Rant on Nick Wang

Reverse the pecking order and Rectify the unjust banking structure

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 16:16:31 +0000

Just came back to Seattle and saw this on the news:

Merrill Lynch exec, Peter Kraus, got paid a $25 million bonus for what amount to a few weeks of work. This is after Bank of America had bought out Merrill Lynch and received a $25 billion cash infusion from the US government’s bailout plan. Peter Kraus just bought a $37 million, 5 bedrooms co-op apartment in NYC’s Upper East Side, at 720 Park Avenue.

I have a big problem with things like this and those greedy CEOs getting multi-million dollar salary / bonus while the average Joe can barely survive from paycheck to paycheck! I guess it’s due to my background, my father is an engineer and I also worked as an engineer at Microsoft and Yahoo! People like us are “creators”, we develop, implement & maintain things so that businesses can run, produce and earn money. To engineers and scientists, there’s more to a job than just monetary compensation, we also look for that sense of accomplishment when we create meaningful things for the world!!! We take pride in our work based on our achievements and meaning, more than how much money we make!!

I’ve always had a hard time understanding finance and the stock market. Why are these people simply trading papers and can make a shitload of money while producing no quantifiable products for the world? Why are we letting these people control our money??! Anybody else think that this is seriously fucked up?!! I wish someone would enlighten me and may be we can find solutions to fix this social unjust, reverse the pecking order, and take back the control of our hard earned money from the evil banks. Speaking of evil, I’m reading “The Google Story” and one chapter is about Google’s process to IPO. What these guys had done really impressed me! Excerpts from the book:

Larry and Sergey knew about the scandals - some criminal, some unethical, all evil - where Wall Street underpriced IPOs and then let favored clients profit by dumping the stock on day one, after the price skyrocketed. The guys wanted no part of what seemed to be a corrupt and rotten system. Google used an egalitarian method for distributing stock to the public, this means anyone can participate, and would overcome the Wall Street bias toward underpricing. Brin and Page resented what they viewed as a Wall Street monopoly when it came to fees. All the firms charged the same exorbitant fees for handling IPOs - 7%; in a $2 billion public offering, they would earn $140 million. … They decided they would compensate Wall Street at less than half of the usual and prevailing fees, and if the brokerage houses didn’t like it, they didn’t have to participate in the deal. Furthermore, they developed detailed plans to wrest control over the unfair pricing and allocation of shares, and reserved the right to cancel the deal at the last moment if they changed their minds. To put it mildly, the Google Guys were sending a “drop-dead” message to Wall Street. Larry and Sergey were advised by their outside lawyers that once they filed IPO documents with the SEC, they would enter something know as the “quiet period”, when they would have to make sure they said nothing to tout the value of Google stock. As populists, it made no sense to Brin and Page that the quiet period permitted something called a road show, where they would meet behind closed doors with big money people, the institutinal investros and heavyweights of Wall Street, to give presentations and answer questions. Why did it make sense to give those big insiders an advantage at road shows gatherings, leaving outsiders and small investors to fend for themselves? This seemed like a typical self-serving Wall Street tradition, and they aimed to break it, or at least bend it, in the process of going public. They would say little or nothing new at the road shows, and give everyone access to the same additional data about Google by posting it on the Internet.

Finally, another excerpt from the same chapter that talks about engineers and good and evil:

Many of the best engineers had a strong sense of the deeper philosophical issues of right and wrong, and of good and evil. Technology, in and of itself, could be a force of light or darkness. By instinct, talented technologists were attracted to a company that had appealing values and virtues that went beyond maximizing profits and market share.

A little too exaggerating, may be. But all the same, a lot of my colleagues at Yahoo! felt the same way back then. (though we certainly didn’t mind when our stock options kept shooting up either.) :P

Comments

Jason Khanlar — 2009-02-09 01:06:47

I agree wholeheartedly. :3 Interesting blog!

Earthquake in China and Karma

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 11:27:51 +0000

Just read something about the victims in Earthquake stricken Szechuan in Western China - a man lost both of his sons and now dedicates his life to exposing the corrupt local government which allowed poor constructions of schools in the area, but got arrested in the middle of the night and was told not to continue bothering the government! A woman who lost her friends due to leaked poison from the local heavy industry factories, but is forced to go back to work there now to get by! Apparently there were a couple of scientists that kept sending letters to the government to warm them about building a big fucking dam right in the middle of not one, but two continental fault lines! One of them also warned beforehand that the added weight of water may actually induce an earthquake! Two thousand years ago, the area was already constantly being flooded and the ancient Chinese went with the flow of nature and simply directed the river into multiple branches! Human and nature hence lived peacefully together for 2000 freaking years. Nowadays, we have become fools who think we can control and alter nature!! orz The earthquake killed millions of poor, ordinary people… and we got a comment from Sharon Stone asking “Is that Karma?” I think it kinda shows how unpopular the Chinese government is in the eyes of the West… but we’ve got to separate the little people - the poor men & women & kids who work at the local heavy industries that are poisoning their lands, just to put bread on the table!, from the corrupt government and corporations!! These people still haven’t gotten back to normal lives, everything is still in shambles, but guess what? Those poisonous factories are already back up and running! If you wanna talk Karma, then please let’s talk about the cheap handbags, clothes, shoes, LCD tvs, computers, digital cameras - Walmart, K-mart, Target… etc etc… Remember what prices used to be 10 years ago for a large TV? Lower prices means more sales and more profit for the corporations, but at what expense? How about factories in China that heavily pollute our Earth?! Part of the money you spent on you LCD TV goes to the pockets of corrupted Chinese government officials and the factories owners. So, economically, we the consumers is where it all started. The bad Karma begins with you and me!!! Let’s really thinking about where we should give our money to!

Limiting Internet Usage before Harry Potter release in fear of Spoilers

Tue, 17 Jul 2007 23:48:40 +0000

I’ve just saw a news from Slashdot that someone had taken pictures of every single page of the US version of Harry Potter book 7 and released it on torrents. In fear of what happened to me when book 6 was released, I think I’m going to stop using the internet from now until I this Saturday.

So much to do... so little time...

Thu, 22 Mar 2007 22:06:05 +0000

It has been 2 months since I last interviewed for that Yahoo JP Business Intelligence Engineer position, and they still haven’t found the right person. Proves me right… it’s hard to find someone with that kind of technical skills while being fluent in Japanese. Meanwhile, my other option was to migrate to our own Data Warehouse team…

I called up the manager over in Sunnyvale after my former manager Phil told me that they’re are short on staff and the manager was thinking about bringing in some temps. That’s the problem with our big corporations these days, it happened in my Microsoft days and it’s happening again now. They just can’t hire any full timers. The manager acknowledged that he needed people, and he realized that it would be beneficial for his team to have someone “old school” like me. Yet, in the end, he had to bring in contractors. So… I’m still stuck here in the New York office. I’ve been keeping myself extremely busy though. I haven’t given up on Japanese yet… studying Japanese vocabularies and grammar at night. At work, when I have time outside of the data migration project, I study my new Oracle Architecture book. I’m also going to work with Phil on testing the data integrity of the Data Warehouse, just pending my current manager’s approval. I wish I have more time though, as I still haven’t gotten around to ripping Wordpress apart and learning to turn it into my web businesses. I’ve gotten through its “theme” and learned to manipulate it using CSS, but I’m not interested in it, I wish someone else can handle that shit for me. I will just focus on the backend. I want to finish all 3 tasks ASAP… how do I juggle all 3 tasks at once? I think my top priority is Oracle, as it is needed immediately for the Data Warehouse, and it’s the easiest out of the 3. Japanese will take the longest, in fact, I have the same feeling as one of my language partner… that I’ll never be able to become fluent in it. (Doesn’t mean I won’t try though.) Finally, the website. I’m really slacking off here… this is the one thing that can potentially bring in the most cash for me, but I’m putting it on the back burner… I guess I just need someone to work together … may be I should search for a wordpress user group in New York…

Had "Okinawan" food last night

Wed, 07 Mar 2007 14:22:06 +0000

At a place called “Suibi Japanese Restaurant” at 53rd St in Upper East Side. It’s Japanese Restaurant Week this week and I found this place on the list. At JapanesePod101, I had learned about Okinawa food like ゴーヤチャンプル and タコライス and their unique alcohol 泡盛. They didn’t have “Taco Rice”, the Goya Champuru was ok but I don’t really like that bitter plant… We ordered something that looked pretty good on the menu, it’s called 豆腐よーうー and it’s described as Tofu added with 泡盛なっとう to become a cheese like texture… well, it turns out to be the same as a Chinese 腐乳 (is that how it’s written?) A tiny block of it cost me $8.75! I felt seriously ripped off! What are some other suggested food from Okinawa? I was disappointed last night, but I’ll definitely try again if I can find another place that serves Okinawan food. :)

Why hadn't I study Japanese more seriously?

Tue, 23 Jan 2007 18:24:18 +0000

Just spoke with the manager for a Business Intelligence Analyst position I found on Yahoo!’s internal job board. This job is perfect for me! I’ve been working steadily toward Data Warehousing / Business Intelligence as my career path, this position requires Oracle skills (which I have, though not extremely efficient as I don’t work with Oracle databases everyday), DataStage (and ETL tool) and Japanese language skills.

I haven’t used DataStage, but I understand the ETL processes and I have been doing similar “Extract, Transform & Load” process RAW, by writing the queries in Oracle, spooling the results to text files, FTP’ing the files to another database server, loading the data into one central database and make the necessary transformation so all the data are uniform and can be queried together. Finally, setting it all up in a cron job to be run automatically. So basically, to learn to use DataStage is NOT a problem for me. It’ll be easy. The problem is the Japanese part. This position is required to communicate with Yahoo! Japan, get the right data from their web log files, ETL them into a data warehouse and create reports for them. And although I am pretty confident about my reading & listening comprehension level, the manager stated that it will basically require a native speaker… Sigh… and I thought I would have an edge here since I have the tech skills and know pretty good Japanese. This makes me regret why I hadn’t taken Japanese studies more seriously and take the JLPT exam. I’m pretty sure that if Yahoo! Japan calls me for an interview, I would do OK even now. But I’m definitely going to take the JLPT Level 2 exam this year!!! I will achieve official “native level” within this year! Now… if I can just get my hands on some DataStage skills… …

Comments

Oracle, DataStage, Japanese - What I’ll do so I can get the job next time! « Before I Die — 2007-01-24 22:56:07

[…] and Thoughts cloneofsnake 10:56 pm Since yesterday’s disastrous interview, I seriously thought about what happened, and came up with a plan to address the problems. […]

Reading materials left in men's bathroom

Thu, 02 Nov 2006 10:40:00 +0000

1031 01 Toilet Drinks Originally uploaded by cloneofsnake.

This happened at my office in NYC. I sent the following email to our social alias. *Just wanna say thanks to the guys who are always so enthusiastic in sharing their reading materials in the bathroom. I’ve enjoyed your Sports Illustrated and ESPN articles by spreading the pages on the floor with the bottom of my shoes. However, please note that nobody likes to touch another person’s belongings in the bathroom, so can you please refrain from stuffing your print outs into the toilet seat cover bin? I just want

to sit on the toilet covers, not toilet covers that had contact with papers that you’ve touched. Today however, when I turn to grab a sheet, to my horror, there was a cup of black liquid sitting there, blocking the way. I was stunned for like 5 seconds. I think this was the first time I’ve seen drinking beverages inside a bathroom stall… I just couldn’t associate the 2 together, I didn’t know what to do! Anyhoo, to the guy who left his beverage in there today… WTH man?! 99.999% of the human population don’t drink while they are sitting on the toilet! But if you like to do that, that’s fine, I respect that… but can you NOT leave your drinks in there for the next person to enjoy? That’s just disgusting Thanks! Nick* \

FIFA World Cup 2006 - Italy 1-1 USA

Sat, 17 Jun 2006 18:23:00 +0000

The last football fan in Italy Originally uploaded by Fabio Sabatini.

http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com/06/en/060617/1/7rsl.html June 17th, 2006, what a day in World Cup football! First, Ghana beat Czech Republic 2-0, then Italy tie it with USA 1-1. Both the Czechs and the Italians played phenomenally in their first matches, Italy played their best game I’ve seen for a while and taught Ghana a football lesson, winning 4-2. The Czech slaughtered the USA “standing around-ers” 3-0. I never really liked watching the Italians because I don’t like their “heavy defense + counter attack” style… especially when they don’t play it very well a lot of times. But on June 12th, the Italians opened my eyes!

It was THE best game in this World Cup so far. With such high expectations, everybody expected them to kick the USA’s ass today. Why did the Italians played so poorly today? The USA did a good job disrupting Italy’s pace in the beginning, still, the Italians scored a beautiful goal first. Then, an unfortunate own goal tied the game again… and from this point on, you can see the Italians getting impatient. The flagrant foul with the elbow to the face! WTF was that?! The coach was so scared that Totti would do something stupid he had to pull Totti out of the game! Nothing against the US, but I really don’t want them to advance to 2nd round. When I was watching the game at the restaurant, there were quite a few tables that rooted for the US. I really don’t understand these people. It’s not like they know the game or even their own US players!! To me, and probably to a lot of other people, (including the Italian players on the field), the World Cup is one of the most special (if not THE most special) event in the world! We want to see good games, so we want only the best teams to go through. Now, to be fair, even the old powers like Italy or Germany can play pretty poorly sometimes, but we should look at their best games. When they play well, they’re really fun to watch. The USA, however, even at their best, they still look like child’s play. I mean for fuck’s sake, near the end of today’s game, one of the US player fucking used his hand to touch the ball! LOL… Reminds me of a comment I read somewhere, someone said “soccer isn’t a real sport because their players don’t use their hands”. ROTFL!!! Sigh… So please, ignorant Americans blindly supporting the US of A, STOP! Only the strong teams go through, please!\

"Beautiful" "Girl" - the peril of Flickr Tags and Yahoo! Picture Frame widget

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 20:00:00 +0000

“Beautiful” “Girl” - the peril of Flickr Tags and Yahoo! Picture Frame widget So recently I installed Yahoo! Widgets on my work computer. I’m not one who would normally install crap on any of my computers, but 1) my girlfriend installed it at her workplace and highly recommend it, and 2) it’s from Yahoo!, so I owe it to them to at least install it at work, just to show that I have team spirit or company spirit or whatever. Well… as you would’ve probably guessed by now, I love Flickr… and this Picture Frame widget is PERFECT! I can put in tags and it will randomly show me pictures from Flickr! I loved it… until today… see, what words can you put in there? Beach, dog, cute, shiba, maltese, tokyo, london, japan, england… … girl… “beautiful” “girl”… Yup, it’s work, so I can’t put in shit like “sexy” “girl” or “boobs”, so I put in “beautiful” “girl”, and I swear to god this ho came up like 20 million times today!

I was like “huh? really?!” went to check the tags I put in… yup, I had “beautiful” “girl” alright… WTF?! God Damn’it! I put in “beautiful” + “girl”, I want pictures of actual “beautiful girls”. I mean, this is gotta be the biggest problem with tags. The owner can tag whatever the fuck they want on their own contents. There has got to be an evolution to this tag thing, I mean… it’s really great for searching 90% of the time, but because people can LIE, we’ll get 10% of shit like this, completely ruining the whole experience. How should we improve tags? As of now, flickr doesn’t allow other people to add tags to your pictures unless they’re in your friends & family list. This makes sense because the picture belongs to you, the owner. Let’s say, if I take a picture of my errr… brain, and someone from come and tag it with “dumbass”, I would be pissed too! However, if someone does feel that I’m a dumbass, he should be allowed to keep that information to himself, right? What flickr has now is called “narrow folksonomy” (where only one set of tages are attached to an item). Given how slow flickr is when searching for multiple tags, I wouldn’t be surprised that its tags are all stored in one big, denormalized table. (Hmm… may be I should try asking this internally, there ought to be documentation somewhere…) Anyway, without knowing the reality, my suggestion is to “upgrade” to “2-way tagging”. There should be another table created to store all the tags that you have given out. So if the original table is like: (When clicking on the URL, it grabs its tags by: SELECT tags FROM WHERE url=’@url’; When searching for URL with a certain tag, it gets the URL by: SELECT url FROM WHERE tags=’@tag’; If searching for multiple tags, then: SELECT url FROM GROUP BY url HAVING tags IN (‘X’,‘Y’,‘Z’); (flickr doesn’t use “LIKE”, if you spell “mountai”, it’s not going to give you any pictures tagged with “mountain…”) Then, the new table can actually be a modification of the original table with additional fields: Hmm… this can actually replace the original table. Most of the tags will be added by the owner, so most will have the same user_id, visible is 1 (yes). Now, the friends and family can also tag the pictures, their user_id will be logged, visible is still 1. Finally, the new option for “everyone else” can be called “private tag” or “your own tag”. These tags will have your user_id and visible is 0 (no). So, in the example of the fugly here… I can private tag it with “fugly”. It’s stored in the db but won’t show up on the picture. When I query the tags, there will need to be a new “NOT” option: SELECT url FROM GROUP BY url HAVING (tags IN (‘beautiful’,‘girl’) AND (user_id=‘self’ AND tags != ‘fugly’))

What was the first fucking thing I say?! Should've listened to me SUCKAAAAAASS!!!

Thu, 26 Jan 2006 17:00:00 +0000

What was the first fucking thing I say?! Should’ve listened to me SUCKAAAAAASS!!! It has been 4 months since we were first told about the Data Cleansing project, and finally, they’ve put out project plan 1.0, with what I had originally proposed on the first fucking day… HA!!! What did I tell ya?!! SUCKAAAAASSS!!! :)) LOL Here’s how the story goes… in Sept.‘05, my manager and our relatively new Business Analyst (B.A.) pulled us into a meeting to tell us that, finally, the Data Cleansing project is about to start and we’ll be responsible for it. Great!! My manager gave a brief sum-up of what has happened on the CRMS migration (upgrade) project so far. The key things I’ve learned from that meeting were 1) We’ll be buying data from D&B. 2) Data Conversion team will come up with the migration logic to “put current data into correct places in future system”. 3) We will be responsible for cleaning the data so that we can feed the future system with clean / meaningful data. Now, what was my first statement on “what to do”? I said: “We need to know about Data Conversion’s stuff. We should look at what their logic is, where they pull those data from, and do our cleansing against that set of data.” MADE PERFECT SENSE, YAH? What did they say? “No, we don’t need to know their stuff, we just clean everything!”

Since then, I’ve raised my objection at least 3 more times, each time our B.A. and managers reaffirmed that we shouldn’t limit ourselves with Data Conversion’s stuff, we should clean everything. So what happened? Our extremely creative B.A. went and came up with some truly spectacular projects - like “get all dinstinct values for all editable fields in CRMS”… shit that wasted a lot of my time, working late nights to pull him the data he needed to support his imagination. As expected, his spectacular projects were met with spectacular failures each time when he presented to the other teams in meetings. He got his ass handed to him every time, and it pissed me off b’coz what I’ve been saying were right! Somehow though, he continued to believe that he was on the right track and he “owns” the desgin process. The end result was a big arguement that took place after one meeting where he had just presented his “solution” to account merges - a spreadsheet with like 50+ columns that would show how accounts were merged together. Obvioulsy, it was shot down in the meeting, I don’t understand how some people can make up so much bull shit. “Why aren’t more people interrigent, rike me!” LOL… I was so deep into his bull shit that I had completely lost sight of the big picture. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again… “Bad managers severely limit other people’s productivity”. Like how my B.A. was limiting me to work with senseless things that he had created. The turning point came when some product manager from the corporation office in Sunnyvale had some high level questions about the goals and “expected results”… our B.A. couldn’t confirm the answer and he let the corporate product manager ask me directly… that’s when I finally got the break and think broader and deeper into the situation. (Those high level questions helped push me to create the solution.) I had to ignore the B.A.’s spreadsheet (and pretty much anything that his creative juice produced). With clear understanding of the project goals and end results, I synced up with the Data Conversion team, and was finally able to create the heart of this project… the complete process of Input/Output to feed and receive data to/from Data Conversion. (That’s why in the beginning, I said we need to know about Data Conversion’s stuff… it’s coz we need to feed them with clean data! I was right!!!) With this solid, technical piece created, I was finally able to stand firm and said “No dude! Look, here it is! I’ve created the entire process. THIS IS THE SOLUTION. THIS IS WHAT WE NEED TO DO.” Just last week, we were able to formalize the project plan. The B.A. still writes the stuff, and it still has a lot of bull shit, but at least the “heart” of it all was written by me, and hence the process, even the spreadsheet output, now makes sense. He was able to present it to upper management and for the first time, got the approval. Today, we had our first “Thursday Data Conversion Meeting” in which everyone had looked at the plan and said it was good. :D LOL! ALL THANKS TO ME!!! God I’m good!

Birthday card for Jose, picked one that jokes about "Casual Friday"

Mon, 28 Nov 2005 14:25:00 +0000

Birthday card for Jose, picked one that jokes about “Casual Friday” It was my colleague Jose’s bday yesterday, and my boss IM’ed me this morning to get him a cake and a card. The card I picked has an old B&W photo of four men in their underwears and pajamas, and inside it says “Wishing you a birthday more exciting than casual Fridays!” If you haven’t heard me rant about this yet, what happened was, aside from my part-time job working at a computer store, I’ve never had to abide to any “business dress code”. This summer, when I started wearing clam diggers to work, (I ’ve always wore shorts to work in summer since my days at Microsoft.) my manager sent an email to the entire team about dress code. Since I’m the “worst” dresser in the group, I think that email was mainly directed at me, and now… I got this card! LOL… I just brought the card for my manager to sign too! Fortunately, she had a good sense of humor and laughed about it. (I don’t know what she really thinks though.) If u’re intested, here’s the email:

Guys -

Just a reminder about dress code - I have definitely seen us slacking this summer and want to address it because team appearance is very important to me. We sit in an open pit with the people we service and it is in our best interests to be as professional as possible.

In the manual it states: Dress Code: Business Casual. Business Casual is still professional dress - jeans are acceptable only on Fridays.

I want to expand this to clarify that T-Shirts (Logo, etc - not to mean short sleeve shirts), Shorts, Flip Flops, Wife-beaters, and any thing else that you wouldn’t expect to see in a place of business is not acceptable.

I understand that exceptions may need to be made on an individual basis but I expect them to be exceptions and not the norm. Please make sure you are adhering to this policy going forward.

If you have any questions, please let me know.

Honestly, I don’t really care. At first I was like… “Shit! I’m in tech yo!! Why the fuck do I have to wear “biz casual”?! But the truth is, I’m fine with slacks and shirts… I was just not happy at having idiotic, completely unnecessary rules applied to a whole team of people! (I brought down the entire team b’coz I wore shorts.)

Complaints about my cheap landlord - Part 2

Tue, 08 Nov 2005 11:41:00 +0000

Complaints about my cheap landlord - Part 2 Sorry to keep ranting, but blog is actually a good way to document what is happening so that in the future, you can use it as evidence or a reference in time if needed. So last time there was the heat problem, the truth is, I’ve gotten a nasty cold because of it… It was so bad that even after my 10 days of antibiotics, I was still sick! (I finished the anitibiotics on Monday and starting late Tuesday, I began to feel it come back again!) Luckily for me, I finally had a good sleep on Friday and it became better, so I knew it was a slight flu instead of the same cold. I took some NyQuil (My favorite drug in the whole world!! :D) and slept some more. I’m feeling much better now. (But still not completely out of it.) I’m documenting here because according to NY state’s tenants’ rights, I can sue

to lower my rent because my landlord couldn’t provide the necessary utilities, which are supposed to be included the rent payment. Now this morning, we had a bit of a drama. Queenie was ready to leave for work, (I was finishing some pre-breakfast) when she suddenly screamed about can’t opening the door. I gave it a try, sure enough, the nob won’t turn… we were locked in!! You know from my previous post that a) this Greek landlord is cheap, b) he had recently installed a new lock. So this lock is NEW!!! I called the super up, Jerry, and once again, he was like… “OK, I try to come this morning.” What the fuck do you mean “try to come”?! We’re fucking locked in!!!! What if there’s a fucking fire you fucking fuck!!! I knew I can’t rely on him, so I began to take the lock apart by unscrewing the face plate, but then I realized what a hell of a mess it will become and also I can’t guarantee that I can open the door. So I screwed the plate back in, took a look at the door crack, and I remembered… “Hey! I used to be able to pick these door locks from the outside with a subway ticket! Now I’m inside, it should be even easier!” I gave it a try, I found a piece of thing metal, (since I don’t have to bend around a corner to reach the hinge) slide it in, and *click*, the door was opened! HAHA!! It turned out, there’s a button on the lock’s side panel for switching the “auto lock” on and off. We had it “off” so that we can just go outside to throw away trash and not get locked out. Somehow that button was switched to “on” last night, but still, it’s only supposed to lock the outside nob, not the inside!!! Anyway, once again, I’m documenting this because according to NY State tenant’s guide, landlord is supposed to provide safety measures, like intercom and working door locks. Our building has no intercom and my door lock is broken. So if we ever get burglarized, we can sue for damages.

Comments

Jackie — 2005-11-09 09:22:00

Hahaha. Broken door lock… oh wait, it was switched to “ON”?!?!? LOL–>

NYC - Cheap landlord families in Astoria

Sun, 30 Oct 2005 20:27:00 +0000

NYC - Greek landlords in Astoria (Cheap) I had previously posted in my Yahoo!360 blog about my cheap landlord not fixing the water heater for more than a week, forcing my gf to take ice cold showers. Now, it’s end of October and the bastard still hasn’t turned on the heat for us. Man, and I thought only Asians were that cheap! LOL… This landlord and the superintendent are families, they obviously own quite a few buildings in Astoria, a traditionally Greek neighborhood. (Astoria is supposed to host the largest young Greek population outside of Greece.) After moving to Astoria, I found out that Greeks are not that much different from the old Chinese immigrants. I’ve heard that there are old Chinese immigrants that moved to NYC and never set foot outside of China town.

They have lived here all their lives but can’t speak a word of English. Apparently, this kind of “living only within your own people’s community” is not limited to the Chinese. The Greeks, the Jews, Italians, Hispanics… actually, come think about it… most people only live within their own communities… hence all the segregated neighborhoods in NYC… Anyway, my super, I have to call him up to get him to do anything! And it’s hard to communicate with him ‘coz his English sucks… Last Friday, our door lock finally broke down. I called him up and he came, took the lock out, showed me that the inside was bent and sort of accused me of breaking it! I said it has always had problem ever since we moved in. He said he would buy a new lock and install it the next day (Saturday), he never came. I had to call him again Saturday night, then again Sunday morning to get his ass down here. When he finally fitted the lock, he said he would sent the bill to me! I was like “Fuck that!! I didn’t break it, u should’ve fixed it before we moved in.” God damn!! The super drives a fucking Mercedes, we pay a whopping $1600 a month for rent and somehow, we still have to endure ice cold water, no heat and pay for our own lock?! And what’s up with the other tenants?! Why aren’t they complaining?!! I have the NY State Attorney General’s “Tenant’s guide” in my hand, so I know my rights and I know I can sue my cheap-ass landlord to lower my rent payment because they don’t provide the necessary “utilities” which was include in the rent. I think I should try suing. What have I got to lose? :D

Fucking Dell! Give me back my camera!!

Thu, 27 Oct 2005 10:55:00 +0000

Fucking Dell! Give me back my camera!! (This is a complaint email I sent to Dell today.) Problem Description: I phoned in to buy the Canon S1 IS digital camera to make sure I can get it before my vacation! It was supposed to ship yesterday 10/26. I went to check its status yesterday and found that the order was cancelled!!!!!!!!!!!!1 I chat and they said they’re not order support, told me to call. I called and the rep said my order was cancelled by “Customer Request”!! How dare you lie like that!! I DID NOT REQUEST TO CANCEL MY ORDER!

I NEED THAT CAMERA FOR MY TRIP TO ENGLAND NOW!!!!!! I’ve already bought memory and accessories fitting that camera too!!!! And I’ve used my coupons that was sent to me in the mail. You cancelled my order and I lost at least an extra $100!!!! The CSR then said there’s nothing she can do, I’ll need to put in the order again, and then forwarded me to sales, but that line was disconnected!!!!!!!!!!! What kind of service is this?? Not honoring my order, not letting me know it was cancelled, extremely hard to get help, and help leads to no where!!! I’m definitely going to file a complaint with the BBB about this!!! What are you going to do about my camera?! *********************************************** Sent To: us_csd@dell.com Referring URL: Date Submitted: 10/27/2005 Date Received(K): 10/27/05 09:48:47 AM

Management 101 - by Nicholas Wang

Sun, 31 Jul 2005 02:18:00 +0000

Management 101 - by Nicholas Wang Saturday night, went to watch Fantastic 4 with Queenie and Miho. The subway was packed on the way back, it really sucked! The reason why I like living in Astoria is b’coz it’s less crowded than Manhattan but is still pretty close to everything. I really hate it when I’m going home in a packed subway. Anyway, on my way back, I was thinking of work (yes, my mind skips all over the places all the time). I’m revising the scripts for account suspension, which was developed 9 months ago, also by me. It’s in testing stage now and I need to set up the entire testing procedure and shit. I could’ve started doing testing early last week, but since moving to the Sales Ops department, I’ve been binded by a lot more “rules” and red tape. One of the rule is, I can’t communicate directly with anyone outside of our department anymore, and that for me is a real pain in the ass. After finishing development, I had to send a written report to my manager, and then she’ll communicate on my part to the programmers in MIS, and come back to me with the “OK go ahead”, along with her expectations to see the resulting changes to current data once my new script runs. Basically, what could’ve been a 2 hours communication with MIS directly by myself, is now changed into a week turn-around time.

It’s kind of funny, there’s a Chinese proverb - “When you hang around with 3 persons, you must be able to learn from at least one of them.” Now I understand that not only can you learn from others who are better than you, but you can also learn from others’ mistakes! :D When I was in the Data Quality department, I had started a simple doc called “Management 101”, it’s all stuff I learned from my manager at the time. I learned a lot from him, but it wasn’t until now that I realized what’s the greatest thing about his management style. My current manager is very strict, she values structure very highly, she doesn’t like her staff going around her back to ask other people anything because she said it would make her look bad. If possible, she likes to control every little detail of what you do. On my ride home, I realized that the result of this method is that your staff will grow dependent of your instructions, and in the long run, you’ll find that your will always have to “tell your staff what to do”, they won’t know how to take initiative and be “self-reliant”. This method SUCKS when implemented on creative minds and developers. It’s basically stopping the creative train with rules. My last manager in comparison, was the exact opposite. He let me know early on that he expected me to explore and find errors in the system and then fix them (hence Data Quality). When I have questions, I would ask him first as he was very knowledgable of the business, but he also encouraged me to go directly to the source and ask people in other departments. We would have weekly meetings and he would ask me what I’ve found and what I’m working on. He would ask me questions, provoking me to think deeper into the issues that I had found, and in many cases his questions would let me to discover broader problems. I learned a lot and came up with a lot of ideas. When I present my ideas to him, a lot of times he would shoot them down… but he also told me to not give up so easily. Basically, I learned that my manager may shoot down my ideas a lot, but if I think I’ve got a good thing, don’t be afraid to argue with my manager! Under this management method, your staff will become highly creative and self-reliant. Like myself, I alone attacked the ONE problem within our company! I asked the right people about the products we offer, the databases’ structures… I single-handedly created the database view that became the “bridge” of two systems. I came up with the ideas, initiated projects, developed, implemented and then moved on to the next project. I know that the biggest problem with this is that it lacks structure, but I still think it’s the better way. We should let ideas flow at the top and put “helpers” on the side to help with organizing and documenting.