Just Say Wen

The other day my friend Andy came over and asked a fateful question: “Oh my God... have you ever played a game called LF2??”

The answer was an obvious and emphatic “YES!”

Little Fighter 2, commonly known as LF2, is a game where kids fight each other. Quite simply, you pick a character, and you beat the crap out of each other. Or, you can beat the crap out of the computer as you pass the five stages of the game.

Since it only runs on Windows, and I was the only one that had it (albeit running on my Mac), the three of us hunched over my laptop, each of us having 7 keys: up down left right defend jump attack.

This game brought back wonderful memories of childhood, where I often shared a keyboard with my friends to play computer games. Where we shouted insults at each other. Where we would deliberately screw each other over just for kicks.

Before we knew it, it was past midnight and we had laughed so much I feel like I did a bunch of ab workouts. Some people might decry the abhorrent violence in the game - and with children for goodness sake. I guess I don’t see that part of it. I just see the children in us coming out and enjoying themselves.

Last weekend I hiked up and camped at Garibaldi Lake. At night, we went out by the lake and were greeted by a sky full of stars. The view was striking and the silence was powerful. And the totality of what I was experiencing got me thinking.

Like a person, each star has a story to tell. It probably had unique parents (every nebula looks different after all), a different time to maturity (our sun took 50 million years - what a baby), and a different luminosity, size, orbit, satellites (siblings?) and gravitational pull. It may also be scarred left right and centre by meteor strikes unique to itself. Just like a person.

Taken as a whole, the universe is beautiful. Sure, it has its black holes and scary warped time-space stuff, but when we look up at the night sky, we see beauty. Pure immense beauty.

We should see the same when we look at humanity.

No one person represents all of humanity, and no one star shines that much brighter than the others. It's the totality of all the stars that make us who we are.

When I think about all that I strive to be in my life, how can I be so myopic to leave out the billions of others who make up the rest of the picture? Without the others, I'm no work of art - I'm just a dot in the sky.

I had Subway twice today - lunch and dinner. Same sandwich too. Kind of sad, but whatever. At least I got an idea for a blog post.

People always rave about how great Subway is and I agree. Healthy, affordable, filling - my main criteria when evaluating what to eat. I've never thought much about the operations of it all though. I was staring at the boxes of veggies and thought to myself, "this looks like a piece of software".

One great advantage Subway has is that it can easily swap out an empty veggie box with a full one and carry on. The boxes can be re-ordered, new boxes can be added if new veggies are introduced, and I imagine they're easy to clean and store. Very modular - just like good software.

A modular business can be powerful in its adaptability. Something like Project Ara, which allows you to build your own phone based on the components you want. Not every business can do this, but I believe the more modular a business is, the faster it can adapt to its environment.

Since I'm heading off to Toronto soon to participate in The Next Founders program, I want to take some time and reflect on how beautiful my home for the last year is.

I live in Coal Harbour, which is right by Stanley Park, and is considered one of the nicer areas of downtown Vancouver. I can't afford it, but luckily I'm renting from a family friend who can, and can afford to give me a steep discount.

From my window, I can see the Second Narrow's Bridge in the distance, spanning an often glittering calm of water. In the summer, I often worked on the balcony with a cup of tea at hand. I had to reposition myself at various hours of the day to avoid the intense glare coming off of nearby condos - some of which were constructed at artsy, impractical angles, seemingly designed to blind balcony loungers such as myself.

A few steps from my condo is the actual harbour, where multi-storey yachts are covered up by tarps for most of the year. You can walk up and down the promenade and catch at least five different languages within 15 minutes. Though the area has many tourists, it doesn't feel touristy. Locals jog and cycle along the waterfront and most of the benches are occupied by whispering couples, gossiping friends, or pensive souls staring at the mountains on the north shore.

There's a community centre as well, where the studios have floor-to-ceiling windows. One can often see rows of adults doing yoga, girls doing ballet, or out-of-control kids running around in Taekwondo uniforms, kicking to their hearts content.

In the other direction, you have Stanley Park, where many people walk, bike, or rollerblade. The tall trees and greenery are a welcome respite from the glass and steel towers of the city. From the park, you can see the Vancouver skyline, the neat gas station in the middle of the water, and Canada Place, with its iconic white sails pointing towards the sky.

What's the last thing you want to do after 30 push-ups?  One more push-up. Yet, that's exactly how the RCMP trains its officers, and that's how they trained me when I was at the RCMP Youth Academy back in 2005.

The picture above is of me and the Corporal (I forget his last name).  In addition to the work he's done for the RCMP, he helped train the British troops before they were sent to Iraq.  I remember when our bus pulled up to the academy, he came on the bus with his cane and yelled, "Everyone off!  Give me two straight lines!"

*silence*

"WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?!"  At which point we understood and everyone clamoured for the door.  I found the situation amusing, so I started laughing.  And that's how I received the honour of being the first cadet to receive push-up punishments from the Corporal.

It wasn't the last time I'd be doing push-ups there.  Aside from the 5:30a.m. personal training push-ups, people did push-ups for all sorts of mistakes: dozing off in workshops, having your pillow at the wrong end of the bed during inspection, or even calling an officer "sir" instead of their rank ("sirs don't work for their money" being the common retort).

At the end of each set of push-ups, which we counted out loud, we were instructed to yell, "And one more for the Queen!", at which point we would do one more push-up.

I'm not espousing a return to the monarchy; rather, I'm espousing the spirit of doing one more when you feel like you can't anymore.  Because you can, and it often pays off.

Since then, whenever I've had to slog through something, I've always tried to do one more at the very end.  It could be when I was knocking on doors drumming up sales for my College Pro franchise, doing practice questions for an exam, or when I feel like calling it after 29 straight days of coding.  And each time I do it, I find myself picking up one more lead, getting one more question right, or discovering one more bug.  It's like magic.

The other day I spent the entire afternoon reaching out to people who might be good Time Auction rewards.  I wanted to stop, but I figured I should do one more.  And that's how I was able to get the Editor in Chief of the Toronto Star to be a Time Auction reward.

There's a neat little command you can add when you want to run the tests to your code.  I use rspec, and you can type:

rspec --fail-fast

And what will happen is that the system will start running your tests and then freak out as soon as something fails.  This is in contrast to running it without "fail fast", which runs all your tests and then tells you a summary of what failed.

One of the benefits of fail fast is speedy iteration.  If I catch something wrong early and I fix it, that fix might apply to later problems as well, hence saving time.  Also, in a situation where you are striving for perfection - as we do with automated testing in programming - one fail is as bad as 50 fails, so you might as well know earlier than later that something is wrong.

During one of my idle moments of thinking and pondering, I extended this philosophy beyond testing code and into the realm of the real world.  What if I added "fail fast" to my career?

Let's say I was rejected by someone I reached out to professionally.  Should I automatically regroup and change how I approached the person?  Not really.  Unlike coding, life operates more on statistics.  You may have the best pitch in the world but you just happened to pitch the one person that will never like your idea.  Better to gather more data points before calling in a fail.  Sort of like:

career --fail-enough-times-to-know-it-is-a-fail

Or:

career --fail-smart

Though we may never reach perfection - even 100% passing tests doesn't mean you wrote all the right tests or tested correctly - fast iteration can be smart if done correctly.

Apparently I like to code.  For the past 30 days I have committed and pushed code to GitHub.  Some days more (51 commits) some days less (3 commits).

To be honest, there have probably been longer streaks - the blank periods in the graph can all be explained.  Before March, I didn't know how to code (pushed a few things as part of a tutorial).  In June, I did contract work for LegalReach, which is under a private repo.  From August to November, I was working full time at AxiomZen, on the Twenty20 product, which is also under a private repo.

The commits that you can see are on all sorts of different projects - a piece of contract work for some ex colleagues, re-architecting FlyShortcut, a 3-day hackathon, updates to JustSayWen, TO Tablets stuff, a yet-to-be-reveiled project with my friend Kevin, and my favourite - remaking Time Auction, the demo of which is now live at TimeAuction.org.

I'd love to keep going.  Really.  Coding has become part of my daily routine.  It's common that I dream of code.  It's the weirdest thing.  I'll dream of getting stuck on a problem that doesn't exist, dream of solving it, and waking not having a clue what happened, only that I solved something and it felt good.

Actually, come to think of it, that's probably how I think about the problems I work on while awake.  In the thick of it, I think, "Why can't I solve this?!  This is SO important!"  And when I solve it, I think, "...was that really worth an hour and a couple handfuls of hair?  What did I solve again?  Oh ya, I was able to use callbacks to create nested has-many objects while reloading the factory sequence so that I can cleanly test my model methods - something that nobody will ever see".

When a puppy does something wrong, everyone is familiar with the training methods of saying no, spraying water, or raising your voice.  And when they do something right, we reward them with a treat.

At least for myself, I think I don't do that latter part as much.  I'm hard on myself when I make a mistake, but I'm not as rewarding to myself when I do something good.  Even if it's something as simple as taking a small break when I finish a task - we are all animals after all.

One caveat.  The puppy in the picture is a clever little puppy called Boshin (Korean for a type of dog soup...).  When she goes to pee in the right spot, everyone says "good girl!" and we give her a treat.  Then we start noticing that she sometimes pretends to pee and then comes to ask for a treat.  Or maybe she pees only a little.  I will need to keep in mind that the only person I'll be tricking is myself if I decide to pull such tricky antics.

A few years ago my friends and I started a tradition where we would go count down to the new year at my friend Andrew's cemetery plot.  He passed away on Sept. 20, 2007 from Olfactory Neuroblastoma.

There's too much to say about Andrew for me to write down in a blog post, and I'm probably not ready for that yet anyways.

One thought that came into my mind at the cemetery this year was the topic of tradition.  Often times I think traditions are silly.  As Mark Twain says in the Adventures of Tom Sawyer, “The less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it”.  Why do people have to tell kids that Santa is real?  Why do people have to buy a wedding ring or get married?   Why do people have to give red bags to each other knowing that they will give you one too, and it might be awkward if one is greater than the other?

I've come to realize more and more that one good reason to keep up a tradition is the beauty of it.  Like art.  There's a depth to each work of art that cannot be seen on the surface - layers of stories buried beneath the one we see.

You may know me to cook as follows: chop everything up, throw everything into a frying pan, serve.  When it comes to food, I value speed, volume, and frugality.  It's no wonder baking a pie for a potluck wasn't exactly up my alley.

Right before I had to bake the pie, I was writing up some code for my latest hack project.  I kept delaying the inevitable because it seemed so daunting to me - how does one bake a pie?!  I'd rather stick with code - at least it tells me when I'm doing something wrong.

A couple hours before we had to leave, my girlfriend finally said to me, "You know all those codes and commands you type onto the black screen and out comes a website?  If you can do that, you can bake a pie."  Well said.  A year ago, I did not know how to program and after going to Dev Bootcamp apparently now I'm one of the top 8% most active Ruby users on GitHub.  Someone even made a jingle about me.  With a little persistence and patient guidance, the mysterious can be made easy.

There's something special about the bus I take to and from Vancouver.  It's not magic or double decker; instead, it can go back in time.

The reason I say this is because quite often I see someone I haven't seen for a while on the bus.  Having always lived elsewhere since high school, the rare occasions I come home usually allow me to bump into someone and have a good chat catching up while the bus rumbles along the highway.  Yesterday I bumped into my friend Devin, and we had a nice chat down memory lane.

I'm also fascinated by how well our mind works to recognize people after so long.  Devin looks quite different now than when I last saw him, and yet somehow I was able to recognize him quite easily.  It's great to hear about what everyone is up to.  Kind of like taking a bus ride into their lives, stopping at the major events and moving on to the next.

For you keeners, I realize that the Totoro Catbus does not go back in time, but it does provide a bit of magic, and I was never into the Magic School Bus (though I have taken this bus in Toronto a few times and the below decked out bus when I was in Nicaragua).  It makes me look forward to taking that bus, never knowing whose path I'll cross, and where this bus will take me today.

"And then he attacked me with a chain, so I grabbed a mop and went all Bruce Lee on him you know?"  Said the homeless man, whom I shall call Y.  He chatted heartily with us while signing his name on the blank housing papers that will likely all be rejected.  This is due to his unwillingness to be transparent with his source of income - gambling.

Last week I went to check out a volunteering opportunity my girlfriend looked up for us.  It is an outreach program that provides information and resources to help homeless people survive.  During the day they have office hours, and on certain nights of the week, they hit the streets to distribute food, blankets, and other helpful resources.  I've been out of the volunteering loop for a bit now, and since I'm in control of my own schedule these days I figured I'd get back into it.  Plus, I'm going to make Time Auction my major project so this is a good way for me to better understand the scene.

It took us awhile to even get a hold of the program manager.  We later learn that he gets about 50 voicemails a day and is constantly out helping clients.  According to Y, "He's the real deal.  Many people out there - they just pretend to care.  God will judge them - if a judgement day does come.  But him.  He can actually help."  We sat down with the program manager and started seeing how we could help Y.  Y suffers from severe cellulitis, to the point where his right leg is literally twice the size of his left leg.  He's overweight (likely diabetic) and smells of damp, unwashed clothing.

Y tells us that he recently got kicked out of a specific social housing unit and has been staying at another one that he absolutely hates, due to the fact that they force-feed him religion along with their aid.  The program manager patiently tells Y of a few new places that have come up and asks if Y would like them.  He refuses to live in North Van ("some gangs are still after me there"), the East Van locations ("I know that landlord, they're sneaky"), or anywhere that's too far away.  Initially surprised, I eventually realized that sometimes beggars deserve to be choosers - if they have no respect for themselves, how can they ever turn their life around?

After the paperwork, we give Y a few things to take away.  He's ecstatic about an old piece of two-wheeled luggage that the program manager gives him.  "Now my doctor's notes won't get dirty from the food I put in my bag".  He also takes some canned food and juice.

We decide to drive him back to wherever he wants to go.  As we're driving through downtown, Y says just up there is fine.  He points to the Fairmont Vancouver City Center, the iconic four-star hotel that sits right in the middle of downtown Vancouver.  He asks us to turn into the valet parking area, where Mercedes SUVs are unloading tourists and luggages carrying people's getaway gear.  As I help unload Y and his life belongings, I become painfully aware of the stark juxtaposition of wealth and poverty - in my own neighbourhood no less.  Y with his blackened foot, no shoes, and dirty belongings walking away from the glittering four-star hotel.

There's a Chinese card game called Sheng Ji (升級) that I believe is a great combination of teamwork, intelligence, signalling, and probability.  As with many other Chinese games (e.g. Mahjong) the game is complicated, meticulously calculated to be fair, and can take a while to play (and can be turned into gambling, but let's not go there).  A good analogy is the game Bridge.

I first started playing in second year university.  My friend and housemate Frank suddenly asked if I knew how to play, and before we knew it we got two other people and the four of us were huddled on the floor in my room slamming down cards and hurling verbal obscenities at each other (not part of the rules but certainly part of the fun).  The long games would also get quite physically demanding, and it didn't help that I didn't have any furniture except for the back row seats of my old College Pro Painting van.  We started playing quite frequently and would often take advantage of exam period breaks to play all night in many fierce intellectual battles (if there's a way to make that sound cooler please let me know).

This game requires lots of memorization - you typically play with two decks of cards.  I've seen Frank play three or four decks and that just boggles my mind.  But then again, that's partly why I play it - to boggle my mind.  Yesterday was the first time I've played in a long time and I felt myself loving it.  The foursome I used to play with are now in Vancouver, Toronto, London, and Hong Kong, which makes playing a bit tough, so it was great to get back into it.  The feeling of taking calculated risks, trying to remember what someone else played three hands ago, and the feeling of playing a "tractor" hand are still engrained inside of me.

Maybe you can tell what a person is like by what he likes to play.  Like Warren Buffett in Bridge.  Or Barack Obama and basketball.  Or my mom and Candy Crush.  According to an interesting article on Aeon Magazine, a lack of play ironically robs children of growing up.  One particluarily disturbing quote is, "The decline in opportunity to play has also been accompanied by a decline in empathy and a rise in narcissism...".  As we've all heard, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

He was not a perfect person, and that's what makes him even more impressive.  Those who say he was not bitter towards anyone missed one person - F.W. de Klerk.

I must confess I didn't know of him until reading more into Mandela.  De Klerk was the president before Mandela, and his negotiations with Mandela to end apartheid led to them both being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Then I read this article, with the title: "Mandela was just a man, and that made what he did extraordinary".  It was fascinating, in that it detailed a person who was just like anyone else - a person who got mad, got disappointed, and released anger inappropriately.  Specifically, the article mentions how Mandela did not think De Klerk deserved the Nobel Peace Prize, since he asserted that De Klerk spent most of his career actually upholding apartheid.  Mandela, further disappointed that De Klerk didn't acknowledge South Africa's past cruelties during the acceptance speech, proceeded to snap over dinner in a venomous tirade against apartheid and its past supporters.  Completely out of character - especially in such a celebratory setting - many who were present were taken aback at this side of Mandela they have never seen.

The article goes on, however, to say that just because he still has some bitterness in his heart, doesn't mean that it should diminish any of the accomplishments he had achieved.  If anything, it goes to show how much he had to conquer and fight himself, and to sacrifice his guilty pleasure of anger and hate, in order to attain a greater goal of democracy and justice for all.

If scientists proved that Mandela was missing a nerve in his brain that made him incapable of anger or bitterness, perhaps we wouldn't think of him as greatly as we do today.  It is precisely this imperfection that makes him so much stronger in our eyes.  We all have our weaknesses and most of the time we know them - even if we don't admit it.  To be able to overcome them for the sake of something greater takes an enormous strength that we can all relate to.

At the time of writing, I have lived less years than Mandela was in prison.  If I was to go to jail now and serve his sentence, I would be out when I'm 53.  If, at that time, I can continue forth and accomplish the goals that put me in prison in the first place, and have only one known incident where I've snapped at someone, you can call me extraordinary.

Why do I feel shy about eating alone in a restaurant?  I mean, do I feel ashamed if I walk to work alone?  Or if I work out alone?  What is it about eating that makes me think it has to be a communal activity, and if you're eating alone, it must mean you have no friends?

I ran out of food at home and was going to meet a friend for coffee in the afternoon anyways, so I figured I'd grab some food outside.  With no Subway in sight, I panicked and almost went into a yuppie organic sandwich shop simply because it had solo high chairs staring out into the street.  But reason got the better of me and I decided to conquer this fear once and for all.

The only other times I've eaten alone in a restaurant were when I travelled.  I often ate at restaurants in developing countries to save the potential intestinal agony of eating off the streets.  But that's ok, because during my travels, I clearly look like a traveler with my black hair, ripped clothes, intentionally battered-looking SLR, and Lonely Planet.

But this time was different.  I was dressed... normally.  Being Asian in Vancouver is like being Asian in... Asia.  I didn't stand out at all.  But when the waitress asked if it was, "for one?" I proudly said yes.  Why not.  I'm going to pay for this meal and I'm going to enjoy my solitude.

Fine, I pulled out my Kobo and started reading.  And fine, I felt better seeing other people who were eating alone at tables of two.  It was at least an incremental step for me.  I'll do what I want, and I don't care what others think.  Better yet, I should know that others probably don't even care about whether you eat alone or not, and those who do are not worthy of attention from anyways.

If you've ever worked with CSS, you've probably felt this feeling of slowly bubbling anger, ultimately exploding in an animated series of profanity and shaking of the laptop.  Unfortunately, unlike our friend Peter, we cannot just rip it apart with the same satisfaction.

On my current project, there have been multiple instances of this, all seemingly as simple as pulling the blinds up and down.  This morning, I felt this way again trying to close the lid on a Starbucks mug my friend gave me.  Try as I might, the lid kept going in crooked, and I swore I just closed it the other day!

After 5 minutes of spilling and asking the mug why it won't close, I finally took the time to step back and think rationally.  I investigated the threads on the lid.  No problems.  I investigated the threads on the mug.  Problem.  It was in the dishwasher and some of the threads had warped ever so slightly, but enough to always derail the lid.

I watched in horror as the cyclist in front of me cycled into a red light.  Sure, he was checking left and right, but why take the risk?  How much time does this guy actually save - and at what risk to himself?

I must say, I'm not a perfect cyclist myself.  The only time I've ever been pulled over was on my bike.  There was a four-way red light for pedestrian-only crossing and I plowed right through it on my bike thinking I'm just a dude on a bike, who am I going to hurt?  A few seconds later a cop turns on the siren (overkill?) and waves me to the side.  He asks for my driver license (are cyclists supposed to have one?!  What if I'm 12 years old?) and proceeds to run it through the database of badasses.  In fact, he actually said to me, "So am I gonna find out that you're a badass?"  He said it in a joking tone, probably because I don't look like a criminal, with my glasses and helmet.  He gives me a warning and a message that "he often picks cyclists off the pavement in pieces" so i should be more careful.  Duly noted.

So, when I saw the guy in front of me do this, I know what he's thinking.  I've been there myself.  I can see the pedestrian countdown almost at 0, and there are no cars in sight.  He had just pulled up, so it'd be annoying to stop and start again (even though he's not wearing clip-on shoes).  It's very tempting to save the 3 seconds plus the 2 second delay before red lights turn green.  A few seconds saved here could mean that you beat the next light, and the next, and ad infinitum until you have so much time you don't know what to do with it.

Probably not true.

Often someone sneaks a trick like this ahead of me and I take my time, only to catch up with them anyways at the next light.  But let's say you are able to succeed 4 times in a given ride, and you save 30 seconds each time.  Would you trade 2 minutes for a chance you'll get hit by a car?  No thanks.  The same goes for speeding when you're driving.  Going 120km/h versus 100km/h is 20% faster.  But unless you're driving long distances, the earnings don't amount to much.  For a typical 50km commute, you'll get there in 25 minutes versus 30 minutes.  And a car is arguably more dangerous - both in terms of harming yourself and harming others.  Is 5 minutes worth it?