How to save water during rationing

May be divide water into tiers:

Tier 1: food grade-from the tap
Tier 2: irrigation grade- water used in food processing, like washing vegetables
Tier 3: flush grade- water used in washing pots and pans, etc. can be used to flush toilets.

Physics of Work

Newton's 1st law: Overcome inertia by creating microgoal. Goals that are so trivial that it can be done or overshot. By doing 1 microgoal a day and avoid stopping, productivity can increase.

Newton's 2nd law: F=ma. Here the F is force required to manage a project. m is the mass of people involved. a is acceleration of project progress. Obviously a well managed project required a big force. So for the same effort, to increase the speed of project, we have to decrease the headcount involved. It is a counterintuitive conclusion but look at the success of guerilla attacks.

Big teams can succeed only by great planning.

Newton's 3rd law: for every action you take, there is an counteraction. So be very careful in what you say or do.

Einstein's special law of relativity: time is relative. If you are happy and doing something that you enjoy, time flies and you will be in the zone all the time with high productivity. If you are bored, time slows to a crawl and so does productivity.

Whatever you do, make it fun and enjoyable...

Sins of our Google

Scientific theory are often overthrown by proving that their basic assumptions are wrong.

Our beloved search engine Google has the following basic assumptions IMHO:
1. Additional traffic by the crawler is acceptable to web sites. This may be a small price to pay. But sites do pay by MBs of traffic.
2. Delay of 2-3 days in getting new contents indexed is acceptable. What if your info is time-critical? That it will be useless in the next day?
3. Customers will come to the site (passive wait). There is no active way to find customers interested in the keyword bought by advertisers.
4. Google has assumed the position of a high priest in deciding which site has a higher rank. Why should we accept the result of a soul-less algorithm?
5. Google has assumed that keyword can retrieve relevant information. Is that always true?

A sin not to start a company?

In the heart of tech city of the world, surrounded by techies and VCs, in an economy fueled by innovation. It is really a sin (if I may use a word that strong) not to do something about your ideas. I have seen mine being implemented by others.

Something I heard on Christian radio struck me today. The host said that if you have a decision to make about doing something, just get a blank piece of paper and write yes! Just like Jesus is 'Yes' and Amen to us.

God speed to all of us with a child in us...

Tale of 2 cities

I'm back!

From the vibrant city of Hong Kong, a place full of life, I am re-invigorated from the daily grunts of silicon valley.

A fresh start. So to speak.

Musings over Google

Information overload: too many emails to read, too many junk mails, too many web sites to visit, too many blogs to keep track, too many trends to analyze. No wonder web clippings company like WiseSearch can charge a premium for their virtual news clippings service.

We don't need organizer for information as Google claims to be, but conceptual simplifier that can give us a bird's eye view of what we are interested in. Kinda like President Bush's CIA briefing every morning, ha?

Dig this: the code of Digg was done in 2 months!

According to Wikipedia, the code of Digg was done from October 2004 to Dec.5, 2004.

2 months! It's now worth about $200million according to BusinessWeek.