “Can I do 5 days instead?” The answer was clearly no, and the reason is that it really takes time for one’s system to get rid of all the toxins and heal.
 
Today, the 5th day, I woke up feeling like my system in full detox state. My tongue has turned a fuzzy white that many people experience while detoxing. And my expulsions resembled what they were during the latter part of the previous cleanse. Luckily this time around, I didn’t feel any sort of tiredness or irritability. However, my workout today felt a bit tiring, most likely due to a lack of caloric intake, caused by my growing wariness to the lemon-syrup-cayenne pepper concoction. Weight-wise, I’ve dropped about 8.5 pounds, which I feel neutral about since it’s not a goal for my and knowing that I’d gain it back quickly.
 
The real nagging thing about the cleanse is that I’m bored. The novelty of it wore off last time, so now it feels like work. Getting up, drinking the salt water flush, making lemonade throughout the day, all that combined with the hit on my social life, has been somewhat trying. But I’m almost halfway through, feeling fine, and looking forward to the promised land of mental clarity and invigorated health. Until then, more lemonade.
 

Today I’m starting another 10-day master cleanse. I promised to do another one within 6-months, so what better day than the first day of spring right? What really bums me out is shutting down the social activities for the next two weeks. However, that leaves me without much excuse to be unproductive or unfocused. I definitely won’t make the same mistake of day-dreaming about food. Time to get a lot of work and reading done while my body expels bad stuff, and by bad stuff, I mean crap.
 

I’m still kicking myself for waiting this long to read Crypto. Not that I ever doubted Neal Stephenson’s genius, as I have read much of his other work. But as somebody with such a fascination with WWII and computer science and hacker culture, I’m way behind the curve. Better late than never, but sure could’ve been sooner.
 
The extant reviews and acclaim more than describe its content. As to how I got into it is where this post comes in. After years of reading non-fiction, I decided to switch back to some fiction for a break. In picking a book, I went through my long list of “must-reads” and stumbled across this massive novel. Wanting to put my eReader to work, this tome was perfect for saving trees, not to mention being on sale. Besides, does it get any more appropriate than reading a geeky book on a digital reader?
 

Reading Stephenson on my eReader
 
Does the device displaying the book seem rather unfamiliar, especially compared to the iPod-esque Kindle? It’s actually a Sony PRS-500, one of the first reading devices using electronic paper. A wonderful hand-me-down from my gadget friendly uncle, this svelte toy has been the perfect companion on the plane, subway, and coffee shops. While I still drool over the Kindle 2, like when I saw it on the subway the other day, I don’t feel so bad after learning about Amazon’s draconian methods for restricting where one can get books from. Regardless, you’ll find me in the camp of happy eReader owners.
 
Over the past couple weeks, Crypto managed to entertain on many a late nights, and tickled my inner geek with ingenious hacker stories and reviving some great times in my past. I’m certain that non-geeks would still enjoy this book tremendously. So don’t procrastinate like I did and give yourself a treat.
 

Last summer, after a series of unpleasant events that involved deceit and disrespect, I had a huge falling out with my troubled cousin. So angry at the time, I de-friended him on Facebook. Half a year later, I login this morning to find a message in my FB inbox titled “Really!?!” In it, said cousin makes a one-sided rehashing of past events, most of it accusatory, and concludes that other families have put up with worse and we should put things behind us, all with a lack of contrition or acceptance of blame. Pretty heavy stuff for breakfast.
 
Well, forgiveness/absolution issues aside, FB has become a medium for me where I share my thoughts and social life with, um, friends. Like many people who get friend requests from their mothers or colleagues, I have a reluctance to share many of the things about me that are on this social network. So it would seem perfectly reasonable for me to not want this part of my life to be an open book with somebody I have nothing in common with other than some DNA sequences. For once the adage, “You can choose your friends but you can’t choose your family” gets turned around for the good – I can choose my friends, including those online.
 
So it took him half a year to discover this act of Internet dissing. Looking back on that post about him, the very first post of this blog no less, I realize that back then I overlooked his clueless-ness, attributing it mostly to youth. But four years have passed already. Some things never change.
 

There’s a reason behind the lack of activity on this blog lately – February is one of those months. Cold, rainy, and mostly dreary, the month puts me in a hibernating mood. Alas I can’t shut down completely. So outside of a few small gatherings, I’ve been working hard, as part of my career-focused new year. I’ve got several projects happening, mostly boring ones. For instance, I’ve been filing endless tax forms for my the last few days. (I swear I’m going to hire an accountant next year.) On the other hand, we’re interviewing several software teams to for a major project. While the balance of fun and tedious work has been acceptable, but it’s still work and utterly un-blog-worthy.
 
That said, I’ve adventured a bit more into the LA food scene, trying different restos and enjoying the special course at one of my favorite’s (yes, I will have to dedicate a full posting about Shojin soon). It’s unfortunate that the recession has hit local restaurants quite hard. Everything from restaurant traffic to gratuity percentages has taken a plunge. They even extended the special Dine LA week for the entire month, which I plan on taking advantage of at least once more.
 
The great thing about Feb is that it’s short. And to end it with a bang, I’ve got this weekend lined up with events before heading out to NYC for a conference. Until then, you can find me in front of my monitor.
 

Been in a huge slump this past week, in blogging and most matters of life. I have quite a few topics to write about but couldn’t find the enthusiasm or energy to put them into words. Not sure why the past week was such a meh week, not exactly the best way to begin Chinese New Year. Wish me luck in getting my act together and being productive again.

The boys invented this concoction in Lima – Inca Cola and vodka. Tastes like bubble-gum and and sneaks up behind to knock the lights out. Ironically the locals never mix Inca Cola with any alcohol…

Gringo Cocktail

I survived! Despite two bouts of food poisoning, sun burn, and altitude sickness, I am back home and couldn’t be happier about the trip. More details to follow about Peru, Gino’s wedding and parties, and of course the Inca Trail.

Kiss from Lima