Life of an not-so-ordinary person

Happy New Year

2012-01-14T21:48:00.001+10:00

Well it's another new year! Financially last year was a good year, it could've been a great year but silver ended the year less than it begun and I was heavily leaning towards silver in my investing, and options can make or break you. I had endured some real rollercoaster rides with my portofolio which ended up with a 50% gain overall. That's in contrast to silver being down several percent, gold up 11% in terms of US dollars, and the stock market going nowhere. So that's really really good progress, even though I was up in the triple digits for the majority of the year but that's just something I have to live with. :) I also visited many countries this year, did the most amount of travelling I have ever have and lived in a different country. I've still been slack with software development. Might think of something else to do before this year is over, but... who knows.

Positives
- Year ended even better than the last.
- Travelled a hell lot.
- Learned a hell lot trading and managing a portfolio. Maybe I could run a hedge fund in the future.
- Grew a hell lot personally.

Negatives
- Didn't save as much as I could, but the good thing is for everything that I purchased I could do so because I could afford to do so.
- Social life is still kind of dead in the water.
- I still need something to truly inspire me.
- Lost the girl in Australia, that sucked but someone else will love me for who I am.
- Economy is still shit house, how long will this mirage go on for?

This year could be a make or break year for many people financially. Which side are you going to be on? If you trust your government then keep with the fiat currency. If you stand for personal freedom then stick with Go(l)d and Silver. For me well I already know the game, its the end of paper. It is amazing what people don't know, and what people are not interested in even though it affects them a great and a huge deal. Unfortunately when the USD collapses, it will be overnight, these things have always happened overnight, and by then it will already be too late for many. The matter of fact is, if you are not in your 80s, you truly have never experienced bad times, and for many this year if not next will be a very, very hard time for many. It's time to take charge of your own finances and your life and stop listening to lying politicians and war mongering governments.

Every single currency lost to gold this year, an average of 14.3%. Here's my "favourite" currencies.

Gold AUD Jan 1 2011 - 1389
Gold AUD Dec 31 2011 - 1531
Return - 10%

Gold SGD Jan 1 2011 - 1826
Gold SGD Dec 31 2011 - 2027
Return - 11%

Gold NOK Jan 1 2011 - 8273
Gold NOK Dec 31 2011 - 9345
Return - 13%

Gold EUR Jan 1 2011 - 1062
Gold EUR Dec 31 2011 - 1206
Return - 13.6%

Bring on 2012!

PMs in perspective

2011-11-22T09:34:00.000+10:00

Silver is currently at 31.60. I've loaded up on more Silver positions and closed out my Oil positions.

To put things into perspective, let's have a look at the Silver weekly chart.

From Dec 08 to May 09, Silver has been below the 50 week MA (Moving Average). Ever since that time it has always been above the 50 week MA. That represents a more than 2 year run above that level! Now that Silver is back below this level it will probably run higher when it gets above this level. Make no mistake, this is a great buying opportunity.

Let's look at Gold.

Gold's graph looks incredible. It hasn't had a pause since Feb 09! Again the blue line represents the 50 week MA.

The trend is still up and both represent great buying opportunities. Although I have to say, Silver represents a better opportunity.

PM Carnage!

2011-09-25T00:09:00.000+10:00

The precious metals have taken a smashing so right now my portfolio doesn't look healthy. It has fallen 50% off its peak just a week ago since I'm very levered towards Silver. Silver has fallen 25% since Wednesday and Friday's 17% decline represents the biggest one day fall since 1984. We're not living in normal times. I have since closed out some SLW Jan positions and moved towards longer term Silver positions. With SLW that's going to take significant time before the chart is repaired and right now that's not going to happen so I will probably close out the remaining SLW positions sometime next week and move those towards July Future Calls, which look really cheap now. Because technical analysis is worthless when it comes to manipulation, what you want to buy when chasing options is time.

My Silver target is still $60 (or higher) by June 2012. The bet of my life. Buckle up Dorothy for the ride of your life.

Gold.ax the breakout is on

2011-09-17T04:03:00.000+10:00

Gold.ax (a proxy for Gold in Australian dollars) has finally broken out of its several year consolidation phase (3 years!!). Another record in another fiat currency.

From this point onwards till next year, expect Gold to rally strongly. This period is traditionally gold's strongest. My target is still around the 1870 level. That represents another 200+ rise.

To the "smart crowd" who chose the "strong"Australian dollar, you've just lost even more of your purchasing power. Amazing how people only chose to buy gold now when it's risen so much when they could've gotten it much cheaper even just earlier this year.

September 11 10 years on...

2011-09-11T23:45:00.000+10:00

Today's the 10 year anniversary of September 11. 10 years on what has changed? Loss of freedom, more wars ("democracy"), more deaths in the name of "freedom". And the US is fast going down a slippery slope into bankruptcy oblivion spending money it doesn't have while China grows its US reserves now in the trillions. In the current debasing competition, the most notable safe haven currency, the Swiss Franc devalued 8.5% in a week against the golden bull. That is a crash.

Model portfolio value

SLW Jan12 30 Call @ 8.67, 6 contracts - Currently $11.25 (29.7% Gain)
CLM2 140 C @ 0.96, 5 contracts - Currently $1 (4.1% Gain)

Current Model Portfolio Value $11,750

I'm still targeting oil at $100 by years' end. If not, close to $100. SLW still targeting $60 early next year.

Introducting the model portfolio!

2011-08-23T04:47:00.000+10:00

The idea.. turn $1 into $2 or more!

Let's create a model portfolio of $10,000. Our target profit level is 100%. So by the end of this year, we want the portfolio to be valued at $20,000 or higher. At least that is the idea. Can I do it? Why not?

This portfolio will be modelled based on my own portfolio. I hold other stocks but I'm just going to stick with the two most recent ones that I've picked along with the price I bought them. I purchased these because I believe these are represent low risk and high reward. Prices exclude trading fees.

SLW Jan12 30 Call (Stock Option) - Average at $8.67
Buy 6 contracts - Total $5202
Rationale
Silver wheaton is a great stock and underperforming silver right now. They purchase silver from mining companies for $4 and sell it at spot price. It's a great business model. The rationale for buying an in the money call is less risk that the contract will expire out of the money. I believe Silver will hit new highs by the end of this year and this should put a boost under SLW to above $50 by years' end. If that happens, each contract will be worth $20 or more.

CLM2 140 C (Futures Option) - Average at $0.96
Buy 5 contracts - Total $4798
Rationale
Oil has collapsed back to Dec 2010 levels. Meanwhile the dollar is getting devalued faster than waste coming out of a person suffering from severe diarrhoea. This is not sustainable. I believe oil will rise back to within $100 by end of this year. The rationale for buying a longer out of the money contract is so that there is enough time for this play to work out.

Currently the above positions are

SLW Jan12 30 Call - Currently $12 (38% Gain)
CLM2 140 C - Currently $0.97 (1.36% Gain)

Current Model Portfolio Value $12,050

Will update as and when we move along!

Graphs of metals versus other paper currencies

2011-08-20T21:22:00.000+10:00

1 year graph of CHF (Swiss Franc), SGD (Singapore Dollar), NOK (Norwegian Krone), AUD (Australian Dollar), GLD (Gold), SLV (Silver) against the USD (US Dollar).

The top performers are

Silver (134%)
Gold (51%)
Swiss Franc (33%)
Australian Dollar (16%)
Norwegian Krone (13%)
Singapore Dollar (12%)

5 year graph of CHF (Swiss Franc), SGD (Singapore Dollar), NOK (Norwegian Krone), AUD (Australian Dollar), GLD (Gold), SLV (Silver) against the USD (US Dollar).

The top performers are

Silver (245%)
Gold (194%)
Swiss Franc (56%)
Australian Dollar (36%)
Singapore Dollar (30%)
Norwegian Krone (15%)

8 year graph of CHF (Swiss Franc), SGD (Singapore Dollar), NOK (Norwegian Krone), AUD (Australian Dollar), GLD (Gold), SLV (Silver) against the USD (US Dollar).

The top performers are

Gold (301%)
Silver (201%)
Swiss Franc (75%)
Australian Dollar (57%)
Singapore Dollar (40%)
Norwegian Krone (34%)

Conclusion? Your best bet is still Gold and Silver against paper currencies, saying their performance is astounding is plain for all to see. Paper currencies will continue their long term devaluation. Interest gained in a paper account will not be enough to account for the decline of purchasing power.

One Early August Morning

2011-08-15T09:06:00.000+10:00

Another night another day! This afternoon I watched Enter The Dragon with Bruce Lee and later a documentary on his life and family. It's inspirational to read his struggles as an actor and as a martial arts artist. His marriage to a Caucasian woman was also at that point in time a very taboo thing. Today it is less taboo, depending on which part of the world you go to anyway. It's unfortunate he died so young, but his legacy will live on that is certain.

Now on to metals...

It's mid August and gold and silver. Gold is currently $1742.60 and silver is currently $39.27. Silver will hit $50 by years' end and Gold, $2000. I believe we are right now in the beginning stages of mania in Gold and Silver. Oil has collapsed back to $83.50. My guess is by the end of the year oil will be back and above $100. I've placed bets on oil and on silver wheaton, a silver streaming company. I expect silver wheaton to reach new highs by the end of this year. It is currently $37 and I expect it to hit $60 by January 2012 possibly higher. Now's the time to get into the mining shares, I fully expect those to take off by the end of this year. The Fed will unleash more QE, whatever they call it, it's going to happen.

I have placed large bets on oil and silver, so we'll see how that goes. Lady luck has been on my side this year. I've not placed any bets on gold but that is because I believe silver has greater potential along with oil. This summer has been stunning for gold and silver, the strongest in almost 30 years. That speaks volumes about the economic uncertainly that is currently present in the world today. People are rushing to real money.

What I expect by June next year
- Silver at $60
- Oil at $150
- Gold at $2500

Most likely, these values are underestimated because the mania will slowly start to realise itself over the next months.

Something bigger than myself

2011-06-29T03:26:00.000+10:00

So I'm back at work. Portfolio is still up from January, I'm currently down 16K from last month. Stocks and commodities are being hammered and I'm quite leveraged with options, so I'm taking a small beating. Mr Williams said from now till summer Gold and Silver will go nowhere, from the beginning of September till December they will rally 20 to 25 percent. I'm going to hold my silver options and probably keep adding.

On to things larger than myself. I feel like I'm looking through a goldfish bowl some times, many times. The person I love has gone back to Australia. I'm all alone. I feel so angry and helpless but I have to keep trying to be strong because I have nobody to fall back on. Nobody really understands. Don't even know if anyone even cares. :(

All the idiots and liars always get the good deals because they know how to manipulate people. I'm sorry that I can't manipulate people. I just want to help people, want people to know the truth, for them to look after themselves, but maybe the way I talk about things is a bit harsh and I don't know any other way. People are just so stupid! How is this possible? The world's being taken over by bastard bankers and fucking governments! People should be revolting on the streets! Not even in the countries that are affected right now but every country should be revolting! But people because think they work harder they'll have a better life, in some aspects that is true but when you're using paper currency backed by the same liars controlling the world and constantly devaluing your earnings, what's the point? Most of the western world have everything. Having material things does not mean having a better life, unfortunately that is what is being purported. You chase money, debt, and you become a slave to the system, to the elite.

Even though I love trading, I know what's real and having numbers in my account means jack shit to me. My shoes have holes but I still wear them because they still work.

If I had one wish it would be to not desire for anything material because all that shit just ends up owning me.

I just wish for the one I love. That is all I really care about.

Holidays interlude

2011-05-09T08:22:00.000+10:00

So I'm on holidays right now going through Italy, Germany, Czech Republic and Norway. Thought I would do an update while Lauren is asleep. Portfolio is back up more than 100K but with Silver getting smashed it's down 60K or so. Good thing I sold right at the top so I've locked in a huge gain. Too many bulls. Silver's now fallen an incredible 20%. I'll probably move in when I see signs of a technical bottom. I'm really happy I took profits otherwise I would've been down even more and the options I've sold have fallen 75% and 60% so I can re-enter much cheaply. Probably no one will ever read this blog other than me and that's perfectly fine. This year has been very kind to me so far and let's hope it continues that way. I'm now valued at half a million Singapore dollars at least. To my dad and uncle who told me to sell my soul to the bank and get a house, I say to them.. well now I do not need to sell my soul to the bank and I can afford to buy a house in full even at these ridiculous prices. When the collapse in housing comes I'll be able to afford several in cash.

Japan Tsunami

2011-03-15T04:41:00.000+10:00

So a great tsunami has hit Japan and it seems like the nuclear rods are not under control. That's going to bloody awful for Japan and the rest of the world. If you're living in the west coast of the US you must get some iodine tablets, now. Better to prepare for the worst then regret later.

Silver is battling resistance at $36. Rumour posted here

http://tfmetalsreport.blogspot.com/2011/03/questions-continue.html

talks about how JPM's losses are exponential once silver hits over $36. Oil is currently around $100 and change.

My portfolio's currently down more than 100K. We'll see how it comes along in the next month or so. I've learnt to relax and not trade in and out, so 100K? No biggie. ;)

Silver silver silver

2011-03-08T06:08:00.000+10:00

I'm mad about silver nowadays. This bull market is going absolutely berserk. A high of $36.60, Silver spot is currently trading at $35.99. Silver has been slowly griding against oil for the past 2 years. The Silver to Oil ratio is currently 1:3. I expect this to fall to 1:2 and based on the graph it looks like a double top breakout will happen very soon.

I expect oil to hit $200 within the next few months. At that point Silver might trade at $100.

Hi ho Silver!

This year is turning out to be so far, life changing in so many ways!

The greatest bull market in our lifetimes!

2011-03-02T10:01:00.000+10:00

I'm just super excited, Gold just made a new high in USD terms and Silver is at a 31 year high. My head is spinning and I'm getting light headed. Damn I'm excited. Better not say anything to jinx myself but I think it's written in the stars that my time has definitely come!

Hi Ho Silver!!

2011-02-22T09:46:00.000+10:00

Damn, silver has hit a new 30 year high of $34! Silver rose close to 5% just today alone and up close to 25% in the past month! Oil was up 6% alone just today. Silver has been on an absolute tear these last couple of days. Skeptics were expecting silver to fall but of course, the graphs don't listen. It now appears that silver will be making a run to new highs very soon. I think $50 by year end is a real possibility, probably before. I'm just glad to be part of the ride. Silver and Gold, a definite buy. If Silver should fall to $25 I'm ready to go all in. Of course that might never happen, I believe we're coming close to the mania stage and in the mania stage you will make more money than all the previous years combined. These are days where your life can be changed forever, you must take your chances and I believe this is one of the greatest bull markets, ever. With the insanity going on in governments it's not a question of how high gold and silver can go, but how low can the dollar go? Thanks Ben Bernanke for causing all the inflation around the world, you're the one causing violence erupting in the middle east, oil and food going straight up. Anyone can see this is all planned, the people in power are not stupid, people should seek the truth for themselves and not believe the mainstream media. Everyone or anyone reading this should buy some gold and silver immediately. You are insane not to. Insane!

Gold.ax has reached its lows

2011-02-10T08:02:00.000+10:00

Okay I am convinced the low of gold is in, at least in terms of Australian dollars. On Feb 2nd Gold hit a low of 128.50, there is strong support stretching from July 2010 at 126.99. I don't believe Gold will go lower than this support. In fact I just bought more Gold at this level. A false breakout occurred on November 25th but this only serves as a platform for a higher target count when Gold eventually resumes its uptrend. The current target is an incredible $207 which represents a 58% increase at today's price!

2010 End of Year Review

2011-01-02T01:51:00.002+10:00

1st Jan 2011! Another year gone by. The bear market rally continues aided by worldwide printing of money aka QE. Financially this year has been the best year for me, ever. I'm quite surprised, my business really fell badly towards the end but my trading activities have done very well. I've positioned myself very well to take advantage of the economic chaos that's about to unfold this year, so with any luck by the middle of this year I would be a thousand thousandaire.

Positives
- I still sold software
- I didn't lose my shorts in trading
- My savings rate is still unbeatable
- US didn't go into collapse
- Financials wise, I'm still way above the crowd
- Best year ever financially. And I didn't have a job for 2 months since I resigned in September.
- Moved to Norway

Negatives
- Sales getting down, some bastard from China ripped off my software including the user interface. I am really unhappy about that. :(
- Economy fundamentals are worse than ever
- USD will collapse this year, Euro, Japanese Yen?
- Moved to Norway
- When will I start writing iphone apps? Grrr...

I put down moving to Norway as a positive and negative because I get to learn new things but my social life is going downhill!

What's in store for 2011...

More applications
Must start writing applications for the iphone, procrastination is killing me.
I also need to start writing a specialised targeted blog... must work on my inbound marketing.

Investing
What do I expect this year? Armageddon, honestly this year will be the year of financial turmoil but if you're positioned then you will do extremely well. I'm betting the USD will fail this year. Other paper currencies like the Euro and Japanese yen will probably fail as well. When that happens there will be a mad mad MAD scramble to gold and all physical assets. People will be astounded by how high Gold will go to. My target is at least 10K Gold and 600+ Silver. There will be corrections along the way but they won't last. This is THE YEAR for Gold and Silver and all hard assets. Stocks? Forget about it. I think people will start to be awake once Gold hits 2K and then the mania will start.

Bring on 2011!

Gold update

2011-01-02T01:37:00.000+10:00

Gold.ax has had a false breakout. It's now close to support. Short term resistance at 141, support at 131.

I still recommend gold as a strong buy. This consolidation only means a larger breakout when gold does indeed take out the 141 level.

Looking at a 10 year graph of gold, gold starts with about a 2 year consolidation phase before breaking out to new highs, from 2006 to 2007 this was what happened, then a breakout in 2008, consolidation again then another breakout and now we're in another 2 year consolidation phase. I still expect Gold to expect 149 level sometime this New Year, my initial target is at least 1870.

Gold, strong buy!!

Graph of Gold and Silver ('92 til present)

2010-12-10T07:49:00.000+10:00

Gold and silver have been gone exponential. I believe this bull market will reach mania next year and this is the beginning of what's to come. Got precious metals?

Silver (USD)

Gold (USD)

Gold and silver prices

2010-12-01T06:17:00.000+10:00

I took a screenshot of Gold and silver priced in Australian dollars.

I believe this will be one of the last few times we will see Gold at the 1400+ dollars and Silver at 20+ dollars. Within the next few months I believe Gold in Australian dollars will be at 1700+ and Silver at 30+ dollars. Got Precious Metals?

Gold.ax breakout

2010-11-30T06:27:00.000+10:00

Gold.ax has finally broken out of its trading range!

If Gold.ax can hold above the 135 level, prepare for some fireworks. The target is 165 based on a consolidation count of 4. It's exciting times for holders of Gold and Silver!

Gold.ax update

2010-11-04T15:14:00.000+10:00

Gold.ax is bottoming! Gold.ax is currently trading at 131, this will be a triple bottom. I expect this to hold and a breakout out of the trading range.

Yesterday's Fed meeting had GLD at one point as low as 129 and SLV as low as 23.48 but both metals have since recovered. Will GLD and SLV accelerate to new highs? The trendlines and MACD have not been broken so I suspect the answer is yes.

Gold.ax, GLD and SLV update

2010-11-02T23:56:00.002+10:00

Well well, I spoke too soon. It looks like MACD is turning upwards again for both precious metals. So, what will the Fed say about QE2? The Fed will speak in a few hours and we'll see what happens then, but from the graph it looks like the market will like what it hears and propel GLD and SLV to new highs. SLV is on a roll gaining 74 cents last Friday, that's a pretty strong move!

The Australian dollar rose to parity against the US dollar today on the basis of the interest rate hikes by the central bank. This brought Gold.ax down to 132.45, a 1.32% fall. Gold.ax is still trading in a range but I suspect will breakout when GLD breaks above 1400 which should occur within the next few months. The strongest season for the precious metals is Nov, Dec and Jan, and this trend should maintain.

Gold.ax, Gld and Slv

2010-10-25T10:09:00.000+10:00

Gold (Gold.ax) is currently trading at 131.85. The ascending triangle pattern that was forming has been broken. Gold is now currently trading in a range between 130.60 and 135.90. There has to be a catalyst for Gold to breakout to the upside. Now is the perfect time to buy! It's a real shame that Gold did not breakout to the update as it would've moved swiftly to my initial target of 145.00. I'm sure Gold will get there, patience is the key. On that basis, Gld (a proxy for Gold in US dollars) is currently topping out with MACD falling and has formed a small head and shoulders pattern, I expect Gld to hit 125 to 126 after which that would be a great entry point. SLV (a proxy for Silver) also has a head and shoulders pattern with MACD falling and I expect SLV to be taken down to 20 before approaching its resuming its uptrend. The correction is here!

Gold update

2010-10-19T20:26:00.000+10:00

Gold (Gold.ax) is currently 135.05, and has added 40 dollars since I last posted in September. I still expect Gold to breakout anytime soon. The breakout will be confirmed at 136.00 after which I expect Gold to move quickly to 145.00 based on the ascending triangle formed between 5th August till present 19th October and then to 1720 AUD.

Gold symmetric triangle

2010-09-30T19:26:00.002+10:00

Gold will be breaking out soon in terms of the Australian dollar. A symmetric triangle has formed in the time period from April till September. The target for Gold in terms of the Australian dollar will be 1720 AUD per ounce. Here is the graph representing Gold (Gold.ax) on the ASX.

I expect this target to be reached by the end of this year.

This will represent a new high for Gold in terms of the Australian dollar. The previous high was 1490 back in February 2009 when the Australian dollar got decimated against almost all currencies.

The Australian dollar is incredibly strong at the moment but will still be weak compared to Gold.

Gold is rated a buy in my opinion.

Sell the AUD

2010-06-23T00:25:00.000+10:00

The AUD has made a bearish crossover to the USD. It has been rallying the past few weeks.

Funnily enough you might think the above is the stock market but no it's the Australian dollar. I expect the Australian dollar to fall within the coming months and have shifted to nothing but precious metals, Singapore dollars and shorting the real estate market (SRS).

Sell your stocks if you hold any, the time is now.

2009 End of Year Review

2010-01-01T00:47:00.003+10:00

It's now Jan 1st 2010. What a year it's been. Crazy bear market rallies, a fake recovery, and suddenly everything seems hunky dory again. Financially it's been a surprisingly good year for me, then again I expected Armageddon or something along the lines of that, so comparing anything to that's a positive.

Positives
- Sales weren't as down as I thought they would be
- I didn't lose my shorts in trading
- My savings rate is still unbeatable
- We didn't get sacked
- The AUD recovered
- US didn't go into collapse
- Financials wise, I'm still way above the crowd

Negatives
- Economy fundamentals are worse than ever
- US will collapse, only a matter of time
- People are still pretending nothing happened
- Sackings are on the way this year

What's in store for 2010...

More applications
I'll start writing applications for the iphone (really). I'm getting an intel mac this month, so I must! I'm also writing another application for Windows to complement the present product line.
I need to start writing a specialised targeted blog... must work on my inbound marketing.

Investing
What do I expect this year? Armageddon as well, but I'm always prepared for anything. I expect Gold to hit 1500 USD this year. Gold shot up to 1300+ AUD before retreating to its present levels. I still expect a higher price for Gold in Feb. I also expect Gold to hit the 900+ USD odd levels sometime this year, before shooting way higher. This is going to be the year for Gold. Stocks? For trading only. With insane stimulus, can stocks go up? Of course. But based on present valuations, stocks are just way overpriced. This isn't any bear market bottom.

Of course I could be totally wrong. Gold didn't hit 2k as I thought it would, but it's set a strong base at the 1k level. The Dow didn't fall as much as I thought it would. But we shall see.

That's all I have to add for now.. I'll add more.. later if I have anything to add. Getting sleepy....

2010 here we come...

AU rising!

2009-11-08T20:26:00.009+10:00

I want to talk about Gold. Gold has been bottoming out in terms of the AU dollar for the last few months. It recently broke out of its trading range and looks set for the next leg up. Here we have a graph of GOLD on the ASX which represents 1/10th of an ounce, over the past 6 years. Overlaying the graph in red is the 50 week moving average, green representing the 100 week moving average and pink representing the 200 week moving average.

Key ideas

You can see that the price of gold in the 100 week MA has only been penetrated once and subsequently recovered. The strong 200 week MA has never been penetrated.

Each time the price of gold falls to the green line this is a signal to buy.

Every time the MACD bottoms this is a signal to buy, the MACD bottoming corresponds with the fall of the price to the 200 week MA

Most importantly, it clearly shows gold in an uptrend

In my opinion this represents a very low risk opportunity to buy gold.

Over the past several years if you had purchased in November and sold in February you would have at least made a pretty good return with 3 years out of 5 with double digit returns. Note that these do not represent trough-to-peak returns, so returns may vary slightly but the idea remains the same, buy in November sell in February.

Nov 5th 2004 (565) - Feb 11th 2005 (537) (5% loss)
Nov 4th 2005 (627) - Feb 11th 2006 (758) (20% return)
Nov 10th 2006 (821) - Feb 16th 2007 (853) (3% return)
Nov 9th 2007 (899) - Feb 15th 2008 (1000) (11% return)
Nov 7th 2008 (1070) - Feb 13th 2009 (1400) (30% return)

Price of housing rises not sustainable

2009-08-20T23:52:00.003+10:00

It's all very simple. It comes down to calculating the gradient or slope of a line

difference in y / difference in x.

Why nothing ever goes up forever? Because x cannot be 0! No matter what bullshit the media sprouts about housing going up forever, it's not sustainable. Sure, it can go on for a long time. Years even. But nothing ever rises forever, simply because of that mathematical fact.

Put simply, plot a graph of X vs Y. Imagine Y to be the price of housing and X to be demand. For Y to keep rising, X has to keep rising. Now, what is X? People. People buying. And there's a finite number of people, yes? Ah ha... now if everyone in Australia buys a house, what do you think will happen then? Is there a true housing glut? Oh really, how many people are speculating now buying several houses?

Bullshit is what I call it.

New version of QFR

2009-08-08T01:42:00.002+10:00

At 1am this morning (8/8/09) I released the 8th version of QFR. It's been 2 years since I last released a major version. WOW. I just realised 2 years just went by.

At the end of the month I'll be doing volunteer tutoring for seniors, i.e. aged 50 and above. It's my hope that I'll start a school of sorts next year. Or end of next year. Have to train myself to be patient and figured this will teach me that. If not, well I'll have lots of old buddies. Or something. We'll see how it goes.

It's late now.. time to sleep.

C++ in the real world

2009-07-25T12:20:00.004+10:00

I read something a few days ago on the stanford computer science notes and it was thought provoking so I'm going to write it down.

In C++ the default behaviour of a method is passing parameters by value. e.g.

void DriveWith(Car myCar)

myCar is a copy of what's passed in. Now think about why did the writers make myCar a copy instead of the actual thing that's passed in? It's good software engineering practise at work. Loose coupling. Simply put just imagine you're a parent with a tenacious 18 year old. He takes your sports car for a spin and runs into an accident. Now because the car that he drove, is your actual car, it's been damaged. Taking this to a different level altogether if the car that he drove is a copy of your sports car, and he damages it somehow, well since it's only a copy, your car is never damaged!

If that only applies in the real world.

Of course you can also pass in myCar by reference, which means you pass in the actual car.

This would look like

void DriveWith(Car& myCar)

Why would you do this in C++? Well it's quicker to pass in the actual thing for one. You don't have to make a copy. And this makes perfect sense, using the above example, it would be extremely time consuming to make an exact copy of your car and then passing it to your 18 year old to drive. Even if it's not car, say watch, shoes, whatever, it would be time consuming to make an exact copy of the same thing instead of passing the actual thing, right?

Now let's say you want your 18 year old to do some shopping, you want them to use the car, but not damage the car, so you give them a copy of the car. To put groceries in, you give them a bag, but you don't give them a copy of the bag, you give them the actual bag, so that they can put stuff in it and it won't disappear. We don't care about the car, if they damage it, it doesn't affect the original car, but we want the groceries, so we pass the actual thing in.

void GoShoppingWith(Car myCar, Bag& shoppingBag);

Now you can get your 18 year old to drive the car without worries, and the only thing you have to worry is them buying the right items to put into the shoppingBag. :)

It's just a pity you can't do that in the real world, well, you can, but it would be very time consuming to create copies of things. Just like in the programming world!

UNG and risk

2009-07-25T12:18:00.002+10:00

My UNG trade ended up in a loss. Was it a trade worth risking? Yes, absolutely. The odds at the time were good based on what I looked at. However in life there's no guarantees. Well, I live and I learn. What did I learn from this? Markets are unpredictable. It's always best to take a loss than to lose everything!

Time for a trade!

2009-06-28T23:42:00.006+10:00

I'm going to trade the stock symbol UNG for natural gas. Looks like it's set to take off. The 30 day EMA looks like it's baselining. Higher lows have been made from May to June. The RSI is about to turn bullish. MACD is about to turn upwards and the slow stochastics look like it's about to turn upwards as well.

So the idea is to sell the 14 July put strike and buy the 13 July put strike, this is a short term play of 3 weeks. This is a bull put credit spread. You gain a credit depending on how many contracts you buy. You get to keep the credit if UNG is or above 14 when it expires. Looking at this graph I'm willing to bet that it is going to be above 14. Looks like a pretty good bet to me.

We'll see in a few weeks if I'm right! The above at present will result in a 30% profit based on the margin required, which is pretty good!

2009 finances checkup 1/3

2009-05-24T21:13:00.008+10:00

Today's I just checked my finances out of fun for the first 4 months.

In this period, I spent at most 24% of my total income, and saved the rest. The most I've saved so far a month is 86% of my income. Most of the money I spend is on rent, usually about 50%. In April rent represented 70% of my expenses.

So far business is doing okay, surprisingly. I don't expect this to continue for very long. From a realistic point of view of course. But that's alright, nothing will stop me from developing software. I don't think I can ever stop even when retired.

Gold is currently $960 and everyone is expecting it to go higher, lately the rise has been based on small volume. Based on the number of shorts that the bullion banks are currently taking I expect Gold to probably fall to as low as $890 or lower. The current 200 day moving average is about $850, 50 day moving average at $890, which will be a great entry point. The stock market is having a bear market bounce and poised to fall lower. Based on what Richard Russell has said, there's been little buying and selling pressure has not fallen much. I don't expect the rally to go on for much longer, maybe a month or less. I've sold all of my stock in Singapore which I bought in February, made a tidy profit. Time to get out of all stocks and let the bigger fools buy.

Value and technology

2009-05-07T23:49:00.004+10:00

I feel like typing about value today. So what is value? Value is perception of what you think what something is worth. I'm going to talk about value because value is important in a customer's consideration for what something is worth. Why is this important? Because people often spend time developing things which often contribute nothing of value to the end product. Often it is something else which drives them to purchase the product.

Well let's consider apple laptops. Bloody expensive compared to similarly priced spec'd machines, yet they cost a premium and people still purchase them. Apple has "fooled" people into thinking it has more value. How? Better design. Social status. It's considered "cool" to own a macbook, own an ipod, etc. Whether or not that's logical or rational is another question. Macs, PCs, ultimately they are the same things underneath, wrapped in different packaging. People are not rational, hence you can always add the perception of value through better design, or the image of providing "higher social status", in order to differentiate yourself from the competition.

Adding value is extremely important because you do not want to waste time and effort on tasks which do not contribute to the bottom line aka profits. The whole idea is to develop the greatest value at minimal cost and time. People often wonder why they spend so much time developing something only to produce minimal results, very often it's just that what they spent time developing has no value to anyone else other than themselves.

So how do you develop value? Ask people what they want, then think about how you can make it easier to solve the problem or even better, get rid of the problem. Think of the best way to do it in the least amount of time. This is when technology comes in. Remember, no one cares what technology you develop in, as long as you can solve the problem. Technology gives you tremendous leverage in not only allowing you to charge the full cost of what it would usually take, but also save you a LOT of time.

Most recently I developed a custom software solution for a company in New Zealand. If I had chosen my traditional choice of software development, (MFC!) it would not only take much more time but would require me to write more code (potential for more bugs!) as well. So I went the the .Net route instead, not only did I save a lot more time, I charged my usual rate which amounted to a pretty good amount considering the amount of time I actually spent on the project. Create value in the eyes of the customer using technology as leverage = recieving a greater amount of money for your time.

S'pore vs Australia wealth comparison

2009-02-25T22:33:00.006+10:00

I'm bloody exhausted. I don't know what's happened but ever since coming back from Singapore I've been extremely tired, I can't even run for 10 minutes without feeling like someone's dropped a ton of bricks on me.

Today I received a monthly sales report from a reseller of mine. In the sales report it says this.

PS. We are happy to announce our new Partner Discount program!

We now offer all our partners 15% discount on most of our products.

Alternatively we are happy to accept barter deals.

Contact xxxx for more information.

Barter deals for software. Wow it has really come to bartering, people aren't willing to fork out cash so we've come to bartering. I wonder what it's going to be like when the USD becomes worthless. It's a sign of things to come. For them to mention bartering, it must really be serious.

So right now I'm more interested in economics than anything else. Oil is trading in a range, which is exactly what Lindsey williams has said. I don't know if what he says will happen will happen, but right now it's happening exactly like the way it is. This is going to be a very interesting year.

Singapore vs Australia, in terms of wealth

I have a gripe with Australia. I don't know how the heck a country this developed ranks 178 out of 181 countries in terms of current account balance, which isn't even positive. Okay so the Australian dollar is falling like a rock at the moment. The government's increasing the cost of public transport. There's high taxes in Australia. You'd think with high taxes, the country would be richer. Nope. Singapore... low income taxes, no taxes on capital gains. The Singapore dollar is stable. The population's less than 20% of what Australia is. Yet the country is one of the richest in the world with a huge soverign wealth fund and ranked 10th out of 181 countries in terms of the current account balance. People in Singapore complain about the government all the time but the thing is they are doing a really good job of managing the country's economy. If you ask me, if Australia didn't have all the natural resources that other countries require, it wouldn't even be a developed country. I like Australia but I'm wondering WTF is the government doing to improve the country's situation. Things like tax returns were unheard of till I came to Australia. One of the things I notice here is that to me it seems that many of the young adults seriously do not give much thought about saving or thinking of the future, no plans, nothing. Compare this to many people in Singapore, who actually plan, the ones my age anyway. Well, other than someone I know, everyone else does. It's just so different.

Christmas review

2008-12-26T01:28:00.003+10:00

I'm in Singapore as I write this using my old keyboard, typing on my old computer table. It's been with me for 11 years. Time really flies. I've typed a lot on this keyboard, including school assignments as well as working product code that I'm selling till this day. So welcome to my almost end of year review.

This year has been a dreadful year in terms of the world economy. Personally I've made some horrible dreadful mistakes this year on investments and have lost a lot of money. Enough to live several years on. It's been a series of expensive mistakes, which I hope I'll learn from. I'm pissed off at myself for losing that amount of money, but I know I'll get over it and make it all back someday. As someone said before, it's okay to make mistakes as long as you don't repeat them. The bright side is that my business has grown again this year. Frankly I find that unbelievable in this economic climate, but well, that's the truth. Business was bloody fantastic the first 6 months, and fell off after that but I still managed to end with double digit growth. And I didn't really touch on my business this year, it's pretty much handled itself automatically. I think that's pretty damn awesome and I must be doing something right. I think one of my downsides is that I don't really count on money being such an important thing in my life, I'd rather help others in the biggest possible way that I can, in the shortest possible amount of time and then being rewarded for that. So if I lose money, I don't feel as much pain, but I know how painful it can be if you're poor and broke, that's why you always need to save for a rainy day. Saying that, I do keep a spreadsheet of my net worth so I know where I stand. I think it's important to know where you stand.

This year is also the first year where I've made in the region of 6 digits in a single year. That's a monumental achievement for me, considering my age. I've done it through getting a "real job" with a "real company" and also previously working on my own software company, not by focusing on how much money I can make but how much value I can deliver to the end user. I'm above my peers in the financial stakes, but I don't compete with them, I only compete with myself. Many of my peers have no idea how much money I really make. Well that's fine, I don't want to be robbed nor do I want them to be envious.

Next year's predictions

These are my predictions for next year. It's not looking rosy at all and it's going to get worse. I'm not a pessimissit, but I am a realist.

The Greater Depression will arrive in the USA, so probably a 50% fall in my business would be very likely, if not worse. If that happens, there's nothing I can do, I'll just do what I always do, create software to solve peoples' problems. Unemployment in the US will be worse than the Great Depression, the figures just keep getting worse and worse.
The housing bubble will get much worse. Option ARMs will reset and many more people will lose their homes.
There's going to be a huge world restructure. The US dollar will collapse and go into hyperinflation. This will happen sometime in August - September.
The Dow Jones will collapse to the price of 1 ounce of gold. I think the US dollar will collapse first, which means the Dow Jones will be something in the region of 40,000 points, random guess, a large number, but mostly rendered useless because of the worthlessness of the dollar. The stock markets in other countries will fall as well, however they will recover as soon as people realise that they do not need to USA as part of the world economy. I don't know when will this happen. The US will most likely not recover for decades. Stocks are still a no buy in my opinion.
Gold will reach at least $2000 sometime next year, possibly even higher, due to economic uncertainty and endless printing of money. If the Dow reaches 40K, Gold will reach 40K. People will lose faith in currencies.
Commodities will get substantially more expensive after the deflation period is over. Standards of living will drop, people will be able buy less with their paper money. More countries will go into recession due to rising commodity prices. People will spend less money and save more.
Lindsey Williams said that the Arab countries will dump the dollar. I don't know if this will happen, but he did say oil will go to $50 a barrel in July and it did happen in November this year. The problem with this is not only will it render the US worthless, but China and Japan, the world's largest holders of US bonds, will lose a huge amount of money as well. I am unsure of the repercussions of this. Australia's hugely dependent on the progress of China.

That's all for now. What I can see right now is a huge transfer of wealth to the Asian countries. I don't know how it's going to end, but what I know is that in 20 years, the world's landscape will be very very different.

With that, I'm going to end with...

Merry Christmas to all!

Entrepreneurship is...

2008-08-17T21:27:00.004+10:00

NOT
- a written course that you can take
- a roadmap to success
- obtaining venture capital
- writing detailed business plans
- a Phd in entrepreneurship
- a career path

IS
- being a contrarian
- belief you will succeed no matter who says what
- action over lip service
- the creation of value (over money)
- saving of time (over money)
- pain reduction (over money)
- solving of problems (over money)
- making the world a better place (over money)
- a lifetime of commitment to your ideals (over money)

In other words, entrepreneurship is a mindset.

Thinking about time

2008-08-17T21:02:00.003+10:00

I think. A lot. I don't think that's bad. I simply can't stand not thinking. About the future, the past, the present. I dislike talking about crap, small talk and wasting time. I prefer doing things, talking is a waste of time! If people talk less and did more, the world will be a better place. Many people spend their lives floating away their time. Doing absolutely nothing other than their job, with no aims, no dreams, nothing. That's none of my business, but I find that absolutely tragic.

People always think the "next generation" after them is always better. Oh really, in what way? Lifestyle? No, it's just different. Finance wise? No we're becoming poorer if you take into consideration inflation. If you don't put energy into your children or society, entropy results. It's like this. Poor kid becomes rich through hard work. Rich kid now has a family, transforms into rich dad and provides everything for his children because he "really loves them". Children have no concept of hard work, money, etc and think everything "falls from the sky", having the benefit of born into a rich family. Children never learn the concepts or understand what working is from their parents. Rich dad passes away, leaving children will all the money. Children will inevitably squander all that money, and so the cycle repeats.

Look around you, you can see this is at work. Many children from rich families have absolutely no concept of money or hard work because they think, hey if my parents die, I can have all this money, so really why do I need to think about finances? This is extremely evident in western society. I wouldn't say it is the same for Asian countries because the mentality is very different with saving an important habit in almost every family. Western society thinks social benefits are an obligation, that they deserve it. Heck no wonder they are getting poorer. Managing money is much more important than receiving it.

Millionaire mindset or winning a million dollars? You decide.

At my age, I realise time is more valuable than anything. We're all given limited time on Earth, but unlimited everything else. Time flies, literally. For me anyway. See.. in life we don't really run out of anything, except time. Everyone can be a millionaire, with enough time. Time is more valuable than anything else. Everyone gets the same amount of time in a day.

Spend time wisely.

Finances and the US economy

2008-08-02T21:07:00.007+10:00

I haven't written in this blog a while so I thought I'll do an update. Financially this has been my best half year ever in terms of my business. I had thought the present economic environment posed a challenge to my business but I was wrong and underestimated either the consumer and/or myself. Obviously I am not counting my chickens before they hatch, as the year end has not been reached yet, but the previous 7 months have been outstanding in terms of profits. Will the next 6 months be the same? I highly doubt so as I have a gut feeling the US stock market will crash within the next 6 months due to the amount of ridiculous awful decisions the US government is making. If I were an American I would march up to congress and demand that all the politicians except Ron Paul, resign immediately. What the heck is the government thinking bailing out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac ?? Every American household now owes at least $400,000, an amount increasing day by day. If you are an American you need to own gold and silver now as the one surest way of protecting your wealth, if you do not do this you will absolutely be finished when the dollar collapses. And I mean zero, kaput. Get out of stocks now before it's too late. The stock market is still far far off from a bottom. The analysts from Wall Street have been calling a bottom since the beginning of the year. If you'd listen to them you would've been losing a lot of money and that's just from the beginning of the year till now. I feel the US government should allow the economy to collapse and then rebuild, which will inevitably happen. There is so much credit and excess which needs to be gotten rid of. If a house is worth 400K, giving people more money will not make them want to spend that money on the house! The prices have to go back down to reasonable levels before people will consider buying them again. People are so scared of losing money but the fact is that money never existed to begin with, it's all numbers and inflation. If everyone each had a house was worth 400K and each house rose to 500K, did everyone make 100K? Are people "richer"? No, because everyone's house has the same value to begin with. You are only wealthier than everyone else if everyone else does not have the same amount of money as you do. The more there is of something, the less value that something is. So what if the economy collapses and people lose money? Money... there is so much money in the world, it is literally unlimited. Which is why I do not believe in working for cheap. If you make yourself cheap you are just saying to others, my only competitive advantage is that I am cheap so you should hire me. I believe in doing things right the first time and charging a premium for that. Afterall if I do a good job once, it's cheaper than hiring someone else and getting them to do it multiple times, after which it will probably be more expensive anyway! You should always set a high standard and charge whatever you think it's fair, but definitely not on the cheap. It's good to be competitive but if cost is all you can compete then you're going to go nowhere up. My software is the most expensive of its kind in the world. I do not compete on price, I compete on quality and having happy customers. Who cares about competition when I am constantly competing with myself?

Coupling and cohesion - software and society, a short discussion

2008-05-09T22:44:00.008+10:00

One of the principals of building good software is to build loosely coupled components, that is, software components which exist independently of each other and do not rely on each other. Doing so would make software easier to maintain and change, as code changes made to component X would not affect component Y. In contrast, tightly coupled software would mean components are reliant on each other, and changes made to component X may affect the behaviour of component Y. This is not ideal as it would make maintaining code harder because it would be harder to isolate bugs or erratic behaviour, as well as make it harder to test the components separately.

Let me explain this relating to society. In society, we are all linked to each other in some way or another. The six degrees of separation experiment tells us this is so. In a family with young children, the children are highly dependant on their parents, which is akin to tight coupling. As the children grow up, the dependence lessens as they become independent, which is loose coupling. Based on software engineering principles, this tells us that if society was modeled upon software engineering, it would be better if everyone were independent of each other. Society would be easier to "maintain". But is this true? Well, not so. It would be easier to maintain if you were thinking about record keeping and statistics of the person, which would be behaviour and data in a software model, as you only contact the single person for any source of 'data' relating to that person. However in real life, no person is truly independent because they take on behaviour shaped by society and is reliant on the same society for different needs. For example, each of us has bank accounts. To deposit money, we go through the bank, in that way, we are reliant on the bank. Humans are reliant upon each other for social needs. This is evident in humans as well as in the animal kingdom. In many cases, a strong tightly coupled society is good. Software code has no feelings and no basic requirements, so they can exist independently. The question to ask is then, why not promote tight coupling in software? As said previously, tight coupling leads to hard to maintain code. However tight coupling is acceptable if the components are highly cohesive, i.e. related to each other. For example, a wheel and axle. The wheels and axle can be loosely coupled and exist independently, with an interface between the two which allows any type of wheel to be used with any type of axle. This interface is tightly coupled between the two components. Making changes to the wheel will mean changes to the interface, but not to the axle. The interface would be like a cashier working at a bank. The bank, and the customer, exist as separate entities not strictly dependent on each other, i.e. loose coupling To deposit money, the customer goes through the cashier, the intermediary. There is tight coupling between the customer and cashier, and cashier and bank, but loose coupling between the customer and bank. In the strict loosely coupled ideology, the customer would be his own bank and maintain his own finances. Not very ideal as that would mean everyone would require a bank each.

So in designing software, it is important to think of coupling and cohesion, and find a balance between the two. In society, no one can truly exist on their own. Cohesiveness has to exist somewhere. In building software, reflect on the principles of how society is built, and taking that approach, think about how you can build your solution better. I find it astonishing how many many things we learn are all linked to each other in some way through abstract thinking.

And to conclude, you can bring about better cohesion in your life by ringing your mother this Sunday and wishing her Happy Mother's Day!

Spirit of Enterprise 2008

2008-05-05T23:22:00.002+10:00

I've been nominated for the Spirit of Enterprise 2008 award in Singapore. The award seeks to recognise entrepreneurial spirit, and the voting is open to public in July. I'm flattered that someone actually nominated my company. I don't expect to win but it'll be good to. :) I'm now living in Australia so the interview was conducted over Skype.

With regards to my last post, I am not sure if I panicked too early, but this year's first quarter financials were the highest so far in any year. With today's unstable economic outlook, I am not sure this can be repeated for the 2nd quarter but we will see how it goes. The hardest thing to predict is human behaviour which can be completely irrational at times. I'm still saving most of my money, I don't spend a lot other than food and rent.

This is going to be a short post, don't have much to rant except that I'm still doing alright financially.

Sign of things to come?

2008-03-23T21:39:00.003+10:00

So almost 3 months into the new year and it is not looking good for my business. Sales in the past week have dropped drastically, I have had no sales for the past week, despite having the best ever start to any year. Nothing has changed in download count or search engine results. Last week has been a crazy week in the US. With the economic situation not improving anytime soon I have a really bad feeling about all of this. What frustrates me is that I cannot do anything about it, other than lowering prices (which I doubt will do much).

Right now... I can only wait. It would be good if sales could resume to what they were before but I doubt so. The zero sales in the past week has never happened before, not even when I was making almost nothing a month back almost 8 years ago. More will unfold in the next month, however I do not expect an improvement with regards to the present situation.

My present plans right now are to

- Save, save and save financially since my business is currently making nothing and I will have to rely on my "real job" with Boeing. Previously I have hardly, if ever, spent a cent of my salary with them, looks like that's going to change. :(

- Learn programming on the Mac, after which I will port over at least one of my software to the popular platform. I've started to learn it, it's different from Windows programming but from what I have learnt so far the changes are a good change.

- Investigate into different products which I can develop. Not all segments of software are affected, it will seem I will have to extend my product line to include other kinds of software. I don't look forward to this as it would mean specialising outside of my product niche, but we will see if I will.

Reflection Part 1

2007-12-23T21:45:00.000+10:00

Christmas is upon us and soon, the new year.

As I look back, this year has been significant in many ways. First of all my visitor traffic is now less than a third of what it used to be because of an algorithmic change in Google's search engine. As a result of this my business was running at a loss for half a year at a 25% revenue loss compared to the previous year.

How did I react? I think I panicked for a while, like anyone would. Thoughts of doom and gloom and whether or not this is sustainable ran through my mind. Eventually I came to my senses. What I did next was very significant, I did what anyone with common sense would do, develop a better product. The matter of fact is, I cannot control search engine changes but I can develop a better product to increase its conversion ratio. I spent about 2 to 3 months revamping my software, writing a lot of new code and thinking about what users want. Was it a gamble? I didn't feel it was. I am very glad I made the changes. My product is now significantly better than its predecessor and not only that, I learnt a lot during this process. Really to increase revenue, the best way is to develop a better product, not SEO, not marketing hype, but to deliver where it matters most, usage and sheer quality. There's a book called "Founders at work" where an ex Microsoft employee named Joel Spolsky was interviewed and he cited the same reason when asked about increasing revenues. Develop a better product and you can also justify an increase in price.

How to develop a better product

Surveys, ask your customers. You are not your customer, your friends are not your customers. Ask your customers what they want and listen to them.

Look at competing products and understand how you can be better than them, but don't match them feature for feature.

Features are important, but usability is even more important. Code is malleable, the user interface is not. Develop an interface that is hard to understand or use and your software will not sell even if it was free.

Implement lots and lots of tutorials to help users and make it easy for them to access help. More help to them means less support that you have to spend time on replying to their questions.

But if they do, always always help them!

Cut down complexity. Always always try to reduce the amount of clicks and data entry that users have to input. Make things flexible but rigid, sounds like a paradox I know!

So I was running at a revenue loss for half a year but still managed to grow by a small amount this year, about 4% in terms of revenue in US dollars, which I am pretty satisfied considering the circumstances. I am very very confident that my conversion ratio has at least doubled, if not, it has actually made people "desire" the product.

Now if only I had my former traffic back.

Secondly, I started my first full time "job" working for a company aka Boeing. Where "job" refers to working for another company other than mine, of course (Boeing actually use my software, and are one of the first to purchase my software when it was released many years ago, you could say it's come full circle). And I still have to say, nothing beats doing your own thing. I'm only doing this to make myself "employable", and also to increase my nett worth and salary. Many years ago when I was 14 I said to myself when I start my first real full time "job", it will be at least $X per month. And I'm happy to say I've achieved that. Combined with my business, I am very sure that I make at least the same level, if not higher, than the senior engineers at Boeing. But I'm younger and hungrier than they are. Needless to say among my peers.. I am very sure I make more than all of them, salary wise anyway. It will take years and years and years for them to achieve the same level as I am making now and by the time they do I'm pretty sure I'll be at a different level. I have to admit with my present salary level I am having trouble spending the money as I don't usually spend much. Now I'm not boasting, I'm just stating the facts. The fact is even with what I'm earning I have a very high level of self worth so I don't feel it's enough. Of course I won't say this to their face, which is why I say it here. I don't care for titles, or career progression, I just want to work with smart people and help other people with my software. To me my business is more important than my full time "job" with Boeing even though it's risky, because there's no salary cap with my business and I get far greater recognition. Every time I receive an email from a new customer, there is a level of excitement which I simply cannot describe and never diminishes. It's like having your own creation being appreciated and desired by many other people in the world.

Business goals for next year?

Hopefully two companies in the US will be selling my software, one's a distributorship and the other a partnership deal. So the opportunity for increased revenue will exist, and growth should result from that. But right now I'm very very concerned with the economic situation around the world particularly the US. If it goes into recession, where the chances are increasing day by day, then my business will no doubt suffer as the US constitutes a significant portion of earnings. If that is indeed the case then at least I have my "job" backup and money saved in case of an economic downturn. Most likely in this scenario, earnings will shrink no matter what I do. The plus points are I can take heart that I've done far better at writing and selling software than many others and the fact that my business has been running at a profit since it began and for several years now proves this. So in the event that the economy recovers after a recession, I can safely assume that my revenues will more or less maintain at the present level. Here are some important lessons that I've learned.

Lessons as a software entrepreneur

Some things are beyond your control, anticipate what you don't expect and then decide on an appropriate plan of action

Code is important, the user interface is 10x more important

Pay attention to customers, your actual users. Friends are not your customer, developers are not your customer

No one cares what technology you use as long as it works

Build for quality, but focus on the important things. If something that works but isn't used often, don't waste time perfecting it. Focus on your energies on the things that matter.

Rankings can get you noticed but only your software will make you money

Don't think about the money, think about how your software can better lives for others

Now I'm going to talk about some milestones that I've achieved in relation to the business, I think this is always significant as it shows how far your business has come from making no money to making at least some money. There's a long way to go, but it gives you an idea of how a business is. These are some personal milestones which I've reached since informally starting the business in 2002, with formal registration in 2004.

Milestones

Sell at least 1000 copies

Sell at least 100K nett worth of software

Sustain the business for at least 3 years

Make a sustainable living off the business

More later.

Microsoft SDE/SDET Interview in Sydney

2007-10-16T11:04:00.000+10:00

I got back from an interview with Microsoft last Thursday. They were hiring for SDE/SDET positions. I won't know the outcome till this Saturday i.e. 21st Oct. How did I do? I'm not sure. I answered all the coding questions right, eventually, but I felt I could have done better. The development manager for one of the groups that interviewed me said I can definitely write code. So I'm assuming that's a compliment, but with interviews, you never know. I only made it to the 3 interview mark, which is typical, but from what I've read online it seems that only people who get 5 interviews get hired. I confirmed this with another recruiter and they said 3 is the typical number per candidate. Anyway, the interview process really is an experience on its own. There were 5 of us in the lobby where we started at 8am. The recruiter, Carrie, warmed us up by giving us some questions about Microsoft. Then she outlined the day, saying that typically the interviews are 3 hours long and if they need more information, they'll have additional interviews after that. Each interview is 45 minutes, with a 15 minute break. My first interviewer was with a development manager, and the second, was with a developer. I had the HR interview last. At the end of each interview, the interviewer will give you hints and tips on improving your coding process, e.g. to use the whiteboard more often for example to lay down your thought process. It was very relaxed, and casual. All the interviewers wore shirts and jeans. The coding questions? Well they weren't that hard, for me anyway. I didn't have to deal with pointers, which I could have, but instead dealt with char strings and arrays, performance optimisation, some data structures. I used pseudocode before I translated one of the functions that I had to write into C++ code, and it worked first time, but then I had to optimise it, which I did successfully. For me I wanted to get the functions right and actually complete them rather than leave them unsolved. I think I did that successfully. The HR interview was alright as well, asked why I wanted to work for Microsoft, stuff about my software company, there weren't any trick questions. After our 3 interviewers, 3 of us were allowed to leave and 2 other people had additional interviews. From what I found out, each of us had very different questions. One guy had to deal with pointers and data modelling, which were quite different from mine. With the 3 of us remaining it seemed like everyone else had bombed in some way. One of them bombed his first interview, the other one didn't finish answering his question, it seemed like I was the only one who didn't do as badly. Anyway we finished at 11am, took a couple of photos, and then spent the rest of the day in Sydney before catching the flight back to Brisbane in the late afternoon.

How to prepare?

Study, lots of study. I read "Code complete", "How to move mount fuji", brushed up on my C++ skills and data structures, and read some more. They can ask you anything, so you have to study as much as you can. Also there's a huge variety of questions. I could not sleep the night before as I was too excited, I'm sure some sleep would have helped me. Microsof really takes care of you by paying for your flights, accomodation, transport and food expenses. I got to stay in the Marriott, which was great!

How did I get the interview?

Prior to the week before the final interviews I had a phone screening with a recruiter. It lasted 15 minutes and she was happy to put me through to the final interviews by the end of the conversation. Your phone screen interview could vary as previously I've had a technical and problem solving interview that lasted more than an hour! Anyway, I was really excited but nervous too as I knew I had a lot to study for. I had only just a week over to study. The good thing was I didn't have to wait months for them to come over to Australia.

Now what?

Now I wait. The skeptic in me says I won't get an offer. I didn't do that bad, but it wasn't my finest hour. Microsoft is still a good place to work as their OS runs on more than 90% of the world's computers and so the impact that I can make is huge. I don't really care how much they pay either, I already have an offer from Boeing (who are waiting for me to decide) but with this opportunity I can't turn down. The good points? I had a great interview experience, and now I can code even better on the board. Have I become a better programmer through reading? Definitely.

Is the world only driven by money?

2007-07-21T02:50:00.000+10:00

Sometimes I think to myself what a crappy world we live in. Everything is motivated by money. The majority of people only work because of money. Whatever happened to being the best at what you can be and helping others? Don't people realise if you chase money you become enslaved by it? How many times have you heard "but the pay is good that's why I'm working at XYZ"?

Here's a quote from a book I read some time ago

"I am not impressed with what people own. But I'm impressed with what they achieve.
Always strive to be the best in your field... Don't chase money. If you are the best in your field, money will find you."

People don't realise the more you chase money the more it runs away from you. I secretly find it pathetic when people get happy over a few thousand dollar pay raise per year, big whoop. Don't go to work because you have to, go to work because you want to make the world a better place for people. Hey I like doing what I do, that's why to me there's no separation. My work is me, I like doing what I do. You have to be passionate about what you're doing otherwise it will only be a job to you, which makes it a chore and you will never be good at it. All big companies who started from scratch, I seriously doubt that money was their #1 priority.

If you're not passionate about what you're doing, quit, it's not worth it. If you do something you're passionate about, you will only get better at what you're doing, as compared to what your previous job was.

Since you're improving all the time, let's assume that to be velocity v. V only increases all the time, since you're doing what you're passionate about. And when you differentiate velocity you get acceleration, A. Acceleration is the rate of change of velocity. Basically this means that you will improve all the time and you will end up differentiating yourself a lot quicker and faster from your peers who are doing dull mundane jobs. You will be improving all the time. It's physics in the real world applied to yourself. Last year I made more than my friends who work full time in terms of finances. Is it because I'm better than them? No, it's because I am doing what I'm passionate about. Remember everyone has to start from somewhere. I started from zero (and in many ways, I'm still starting from zero!), I made my software free because I wanted to help others. If no one had suggested to me to sell my software, I probably never would have.

Don't work for the money, work to be the best in whatever you're passionate about and make that your life, not your job.

Dimensions of information

2007-06-08T01:57:00.000+10:00

Something interesting I read today.

Information has 3 dimensions according to Boisot

Codification. Codified information has concepts that are easily mapped to categories. For example, Clark Kent breaks down to First name and last name, rules of assignment are easily understood, there is no ambiguity.
Abstraction. Highly abstract information has a smaller set of more difficult to initially understand set of concepts that are more general purpose. E.g. animal is abstract. Sand is concrete.
Diffusion. Highly diffused information is shared widely. Information that is not diffused is held within a few people's minds or hands.

So a lot of the stuff in Web 2.0 (I still dislike that word, who comes up with them??) is data is mildly or poorly codified, almost never abstract, and very easily diffused. The author of the above, Boisot, says that extracting direct economic value from this kind of information is difficult because it is chaotic. The market for this information is also typically dynamic and fast changing. Intellectual ownership of this information will probably be suspect.

Information that is the exact opposite, i.e. codified, highly abstract and low diffusion is more ordered and stable. Things such as academic journals, reciepes. The information is more easily converted to some form of advantage.

So much information from Web 2.0 is often valueless and chaotic. Companies trying to live in this zone will probably disappear quickly and buyers should beware. There is a need for companies to understand how they make money off the information and how information flows between these two very different states. In other words, it's hard to make money from information that's not codified, not abstract and highly diffused. The companies that are considered the top examples of the web 2.0 economy are actually using the chaotic information as a ruse to make money the old fashioned way of bank accounts, trade secrets, proprietary technology and massive scale to win.

Re-factoring, abstract, re-factoring, abstract.. survival of the fittest

2007-05-01T03:10:00.000+10:00

I have a headache. Too many late nights of programming. I'm re-factoring my code at the moment. As much as 80% of the code written is new. Basically I have re-implemented my software. But it's for the better. A lot of it is now abstract and can be re-used in many other ways. If you sit down and think about it. The most powerful things, are abstract. Layers upon layers of abstractness. We're using them, everyday. Shoes with soles and shoe laces. Shoelaces built from string and plastic. Children are powerful, babies are powerful, because their minds have not been moulded like an adult's. Therefore even though they have nothing to build on, they are very adaptable. Like plasticine. In software, things have to be abstract as much as possible if it was to be re-used.

I like to follow this motto. Less code, is better code. Therefore no code, is great code.

My software will be the best in its class when it's released, not only in terms of functionality, but looks as well. I think many of today's software look like utter ugly crap, designed by engineers with no concept of design, but with the "implementation model" in mind. Basically, the simpler it is, that's what an engineer will follow. But it is not necessary the ideal way of interacting with the software. There's a conflict of interest. The engineer wants to design it as simple as possible. The user on the other hand, wants the end product to be easy to use and interact with. Engineer designed == BAD for user!! Why should people use something just for its functionality? Isn't software art itself? It should be pretty AND functional. The world of Windows applications has gotten to such a point that people use their computers, because they have to. Even if it's ugly as anything, they'll still put up with it. That is why anything that looks good, and functions well, will have a signficant advantage over any other product. If it's in house development, no one cares, but if it's in public domain, it better look good or it's not going to last if (when!!) a superior one comes along. Look at Netware. They dominated the network market for a while because they were the only ones with networking capability. But it was too God damn hard to use. Along came Windows with its built in networking (and far far easier interaction) capabilities and it's goodbye Netware. When was the last time you heard of the Netware running.. anywhere?

Like all survival of the species rules, this applies to software. In the software world, if you're the only solution (for now), good for you, but I'm sorry to say that inevitably an easier to use solution will emerge and take a stranglehold on your business.

Contemplating.. struggles

2007-01-25T22:02:00.000+10:00

Well I haven't updated this blog for a while. Not even sure if I should. This year I foresee will be a year where I struggle to grow my company. Last year I grew approx 90% compared to previous years where I grew over 100%. I have surprised even myself with how much I've grown as essentially a one man software company. According to my growth stats I'm experiencing exponential growth but I'm not even sure I'll be able to meet growth at all this year with the ridiculous competition that's now prevalent all over the web. I guess only time can tell. I'll be focused on re-developing a lot of my code that's now 8 years old or more, (back when I was still a teenager!!) to a different language altogether or even cross platform even.

Also this month will be the month where the university faculty decides on the awards of uni medals. Somehow I don't think I'm going to win the award but I've tried and that's all I can ask for. Cross my fingers.

Marketing 101

2006-12-20T18:21:00.000+10:00

Found this bit off a website.

So, what is marketing?

You see a gorgeous girl at a party.
You go up to her and say,
"I am very rich. Marry me!"
That's called Direct Marketing.

You're at a party with a bunch of friends and see a gorgeous girl. One of your friends goes up to her and pointing at you says, "He's very rich. Marry him."
That's called Advertising.

You see a gorgeous girl at a party.
You go up to her and get her telephone number.
The next day you call and say,
"Hi, I'm very rich. Marry me."
That's called Telemarketing.

You're at a party and see a gorgeous girl.
You get up and straighten your tie; you walk up to her and pour her a
drink.
You open the door for her, pick up her bag after she drops it, offer her a
ride, and then say,
"By the way, I'm very rich "Will you marry me?"
That's called Public Relations.

You're at a party and see a gorgeous girl.
She walks up to you and says,
"You are very rich...?"
That's called Brand Recognition.

You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and say,
"I'm rich. Marry me"
She gives you a nice hard slap on your face.
That's called Customer Feedback!

Before Getting Married...

2006-12-20T12:04:00.000+10:00

One should ask their spouse these questions, or wish they had.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/fashion/weddings/17FIELDBOX.html?em&ex=1166677200&en=9cbe5538cb1d2c45&ei=5087%0A

Do's and Don'ts of Entrepreneurship

2006-12-19T16:46:00.000+10:00

Interesting read at Wharton

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1623&CFID=2509797&CFTOKEN=96914375

Baby talk

2006-12-14T18:46:00.000+10:00

There was this program on tv that supposedly provides parents insight on what their babies (0 to 12 weeks) are trying to say.

Neh means hungry
Owh means tired
Eh means burp me
Eairth means lower wind (use bicycle legs to provide the baby relief), emphasis is on the r letter
Heh means uncomfortable

Hope that helps me, someday. But until then I'm just putting this up in case I forget. Maybe it'll help you too. I'm sure a search on google will yield further details.

Professionalism and Software Engineering

2006-12-08T16:31:00.000+10:00

Interesting reads at

Is Software Engineering actually Engineering?
http://iwarrior.uwaterloo.ca/?module=displaystory&story_id=1051&format=html

Professional Awareness in Software Engineering
http://systemsguild.com/GuildSite/TDM/Professionalism.html

Top Ten Myths about Software Engineering
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~sahilt/research/SEMyths.html

Programmer’s Maxim

2006-11-22T12:02:00.000+10:00

Good coders code, great coders reuse.

Never re-invent the wheel, if you already have a function that does something previously, use that function. Don't re-write. In all my work at uni I've re-used code from one assignment or another. And since it's my own work, it's not cheating. In fact I remember from one assignment I re-used code from an assignment that was done prior to even starting uni.

I re-use code in my commercial work as well. As well as other freely available code. If it's there to use, use it. The reasons being, you don't have to write the code, but also because it's another person's implementation very likely it's already been tested many times, has it's bugs ironed out and has been proven to work (and thereby saving you programming and debugging frustration).

Are you a good coder, or a great coder?

$300US per second

2006-11-18T01:11:00.000+10:00

That's how much Bill Gates makes a second, from the conception of Microsoft at 14 hours a day till sometime in 1998. That's pretty astounding.

How much do you make a second?

Use this ridiculously simple formula

Take the amount made per year divided by 12 (monthly), divided by 4 (weekly), divided by 5 (assuming 5 working days), divided by 8 (assuming 8 hours a day), divide by 60 (minutes) then divide that by 60 again to get seconds.

Very likely you're only making a couple of cents, or even less!

Here's some stuff about average salaries in the US, for programmers

Salary by school (US)
Gender distribution (US)
Salary by years of experience (US)

Salary by years of experience (AU)

I'm assuming these salaries are pre-tax values. Payscale.com has some very interesting data for salary comparison so join it (it's free) and have a look. My data's somewhere in it. ;-) Obviously I'm not from the US so I my data isn't in the US ranks.

If anyone's interested, I'll post my ranking but for now I'll keep mum.

Ericsson update

2006-10-31T00:42:00.000+10:00

Right now I'm working at Ericsson, and it's boring. With regards to some positives, it's a good place to work, I get my own office (aka meeting room), flexible hours (maybe cos I'm freelance), few people to deal with, but damn it's boring. Not to mention I'm working with radio engineers who seem to be more concerned with saving their asses and not much sense.

Question : Why is this macro so slow?
Answer : The file's hundreds of megabytes. VBA is not meant to process files that big. In fact VBA's not even meant for processing files at all. It's interpreted for goodness sakes! It's slower than VB.

The macro's already optimised, there's no screen output at all. They're running a macro that processes a file that can range from hundreds of megabytes to gigabytes. Run that in VBA and it's going to be ridiculously slow no matter what CPU you're using. They're talking about "optimising" the algorithm, when there's nothing to be optimised, and not that I know of. It's just that VBA is just S-L-O-W. Can you imagine writing a macro to process a file that big in VBA? Not to mention deal with other constraints like 65,000 line limits, constant changing of minds (this will be the LAST graph.. (next day)... can we add another graph? Can we change this graph?).. if it's anything I learnt it's that these people cannot make up their minds and have no planning whatsoever even though they are already behind schedule) I've had to rely on all kinds of tricks to deal with the line limits, splitting up data files into multiple sheets, storing the names of these sheets and then writing functions to generate graphs and statistics from these multiple sheets. It's enough to give anyone a headache.

What on Earth are the people at Ericsson doing?? Their plans are non existent, they don't know what they want (nor their clients I might add!!) and they don't even know the contents of their own data logs. It's shocking.

The plus side is this month in renumeration alone I'm getting the most I've made out of any other month ... ever. Which is common sense of course, multiple jobs = multiple sources of income. Therefore this makes it pretty good but working for other people truly suck. In fact I wonder if it's seriously worth the amount of money.

They still have yet to pay me, but I should get paid by the end of the week at least.

Q & A on Banking and Careers

2006-10-18T00:13:00.000+10:00

Cleo has a surprising good Q & A on banking.

Available at
http://cleo.ninemsn.com.au/cleo/cash/qa/banking/default.asp

Can't believe so many people are in debt. Simple math will tell you spending more than what you make = debt.

There's also a Q & A on careers, which is quite good as well.

Available at
http://cosmo.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=48315

University.. too easy.. industry best practise.. not going to happen

2006-10-16T01:55:00.000+10:00

Sometimes I feel university courses should be made harder. Why? So that the ones of "less intelligence" will be filtered out. The matter of fact is, too many people nowadays have degrees. Therefore it's really really hard to distinguish who is really skilled at what they do.

To be honest, I wouldn't hire half of the people who I studied with. And out of the few many I'll only hire a few. And they aren't anything grand either. To enrol into currently requires an OP of 12. That's kind of low. It's like saying "if you're average you're good enough to do IT". And that's wrong, because there's always a greater need for skilled people. Skilled people are the ones who get the economy moving and expanding, factory type workers only serve to work and be part of the system. I used to come from a really competitive school where only the best 40 students out of 440 odd students are only allowed to take Science. Let's face it, having interest in something would very likely make you score well in it, but many people don't know what they are interested in, so they take something "easy to do". Or even worse, chase the area of study which has the most money. But some people just suck at things they are interested in.

There should a "generic" course for such people.

IT nowadays is treated like a factory worker type of skill. We need hundreds of programmers to finish this one project! Yeah let's just get Mr X, Mr Y and Mr Z who know the basics of Java and employ them! We need factory type workers.

Good software is built by a SMALL TALENTED team. Always has been and always will be. Not a bunch of factory workers.

Look around you. Everything that's currently big, started off small. Microsoft, Apple, youtube, google, blah. Then they start becoming massive mammoths, hiring workers by the hundreds... a la factory, while the founders become billionaires. There's no company that started off BIG.

In fact, everything that's big has always started off small. Do you wonder why? Because there would be too much bureaucracy, paperwork, politics, and dim wits pulling down the productivity levels of the team.

You don't hear of a success story of a company with 100 founders. That will never happen.

If it's what I've learnt, small teams are always more powerful, more productive, and definitely more of a threat as compared to a large clunky corporation. But everyone, aka the majority of people, feel "safe" joining a large corporation or government type of organisation. Makes it look good on their resume and employable by other large corporations.

I wonder what the heck HR managers learn in uni. Who do they employ? The rebel / smart person who has tried to start his own company, or the person who will make a "loyal servant" to the company? (i.e. less risk taker, security type person, with little / no ambition, average grades) The founders of a company always want to strike out on their own. Can you imagine if they didn't? Would they even be "employable" because they are more likely to work at XYZ company and quit only after a few years having learnt everything there is to learn? In an alternate universe, what if the founders of google never started google but went to work for another corporation, would they employ them? Who are HR managers to decide how much YOU are worth? If you are a high productivity person joining a large corporation, chances are you are being gauged accordingly as a low/average productivity person and paid accordingly.

Experience is learning and tolerating the ways of overcoming problems imposed by bureauracy, and office politics. What a damn waste of time. I'll rather be learning, and having a high level of productivity doing actual work that benefits society. Large teams suck big time. Always have and always will. "Yeah I joined this super large mega huge MNC and was part of a low productivity workforce!! Hire me!"

The smartest people always stand alone improving the economy, and the rest, form the factory workers.

"Industry best practise" is another term that I find ridiculous. If every company was incorporating industry best practice, then it WOULDN'T be industry best practice now would it? It would be "average low productivity practice". If everyone was doing the same thing, how would that be best practise?

The best practises are therefore never common. Once told to others, it's not best practise anymore. If your company is following "industry best practise" from an "industrial source", chances are very likely that you are NOT following a best practise, but some form of average practise that everyone is using which has deemed to be stable. But I can tell you it's definitely not best practice.

It's like attending a seminar that says "do this and you will make a million dollars". Now if everyone does it, then honestly do you think it'll still make you a million dollars? Of course it will, but the chances of it happening again are rare. This is common sense. The people giving the seminar made a million dollars because they tried something originally different from "industry best practise" and it worked for them. Then they get richer by selling their idea to other people. It's sort of like a pyramid scheme where the people at the top get richer and richer and the people at the bottom get the scraps.

Think about it.

Macro mania

2006-10-13T02:08:00.000+10:00

Well I've finally finished customising my software, at least.. for now. Ridiculously busy over the past couple of days. I thought today was Wednesday when it was Thursday. It's now actually Friday but I'm posting this Thursday night. Anyway.. today I tutored one of the undergrads, and it was... awful. The person who I'm tutoring does not know any programming whatsoever even though he is studying IT. The subject, data structures and algorithms, has a substantial programming component. He's really struggling and it would be truly a miracle if he gets something together. What on Earth are they teaching in schools?? Apparently he got credit at the uni because he "touched" on object orientation 6 years ago and even then he said it was really easy.

My software's not going to go retail cos the corporation couldn't find anyone to distribute it so they're doing it online instead. Ah well I'll just have to look for other avenues. Perhaps the person who I communicate with will know of other people who I can approach to get it sold retail.

I'm now a part time consultant for Ericsson writing their Office macros. They have hundreds of graphs to generate from their huge logs of cellular phone data. It's cool what you can do with the macros, despite its obselete language implemenation i.e. VB. I have to say I've never written a macro before last Thursday but now I'm getting pretty good at it. I'll add it as another skill that I have to my list of other skills. VB is such a stupid language sometimes but it's ridiculously popular, probably assisted by it being built into Office. I'm pretty sure I can sell these macros if I wanted to.

Some idiot last night spammed a heck lot of inboxes and made the return address my company domain. I received about a thousand bounced messages last night and had to turn off my catchall email address.

So what is a catchall email address.. ?

if your domain is ihatespam.com, you can set up a catchall email address that grabs all email directed to *@ihatespam.com to an email address, for example execute_all_spammers@ihatespam.com
So email sent to spammers_suck@ihatespam.com, spammers_must_die@ihatespam.com will be sent to execute_all_spammers@ihatespam.com
The idiot used return email addresses such as random names like Joe.Schome@mydomain.com and sent them to an invalid email, which resulted in the email being sent to mydomain.com and flooding my inbox.

I hate spammers.

Hopeless iPowerweb Tech Support

2006-09-29T17:37:00.000+10:00

Below is the actual tech support I received from ipowerweb. They are bloody H O P E L E S S with their tech support.

Please wait for a site operator to respond.
You are now chatting with 'Max T.'
Max T.: Thank you for contacting IPOWER Live Chat. How can I help you?
Me: host120 is down
Me: what's going on ??
Me: can't view my website at all
Me: See Incident: XXXXXX-XXXXXX
Max T.: I'll be happy to assist you.
Max T.: We do apologize for the inconvenience faced by you.
Max T.: Admins are aware of your server problem and there is some network issues. They are working on it.
Max T.: We have been advised that the problem has been isolated and that the issue would be solved soon. For quality's sake, our admins tend to spend a slightly longer time investigating the root cause of an issue to completely fix it, rather than merely applying a temporary/unsafe fix, we've taken every possible step to ensure that this does not happen again. <-- copy and paste response (what lazy asses)
Me: it was fixed now it's down again
Me: yeah right I've seen that reply before
Me: please spare me the copy and paste effort :P
Me: it was fixed 3 hours ago and now it's down again so what gives
Max T.: Yes I understand.
Me: so what's going on? There's 50 other websites hosted on that server, and I can tell you they won't be happy
Max T.: I understand.
Me: and ?? What are you going to do about it??
Max T.: I apologize.
Me: please don't patronise me, just fix the thing
Max T.: It is being worked upon.
Me: how long is this so called "fix" going to take, if it was fixed before then why is it not working now ???
Max T.: I'm sorry for the delay. I'll be right with you.
Me: just look into what's going on!
Max T.: I will be right with you.
Max T.: Thank you for waiting. I'll be with you in just a moment.
Me: ...
Me: just fix the problem!
Max T.: Yes, It will be soon.
Me: how soon??
Max T.: I'm sorry but right now I'm having no ETA for the same.
Max T.: But please be assured that it is been looked into and will be resolved very soon.
Me: no ETA but soon??
Max T.: It will be up soon
Me: what 1 hour soon, 2 hours, 3? 24 hours?
Max T.: NO ETA
Me: soon but no ETA, looks like you guys have no clue what you're doing
Max T.: Please understand it is being looked .
Max T.: We do not have any ETA at the moment
Max T.: I cannot confirm the same
Me: then how can you confirm SOON? If you don't know, then just say you don't know!
Max T.: Thank you for waiting. I'll be with you in just a moment.
Max T.: I'm sorry for the delay. I'll be right with you.
Max T.: I will be right with you.
Max T.: I will be right with you.
Me: forget it, just go fix the problem. spare me your auto replies, and by the way look up the dictionary on the definition "SOON" because you misunderstood its meanining

Max T does not understand the word "soon" and is a total incompetent fool! I can't believe the employ such "technically gifted" people. I have to say another time, they needlessly modified a .htaccess file on my website and caused it to be down for hours. What morons...

Then again a lot of tech support's pretty damn hopeless. The only tech support which I found that was ever good was a technician on dodo internet but their customer service was plain stupid.

No money to pay

2006-09-27T02:46:00.000+10:00

I found out from one of my close friends that one of the people working for the startup has no revenue! So people who are working for them aren't getting paid at all for the moment. That's shocking. For obvious reasons I won't name the startup, they are getting people to invest in it but they have no revenue at all. So essentially people working for them now are working for free. Perhaps that is why the HR manager has not gotten back to me yet... even though she said she was going to 2 weeks ago. I found out today they only just hired the VP of engineering.. who I am supposed to talk to, last week.

That reaaally puts me off from joining them. I didn't believe in their product in the first place. Frankly I wouldn't understand, nor anyone who I have talked to, the need for that kind of product. In some ways I hope it suffers and dies a tragic death, but on the other hand if they offer me insane pay I'll join them but not if they're not paying me.

On to something totally irrelevant, here's a short article on what Bill Gates wish he'd known
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fsb/fsb_archive/2006/03/01/8370302/index.htm

And on to something else, my business is sort of plateauing. To be honest I have done as much as I can on my own, and it has been really hard work. The growth rate of my business is shown here

2002 - baseline
2003 - 158.42%
2004 - 144.96%
2005 - 142.53%
2006 - To be determined

I really need a partner to market my software. Growth has been significant over the last couple of years. But then again that's not very hard to achieve considering the small amount I was making before. (Before 2002 I don't even want to talk about how much I was making then, but it was very very very little.)

You don't realise how much work you have to do from developing a product, marketing it, handling customer email, developing the website, looking at competing products, and more. The best thing is, I learnt all of this on my own with zero academic knowledge applied. I didn't even take up any so called entreprenuership courses. Is university really that useful? All my friends are now working for people making them richer and I'm making money on my own. Would you hire me for a greater sum of money than them? (By the way my grades are also within the top 1% of the university) I applied for a position with Accenture recently I wonder if they will even reply or feel threatened with my background. Frankly I feel sometimes if you are too ambitious the company won't hire you.

Time for bed.

Name Your Price.. Need Suggestions!

2006-09-16T03:35:00.000+10:00

Well the french guy today asked me how the tutorial was going, I think he's going to be disappointed if I say oh not much I'm still working on it. He also asked me to name my price for the position (which has no formal title yet by the way) in France. I'm assuming this would be development work, and other kind of work as well that I do not know yet of. The company's got no name either, it's new. Any suggestions ? (To whoever is reading this??) I'm thinking 96K EUD per annum. I don't think that's an unreasonable amount. It costs almost 4 euros for a big mac in France. If the price isn't right I'm not going to do it, simple as that.

Maybe I should work on the tutorial first.. which isn't a real tutorial by the way.

One of my resellers, SHI is selling my software for me which is great. They also resell Microsoft, Adobe, McAfee, etc software and other hardware as well. Company profile available at http://www.florida.shi.com/Global/Content/About/about.asp. They only sold a copy of my software before this, but all their sales are large sales compared to what I'm used to. I wonder how much they are actually profiting as their purchase price is exactly the same as my retail price, I am sure they are making money from this. My other seller, SoftwareCasa's also sells software for me and they're based somewhere in Europe. There's also the one in France, Avanquest. And there's Kreis I&C in South Korea which has only sold one copy for me since March. These aren't as good as they could be but they should improve over time. Why I'm doing this is because I hate to rely on google and search traffic for people to find out about my products. Need others to sell my software for me without me breaking into a panicky sweat. I always worry about each month's sales.

WWDC 2006 and reverse engineering

2006-09-10T02:10:00.000+10:00

I went to WWDC last month, can't believe it's been more than a month already. To be honest I wasn't hyped by the keynote. Sure, spaces is useful, and the chat thing with moving backgronds is cool, but nothing revolutionary. Time machine looks great but's nothing new. And why all the jokes being poked at Microsoft? Found it ironic that the Mac crashed while time machine was being used. Many people cheered and clapped as if it's were God speaking during that keynote and many other presentations. It almost seemed like it's a cult. Of course people would say great things about the company that they're working at, especially if you're the CEO, VP of Engineering, etc. They are *paid* to do this sort of thing. If they went on to another rival company, do you think they would still sing praises of their former company?

The plus side? I got a cheap laptop bag, talked to the CEO of santimage, got some good chocolates, and a former yahoo group director who shall be unnamed but is heading a startup. I might go join them but I'm still waiting. I have enough money to survive for now and I'm not really in a rush to join anyone, not for the right price. San Francisco was expensive and I met some really strange people. Clam chowder was good though. :-)

Today, Codelock, a so-called PHP and HTML encrypter was reverse engineered by moi. It can be found at www.codelock.co.nz and I stumbled across it after finding out a script that was "protected" by this program. I find it funny how they say you can use it to "protect" your HTML files (in addition to PHP) using obfuscation. First of all it would be stupid to encrypt HTML as search engine robots would be unable to decipher any of the resulting obfuscated code, resulting in zero web traffic from any search engines. Secondly it would result in a total mess if you wanted to make changes and tried to edit the HTML directly and not feasible for maintenance. Lastly why would anyone steal HTML code is beyond me. The funny thing is the authors themselves didn't use the application to protect their own HTML but yet cite the software as a tool which can be used to protect HTML... perhaps they only use it to protect their PHP files.

But on to the software itself, Codelock uses a decrypter file to decrypt your "protected files". The only problem is, the decrypter itself can be relatively easy to reverse engineer, with some trickery. The decrypter stores information such as checking of expiry dates of scripts and things like that. However once the decrypter's source is revealed, you can remove these checks such that even if an encrypted script does say to check for expiration, the expiration check can be bypassed directly by editing the decrypter's source code (which has very strange variable names I have to say, probably to confuse the heck out of whoever's reading it). Once the source code is obtained, it is also relatively easy (to me anyway) to deconstruct any encrypted scripts and output the source to plaintext. Sort of like a master key to any protected house. The result? The php script that was "encrypted" using CodeLock was fully decrypted and its source code exposed, after which I made some changes to remove the limitations that were present in the script.

The website itself says :

Codelock for PHP is a strong deterrent. Most end users will not be able to decipher your code and will have a difficult time working through the 24 levels of encryption used by the software (V1.5). It will take more than the average programmer to decipher your scripts. The fact is, any PHP encryption program does needs to decrypt the file at some time, so the code will theoretically be available to experienced crackers during its execution. However, it would take considerable expertise, a lot of time and a rewrite of some of the core PHP decode engine (codelock.php) to get at it. Note: The Decryptor file (codelock.php) is also Encrypted. As well as all this, it would be a violation of our reverse engineering policy.

Sort of like giving a locked treasure chest along with the key, except that the key is initially a jigsaw puzzle. The "violation of our reverse engineering" seemed like a last ditch effort to persuade the consumer to part with their money, knowing that if all else fails, it's against their policy! Ehhh... so what?? It wasn't a strong enough deterrent for me and I don't really consider myself a super coder other than armed with insight, common sense and some limited knowledge of encryption. In fact, PHP isn't even my specialty. Perhaps this experienced cracking thing only applies to their latest versions. Admittingly I have no idea what version the one I was working on but it was released as a commercial version and distributed with a "protected" php script.

Well off to bed!

Graduation in 24 hours

2006-07-20T00:16:00.000+10:00

It's early Thursday and I'm graduating again tomorrow. Bachelor of Science, first class honours in the field of Computer Science. It's been a quick year. Sort of. My overall GPA is now 6.70something out of a maximum possible of 7. To the majority that would be pretty damn good but to me, well let's just say it would be good enough if I get the medal. :) It's not the first class honours that I'm really aiming for but the university medal. Hopefully my grades are still good enough to obtain it. The thing is I wouldn't know till end of the year. If not, I've tried my best, pushed myself to the limits, and I can only blame the stupid professor for being an idiot and totally giving me crap marks which I felt were unjustified. Bah!!! Either that or I can blame myself for trying to do the insanely impossible by taking on 3 special topics which no one has done previously at UQ.

Then I'm heading down to San Francisco in August for the WWDC conference, hopefully that will be interesting. I'll be catching up with an old friend too who is doing an internship in the USA.

I'm also applying for permanent residency in Australia at the moment, there's a ton of paperwork involved. Ridiculously troublesome. I can understand why some people would pay 2K to get a lawyer to do it, but it would be a waste of money. The process is not impossible, just tedious!

End of the road

2006-06-26T00:13:00.000+10:00

Well uni's over, results will be out soon. I'm sick and tired of this semester, so tired of studying. Not even sure if all this studying will pay off. I hate it how so many idiots are doing IT. WHY? God dammit so many of them are crap at what they do. Sometimes I really regret taking IT, I had all the academic ability in the world to take any field of study. Should have done something that's in demand worldwide. It's really depressing sometimes. If your field's not in demand it's really hard to distinguish yourself even if you're the best.

I just want to retire. Heck with the rat race.

Universities are a business, who gives a damn about teaching??

2006-06-16T02:54:00.000+10:00

My thesis supervisor told me today that the university's cutting down courses and cutting down on the number of staff. She also told me that the Uni of Melbourne, not where I'm from, will be introducing a graduate program and will be cutting 10,000 students from its enrolment over the next 10 years. All the money that universities are getting are from doing research. It's true. That's what they are doing at QUT too, the dean sacked half of his staff and hired researchers instead. Not people who are good at teaching, but people who can actually bring money into the uni! So no one cares about teaching anymore. You can be the lousiest teacher but the university will hire you as long as you can bring in research grants. Kind of a sad state to be in, I thought you go to uni to learn, but apparently not, you just contribute to their business and maybe you'll learn something along the way! No wonder so many uni lecturers are crap. There's absolutely NO incentive to teach. You don't even get paid additional to teach a subject. And hear this, if you've been selected to teach, you can actually PAY OUT a figure of 16K AUD to the university so that they hire someone else from outside the uni to teach the subject.

It'll be interesting to see what happens in the next few years. People will go to uni but they'll be complaining that the lecturers are all crap. No wonder we get people who know crap who work in "the real world", because the lecturers teaching them are crap in the first place.

According to dictionary.com, a university is

An institution for higher learning with teaching and research facilities constituting a graduate school and professional schools that award master's degrees and doctorates and an undergraduate division that awards bachelor's degrees.

I emphasize higher learning. Now if lecturers who can't teach, tech, then students learning will be impeded. Which is really a bureaucracy. Perhaps this should be changed to "An insitution for RESEARCH, with learning an afterthought and fueled by bureaucracy and business driven purposes".

Sad sad sad...

Thoughtworks

2006-06-09T16:49:00.000+10:00

So this other company called thoughtworks is interviewing me. Apparently if you don't have more than 2 years of "real work experience" in a large commercial environment, you get placed in their graduate program and spend 6 weeks in India on their training program. They also say that they hire the smartest and brightest, however this blog post indicates otherwise.

http://www.pyrasun.com/mike/mt/archives/2005/04/23/18.29.03/index.html

Not sure if I want to work for them now, and there's no way that I'm working for a starting grad salary, no way. I like it where one person said "They helped develop me, a 22 year-old kid fresh out of college with little more than two semesters of programming under his belt." Surrounded by idiots or newbs is the last thing I want to be doing.

Interviews

2006-06-08T21:46:00.000+10:00

Today I had the longest interview with Redhat, whom headhunted me recently. 2 days ago I had an hour long interview over the phone and today, I had an interview that went well over 3 hours in person, in fact it was close to 3 1/2. 4 different people interviewed me. It took such a long time I thought it was going to go on forever. Some of the questions I felt were strange. Like how many cars are in Australia, how many company cars are in Australia and how many buses. I'm assuming that's how they think about your problem solving and creative process but I felt it was stupid. Anyway... I did alright I think, except I buggered up the reverse linked list question, but I figured it out in the end. I'm still not sure if I should do it though. Apparently many engineers work overtime and I'll hate that. I like to put in my 100% during office hours and after that it's enough, I don't want to live in work (unless it's my own thing.. of course). We'll see if I get it or not. But it's no biggie if I don't. Not to say I was trying not to get it, cos I am still interested in it but I want to learn as much as I can. If I can't learn or if it's not interesting there's no point in doing it.

International Prospectus 2007 - The face of Science and Technology

2006-05-09T17:41:00.000+10:00

So I found out from a friend today that I'm in the international prospectus for this year, on page 74. I'm the "featured graduate" in the Science and Technology section, out of five other sections. I have to say, the picture is HUGE. My face takes up more than half the page! They could have made it smaller at least. Unlike the other featured students, I made no attempt to say the university's the best, even mention the courses available, or the slightest hint that teaching was even remotely good. Maybe the international student count will drop now. Haha!!

Sleep, need.. more

2006-04-24T02:10:00.000+10:00

It's 2am and I'm going nuts over Rails. Can't get the scaffolding to display properly if an id is not autonumber. Blah. Ian I hope you can help me. Ian's the supervisor of this subject, but somehow I feel he is busier with other things. There's no textbook on rails either that's available to borrow, so I am .. dependent on google. Waste of time this is!!

I swear by the time I finish this semester will be an incredible achievement by anyone's standards. I don't think people can live or stay sane with that amount of work that I'm doing.

People need to think about their future more. My brother has no idea what he's doing in the future, other than study. Everyone only plans for the moment. I told my mum this and she said she'll advise him, with what? To work harder? Where's that going to get you? Uni work, so much of it's irrelevant. I wish it were true, but unless you apply everything you learnt everyday, you won't remember much if not all of it. Sometimes it's not what you've learnt, but what you apply what you've learnt, that gets you anywhere. A lot of technology stuff that's being taught in uni is way WAY outdated. And if it's taught? Well it's crap because they get crap lecturers to teach it. They should get people who are leaders in their field to teach it, but they're not going to do that even though they have millions. Alas alack, one can only depend on themselves. Rails would be a great subject to teach, but too bad the universities won't teach it till.. YEARS later, if ever. I can remember back in 2003 one of the lecturers said "next semester" they would be introducing this new subject to teach X, well fast forwad to 2006 and still zip!!! Another instance that I can remember was learning programming in Windows 3.1 when Windows 95 or 98 was released. It was plain stupid, when I asked the lecturer why he didn't reply, I suppose it was his way of saying heck I don't care, I'm just being paid to teach. Yes I'm in a bit of a complaining mood. But makes it easier for me to differentiate myself from the rest... I hate it how people say I only make X amount of dollars when I deserve more, when they do nothing to make themselves stand out, do nothing to make themselves improve, but complain as if the world owes them a living. If I'm a boss of some big company, and there's A, B, and C, and all of them are the same with skills, I'll pick the one with best value for money, a.ka. cheapest labour. It's only common sense. Don't these people think?!??

Anyway I've had enough of complaining, time to sleep...

Interesting times

2006-03-27T00:28:00.000+10:00

I'm currently reviewing a contract and it talks about withholding tax of up to ONE THIRD of income. That's just crazy. This is irregardless of how much you earn!!! Damn France taxation system. I'm not sure if I can even claim it back, but I hope I can. I'll probably still want to sell it in France because of the opportunities it can provide, but still I am quite pissed off at how much tax I will have to pay.

On the other hand, my software's currently being reviewed in Japan to go retail. That will be a separate contract. It will be just fantastically awesome if it happens.. cross my fingers. It's always been a dream of mine to have it boxed on a shelf in a shop. I remember a friend who was sort of saying as a joke so you sell your software in a box about a year and a bit ago, and now it's becoming a reality. Royalty payments for life if it happens. Makes me wonder sometimes why am I even bothered about uni!! And the answer is, I have a point to prove. And because, I can!

Well, back to studying!

Careers Fair

2006-03-22T20:13:00.000+10:00

I went to the university careers fair today. I was there late and it was just about to close (which has been the case for the past 3 years) but managed to pick up a handbook called graduate opportunities 2006. I was interested in the graduate employment statistics and here's some bits off it. It's called "Median starting salaries of bachelor graduates in first full-time employment and aged less than 25, in Australia 2004". Numbers in brackets are starting salaries of the different degrees.

Medicine graduates are the ones which the highest employment rate of 99.6% (50K), followed by pharmacy 99.3% (38K), veterinary science 97.1% (36K) and dentistry 96.4% (60K).

From the other end of the table, we have arts and design 56.8% (32K), mathematics 65% (40K), humanities 65.5% (35K) and biological sciences 67.4% (36K) forming the bottom 4.

The median salary was 38K, 39K for males and 38K for females. At first glance I thought these salaries were actually low. And I still feel that they are low. Including taxes it would be much lower!

At the careers fair there were no small companies, only the big (and D U L L, Australian tax office, AusAid, MasterFoods, Ford, blah blah.. zzz) ones. The ones that provide-a-stable-income-so-that-you-may-shut-up kind of company. Why?? I would rather work for a small one than a big one. I walked past 2 companies that actually have purchased software that I've developed. They just have no idea! I suspect most if not all the people who were advertising were minions.

Anyway back to work!!

Why you need a university scholarship (from the perspective of an overseas student)

2006-03-19T01:07:00.000+10:00

International students bring in heaps of money to the universities in Australia. And then spend years paying back the loans. And I mean years.

As an international student studying a Science bachelor's degree, you will spend approximately 22 K AUD each year on fees alone. This is based on a full time university load of 8 units per semester. Now let's include living expenses, which is estimated at say 15 K. That makes it a total of 37 K AUD each year. And a total of 148 K AUD over 4 years for the full degree uptil honours.

Now let's assume this international student, who is from Singapore, goes back home and finds a job that pays a graduate pay of 2.08 K AUD per month (or 2.5K SGD), which is a best case scenario, in reality this could be as low as 1.66 K AUD (or 2 K SGD) or lower even. Now let's assume the student, now working, gets a pay rise of 83 AUD per month, (100 SGD) each year.

Total earnings after 1st year = 2.08 x 12 = 24.96 K AUD
Total earnings after 2nd year = 2.163 x 12 = 25.956 K AUD
Total earnings after 3rd year = 2.246 x 12 = 26.952 K AUD
Total earnings after 4th year = 2.329 x 12 = 27.948 K AUD
Total after 4 years = 105.816 K
Deficit of 42 K!!

After 4 years that's still well over 40 K short of what they paid for their degree, in fact it will probably take about 2 more years to achieve the same amount that was spent on a degree. That's 6 years of your life. Remember the 105.816 K is the amount that they are paid for and does not take into account living expenses, one will surely not even come close to saving that amount over 4 years. What's my point ? Well if you have a scholarship, the outlook is very different.

Let's say you have a full undergrad scholarship which covers all tuition fees. After 4 years, you only spend 60K. Still a substantial amount but less than half of 148K.

After graduation, and assuming you earn the same amount as mentioned early (but of course being exceptional they will probably get much more), you will cover the costs in slightly over 2 years. That's an almost 4 year difference between not getting a scholarship. 4 years is quite a big difference in terms of money, and time. If you include living expenses this gap will be much wider.

My point is, if your parents are paying for your uni fees, think about them and what they are doing for you. You always want to provide the best for your children. Getting a scholarship, as a son or daughter, will help them (and yourself) immensely. Not to mention bragging rights too.

Millionaire advice and RIP Betty Anne

2006-01-10T09:59:00.000+10:00

So I've finished reading a millionaire book, and here's an excellent quote that I've encountered.

"I am not impressed with what people own. But I'm impressed with what they achieve. Always strive to be the best in your field... Don't chase money. If you are the best in your field, money will find you."

Isn't it inspirational? I realise it's what I've been following, subconsciously. I like to highlight the phrase, "Don't chase money. If you are the best in your field, money will find you." Have a think about that.

Millionaires are frugal frugal frugal. They actually have annual planning for everything, gifts, shopping, etc. Most millionaires also own 2nd hand cars. Believe it or not. It sounds like me. I know I'll be a millionaire. It's only a matter of time. The ones who spend the most, earn high incomes but have high expenditure too. So they will never be wealthy, no matter how much they earn, aka the high volume consumer. Wealth ignores all social status. The thing to note is always live well below your means no matter how much you are earning.

Another interesting thing to note is adult children who are given monetary gifts (also referred to as "economic outpatient care") by their parents accumulate LESS wealth than adult children who are given less. True fact. Are you given lots of monetary gifts from your parents? If you are perhaps you should be worrying about your future.

Most people have two types of children and typically, the most economically productive one receives the smaller share of the parent's wealth, and the least productive one receives the lion's share of both economic outpatient care and inheritance. Suppose you as a parent have noted at an early age that your eldest child is independent, achievement oriented and well disciplined. Your instinct would be to nurture these traits by not trying to control his or her decisions. Instead you spend more time helping your less resourceful child make decisions, or you actually make decisions for him. So what happens is you effectively strengthen the strong child and weaken the weak!! And it is the weak one the becomes the product of economic outpatient care.

That's it from the book, I've picked the most interesting bits out of it.

Betty Anne was an elderly lady from Canada who I talked to over the Net every now and then. She discovered me through puter-school.com where I was listed as a volunteer to help people with their computer troubles. I helped her with her computer troubles and got to know her a bit and some things about Canada. She passed away suddenly on boxing day due to a cerebral aneurism, which is basically bleeding in the brain. Reminds me of what happened to my cousin. Anyhow. RIP Betty Anne.

Eve of 2006 and a summary of 2005

2005-12-31T20:39:00.000+10:00

Today I went to brett's wharf where I had the most expensive lunch and then watched Fun with Dick and Jane at Southbank cinema. I fell asleep for about 20 minutes, which is not usual for me, for some reason I always fall asleep in cinemas, so I missed out on the ending. Oh well.

This year in terms of business, was quite good. I made more much than I expected. More than friends who are working full time even. I think I surprised myself and my mum (Didn't tell my dad, otherwise he would expect some money I am sure). If I had a so called "real job" I will probably easily make much more. And I wouldn't deny that some of them probably even work harder (a heck lot harder) than I. Whoever started this myth that working hard makes you more money should be "dragged out into the street and shot" (quote from Garfield). I've made enough to pay for the down payment of an apartment, all this time while

1. being a full time uni student
2. getting good grades
3. maintaining my sanity

In terms of academic performance, I couldn't ask better. I obtained a perfect GPA this year. It's funny how my primary school teachers used to say I'm an underachiever all the time. At the moment I'm not sure if I'm overachieving, but I can possibly say that I could do better in terms of earning more, and helping more people. I'm no joe millionaire, and I'm not making that much, but I'm sure I'll get there one day. I'm actually reading a book on millionaires at the moment, it's very interesting.

What I probably need to improve on is personal relations. I don't talk to many people, and hate crowds. Talking crap is one thing I'm never good at.

Well, onwards and upwards. Next semester's my last semester as a full time uni student. I'll be tutoring little kids this time round instead of uni students because I absolutely hate marking.

Happy New Year, to everyone who reads this.

Queue cutting girls and ragaholic customers

2005-12-13T08:05:00.000+10:00

So I used to think girls were really decent and sweet things (probably because of my mum). Of course this isn't true anymore. I was catching a cab close to midnight last Friday, the queue wasn't too long, but there were zero cabs. There were 2 guys at the head of the queue, and this girl about 17 or 18 just walked straight into the queue and asked them if she was cutting into the queue if she did that, sort of irrelevant question really, not sure what the guys replied but then she said I'm with the both of you and winked at them. Then of course she got into the cab with them when the next cab arrived. Now I'm not sure what propelled her to do that, perhaps male manipulation at work, but it did (Perhaps it was the first sign of a promosing pr0n star career!). Maybe because they were about the same age as her, but I thought that was really pathetic that she couldn't queue up like everyone else.
Saying that, I know there are decent girls out there however I think it's becoming increasing prevalent that girls are equally as bad as guys. No offense to anyone.

Yesterday I dealt with an angry and frustrated I-require-anger-management customer, who for some reason, was blaming everything on my end except himself. What did he do exactly? He ordered the wrong product, did not read ANY instructions that were provided whatsoever, and then subsequently sent me email messages saying he was going to complain to paypal and ebay, that my company was a fraud, that the website was a deception, and that I was conducting theft. Yes all of that he said, even though I was asleep and he was the one who actually made the payment, voluntarily, with no one pointing a gun to his head, nor a knife to his throat. Sheer genius at work. He said he did not recieve the software, but it was already mentioned that orders may take at least 48 hours. He said the website was a deception, when I have no idea how he gathered that, unless he was drunk, or perhaps suffering from extreme paranoia. That I was not a company located in the US (and the point being...??). Oh that my customer service sucked too because I was not giving him an instantaneous reply even though I did reply to all his email messages. I told him it was not my fault that he did not read any of the instructions or details that were provided, and he could only retaliate with the customer is always right (but not always reasonable) and pride cometh before the fall (Indeed, I wonder who was he referring to). And he attempted to use italian, he used the word "ciao" but spelt it incorrectly, so I corrected him.

Really some people.

Other than that it's all good in the customer world. I think I can handle 1 case of "oh your non USA company and products suck really bad" compared to hundreds of others who disapprove that view.

Summer and salaries

2005-12-08T16:54:00.000+10:00

I hate summer. Really I do. Walking to school makes me sweat like I've been through a marathon. Wish I could transform myself to a fish and live in a bowl. But then I would need to get someone to feed me. Clean my bowl. How troublesome. Knowing me I might do something crazy too like jump out of the bowl and end up experiencing a near death experience too. Eek.

I was planning on enrolling in a summer project this semester but then the co-ordinator said you couldn't do that if you were a full time honours student, you could only do it if you were a part time honours student. Turns out today my supervisor tells me that you can enrol in one, that's no problem with the school. Then she tells me 4 students have. And I said well obviously they didn't ask the course co-ordinator. Argh. Stupid university ambiguous rules! Hopefully I can still do one, less workload next semester. I realise I'm competing with some really smart arses. There was this one person who had 7 publications upon completion of honours. Not sure if he recieved the university medal or not, but probably yes. I'm sure he will end up being a PhD doing research for the rest or most of his life. Not sure if that's good or bad, but anyhow the best thing is to always compete with yourself. Besides, I'm not doing that bad. It's good to be a generalist, i.e. one that has multiple skills, in today's society rather than a specialist, i.e. one that only has a single specialised skill. Actually I would say it's essential to survive. If the area that you're working in experiences some economic disaster at least you can always branch out into a different area.

The education system in today's society is flawed especially in the way salaries are paid. Why would I say that, well look around you, the brightest people are not necessarily the ones who make the most. My parents used to say work hard so you can get a good job with good pay, and I'm sure everyone's parents have said that to them but it's not true. In fact, a few months back over at UQ where there was a summer research internship thing going on for undergraduates, the PhDs who gave the talk actually said do not do undertake this research program if you want to make money. It was paying about $200 a week, you can probably survive by eating grass off the ovals, okay it's not THAT bad, just really awfully bad. So the students are conditioned to acknowledge that hey, even though I make a slightly pathetic salary, at least I will get something done in my resume. I don't think that's the right thing to do. Heck someone I know who will be doing a PhD soon has said to me she just wants to study and doesn't really care about the money she makes as long as she has her own nice apartment. Do people look upon themselves so lowly (lack of ambition) nowadays??

99% of the honours students who graduate with me will probably be made use of (aka "hired") by someone who wants their skills but not give them the salary they deserve. Then again everyone has their price, so I suppose as long as they are happy, but I know I won't be working under anyone unless we were joint partners.

One step closer to the university medal

2005-11-30T02:47:00.000+10:00

Well I scored all high distinctions this semester for my first honours semester, YES! Basically a high distinction is the best grade that you can achieve at the University of Queensland, and universities around Australia. So one large step closer to the university medal! For someone who is academically ambitious so to speak, grades mean a lot, especially since I'm striving to be more than uber. Anyhow, I can afford to get all distinctions next semester and still get 1st class honours, AND qualify for the university medal. The lowest I've ever scored for any semester is 3 high distinctions and 1 distinction, so that's a low probability that I will get all distinctions. We'll see next semester anyway, but I'm pretty sure I'm on the right track. For the curious this semester I took COMP4001 which is the course code for complex systems, INFS3204 which is service oriented architectures, COMP4809 which is research methods, and COMP6804 which is my thesis project (and the mark hasn't been finalised yet, not until next semester since it's a yearlong subject).

Anyhow I'm flying back to Brisbane tonight. Tata Sydney you've been nice but really, why are things so expensive around here ?!?

In Sydney

2005-11-25T02:05:00.000+10:00

I'm currently in Sydney taking a break from finishing my exams. It's the same as I last remembered it. The last time I was here was last year around February. Nothing much has changed, if at all. I'm staying with a friend who lives in Parramatta. Parramatta has quite a large Asian population, something which I'm not really used to, but that's fine with me. So anyhow today I spent around 8 hours in a karaoke booth. Well not really 8 hours because we left after an hour or something to have dinner, then went back. The place was called K-Mix. Anyhow it was $10AUD per person. The English songs were all pirated, but the other songs were original! Actually some of the English songs were clips of Australia, there was one of Sydney. That was funny. Today I had yum cha as well, and had pork ribs and chicken feet, first time I've tried both. They actually didn't taste that bad. But I doubt I'll have it again. I only ate it cos my friend convinced me too. Haha!! I've been having Asian food since I've been in Sydney, which I am not really used to because I don't usually have it all the time. In Brisbane anyhow.

Why go to university and why get good grades ?

2005-10-26T11:38:00.000+10:00

The matter of fact is, you do not need a university degree to do well, earn big bucks, etc. However we all know education is important. Because it's what we are judged upon if we aren't rich and famous, have so called celebrity status, etc.

There are varying levels of how "good" your academic capability is, based on grades. Every subject that we study is graded upon. If you get good grades, it would mean you would be a better person suited to the job, or better qualified, but does it really matter ?? Well if you look upon it in a personal perspective, yes it does. If you do well for the subject, you would be more capable in providing the services when you start to work. Therefore this would make you "less selfish" so to speak, because you will provide value for money to the persons who you provide services to. If you score badly, then it would mean you do not provide value for money to the person you provide services to, and in many cases, weave a story and hopefully the poor person will believe you (or not!). This would therefore make you a selfish person. So, are you a selfish person? Are you someone who just aims for a pass for your subjects? Because if you are, you know you can do a better job than just aiming for a pass. And if you ARE aiming for a pass, perhaps you should just drop the subject and take up a different subject. Otherwise you will only make yourself suffer. And inevitably others as well.

So aim for good grades. You will make the world a better place if you do!

First scandalous entry

2005-10-25T16:58:00.000+10:00

I'm bored, so bored that I've decided to create a blog. Whether or not this results in anything productive, I do not know. I'm supposed to be working on my thesis but I have no wish to do work at the moment. Go me! I'm supposed whoever is reading this is dead bored too. Hahaha!!

So who am I anyways ? I'm a full time student pursuing the university medal at the University of Queensland in Australia in the area of Computer Science, I own a software development company, with a relatively comprehensive portfolio. I believe in working smart and helping people. I like to aim for the impossible, be above average, and so on and so forth. I have a background in multimedia and e-business, and can possibly provide some really handy tips for you, the reader, if you own a business, on improving pagerank and traffic.

This blog, at this point in writing, will talk about my life in uni (or what's left of it!), my aims, my business, and other things.