Hacking the Good days…

When I was a little girl I thought the coolest job ever was to be the person who serves ice-cream in Hong Kong’s convenient stores; it always mesmerizes me seeing the landing of swirls of soft ice-cream and that really stuck with me for a while. And I would secretly fancy adding an extra swirl to everyone who visits my store.

When I was about 12 I decided that being a psychologist was my true sense of vocation. It sounds wrong but I was very fascinated by the typography of personalities, as well as what makes people loveable and loathe-able. Working in a psychiatric hospital as a young intern, the idea that you can’t make everyone happy started rooting in me… as devastating as it may seem, I started gradually realizing that there are people who would never be happy. If you want to be sane, you better leave them alone.

This realization doesn’t come conscious though, probably until when I was about 19, things started to change. As lame as it sounds, it was the internet that changed me… the first thing I remember that truly shocks my world (sorry, Yahoo!), it’s google search – imagine all information (well I know it’s not all information) around the world at your finger tip! Then I became more aware of all the interesting cultural movements, such as Open Source *slash* open initiatives from Firefox to Wikipedia, where people seem to enjoy the luxury of being super altruistic, or egoistic, and present themselves in a way that *they* want.

Apart from the Wikipedian vision that drives ‘the sum of all human knowledge’ to even the most under-privileged population, to less well-know grass root movement as little as bringing one extra kilo of goodies to poor kids in China, the internet never ceases to amaze me.

Starting my career as a community manager in Yahoo! Europe seems to be the best place I can be. It wasn’t as easy as I thought, and there are hurdles for me (and fella geeks), such as occasional needs to push through layers of ‘corporate membranes’ to get things done, but somehow by remembering that it’s passion that matters, everything seems to be fine. After all, job is just what we do to exist, but passion is what we believe in to live. As my cool colleague, Farhan, told his story – there is no excuse for lack of passion…

What is your passion?

The geek in us…

Emuishere Peliculas’s photo on Flickr

• geeks are often disorganized or have a twisted skein of attention-deficit issues
• geeks love assessing, classifying, and defining the objects in their world
• geeks crave actionable items and roll their eyes at “mission statements” and lofty management patois
• geeks like things that work with technology-agnostic and lofi tools
• geeks like frameworks but tend to ignore rules
• geeks are unusually open to change (if it can be demonstrated to work better than what they’re currently using)
• geeks like fixing things on their own terms
• geeks have too many projects and lots and lots of stuff

From 43Folders

*running to pick up the book

Danah is PhD student from iSchool, UC Berkeley – her overview of the social divide between MySpace and Facebook is a fascinating read, even though she’s extremely humble about her academic vigor (you don’t really need to – this essay as itself is very informative as it is). Some insights on social divide on American soldiers in Iraq:

MySpace is the primary way that young soldiers communicate with their peers. When I first started tracking soldiers’ MySpace profiles, I had to take a long deep breath. Many of them were extremely pro-war, pro-guns, anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, pro-killing, and xenophobic as hell. Over the last year, I’ve watched more and more profiles emerge from soldiers who aren’t quite sure what they are doing in Iraq. I don’t have the data to confirm whether or not a significant shift has occurred but it was one of those observations that just made me think. And then the ban happened. I can’t help but wonder if part of the goal is to cut off communication between current soldiers and the group that the military hopes to recruit.

Yes, for those who choose to be on facebook instead of MySpace, we tend to be more fitting into the ‘hegemonic’ class (‘white’ upper middle class, well educated, went to good school, and prefer Sauvignon Blanc over Pinot Grigio), plus i found that almost 80% of my ‘friends’ have at least one gradschool degree, as opposed to ’subaltern’ class on MySpace. Does opening up between the two networking sites mean that users ’suffer’ less from the social divide? That itself, solicits research which will yield huge implications on future ICTs policies, as well as, just how generational divides can so aggravated by the intense social networking phenomenon.

It’s really scary to think about how the internet can bring about social capital to those who are already having a headstart in their career, like linkedIn, facebook, blogs… how important online visibility is to one’s career prospect? Should we devote resources to educate students on how to ‘market’ yourself on the internet as opposed to Chemistry and Biology? As we are at a point of which you can get disadvantaged for not having personal presence on the Internet, are we sacrificing privacy for publicity? Where to draw to the balance? And in ten, twenty years time, will the Gen Z, AA, BB whatever, still care about the ‘boring’, ‘paranoid’ notion of privacy on the Internet?

Last but not least, apparently in China there is a trend of giving your children ’special’ names so that they are more cacheable by search engines.   Hm… this is indeed interesting.

One more note, on the side, is, I’m very curious about how the Beijing Olympics’ ‘nests’ and ‘twisted donuts’ are going to unfold in less than 300 days!

One thing I particularly like about working in Europe is the amount of holidays we get!  With my whole week’s off last week,  I have had been less productive than I’d love to, and instead, completely jumped into the world of films and comedies with both feet!

Of all the 10+ films I’ve seen, I particularly feel obliged to share with you a live comedy at the Soho Theatre (and I hope I do this in time!  The show is on until the 5th of Jan) – My brother and I are porn stars.

For people who find Borat unsettling but yet paradoxically enjoyable, you will also not be too sure about when and where to laugh during this comedy, which is very very anti-pc.   If Borat guts us because it treats race (and racism) with such deliberate contempts, My Brother and I are P*rn Stars flipped both sex and religion trump cards and makes you squeamish at time, feeling unsettled at the most, but still manage to crack you up at the most unexpected spots.

I suspect that all of my friends would love it, and if you don’t, you’re probably not very liberal haha.

Glad that I don’t have much religious affiliation…

:)