Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone!

As many have noticed, I’m on a blogging break and will continue to be in one for a while. 2008 has ended rather poorly but I have some great things to look forward to in 2009. (whoever stole my car on Dec 31st 2008, please return it…)

1. The NYCIML will finish its inaugural year as a student run organization under the excellent leadership of Yitian Liu and Maria Guirguis!
2. The NYMC will begin it’s second full year of operations. For 2009, we will be expanding to include programs to server the middle schools. New programs include two middle school student classes (I will be directing the program in Manhattan), and a middle school teacher program.
3. My healthcare strike team is shaping up quite nicely and we’ve finally located a project. I can’t reveal much about it yet.. but needless to say.. it kicks ass!
4. After consulting with a few friends, most notably jenniewang and Jorian, I’ve actually decided to take up Yoga. We’ll see how that goes.
5. NYCVPF made its first grant to Concrete Safari! Consider joining the organization if you are interested in social philanthropy.

Even though I am in the midst of a blogging break, I am still quite active on twitter.

In the mean time, check out this kickass Christmas card from First Round Capital.

Wow, I’m really impressed with the disastrous state of economy. I don’t really have much to say about it except that I am expecting these companies to fail within the next year or so:

• Citigroup
• GM
• Ford
• Chrysler
• Goldman Sachs
• Yahoo
• Citadel

Let’s see what actually happens….

So I just had dinner with two of my close friends, Ji Li and Dr. Wen Shi. One topic we touched on was our personal life philosophies. I assure you we don’t talk about serious stuff all the time, but sometimes it comes up! (In fact, if you had actually sat through the 3 hours, you would have thought all of us were total retards).

As a direct result of tonight’s conversation, I decided to write a few posts about my personal philosophies on life. Here is part I, my philosophy on effort.

If you read my about me section, you’ll probably see that I’m involved in a lot of different things. I often get asked how I could possibly manage having all these commitments at once. My secret weapon is in fact not brilliance, but what I like to call “compounding effort”.

The basic tenants of “compounding effort” is to simply push yourself 5% harder every year. I know it sounds simple and trivial, but the overall effect can be quite shocking. Indeed, humans in general are incredibly bad at recognizing anything non-linear. We really do not understand multiplication, and thus have very little intuition on how fast “compounding” really is. This is possibly a direct result of the environment we live in. Very few things in nature are non-linear. To add to the problem, we also have a need to see tangible results. The combination of these two qualities is that we as a race, especially Americans, rarely understand the need for long periods of sustained effort.

Take my “compounding effort” rule for example. Here is what happens to Person A’s efficiency over the course of 20 years if he / she follow my rule strictly.

That means compared to Person B who did not push him / herself, Person A is 3 times more efficient at the 20 year mark! Person A can do in a day what takes 3 days for Person B! How can Person B possibly hope to compete with Person A at that point? In fact, I can define a new quantity “effective life experience”, which is based on the amount of work a person actually does (think of it as the area underneath the curve of the effort curve).

There is something I’m sweeping under the carpet of course. Specifically, it takes time to become more efficient. Personally, I think I spend around 30% of my time just to become more efficient in the next year. So naturally this leads to an optimization question. Assuming I start pushing myself when I’m 10, and will stop working when I’m 60, how long should I push myself before the function is no longer optimized? Below, I’ve plotted a few life experience vs years curves.

Notice that for all of these curves, it is NOT worth it to push yourself forever. There is in fact a point at which you should stop pushing yourself, and use 100% of your efficiency. Also notice that the maximum life experience point, pushing yourself 5% harder a year is akin to accomplishing TWICE as much as a person who only pushed him / herself 2% harder a year, and is akin to accomplishing THREE times as much as a person who never bothered pushing at all. From the graph, it is clear that everyone should be pushing themselves until at least they are 30, which unfortunately most people do not do.

As my parting words, here is Jack’s intended life experience equation.

In the process of managing non-profits and startups, I’ve used many different online tools to better enable collaboration and communication in organizations. Through the years, I’ve tried many different tools, and now think I have a pretty good list. Please bear in mind that the three dimensions I’m optimizing across are ease of use, reliability, and cost. I am still looking for solutions in two major areas, and would love suggestions if anyone has them.

Website Registration: I’ve used GoDaddy and Namecheap in the past and they are both really good. If you have to be anonymous, try International Alliance Privacy Services.

Website Hosting: I’ve tried self hosting, as well as many different online hosts. If you have a good technical person on board, and REALLY have the need for something advanced (cron jobs, RoR, significant processing needs), try either dedicated hosting or colocation. For dedicated hosting, I really like Softlayer. For NYC based colocation, I really like Pilosoft. For most website hosting needs, all you need is a good shared hosting provider. I highly recommend NearlyFreeSpeech. They are extraordinarily cheap for low traffic websites, and I have yet to see them go down. I do NOT recommend GoDaddy, or NameCheap for web hosting.

DNS Hosting: Normally I just use my domain registrant, or my webhost, for DNS hosting. However, if I really need to be anonymous, I will use FreeDNS.

Email Needs: I used to use my own mail servers, but now, I completely rely on Google Apps. If you are a registered 501-c3 organization, you can also get GoogleApps Education and Google Checkout for free. Therefore you get the hyped up version of Google Apps, as well as free payment processing!

Actual Website:: I am now a total Wordpress convert. It started as a blogging software, but has grown to become a very very stable content management system. I’ve tried other CMS like Joomla and Drupal, but they are really really complicated to work with.

Internal Website: Mediawiki, the software behind Wikipedia, is great for internal websites. Any member can just click on edit and then add or remove information. I’ve tried other wiki installations, but none are easier to maintain than MediaWiki.

UPDATE 1: I’ve since tried out “Google Sites”, an app that’s part of the ever expanding Google Apps, and found it even superior to Mediawiki. Here you’ll also be able to easily manage spreadsheets and files!

Phone Service: For those who simply need a phone number, but don’t necessarily want to answer it all the time, I highly recommend the currently freeGrandCentral if you can secure an invitation. If you can’t secure an invitation, you can use RingCentral.

Fax Service: For a great fax to email service, definitely try RingCentral.

Conference Call Service: Unless you really need a toll-free number, I highly recommend FreeConferenceCall. There is a short message in the beginning of the call saying this is a service provided by freeconferencecall.com, but do you really mind?!

Forms, Spreadsheets and Documents: I really like GoogleDocs (part of Google Apps mentioned above) for simple spreadsheets that are shared between multiple people, i.e. financial projections between executive committee members. However, if you need to construct a nice looking form to accept information, Google Spreadsheet really sucks. I’ve found Zoho Creator to be absolutely amazing in that respect though. They even allow for scripted actions like automatically sending an email using data you just collected as acknowledgment. For example, at the New York Interscholastic Mathematics League, we use it to collect registration information.

Business Banking: I am starting to really like Chase Business banking. They have a pretty high monthly service charge, but one that can be waived if you open a business credit card and charge any amount on it each month. So simply have your credit card make 1 dollar monthly payment onto Paypal.

Newsletter: I’ve tried out Constant Contact and they are a great service provider. Unfortunately, they are also decently expensive (15 dollars a month) for organizations starting out. I’ve tried open source solutions like Dadamail and Phplist and they are both too difficult to use for any normal human being. If anyone knows of any good newsletter provider, hosted or not, I would LOVE to know.

Project Management This is an area I’ve tried many tools and just can’t quite get used to any of them. BaseCamp seems to be the best at the moment, but they are REALLY expensive. Also, I STILL don’t know the difference between milestones and tasks. Ever since Activecollab betrayed the open source community, it has started to really suck even as a tool. I have found Collabtive to be a really good imitation of BaseCamp, but not nearly as polished. So if someone knows of a good project management tool, I would love to know.

So there you go, my years of trying out different tools boiled down onto one blog post!

Since I haven’t blogged in a while, and since I’m sitting here at the final event of the Miss Chinese NY competition with an active internet competition, I mind as well try live blogging here.

Conflict of Interest Statement:

• I’ve been dating Contestant #1: Shali Zhang for 7 years.
• The opinions expressed here are purely mine, and do not express the views of Shali, or any organizations that I work / am affiliated with.

1:05 - All the girls are on stage doing a very odd dance routine in aerobics outfits.
1:15 - Wow, the emcees are very un-attractive. The guy’s name is actually amigo??!! They started speaking in English and Chinese, but then somehow decided to drop the English translations two sentences in.
1:20 - The Chinese emcee is going to sing? The program has switched from Cantonese to English to Cantonese to Mandarin. Wow, the bitch of an usher is ridiculous. She keeps moving people around well after the event has started.
1:25 - The contestants are now doing a cat walk.
1:30 - Thanking another group of sponsors… this is the third group of people they’ve thanked tonight.. and apparently they are all consultants.
1:32 - The 5 girls who won the talent show are now re-doing their bit. Contestant number 8 is first and is singing a Chinese song. Her singing’s actually quite good, though her hand motions are quite awkward. Contestant number 9, Stephanie Huang (sp?), apparently is going to sign a song? She actually looks quite graceful doing this “song” that very much resembles a dance. The next contestant will be doing a modern dance. The emcee is actually telling the audience that all the male will be having a good time? Contestant 11, Melody, is also doing a dance, spirit of the peacock. Her dancing is quite graceful and calming. So nothing much to add here. Contestant 13, Vicki Pon, is apparently also doing a dance. There is now a chair on stage.. so this should be quite hilarious. haha.. they even did the red light thing. This is totally a strip tease. She really really likes to swing her hair. This is like a shampoo commercial gone wrong. I totally fail to see how her dance is a talent whatsoever. She’s basically just walking and swinging her hair around… Wow, she left without taking a bow.. she just left..!! This reminds me of what I did in 6th grade…

Wow, this competition seem extremely rigged. Time for swimsuit competition! w00t.

1:51 - Swimsuit competition begins… with the Q&A at the same time. Shali is sporting her swimsuit quite well :-D They just asked Shali why bears hibernate and humans don’t? What kind of question is this for a beauty contest? wow. They just asked Contest #3 to pick an object to represent Chinese’s culture. Contestant #5 just did some of the weirdest laughing ever. They totally threw her a weird ass answer.

Apparently the beauty pageant has never reached black in all these years.. even with all the sponsors et al. That’s really quite sad….

Wow, Vicky just got asked whether she prefers taller or shorter guys. Instead she said I prefer money, and shorter guys like the em-cee. Why you ask? Apparently, if she’s mad at him, she can step on him. She can carry him around like an accessory. She can kick him around. She’s absolutely hysterical… omg.

2:21 - The special guest is now coming on stage. Some dude from HK who I’ve never heard of. He’s apparently causing quite a bit of excitement in the room. I wonder if this is the principle of scarcity at work.

2:36 - The presentation of the award begins now! How did Vicki manage to get a high score on the Q&A? Are you kidding me. This is totally rigged.

2008 Miss Congenality - Contestant 7, Loviena Liao
2008 Miss Photogenic - Contestant 3, Angie Chen
2008 Best Evening Gown - Contestant 13, Vicki Pon
2008 Miss Talent - Contestant 10, Shelly Yang
2008 Miss Popularity - Contestant 13, Vicki Pon

2:45 - Wow, they are doing some retarded shit. Each contestant gets an envelope stating whether they are in the top 5, and then they forced each contestant to reveal whether they are in the top 5 in real time on stage. This is some demeaning absurd shit.

So the top 5 contestants are apparently contestants 8, 9, 10, 11, 13. (Jessica Yang, Stephanie Huang, Shelly Yang, Melody He, Vicki Pon).

Hahahaha the skits they are doing with the top 5 contestants are so hysterically bad, but still hysterical.

Wow what a surprise. Vicki Pon won…

My response to the comments so far (07/23/2008)
I have nothing against Vicki Pon personally, and I think she’s quite gorgeous as well. However, I don’t believe her talent show was either appropriate or really a talent. Her answer in the Q&A portion was also quite inappropriate given her venue and position. Regardless of what she might think, she is being held up as a representative of the Chinese American community, and a potential role model for young girls. Her answer of “money” was entirely inappropriate.

I am particularly disappointed at the Miss Chinese NY Beauty Pageant organization and its CEO, Mr. William Yip. As one of the organizations that’s more prominent, and thus outwardly representative in the Chinese American community, they are in a position to generate a lot of good will for the community. Instead, it has bungled the opportunity and has instead generated a great deal of ill will from both inside and outside the community.

I understand that the goal of the pageant is to generate the best candidate possible for the Miss HK pageant. Having said that, they can better accomplish this goal by changing the rubric and format of the current Miss Chinese NY Beauty Pageant competition and still be fair the all the contestants. Instead, they have chosen to bury the process in deceit and corruption.

I am personally very active in Asian American political representation and it’s incredibly frustrating to see events like this undoing a lot of good will built overtime through the arduous work of many others.