Alvin Lai

How to do what you love

1. Realize that you can love work
2. Most of the time, a college student would be wrong about knowing what he loves – working on severely limited information
3. Seek jobs that let you do many different things, so you can learn faster what various kinds of work are like
4. Constraints give your life shape, remove them and most people don’t know what to do – lottery winners
5. Always produce
6. Do a good job to make sure you’re not using dissatisfaction as an excuse for being lazy – gets into the habit of doing things well.
7. Finding work you love requires discipline.
8. Don’t be distracted by prestige and money.

Salient points from Paul Graham, founder of ViaWeb

I’m not sure if it’s the case for most of you, but I’ve found it increasingly difficult to get to know new music.

Maybe I’ve grown out of techno. I need a breather from classical.

Maybe a friend has sent you a single song that you really like but don’t know where of that came from.

Sure you could check out the other songs from the same artist. But what if you could get to know new songs that feel similiar?

In comes Last.FM

The sky got a little clearer when I finally stumbled back on Last.fm. A webservice that introduces music based on similar artists you specifiy.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but you could only listen to a limited number of 30 second samples from the website when you search for an artist.

And you even have to sign up to preview the 30second tracks. Oh well, I signed up grudgingly and guess what I stumbled on?

A Last.FM Player application download!

It recommended me the Mac OSX version, but there are also Windows (maybe Linux) versions for download too.

And what does it do?

Search for an artist and it plays FULL length tracks of similiar music!

Such a godsend.

Searched for Stevie Ray Vaughan and what did it get me? Led Zepplin Stairway to heaven, another of my favourites.

Found another nice band!

The Allman Brothers Band – In Memory of Elizabeth Reed.

Anyone has the CD?

Enjoy!

Apparently not :/

Again, the only way to eject the DVD was
by accessing openfirmware, holding
CMD+Alt+O+F at start.

Why did I start adding advertisements to this fresh new blog? You might ask, have I gotten greedy?

Oh no, that’s the beginning of distracting, non-relevant advertisements, you might think.

While it’s true that I get to collect a little passive income from the advertisements, there’s also another compelling reason to do so, one that would benefit you, my precious blog reader, to a great extent.

So.. What’s in it for you?

But before going into how you can benefit from the addition of Google Adsense to this blog, it only makes sense (I couldn’t resist the pun) to give a quick overview of how Google Adsense works.

Google Adsense is Special

Unlike any other ordinary static or rotating advertisement banner systems, this advertising system from the world’s best online search company has an interesting twist in connecting the advertising industry with its forte in relevant search.

The difference arises with Google Adsense scanning the content of the blog, looking out for relevant keywords to try to match its database of advertisements which equates to..

Article Relevant Ads!

Which can act as a quick reference to see additional information related to the blog’s content.

So next time, after reading an article, it might be interesting to check out what Google Adsense has found relevant.

Got questions on Google Adsense, ask me! I’m also learning about Adsense in the meanwhile and it would be interesting to find out what others think of it.

Meetings are very much part of life for the average knowledge worker – be it a student doing a school project, a business leader managing a team or even a government leader debating policies with his ministers.

Sick of meetings?

How often do we find the meeting we chair disoriented, vague, draggy, downright boring and a total waste of time?

A project tight deadline coupled with a succession of ineffective meetings would only prove detrimental to both human relationships among team members and stress level.

While drafting this post, I realised that planning and having a successful meeting somewhat mirrors good project management techniques, so here’s my take on the 6 points to an effect meeting!

What constitutes an effective meeting?

1. Meeting purpose – if you aren’t even clear about why you are chairing this meeting in the first place, don’t expect the mist to clear, ever. It is much easier to discuss a clear objective in mind.

2. Meeting preparation – ever went through 5 minutes into a meeting and realise that everyone forgot to bring a laptop with the project notes? Well I have, and it was a major source of distraction having to retrieve it, not to mention time wasting and morale busting.

3. Meeting agenda – sounds very much like a meeting purpose, but the agenda is a broken down list of, hopefully, small and addressable issues, which is light years way nicer to address than an amorphous blob of something.

4. Meeting action items – a meeting is not a meeting when everyone leaves it unsure of what to do thereafter. Clear and direct actionable items with deadlines assigned to team members not only allow for good project progress tracking, but also indirectly benefits the team members themselves as they are clearer of tasks expected of them, contributing to lower stress levels and better self esteem, knowing that they are needed, part of the team and effective.

5. Meeting reminder notes – a meeting’s pretty much a waste of time if your team does not remember the salient points that were raised, right?

6. Meeting follow-up – successful meetings build up from successive meetings. Knowing when’s the next agreed meeting at the end of a meeting cuts down co-ordination time. Since all/most project members are already present, it’s actually much easier to agree on the next time to meet in person, rather than having a single person making phone calls to everyone later and struggle to make out the mish mash of timetable clashes.

I found a nice meeting organiser/planner template for all you templating folks, which can be downloaded here.

Credits to Studentlinc for this blog post’s inspiration.

Looks cool, check it out here

Ever been in a situation where you’re with a group and suddenly everyone starts talking about an unpopular person?

“He’s a good guy, but someone needs to tell him how how insensitive he can get”.

*or*

“He’s a great leader, but he needs to better his people management skills”.

And most of the time, no one wants to play the bad guy in letting the poor guy know about it..

It’s only human nature, living in a high-context Asian culture doesn’t help too.

Think about the potential

Ever wondered what kind of information went around you, stuff that you really need to know but no one is willing to tell?

Questions like:

• What dumb, avoidable things do I constantly do?

• What disturbing or even hurtful behaviours I have displayed that I do not even know about?

What a better and self-aware person I would be if I got to know a fraction of all those unspoken truths about myself.

So what can I do about it?

Blogger Scot Berkun has a blog post on how to better access these unspoken truths about yourself and I think it’s pretty well rounded up.

In short, 4 points:

1. Ask for it – you have to start at some point and you have to make the first move and graciously handle and evaluate everything that ensues.

2. Reward those who give it – other than family, it’s very rare to have friends who tell you things no one else will say. Go out of the way to emphasize how important you value this quality and reward them for their feedback.

3. Act on it – If someone goes all out to risk his limbs and friendship to express his frank opinions then see nothing happen, they’re unlikely to take that risk again since advice has fallen on deaf ears. If you can act on the advice, even in a small way, you would have built a stronger relationship with that person.

4. Make a pact – reciprocation works best and having a pact in place to try and tell the other person what they should hear works wonders.

In the end, humility and graciousness gets you reaping the most

Came across this interesting site where it teaches you how to remove these dangerous pests whilst camping in a completely non-toxic way.

Might be useful for those planning for expeditions during this holiday

Check it out here.

What’s a Cocoa Application? You might ask.

To put it simply, its a Mac Application!

Followed Apple’s Introduction to Cocoa Application Tutorial Using Objective-C in getting started.

In the introduction chapters, it says that Cocoa programming is object oriented and makes use of the Model-View-Controller (MVC) paradigm, which is nothing new to me since the wonderful Ruby on Rails is also based on MVC.

Then off I went in creating a new Currency Converter cocoa application project in XCode2.2..

Once that was done, it was down to creating the GUI interface with Interface Builder.

Interface Builder is wonderful I tell you.

Not only can you drag and drop window components like checkboxes and textfields ala Delphi style!

it also has very very sweet alignment guides which awesomely snaps in place nicely.

Assigning Labels to have it snap in line with the TextFields is also just as sweet.

And talk about micro positioning.

Enabling TextField focus changing via tabbing is also just as easy via a control dragging and clicking some checkboxes in the Inspector. You have to try it out on your own!

Next up was to create the CurrencyController controller duh and the Currency model.

When it was time to specify how the specific Models (A Currency class which specifies data), Views (The GUI Components like TextFields) and Controllers (The CurrecyController class which is the business logic) communicate with something something new to me called Outlets, it became a little fuzzy, but you can easily accept it as some sort of message passing mechanism like MPI in Parallel Programming.

Then coding the actual controller and model classes..

After that was done… Build time!

As excitement got the better of me, I made some mistakes, but thankfully XCode was smart enough to pinpoint the exact lines with errornous code.. Great!

Finally done!!

And a raw sense of achievement ensued.