Listening non-technical audio books seems to be one of the most effective ways to get my mind off work late at night, and not to dream about programs and bugs during sleep.
I’ve enjoyed The Audacity of Hope by Barrack Obama. Perhaps because he was once a professor, the intellectual depths and rigor exhibited in this book far exceed Bill Clinton’s My Life and Hillary’s Living History. One interesting observation is that he derived a lot of his reasoning and understanding from the frame of constitution. That is something I plan to study one day.
I bumped into my second brother, Dr. Xiaoliu, on Gtalk the other day. He asked me “are you still working from home?” I knew what he meant. It is hard for a doctor to imagine that one can actually “work” and “stay at home”.
I enjoyed working from home over the past five months or so.
The biggest benefit is being able to live in any place I likes. Then there is no more daily commute chore, which used to take at least one hour each day. That was 220 hours per year, and equivalent of over a month of working days! Furthermore, I’ve always disliked the cubicle office life, where there is little privacy. Equipped with 10Mbps fiber optics connection, I am able to do online collaborations very quickly. Questions are often discussed and resolved in minutes.
I’d be lying if I say there is no downsides to telecommuting.
Face-to-face meetings have very important values that are hard to duplicate using other medium. When I left my expertise area and jumped into the Web 2.0 world, I truly realized that the ability to learn is the most important ability of all. In this Internet age, information is everywhere, but a good portion of knowledge is still contained in books. The following books helped me a lot over the past few months:
PHPEclipse guide
Scalable Internet Architecture
Designing with Web standards
PHP definitive guide
HTTP, XHTML guide
Ajax and PHP
Flash CS3 Professional Video
So back to my brother’s question. “Yes, I still work from home, and I’ve enjoyed it”. It’s good to work with a super smart team and from home!
Two of my colleagues worked on a creative idea to develop prologue - group twitter-like service, within a few days. Technically, it utilizes the underlying WordPress tables and existing logic and adds new presentation (or theme). The result is a very attractive new service! It is widely reported in the tech media.
This is an indication of the excellent versatility and extensibility of WordPress software. With a little ingenuity, you can manage ANY content using WordPress, and do amazing things with this free open source software.
“Founders at Work”, a collection of interviews with founders of many successful startups, turned out to be something very fun to read. Both of WordPress competitors - Blogger and Six Apart, are described in the book, and that makes the reading even more fun.
Some interesting points:
Most startups are started by geeks like you and me, who initially just want to do something fun, or to solve an immediate problem he faces daily. For 37Signals, it was the need for a simple tool for internal project collaboration; for del.iciou.us, it was organizing 20,000 bookmarks efficiently. The problem that one man tries to solve turns out to be a common problem and the solution is welcomed by thousands users instantly.
Keep it simple. Simplicity is beauty. Most of the Web 2.0 startups have small teams, so keeping it simple is about survival or death. Users like simple, elegant technologies, and best things are indeed very simple.
Ability to solve a core problem that differentiates the startup from many peers. Paypal solved the fraud problem that sucked millions of dollars monthly. Its competitors couldn’t and died.
My interest in Internet privacy dated back my graduate school years, when I co-authored a few popular papers on this topic. Prior to 2001, privacy was a much hotter topic; Terrorists attacks changed the dynamics.
I believe anonymity is good. It allows everyone to voice his or her opinion without fear of criticism or prosecution in a large part of the world.
The larger issue or today’s Internet is not lack of accountability; it is the lack of privacy, and the search engines are part of the reasons. But can we blame big-G for that? No. For the same reason we can not blame the auto industry for causing 40,000 highway death every year.
It is interesting to hear him saying that the highest form of martial art is a form of expressing oneself. During graduate school years, I’ve studied some kung fu with an excellent master whose skill is probably better than Bruce Lee, I’ve also studied some math with internationally renowned mathematicians. One similarity I do notice is that yes, both are forms of expressing oneself.
There is an ancient Chinese saying “It is easy to give sinister words, but hard to utter good phrases”. In other words, human beings have tendency to criticize, condemn, and judge. Yet it takes great understanding and big heart to console, encourage, and build up.
Why our human nature has this tendency to blame others, and not ourselves? It’s because we are all prone to the self-righteous attitude. Then, why this direction and not the other way around? I’ve been pondering over this question for a long time now, and I believe the explanation can only be found from theological point of view.
There are two forces exist in and beyond this universe. Force of Light and force of darkness. The force of Light creates, nurtures, fosters, encourages, and gives meaning to otherwise mundane existence. The force of darkness destroys, depresses, demolishes, defeats, and judges. Similar notion was vividly illustrated in C.S. Lewis’s book.
Seek and walk in the Light. Everyday let’s put a smile on a child’s face, cheer up a grieving heart, and console a languishing soul.
