“From conducting Equity Research at Thomas Weisel to entering tech as the CFO of Playdom (which she helped sell to Disney for $760mm), Christa Quarles went on to senior roles at Disney and Nextdoor. She is now the CFO of OpenTable and is in charge of figuring out the strategy for what OpenTable does next after it’s $2.6B sale to Priceline. Christa sat down with Zaw to discuss the ways in which she has shaped the companies that she has been a part of.”
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http://www.rosietheriveter.org/
“As the U.S. faced a new and daunting challenge of a global war in the 1940s, people on the home front came together as never before. The stories of their struggles, which broke barriers and shaped many of today’s best social innovations, chart a path for new vision today.
Rosie the Riveter is a reminder to all of us to try new things, test our limits, and believe in ourselves and others. These tales of dedication and courage can inspire us!”
– Tony Tam -
Get IP Address from Command Line
http://davidwalsh.name/get-ip-address -
We will all die one day. That is the way of life, it’s interesting that even kids realize their parents will die one day and they don’t seem very surprised by that. It’s an eventual fact all humans accept as part of life.
People often say “live life as if it’s your last”. I interpret that as live life as you may die any day and you should live your life with no regrets.
– Live life with nothing unsaid to your love ones. Say “I love you” now. Say “I am blessed to have you in my life”. Say “You are good enough as you are”
– Live life with with no regrets. If you have made mistakes, try as hard as you can to rectify them now or accept that you made mistakes and forgive yourself. If there is something you have not done yet and you will regret not doing it, tell your love ones that you want to accomplish that before you die and do them together with your love one.
– Make choices now between what is truly important to you when you are on your death bed. If you imagine when you are dying, what would you wish to have spent more time on. Is it work? Would you want to be leave a legacy of work behind, choose that now. Is it family and friends? Would you want to be surrounded by friends and family who all feel like you have spent your best self with them? Choose them now, don’t tell them when you are dying that you wish you spent more time. You have the power to make that change, NOW
We are flawed humans, we will make the wrong choices. Time is also ticking away for all of us. Most of us will likely live until we are 80 years old, some of us unlucky ones will die sooner that others
It’s the choices we make along the way that will define us as the unique individual we all are.
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Tony Tam -
(repost from 1/9/2007)
I believe I have a healthy relationship with money. I know how to invest my money, I know how to earn money, and most importantly I know how to spend money on the people in my life.
I usually don’t make such bold statements since I’m usually a humble person.
Money in itself is a concept, it’s an enabler. It enables me to support myself and my family. It enables me to show my gratitude to my parents. It enables me help a friend fulfill his dreams of opening a restaurant. It enables my daughter to go to a private school.
It’s painfully obvious to me that many people don’t spend enough energy learning about how to invest their money. What they are missing out is the ability to have money earning more money.
We all work hard for the money, we owe it to ourselves to get educated about how to invest it. Let the money grow by itself.
Next time you hear yourself say: I don’t know how to invest: remember these words: ‘There is no excuse, learn about it. It’s not magic.’
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(old post from 2007)
Kate loves watching Blue’s Clues and especially one episode, “Steve goes to college”. So tonight, instead of reading she wanting me to tell her all about college. I used this perfect timing to tell her about learning and doing well in school.
Kate: “Is there a pink college? I want to go there.”
Me: “Sure I’m sure there are pink colleges. There is a Brown college. If you study really well in school, you can go to any college you want”
Kate: “I hope I study well”
Me: “Yeah, or else you may end up going to a gray and boring college, that won’t be fun”
Kate: “yeah….”
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Don’t be that person
- who does not respond to emails
- who does not respond to feedback
- who is late to meetings
- who says he will do something but doesn’t after repeatedly reminded
- who speaks at a level of detail that is too little or too much in an executive meeting
- who gets too emotional in a professional setting
(The drawing is a sketch from my daughter for her art class)
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While chatting informally with some co-workers, I heard some of them talking about their frustrations about not feeling recognized for their work or working on projects they don’t think makes a difference.
Corporations, which usually mean people in management roles, value those individuals who go beyond doing what they are told to do and look up from their daily work and try to plan for what they want to accomplish in the next 9 months.
As engineers, we are judged on our productivity but more importantly for our potential and influence. For any piece of work we produce, how many other engineers does it influence? Is the engineer helping others to be more productive? Can the engineer take on bigger projects?
When we work on any project, we should ask ourselves what is the BHAG? What is the elevator speech if I happen to be standing next to the CEO and she is asking me what my project is about.
If you are working on a project that you think is not adding a lot of value, finish up the project, document it well and ask to be assign to something else. Better yet, dream up something you are really passionate about, and pitch your idea to as many people as you can.
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The original post was in 2005 when C. was 5 years old.
A few days ago, C asked “Dad, will I hate you as a teenager?”
I was a bit caught off guard. I told C that it’s possible that when kids grow into their teenage years, their hormones could change, and they will be testing the boundaries of being independent. There will be a lot more conflicts between the parent and child.
However, if we continue to communicate, if I spend quality time with her and we genuinely enjoy each other’s company, I don’t see why it has to be the case that my teenage daughter will hate me.
I did tell her that she might be embarrassed by me since I am very geeky and uncool. This she did laugh at and agreed.
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(Repost from 2006)
So this film producer and I were chatting on the train back from Copenhagen and we got on the subject of working for Yahoo! and I was telling him about how I got a very unique perspective about the major news events the last 7 years. Almost 100% of the people out there hear about a huge news story and go to the tv or internet and find out more about it.
My job as a news engineer is sort of twisted, when a huge news events happens, my only concern at that moment is not about that news event, how many people died. My concern is about whether we have enough server capacity to handle the news event, what type of news articles are we getting from our wire services, and how to get those stories up to our web servers as soon as possible.
The most memorable time was sept. 11 when David Filo calmly asked me how we could satisfy infinite demand for news? I remember that day well, because I felt my blood was cold, not because of the event but my mind was completely focused, I was in the moment, trying to solve that one particular problem David posed for me.
I’ve often written about how lucky I am to be working for Yahoo! How I am part of a team here at Yahoo! News who touch the lives of more than 30 million users every month. If I infer from our data, over 7 years, what we’ve done here at Yahoo! News has touched the lives of over 100 million users. How many people have that opportunity to work in a job where that little bit of cyber dust gets distributed from your fingers tips to that many users? I count my blessings.
Now back to the film producer: he looked at me and said that he is very happy for me. For finding that peace, able to look back at my career and reflect on what I’ve accomplished.
He said “Life is really just about 2 things. Work and Love” I infer from what he said: work is how you fit into this world and how you define yourself. Love is what’s in your heart and what’s in your soul. I got slightly wet at the corner of my eyes as I think about whether I’ve given my love from my heart and from my soul. Most probably not.. more to work on.
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I sometimes say in jest that in the corporate world the “humans are the problem”. Communication, expectation and difference in perspectives are some of what causes executions of projects to not work.
This is a response to frustrations expressed by people on my team that “other” people are doing things the “wrong” way. I find it fascinating there are such divergent views of the same project. Thus happens often when a project spans across multiple teams and multiple timezones. Also when team members play very well defined roles, it may be difficult to see gaps which don’t fit these roles.
For example, when a customer reports an issue, and he has already done a lot of troubleshooting on his own but has hit a wall. He reports a ticket as a bug, with very cryptic message such as “feature X” is not working. His expectation here is that someone will respond in less than 24 hours and maybe even provide a fix for the problem. The team that is assigned the ticket 1) may not be the right team 2) may be fully committed to other tasks 3) may not be looking at incoming requests on a regular basis. In a scrum environment, the team also is highly incentivized to deliver what they started the sprint with and ignore all incoming request unless it’s a spike item.
The original ticket may not even get looked at for 2 days. Meanwhile the customer is frustrated with lack of confirmation. This is when there may be a start of escalations to various management and eventually the original team will have to spend time looking at the item anyways, but precious time will have been wasted on escalations.
Humans are inherently flawed in the way we perceive the world. We can only see the world in a limited number of perspectives. In the corporate world, that often is the perspective of our well defined role. When we can see more than one perspective and if we do this for a small amount of time everyday, it goes a long way to solving and filling the gaps in expectations, having empathy for the person on the other side of the team boundary and the other side of the world if that person is in another timezone.
A corporation is a mini version of everyday interaction in our personal life. When we think there are problems, it usually means “humans are the problem”. Which to me means: we should look to ourselves to see what we can do personally to change and fix the problem.
T
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Tam family 1975 I grew up in communist China from 1970 to 1979 before coming to the United States. This photo is a rare photo of our family together. This is the time when China just opened their immigration policy to allow people to leave China.
My mom was a pediatrician, my dad was an architect. I have fond memories of a community who worked hard, all paid equal amounts (around $75 a year) and surround by people who were liked minded.
My vivid memories before I was 9 years old were
- walking to get breakfast with food ration tickets
- getting up early for a morning run with all my classmates at the crack of dawn
- doing morning exercise routines and eye exercises to keep our eyes healthy
- raising silk worms
- trying my first cigarette and choking and swearing I would never again
- huddle together with the family to try a rare pot of molasses and twirling it with chopsticks
- waiting for my dad to come back after a 3 month business trips, he was gone most of the time
- eating roasted hot peppers that my sister gave me as a prank
- cheering my sister on as she competed in jump rope competition
- getting my first red scarf after being induced into the little red army while holding the little red book of Mao
- making our annual coal blocks to burn in our cooking stove using a metal stamping tool
- huddle together with others in a dorm to watch the only TV in the whole building
- bringing empty toothpaste tubes to trade for candy
- bring a bowl of rice to a cart outside to get pop rice
- reading Chinese hand written letters in cursive from my relatives
- watching my dad do Chinese calligraphy
- looking at the hand drawn architecture plans my father finished that night
- running away from boarding school and crying until my parents took me out
- head lice, falling down into a sewer, falling flat on my back from an elephant shaped slide
- sleeping on bamboo beds and my mom fanning me to sleep
In the backdrop, my parents did struggled with their friends who were re-educated and committed suicide under enormous pressure from cultural revolution. As a kid, the events of the cultural revolution just seem to be normal events that I hear my parents talk about. They ultimately made a choice that my sister and I didn’t have a future in China and were able to come to the US through immigration because my grandmother was here since the 1960’s.
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I was visiting this jewelry store in Rome by a very famous jewelry maker Diego Percossi Papi (exibition). The shop is tiny and I was a bit intimidated since the jewelry were all well over $1,000. I looked into the shop for a good 5 minutes until the owner/designer buzzed me in and told me to look around.
We got talking about jewelry and he pulled out his custom jewelry that he was making for his clients. He told me he’s been making jewelry for 40 years. He usually takes a sentimental piece of stone from a client and he’ll design something custom. Each piece takes him about 1 hour to sketch and 18 hours to make. I ended up asking him to take a photo with me.. I was in love with a $1,600 diamond/ruby ring. Maybe next time I go back to Rome, I’ll have something made for me.
Passion plus longevity is such a rare thing. I think it must be such a gift to have passion for something and be able to do it for 40 years. I hope my little fingers and eyes can survive for another 30 years so that I can still type for Y!
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April 21st, Google will rank sites higher if they are mobile friendly.
Check out your site’s mobile readiness with Google’s tool
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Nicholas Zakas take on consensus building.
http://www.nczonline.net/blog/2015/04/14/consensus-driven-development/
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In 2013, public relations executive Justine Sacco tweeted an offensive AIDS joke before boarding a flight to South Africa. By the time she landed, she had been denounced around the world, and lost her job soon after. Did Sacco deserve her public humiliation? Or was she yet another victim of social media shaming and a growing “culture of outrage”? Journalist Jon Ronson examines these questions in his new book, “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.”
* Duration 51:45, Play Position: 9:39
* Published 4/10/15 12:15:10 PM
* Episode Download Link: http://podcastdownload.npr.org/anon.npr-podcasts/podcast/151/510075/398825275/KQED_398825275.mp3?orgId=151&e=398825275&d=3120&ft=pod&f=510075
* Show Notes: http://www.kqed.org/epArchive/R201504100900?pid=RD19
* Podcast Feed: KQED FM KQED s Forum Podcast (http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=510075)
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Shout out to Micharl Radwin of Yahoo.
https://ruthlessray.wordpress.com/2013/09/02/inventing-favicon-ico/
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I am working on an Android app which takes the menu data from Locu.com API display the dinner, drink, dessert menu and allows a customer to add items they are interested in into a ‘cart’ for the wait staff to look at and discuss the item the customers are interested in.
I’m using the project as a learning experience. In the last week I was struggling with getting Android Fragments to work properly because I have nest Fragments. The app has a main Activity, with a tab viewer, 3 Fragments and Fragments inside those 3 Fragments. My app would often crash when I swipe back and forth and it looked to me like the Fragment::onCreateView() was called multiple times which was what the Fragment lifecycle was suppose to do.
I traced this down to the Android core code dealing with Fragments and thought maybe the problem is with the v4 API.
I have tried these 3 routes and I’ve finally found the fix this morning
- Replace the default Android Tab layout with PagerSlidingTabStrip ref: Android Guides from CodePath
- Use code to create the Fragment instead of using layouts, this didn’t work either
- Finally from this stackOverflow article (link), a gem that mentions Nested Fragments are support now at version 4.2+ Android SDK http://developer.android.com/about/versions/android-4.2.html#NestedFragments
What I’ve learned
- StackOverflow is very useful but there are conflicting answers
- The Android SDK is complex because there are so many backward versions, but having the Android source code to step through is invaluable. Also the main documentation did not talk about Nested Fragments being supported.
- Having Gradle to manage dependencies is fantastic
When I’ve found things to be useful, I have been adding the to my bit.ly Android bundle
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NYTimes: Pointing Fingers in Apple Pay Fraud
http://nyti.ms/1AQkQkq -
This article reminds me of how I felt as a single parent with C.. Scared, protective and constantly worried. As she is heading to high school, I wish to teach her to be independent, free thinker, know to fail and recover. For other parents, this article is a great read amd a reminder that being a parent is a thankless job, but that is circle of life.
NYTimes: All Parents Are Cowards
http://nyti.ms/1z9WMJd -
In helping my friend’s modern Japanese I Privé raise awareness, we decided to try to pay for marketing on Facebook, Yelp, Yahoo, Google. Here is what I’ve learned about the effectiveness of these companies. Keep in mind that is this my owner personal experience and not based on a large marketing budget and only apply to a small restaurant.
When we think about marketing, it’s not just about driving people to visit the restaurant, it’s also about building a relationship over the long term so that we can communicate with current and potential customers. The return on investment focused on long term relationship as well as sustained value.
Yelp
Yelp is the first platform most people think of when they want to find a new restaurant. When we started the restaurant, we agreed that building a good reputation on Yelp is the primary focus. To do that, we have to focus on awesome food and great service and the Yelp ratings should take care of itself. We also agreed that we have to be listening and responding to any negative feedback and act on them.
We did pay Yelp for advertising in one of his previous restaurants and noted that the ROI for paying removing competitor ads, hosting a video, pay for view ads for similar restaurants was about $3 / click to our page. We thought that was not worth paying for. The main reason was that for a new restaurant, we wanted to build a good reputation on Yelp rather than just driving traffic. So we decided to pay $0 on Yelp but focused a lot of time responding to customer.
We do love Yelp’s transactional business model. The integration with Locu for $20/ month. The integration with online reservation with seatme.com for $99/month. These services are well worth the money. I did an analysis of Opentable, the cost would have been about 8 times the rate of seatme.com. We had the luxury of too many people wanting to get in, so we didn’t need the exposure of Opentable for immediate term traffic.
Future: We spend 50% our time focused on paying attention to Yelp and responding to our customers. We would love to integrate with Eat24 as well once the pricing model looks better.
Yahoo
When we looked at our referral data for our website http://iprivesake.com/, Yahoo and Bing combined to have < 1% of referral. We decided to first focused on improving our SEO and make sure when users looked for ‘i prive’ they would find us. We worked on this for 3 months, even thought the current search for ‘i prive’ still has a suggestion for ‘in private’, our website appears to be #2 in the search result.
At the 3rd month of opening, we decided to spend buying native ads on Yahoo Gemini. The Gemini ads appear on mobile, desktop and search on yahoo.com and other *.yahoo.com sites. To my surprise, we saw a 0.07% click through rate. While that doesn’t sound like a lot, the CPC was $0.48 which is almost 6 times better than Yelp. (While the CPC on Yelp is higher, I do agree the quality of the acquisition is way better on Yelp because people are looking to each that day or that week)
I also love the Yelp check in deals, because we get to see how many people checked in for the deal and how many redeemed.
Future: We decided to continue to buy ads on Yahoo in order to build brand awareness and expand our reach. There are some drawbacks in the granularity of the demographics and geolocations we can target to. It’s at the DMA level and not on the city level.
Google
We bought Google Ad words ads which would show our ads on affiliates and on Google search for certain keywords. Very surprisingly, the Google Ad Words was not very cost effective. We had a CPC of almost $1.11. We were getting 40% of our web traffic from google.com, without paying them anything. They did a great job of refreshing their index and our SEO worked really well.
Future: For restaurants, Google Ad Words would drive clicks, but I cannot retain a long term relationship with the customers after that first click. We decided to stop and just pay attention to continue to improve our SEO and also the integration with Google+ into the search results is effective for coupon promotions.
Facebook
I am not a personal user of Facebook, but I was surprised at how well Facebook marketing was. For a CPC of about $0.77, I’m able to get a Facebook like. From that point on, I’m able to market to about 10% of the audience via free news feed. Then I can boost my feed post to about 4,000 people for about $50.00. This is great to keep people engage on a weekly basis as well as do one time promotions of coupons.
Future: The bulk of marketing dollars will go into gaining Facebook likes for the next 6 months as well as posting photos to keep users engaged. Also it seems like people don’t really mind when we post about 1 photo a day. It’s not like email spam, because you can ignore the news feed posts.
I Privé Facebook Mailchimp
From the beginning, my vision is to build a relationship with customers. Customers who subscribed to our email list will only get 1 email per month, never more than that. We get almost 250% better open rates than the industry norm. It’s a great way to build a long term communication channel with our customers. Email coupon campaigns have proven to be hugely effective.
Future: I think we continue to keep up our part of the bargain, never spam our customers and we built the email list. We are growing about 50% a month here, so it’s worth to keep on investing.
Conclusion
What surprised me is how ineffective Google campaigns are. Facebook demographic targeting, the real time feedback about how effective each ad is really has pushed Facebook forward and convinced me to open up most of our marketing budget. Yelp’s checkin deals are effective as well for restaurants. Ultimately, we want to own the relationship with our customers, so the most valuable marketing is our email database. And the surprising dark horse has been Yahoo Gemini ads.
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Watch his talk on YouTube
- Programming is one of the hardest things humans do
- Programming uses Head and Gut, we don’t really know how we do it
- JavaScript: Good Parts. Bad Parts. It was done in 10 days and released to the wild
- JSLint : defines and professional subset of JavaScript
- JSLint will hut your feelings
- Example: braces should be consistent. Javascript forces on the right because there are cases (return statement that forces this)
- We are constantly making mistakes, this is why rational people don’t do programming
- “That hardly ever happens”, is another way of saying “It happens”
- A good style can help produce better programs. Style should not be about personal perference and self expression
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(Photo from my restaurant I Privé)I listened to Bob Sutton’s podcast on Scaling Excellence Successfully podcast fro the Center for Social Innovation podcast at Stanford
I checked out his blog and found a list of books he recommends. I’ve put To Sell is Human, By Dan Pink. in my SF library queue. (I removed the referral code from the link)
Check out his blog
http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2014/12/12-books-that-every-leader-should-read-updated-.html -
In high school I played badminton for 4 years. I liked the sport, but did not love it.
When I went to UC Berkeley, I join the badminton club and we trained and competed against other colleges. We would travel both days on weekends, come back as a team, have dinner together and laugh about the tournaments. I played singles, doubles and mixed doubles. My feet would often have blisters and when my parents were shocked to see how much pain I was in, I told them I barely feel them during the games.
I truely loved the game. I setup practice nets in the garage and practiced serving hundreds of birdies a night.
The sport was the one ‘class’ that I truly look forward to.
After college, I dreamed about badminton, but because of work, having my child, and being depressed, I was not able to play for 10 years.
When the wave of badminton gyms open up in 2006, I signed up with 3 coaches and they taught me and trained me for 4 hours each week. I biked to my sessions in Menlo Park, I would take public transportation for 3 hours to get to my sessions. I played tournaments. I was truly happy.
Today, I am able to spare time to play badminton at least once a week. When I am playing, I feel like the luckiest person. I have a sport I truely love, I am very good at it. Mostly importantly, I can walk to any gym in any country and talk badminton and build small relationships with my fellow badminton players. When I visited Bangalore, Malaysia, Seattle, China and Taiwan, I often walk up to people and just play pick up games.
I hope my daughter also is so lucky to have a sport she truly loves, and is good at. No matter how hard other parts of life get, she will know she has something she loves to fallback on.
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I’ve struggled with having too many meetings where I didn’t find them useful, but I felt that there is 10 minutes of useful information so I go to get that info.
This particular week, I’ve had several useful meetings. The 3 attributes of these meetings that made them particularly productive are
1) They are 30 minutes so it forces us to get to the point
2) It’s not one way sharing of information, rather it was setting context and then a lot of discussion and answering questions. In the end, both sides ended up getting what they wanted.
3) The right people was in the room, there is no “I’ll ask this other person later” -
I am in a position to evaluate different point of sale systems for a restaurant I’m invested in (I Privé). There are 3 different business models I have seen.
- Take a percentage of every credit card transaction, give away the hardware
- Hosted software, charge a recurring monthly fee per hardware device
- Sell one time hardware, one time license fee per device and optional support control monthly.
Let’s assume the restaurant makes $1 million in revenue, needed 3 POS systems, 5 mobile devices.
For option #1, that comes to $20,000 in costs.
For option #2, it comes to about $300 / month, $3,600 / month
For option #3, it comes down to $7,000 in one time equipment and $600 / year.
Over 10 years, $200,000 vs $43,200 vs $7,200
A quick back of the envelope calculation, tells me to go for #3, assuming all things being equal. Of course #1, #2 do look like they have more functionality and more extensibility. And #1 and #2 also look like they are heavily staff, with ambitions to go public. I don’t blame them since the revenue growth would be very high, but at the cost of the restaurant business.
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Out of a team of 10 people, how do you standout without making others look bad?
Figure out what is the BHAG. Out of the 10 features, bugs, on the list of todo, what are the most important pieces that move the needle?
Write down all your ideas about improving, developing those 2 things.
Ask to take ownership and responsibilty.
Look at them, rank them, carry them with you and work on them everyday.
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If you want to start doing something and improve and do it really well, I suggest you do it everyday. Even if it is only 10 minutes a day, find some time to do it. 10 minutes a day, 365 a year is 3650 minutes a year, almost 60 hours.
You will find that once you build up this habbit, it’s hard to even stop doing it.. You will get better at whatever it is you do.
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When you decide on what to spend your time on at work, try to spend your time that you can actually make a big impact. Otherwise in today’s corporate world, you don’t get credit or acknowledgement on it.
Either decide not to work on it, or if you decide to spend X% of time on it, do an awesome job at it.
We all multitask and work on multiple things, try to trim those that you cannot give full attention to.
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Embrace the fact that you won’t get the exact number right.
But make sure to get the order of magnitude correct. Should you be getting 50, 500, 5000, 50,000 customers?
If you get 30,000 page views, 6,000 clicks and 50 customers what that’s a good marketing return on investment?
Once you have mastered being able to do quick < 5 mins back of the envelope calculations, the you can make decisions faster and more accurately
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When you are working on something time passes by without you knowing it.
When you start creating a list of things that you want to continue improving and you’re actually getting them done.
Whenever you have a free moment when you’re thinking about it or doing something for it.
You wish you have more time to continue working on it.
You are very lucky to be passionate about something.
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C. attended a animation summer camp and did this awesome flip book animation
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Think Like A Freak – Currently just started, but already loving the way the authors encourage us to use data instead of intuition to understand the world.
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A good graphic to have handy if you are using git
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What are the best life hacks to tackle procrastination? – Quora.
“Work expands so as to fill the time available for it’s completion”
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My reading list this week:
James Patterson, Cross my heart
- I couldn’t put this kindle book down. One of his best best books and story line. The ending was interesting and left me really want to read the next book in Nov.
Getting back to Objective C a bit on http://www.objc.io/
- I love the simple and get to the point writing
Shanghai Girls from Lisa Tse
- Recommended by my wife to understand life before the cultural revolution. I was born a little after the start of the revolution. Reading it at 5:30am this morning for about 10 minutes. So far, I would say a 5/10 interest level. Hopefully it’ll get better
Systems Performance book by Brendan Gregg
- This is part of our reading list at work, so far it’s very useful information to brush up on fundamentals of computer science
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Trying to figure out how to align a text inside a TextView for Android.
Found the answer on StackOverflow
<TextView
android:textAlignment=”center”
android:layout_gravity=”center_horizontal|center”
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A good read on leader of Android. I learned about him during the Google I/O 2014 conference.
Tony
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http://iprivesake.com/
– Japanese fushion restaurant -
My daughter C. designed the logo, intro video and the entire app screen for this fun math game. Try it out and let me know what you think.
download on
The 24 Game is an arithmetical card game in which the object is to find a way to manipulate four numbers so that the end result is 24. Addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division are used.
The game has been played in Shanghai since the 1960s, using ordinary playing cards, but now it comes to your iPhone.
You can play by yourself or head to head with another player for a unique 2 player challenge.
Example:
If you get 3, 5, 5, 6 then a correct answer would be 3 * (5 + 5) – 6.Other easier 3*8, 4*6 combinations are (2+1) * (4+4) or (2+2) * (1+5)
Difficult ones are the ones where division comes in 6*8/(7-5)
3 Levels for all age groups
Easy for 6-8 : 1 point
Medium 9-12 : 2 points
Hard 12-99+ : 3 piontsFather Daughter team
– Designed by C.
– Music by Will – featured on https://www.youtube.com/user/thesecuritycame
– Engineered by Tony
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I want to learn from others on how to maintain good habits, one of those is to code everyday.
I have missed a few days, but I’m very happy with my progress so far. It has resulted in 3 mobile apps published on the Android and Apple Appstores
John Resig – Write Code Every Day
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http://sealedabstract.com/rants/lets-talk-about-sparrow/
Let me tell you how it actually is, because I write iOS apps. A fully-dedicated senior iOS developer is way more expensive than you think. I’m not talking about “some guy whose LinkedIn profile says he is a senior iOS developer, let’s send his profile to HR.” I mean, a person who can read your ARM assembler, lecture on the finer points of Core Data, coordinate with graphic designers, draw mockups, tell you what is going to pass Apple review, solve customer problems, be a primary on the sales call with the client, negotiate the cost, write the proposal, know what’s in the HIG, come up with a class diagram that doesn’t suck, give presentations to management, train any developer in your organization, and actually get the coding done. Specifically, a guy who you can lock in a room with a Macbook for three months and he emerges without any oversight or management from anyone, with Sparrow.app. That guy can go from interview to interview and never even hear a starting offer under $125k, or $175k in the valley. Never even hear. That guy has Apple HR calling him saying “we know we can’t poach you, but maybe you can recommend someone?” Apple HR.
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Nice article about some of the differences between development in iOS and Android.
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My best friend Stan and I are building a new Japanese restaurant in Burlingame
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This is from Quora
Find something that fully engages your mind. And your heart. For that is the way to happiness.
Push harder. Do better. Never give into complacency. Be wide-ranging in your interests, and decisive in your judgments. Give every opportunity the benefit of the doubt. Always go the distance. And don’t buy uncomfortable shoes.
Think for yourself. Be realistic, but not pessimistic. Listen.
Do not let shyness rob you of pleasure. But be careful when you are the center of attention, the light there is blinding.
Do not lie, cheat, or steal, even when everyone else in the country is.
There are no known, predetermined, absolute values. We create our own morality. A good person judges his actions by the effects they will have on others, and by estimating the result if everyone behaved the same way.
Don’t look for the meaning of life. Supply it.
Return your calls, and answer your mail. This alone will set you apart, as many people are either too rude or too disorganized to practice this simple courtesy.
To be born into this country of freedom and opportunity, but with a disability that renders both outside your grasp, may be the cruelest trick that fate can play on an infant. You have no disabilities. Always remember that.
A heart never heals, but it does get stronger.
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A quick follow up to the simple tipping app for Andoroid
This is the iOS version of the How To Tip app
Get How To Tip on Apple App Store -
I use Trello to keep track of my long term life goals. I setup ‘organizations’ for ‘health goals’, ‘work goals’, ‘money goals’, ‘family goals’.
Then setup boards for each goal.
I still use Remember The Milk for single task todo. Using Trello allows for multiple taks for each goal. I also look over all the goals to remind myself what my long term goals are to keeo me focused.
One change I am making is to copy what Marissa M. does with writing down a list of todo for the current day on paper.
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’Tis the season to talk tech, have some drinks, and hang out at Yahoo!This Thursday we’re hosting our Pre-Holiday Engineering Open House and Good Time. If you made it to our first open house, then you know not to miss this one!We will be talking tech, serving cocktails + mulled wine + snacks, and having an appearance by our very own Sanjay Claus and Elves. Seriously? Yes, Seriously.We will have lightning talks on:* Node.js — How Yahoo is rebuilding our biggest sites on Node.js* The Olympics — how we serve the crazy load and keep medal counts, video, blogs, and articles flowing and up to date* Personalization — a bit about how we rank and serve a personalized list of stories to youCome on down this Thursday evening and chat informally with the engineers that make it all happen. Have a snack and a drink. It will be a fun and enlightening time… Then take Friday off ;)
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Ever wonder how often we release the Yahoo Homepage? Or how big a speed boost Yahoo Sports gets by doing Edge-side Assembly? Curious to hear the tricks we use to keep CSS bloat free and forward-compatible with things we haven’t even dreamed up yet?
You’re in luck! Our engineering teams are hosting a casual evening mixer with food, drinks, tech talks, and in-depth breakout sessions.
Topics for this Open House are:
- Shipping code super-fast at massive scale – How we build, test, and release the Yahoo Homepage.
- Edge-side Assembly, Caching, and Resiliency – How Yahoo Sports cut their TTFB and improved site-up.
- Stencil UI/UX – How we are using the principles of Atomic CSS and standard design patterns to keep page weight down and stay “forward-compatible”.
Come hang out, talk some tech, and have a good time with us.
Yahoo has plenty of on-campus free parking and is conveniently located near two VTA stations.
See you soon!
Contact me if interested
November 21, Thursday 5:30pm
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ydev setup <anything>
I did an informal poll at Yahoo, and also with candidates who interview with Yahoo.
When they join a new team, how long did it take to setup their dev environment. It ranges from 30 minutes to a day, and even several days.
I asked them what if I pour water on their dev box, how much effort would it take to setup their environment again.
Usually people looked at me like I was crazy, and then they say 1/2 day, and they have to look up a twiki page, or some notes.
The effort I am pushing for at Yahoo is for any dev env to have a single line of setup, to install, verify it works, and takes less than 1 hour.
This tool would track
- how many developers install it
- how many failures, successes
- how long it took
My team and I built the ydev tool that does exactly that. We love it and so do many others.
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How To Tip Calculator – Android Apps on Google Play.
Calculate how much tips to pay. 10%, 15% or 20%
Also includes a guideline on tipping in restaurants, bartender, barista, delivery person, hairstylist, cab driver, chauffeur, hotel housekeeper
Get How To Tip on Google Play -
Tips for living http://zenhabits.net/28/ My favorite is the one about expecting less and the one about telling the one you love that you want to spend the rest of your life with him/her.
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In trying to pick iPhone 5 or Samsung Galaxy S3 to replace my Blackberry.
I was torn and have switched back and forth for the last 4 days. I finally found an old document written on November 1, 2011 7:52 AM in Evernote. I wrote this document when I had the Blackberry and why I actually enjoyed having it. It’s nice to have an objective document written before any of these phones were released.
The winner is Gallaxy S3 for me personally
Must Haves
– replaceable battery S3 wins
– easy to type up emails S3 wins
– allow for internet tethering S3 wins
– easy to read screen to read nytimes, software documentation without eye strain tied
– easy to type up tasks and capture meeting notes tiedNice to have
– easy to deal with large volume of emails tied
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zen habits: The Tiny Guide to Being a Great Dad
http://zenhabits.net/great-dad/
“vision without execution is hallucination” –
https://tonytam.wordpress.com/ -
Also heard someone else added,
either you are a leader or you are not.
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Picking individual stocks over the long haul is not a winning strategy.
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All I Wanted Was for Alice Waters to Feed Me
Then she picked up a large copper spoon with a two-foot handle. She rubbed olive oil into the spoon’s cup and cracked in one of the eggs. I saw the golden-orange yolk. Holding the end of the spoon’s handle, Waters extended the egg into the fire. She held it there until the white turned opaque and puffed like a soufflé.
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http://happiness-project.com/happiness_project/2012/05/happiness-without-a-good-work-ethic-is-pretty-impossible/
via Byline
Happiness interview: Hugh MacLeod.Hugh is a cartoonist with a wildly popular blog, gapingvoid. He is the master of capturing a large idea in a single drawing, and a great deal of his work focuses on happiness: how to find happiness in work; how to have the courage to be yourself, do what you love, and take risks; how to build a life around your own values, interests, and temperament.
He has a new book, Freedom Is Blogging in Your Underwear, where he explores how blogging, and the intellectual and creative freedom it gives him, changed his life.
Having a blog isn’t the right route to happiness for everyone, of course. But zoikes, it’s a thrilling tool. And his book is really about how to think big for yourself and the possibilities that the internet offers.
Gretchen: What’s a simple activity that consistently makes you happier?
Hugh: Besides being with my loved ones, the most important and happiest part of my daily routine is finding that quiet, solitary one- or two-hour window in the day that belongs to nobody else but myself. That is where the magic happens. It’s almost like prayer, only more fun and proactive.What’s something you know now about happiness that you didn’t know when you were 18 years old?
That happiness without a good work ethic is pretty impossible. I guess I always knew that intuitively, but back then I still equated happiness with “Leisure” and “Party” way too much. That being said, being young and stupid was an awful lot of fun, for a time.Is there anything you find yourself doing repeatedly that gets in the way of your happiness?
Trying to do too much at one time. It took me years to learn to lighten up and delegate, even half properly. Luckily, I now have a great team, including Jason Korman, my fantastic business partner and business manager.When I lived in New York, I was surrounded by people (and I was just as guilty of this) who were running around like crazy–jobs, parties, lovers, art galleries, gym, shopping, museums, restaurants, bars, personal drama, the whole nine yards. Not only was it exhausting, very few of us actually managed to get that much interesting done in the end. We were too busy trying to keep up with our peers; it was definitely quantity over quality. Again, a good but expensive lesson.
Is there a happiness mantra or motto that you’ve found very helpful? (e.g., I remind myself that “Outer order contributes to inner calm.”)
“Unhappiness is overrated.” Even from a young age, it always surprised me how far people will go in order to justify their own unhappiness. “I’m totally screwing up my life and the life of others around me for no good reason, and it’s all for THE BEST!!!” Yeah. Right.If you’re feeling blue, how do you give yourself a happiness boost? Or, like a “comfort food,” do you have a comfort activity? (mine is reading children’s books).
I’m rarely blue these days, however… when it does happen, I remind myself that I’ve actually put the hours in, that my work is good and that what blessings I have are already MORE than enough for any lifetime. Constantly wanting more and more ALL THE TIME is just vanity, is just the devil paying tricks on you.Is there anything that you see people around you doing or saying that adds a lot to their happiness, or detracts a lot from their happiness?
I think people easily forget that that genuine happiness begins with genuine kindness and compassion for others, begins with genuine grace and graciousness. It’s a surprisingly difficult and painful lesson for us all.Have you always felt about the same level of happiness, or have you been through a period when you felt exceptionally happy or unhappy – if so, why? If you were unhappy, how did you become happier?
I was miserable for a long time career-wise, till I figured out exactly what I was good at and how to effectively put it into practice. In retrospect I’m not sure how smart that was, but mea culpa, live and learn. Luckily, I always saw my unhappier phases as temporary, I always thought I’d win in the end.
Is there some aspect of your home that makes you particularly happy?
Ana, my girlfriend’s cooking, Yum! Living in a genuinely loving home, however dorky and low-key, is SO preferable to the alternative, I have no words.Have you ever been surprised that something you expected would make you very happy, didn’t – or vice versa.
I once thought that a flashy, big-city, alpaha-male job in an advertising agency would make me happy. Not only was I wrong, it didn’t even pay THAT well, considering how much blood, sweat, toil and tears it exacted. It was a VERY expensive and painful education.
Though I heartily recommend a quiet, low-key, productive daily routine (at least if you want to lead a creative, artistic life, that is), I’m still glad I had a few fun, wild’n’crazy years beforehand. The trick is to not let the latter carry on too long after its sell-by date.
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http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/04/computer-book-market-2011-part4.html
Large Programming Languages — 50,000 — 200,000 units in 2011
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And I don’t believe having any of those would contribute to greater happiness than I already have. Here’s what I do have that contribute to my happiness:
Time
Loving relationships
Meaningful work
Health
Books
Enough -
Reasons I’m disconnecting from Facebook
- I don’t visit it often anymore, maybe 2-3 times a week
- It’s hard even for a technologist like me to keep track of new privacy settings that I have to actively manage
- It’s not something I’m proud to tell my child
- I’ve been on the fence about leaving anyways
- The final straw is reading the NY Times articles about other people also leaving and reminding me to do it
- It encourages short messages much like twitter, so why not just use twitter?
- Since I do blog on WordPress, why not just blog?
Facebook made it difficult to remove myself
- First try deactivate, but it emailed me that I can reactivate anytime in the future. Which meant my info is still there
- Then I search for ‘delete Facebook’ and found a permanent delete option.
It’s been 3 months and I don’t miss you.
T
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2 papers from Jennifer L. Aakar from her Stanford class on Designing Happiness
http://faculty-gsb.stanford.edu/aaker/pages/documents/AllReadingInsights2.pdf
http://faculty-gsb.stanford.edu/aaker/pages/documents/ThePsychologyofHappiness.pdf
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It’s that time of year for me to reflect on why we are here working everyday. Please chime in with your thoughts.
What motivates us to be happy and motivated at work?
- Money
- Recognition
- Being valued
- Making a difference in the world and self motivation
Money is a great motivator, it’s an enabler for future security, giving our family what they need and want and a validation of our worth in society. There have been a lot of studies online which show that incremental increase beyond your basic needs do not increase happiness.
From personal experience, throughout my work life, I have received large bonuses, increase in pay, stock option pay outs. The increase in happiness has lasted at most a few days. Surprising even myself. I told myself to enjoy the increase in monetary longer, but it fades quicker than you expect.
Recognition by your peers and your upper management can have a much long lasting affect on your happiness. As more people recognize your good work and actually regularly make comments about it, this can contribute to your long term happiness because it contributes to your sense of purpose in society.
Being valued by others as a source for advice goes beyond the output of your work. You are being seeked out to help others to grow their own career. This will have lasting impact to the people you affect. Sometimes this will even create life long bonds after both of you leave for different companies.
Making a difference in the world and self motivation would be the highest level of sustained happiness. When you feel like your work is your life calling, then your happiness is fueled by the opportunity to work. Your work increases your happiness. Your happiness makes you want to do better work. And the cycle fuels your growth of happiness.
Keep in mind this doesn’t mean you have to work more hours. A balance between work and personal life will lead to happiness long term.
T
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Heads up…Do you communication enough with your direct reports?
What about your peers in the same group?
What about other peers across the company?
And your management chain, 1 level, 2 level and ultimately up to your CEO?
How often should you communicate? What is the most effective way to communicate (email, face to face, blog post, tech talk?)
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Yahoo! as a company is 17 years old today. I am very proud to be part of this ship for the last 13 years.
Thank you for allowing me to join as employee ~900. I’ve learn so much from being thrown into the fire.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to build Yahoo! News. I’m grateful to be part of internet history.
T
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This is an interesting read from a Stanford professor, on how to form healthy habits as well as how Facebook became a habit for many people.
I personally have been using this model for myself to remind myself to do push ups and drink water.
Using motivation (getting stronger), ability (right before bedtime) and trigger (a yoga matt)
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Drawings from Ryan, Will, C. for Wedding – 1
Drawings from Ryan, Will, C. for Wedding – 2
Drawings from Ryan, Will, C. for Wedding – 3
Drawings from Ryan, Will, C. for Wedding – 4
Drawings from Ryan, Will, C. for Wedding – 5
Drawings from Ryan, Will, C. for Wedding – 6
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I’ll be married to the woman of my dreams.
Katherine and I have been a part of each other’s lives for 3 years. She is the most intelligent, kind, warm and thoughtful woman I have ever met.
During the first few months of dating, she introduced me to most of her close friends. Her friends are kind, friendly, inclusive and all have a little bit of Katherine in them. After meeting her friends, I noticed something different about my feelings towards her.
After 6 months of our dating, I was invited to spend a week with her family in Tahoe. I fell deeply in love with her during that week. After the family trip, I realize that Katherine gives a lot of herself to her family, friends and she is a sum of all the great people she surrounds herself with.
I look forward to building a meaningful life with Katherine by working hard together, sharing life’s good moments and shouldering life’s challenges as a couple.
I look forward to making our hopes and dreams come true by supporting each other and communicating constantly.
I look forward to building a family by including everyone in our lives with open arms.
T
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I spent $40 today at Yahoo! to measure how many calories my body burns if I were just sitting down. I spent 15 minutes breathing in a tube and out comes a chart of how many calories I burn. It turns out that my body burns 1,872 calories, plus 561 calories with just normal movement everyday, and if I burn 234 calories with exercise, that adds up to 2,667 calories / day. I did this test to understand why I’m snacking everyday and also to understand how much food and exercise I should be doing if I wanted to grow muscles or to loose weight. I highly recommend spending the money to understand your body.
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From The New York Times:
OPINION: The Joy of Quiet
Trying to escape the constant stream of too much information.
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I submitted this to This I Believe website 10 months ago, and I received an email from them that it is finally posted.
Here it is: I Believe in Consistency And Persistence « Tony | This I Believe.
Many aspects of my life are based on 2 simple concepts: consistency and persistence.
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I’m thankful for having good health. I’m thankful for having enough time left on this earth to still dedicate my life to things that are meaningful.
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From The New York Times:
SCHOOLBOOK: How I Became a Teacher
A first-year teacher writes: “As a high school student, I never once considered the training my teachers had received or what their personal teaching philosophies may have been. I did not know what a lesson plan was.” Now she knows.
Sent from my iPad
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I was trying to convince C. to work on this App with me, she didn’t really like the idea and thought it can be done with pen and paper instead.
App: Goal With A Friend
You:- Set a goal
- Pick a charity, schedule a payment
- Invite a friend to help
- How much is it worth?
- Pay 10 percent first
- Pay 90 percent when done
Friend:
- Accept to help a friend
- Email, call friend to help
- Get instant 10 percent fee
- Get reminders to help ‘you’ to achive goal
- Get final payment in cash or paypal when done
At the End
If goal is not done, final payment is donated to a charityWhy this is useful
- We ignore reminders
- Things get done when a friend knows and remind you
- There are incentive for the friend and incentive for you
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I love working for my manager, Cecilia. She is caring, funny, a good listener and a good person.
I love working for my manager’s manager, my VP. He is strong, careful, a good listener and thoughtful.
I love my co-workers, they are good, smart, passionate and caring.
This is what makes me love my company, Yahoo!
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Living Without Work: The Long-Term Unemployed | KQED Public Media for Northern CA.
Treat people looking for work with basic acknowledgement of receiving their resume, follow up quickly after the interview.
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There are many articles and personal experiences of how people are using the GTD method to get things done stress free. I think the human bring is not built to not remember things and when you should do them. Hence the use of tools, paper to capture information is helpful.
Here is what works for me using these 2 tools. Evernote and Remember The Milk. You can search for Evernote GTD and Remember The Milk GTD
The important thing is for you to use the method that works for you every day, regardless of how it’s done. I’m using the following as an ideal, but there are flaws in my executing them (as Katherine could tell you about following up on scheduling a doctor’s appointment)
Evernote
- I setup a private email address in Evernote so that I can email notes to myself from anywhere
- I do not use bookmark services when I come across something to read, I email it into Evernote with the #read tag. Then I setup a smart folder for the tag ‘read’ in order to read it later
- When I’m on my laptop and want to capture something, I print it to PDF into Evernote.
- I follow this method of GTD with Evernote with 9 notebooks. The most important folder is my 3_ASAP folder of my important projects
- All notes I capture using any other tools eventually goes into Evernote, that is my single source of truth for anything that is not time sensitive.
- I also have a 91_Passwords folder where I put in all my passwords but for a password, I either encrypt it in Evernote or if it’s one of my 10 or so passwords I use, I put the first and last digit but everything in between, like L…….1 just a s a reminder.
Remember The Milk
- I love the web interface for Remember The Milk to capture tasks and group tasks together. So I create my personal projects and work projects and create tasks that is needed complete the projects. I first create a search #project, #NNN then save the search. Then every task I create falls into that project
- I also setup a private email address in Remember The Milk so I could email myself tasks with tags #project, #NNN, where NNN is the name of the project
- When I have something to read and if I think it’s time sensitive I would also email it into Remember The Milk with #read tag or with #project, #NNN tag
Daily Ritual
- On my Firefox bookmark, I have a Daily folder where I put in all the links I should visit at least once a day. Yahoo!’s corporate portal, my bug list that I’m assigned to, the list of un-triaged tickets, 3 of my personal blogs that I should write something for, NYTimes.com, Mint.com to check my finances, Remember The Milk for my task for that day.
- Everyday I’m trying to get my Inbox to zero, anything I need to get to a later time, is forwarded to RTM or Evernote
- I schedule slots on my calendar to work on my tasks so no one can schedule meetings into those slots
Weekly Ritual
- Friday’s I tend to organize my Evernote, Remember The Milk list. Review what I’ve done over the last week and make adjustments.
Monthly Ritual
- I review my job description and adjust if I’m not doing what I’m suppose to, or I may need to add/subtract something from my job responsibilities and write down an agenda to talk to my manager about
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Hallway conversation with 2 co-workers today went like this.
Tony: “Hey L., how come you were able to get your ticket resolved?”
L: “Oh I commute with G. and he did it for me”
G: “Happened to walk by, yeah, it was easy”
Tony: “But if someone else asked you G., what would happen?”
G: “It goes into my queue, because I trust L”
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So, if your queue of things to do is too much work to do. How do you prioritize the queue?I assume your queue is
1) Your Inbox
2) Your bug list
3) If you are using scrum, then your current sprint
4) You have some stuff in your brain
5) Favors you do for people you trust
6) Your goals that you set for yourself
7) Other todo listI’m curious how do you figure out what to do next?
How much of your actual time are you spending on the following 4 bucket
1) Important non-urgent
2) Important urgent
3) Not important, but urgent
4) Not important, non-urgentDo you have a way to determine which bucket your queue item falls into?
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I have learned a lot from John Thrall. while working at Yahoo! in the last 3 years.
John became the leader for Yahoo! Media during a transition of the leadership position a few years ago.
From the point of view of the rank and file, he looked to be young, high energy but an unknown from our perspective.
I worked with him closely for 2 years to build the new Yahoo! Publishing Platform. He mentored me quietly through the life cycle of conception, buy in from executives, prototype, design validation and finally execution.
All along I appreciated that he never micro managed. Instead, he paved the way for me by evangelizing my role as the architect and encouraging different approaches for me to double check my assumptions.
One of the most important intangibles qualities John demonstrated is his commitment. Famous quote (I paraphrase) : “I’m not going anywhere, I’m here at Yahoo! for the long haul. Let’s do this right!”
He probably has no idea how reassuring and rare it is to hear the commitment spoken out loud and be believed.
T
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The Livestand from Yahoo! iPad app launched on Nov 2nd and became the #1 News iPad app and #2 overall app on the iTunes AppStore in 1 day. Today on Friday Nov 4th, it became the #1 app in 3 days on iTunes. You should try it yourself and compare it with Flipboard and Zite and see for yourself which one you like. Perhaps it’ll be another app on your iPad to satisfy your reading needs alongside those other great apps. There is always room for 3.
It’s testimonial to the great work done by the Livestand team, Alison, Jin, Mike, Ric and the engineering members whom I don’t know personally. I know internally it was great feat for the following reasons.
- It’s a BHAG within Yahoo! not just to build YAA (yet another App). It’s forward looking to build a platform for our users, our advertisers and our publishers.
- Along with this launch, Yahoo! also launched a platform to deploy HTML5 applications called Cocktails.
- The entire iPad experience runs on HTML5 (CSS, Javascript), inside of another Yahoo! platform which provides the native iOS services to Livestand. This Yahoo! platform will also be ported to Android as well a open sourced in 2012
- Pause: The Livestand app launched alongside 2 brand new platforms! 3 launches at once!
Why am I re-energized to work for Yahoo!?
- I haved worked on a project for the last 2 years on rebuilding Yahoo! publishing system call Yahoo! Publishing Platform and I have seen our ability to excuted on BHAG. We have launched almost 100+ Yahoo! media sites (OMG, News, Movies, TV, Sports, Finance) in more markets that I’ve seen in my 12 years at Yahoo!
- Livestand is another example of launching a product and platform at the same time and our ability to execute in less than a year shows that we can execute as an engineering community
- I found the internal docs to setup a Livestand development environment, I ran the scripts, got Livestand built on a iOS simulator and open up Safari and was able to run Livestand on my browser, in .. less than 1 hour! What? that is just awesome!
- The Cocktails platform is just a start for Yahoo! to build more native-like apps in less time and at scale
- Even with all the crap going on in the press, internally our leaders are focused, supportive and willing to tackle more BHAG
- We have been working hard at 2012 planning and I’m even more excited to see what we can excute on in the next few years
Thanks Livestand team for injecting more energy in this 12 year Yahoo! veteran !
You might also like: Why I Came To Yahoo! And Why I Am Still Here?
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On November 3rd, 2011 Yahoo! Livestand becomes the #1 News app on the Apple AppStore and #1 overall free App
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1. Getting more : I finished reading, applied it. Should circle back again2. Lean startup : he gave me a copy this week, will read3. 4 steps to the epiphany4. The checklist manifesto5. Leadership and self deception6. Jack welch: straight from the gut7. Jack welch: winning
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I love programming and I love teaching C. about my work. I’m starting to document our work here on a new site http://kidsprogramming.wordpress.com/ and this is first post
Teaching Kids Programming : Social Drawing HTML5 Canvas Part 1/5
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I was the Yahoo! News engineers almost 10 years ago. Yahoo! News is working on a 10th year “9/11 Rmembered” http://news.yahoo.com/september-11-anniversary/
This was 5 years ago
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In June 2011 this year, when I was looking at my investment accounts, I noticed that it had fully recovered from the nearly 40% drop since March 2009.
I was in the middle of selling my house, moving into a new rental, planning for a wedding for next year and starting an investment in a restaurant. I asked myself how I would feel if the market dropped another 40 percent. Was I mentally ready?
The answer was that I was going to very stressed *and* I might be tight on cash flow.
I immediately liquidated all stock mutual funds out of my 401K, 529 plan,education plan for Cate, Cate’s custodial account and my investment account. I moved everything into the Vanguard Total Market Bond fund.
The reason I am writing is that I had put a note for myself in remeberthemilk.com to evaluate the decision 2 months later. And today is that date. This is how using a GTD system with tools like RTM is helpful.
In hind sight, I was very lucky to be out of the market when I am in need of feeling less stressed.
T
Tony Tam 