Bed time snack
I was just looking for this kind of tips: what to eat if you are hungry before bedtime; can't be too full, but definetely not too starving. The winning combination? whole wheat bread toast, hot tea plus honey to release insulin, which helps tryptophan get to your brain, where it's converted to serotonin and quietly murmurs "time to sleep."
http://food.yahoo.com/blog/beautyeats/746/top-10-foods-for-a-good-night-s-sleep
The first day in 10 month
That is right: 1st day since April 2006 that I actually woke up before 9am getting ready for work. That is the first day of my full time job: hey, when you are running out of cash during startup odyssy, it's time to get positive cash flow. Luckily, I really like my new job, you don't hear me talking about liking a job! But I actually do. First of all, I get to drive north toward SF everyday, 2ndly, there is no buroidical structure, 3rd and most importantly, it's the Internet stuff I breath and love everyday, and I got the corner office the first day!
You know what, movie marathon days are just a week old but it feels like ages; I eventually made the trip to famous bucks resturant at woodside: you are right, that famous bucks! And the horse silverado at Stanford barn licked all over my green jackets, but I loved the quiet conversation between us.
Movie marathon
By the time I finished watching all the movies I can and stepped outside, it's completely dark (of course at 10pm) and wet (raining!), considering it was sunny when I grabbed a coffee before going into the cinema.
Let's see: I started with "letter from Iwo Jima", picked up "Children of men" and "Arthur and the invisibles" (man it's horrible), bypassed the "dream writter" (so boring and cliche), revisited "blood diamond"(love this movie), completed "The pursuit of happiness", I found myself happy with my choice, even though pursuit means you will always chase but never will have something, as per Will Smith in the fabulous "The pursuit of happiness".
When I got home, another netflix's movie "The matador" is waiting for me. I ought to remember this day: a day with only movie and icecream.
Pan's Labyrinth
I like cozy warm place in a freezing day. Cinearts is just such a place. Lately, I more and more think a movie should be entertaining at the first place before being educating, while in most cases, it's just opposite. So today I decided to watch a fairy tale/sci fi movie called Pan's Labyrinth, it's actually spanish, which I did not know until the movie started. Loved it.
My first commercial shoot
It's freezing outside and I had been staying outside waiting with the clueless location coordinator Paul and production coordinator girl (we talked a lot but I forgot her name). Slowly Kaboom production's (http://www.kaboomproductions.com/) producer Eric McCasline drove in his shinning BMW SUV, wearing pretty trendy army green hat; then John the co-director pulled in his brand new black Mercedez C320(?), "wow, you guys in this business are all doing pretty well, maybe I should change career" I half joked with them. It's fun to see what people with complete different background are doing, and how they are doing. Both Eric and John are probably in late 20s to early 30s the most, while Paul and that girl is about mid 20s, I'm not sure if experiences are the factor? About 1 hour after we froze our ass off, more people started showing, first is Matthew Winks, the executive producer from McCann Erickson, which did the famous Microsoft animation commercial. Matthew is a tall, all american boy with Tom Cruise's top gun style sun glasses, nice jeans and shoes, He said he has been living in the city for 10 years and can not imagine anywhere else he would rather to live. I have trying to spot who is the man picked me as the featured actor for this Nortel commercial. Finally here came the man, director John, the spiky haired white guy with a specially wrinkled dark brown blazer, two old folks in charge of lighting and audio rolled in later, while there are another girl and blonde boy showed straight on the site, so there are total 9 people working together to shoot this short commercial, where I acted as a Chinese business owner; I think John the director went creative a bit in the later part directing me to toured China town's main street back and forth a few times. It was a lot more fun than my last acting as one of hundreds of Marine soliders in the movie "state of union", mainly because I actually got to talk to people behind the story and all these wonderful people worked around me. Now I kinda realized why people want to be actors. It's the attention they are getting, a fairy tale they are acting upon, and culture and story they are experiencing.
I can go into a lot more detail writing about everyone I came across and every moment of this afternoon. But I will leave it to the future when I am more calm and at peace.
When Apple is no longer just a computer
I bought three Apples (note: I hardly eat any fruits or snacks at all, let alone buying them) as tribute to Apple Inc.'s last day on earth. I was about to upgrade my cell to either Treo or blackberry; but now I am not that sure. iPhone rocks! Why no one else has thought about a touch screen phone?
The first week of 2007 has been very productive, I will start full time job at another more established startup going IPO this year, more importantly, I love the field they are in.
The 10th page of searching term "groupmingle.com" gave me a result published on a Chinese newspaper regarding our site.
http://www.chinaqw.com.cn/tzcy/cyjl/200612/25/55870.shtml
5 months after I bought Jim Cramer's Real Money, I finally decided to read it. Jim Cramer is one of those what I call "original" people with great mind and a lot of luck as well.
New progress
Our strategy of pulling power organizers for groupmingle.com has appeared to be working. New organizers have started to organize events on the site. The next strategy would be marketing through these people. Hopefully we can generate enough amount of traction certering around power organizers' geographic location.
Bazaar called me to extend the offer.
New year just seem to have a great start.
Neural science
I will meet with Bill Softky in less than 15 hours. I am fancinated by his research, see http://www.softky.com/Bill/ScienceDir/index.php
I am pretty good at framework but aweful on implementation, without any training on neural science I understand pretty well the architecture of his approach, in fact, I probably am able to come up with my own framework, although that is a bit exaggerating.
People in science are so different from people in business. I think I like scientists better.
One word keeps popping up: streaming. I was thinking to stream real time social network data to people's cellular phone.
20 mil acquisition before public beta
How cool is that!! Leo informed me that a company called getabuz.com, founded by his friend, is in talk with myspace and facebook for potential acquisition for 10 to 20 mil price range: that is before the site is open for public beta and there is alexa ranking whatsoever. It enables people to create music overlaid voice mail to their cell phone, very cool. I am immediately hooked with the service. This is the kind of viral effect and cutting edge market observation. The entire development process is similar to groupmingle.com but the result is so much different.
The first day of 2007
It's pretty warm for a new year day. Sunny, quiet on the street. Bo and I went to startbucks for about 2 hours while he was busy coding/testing between his two IBM laptop linked through Treo to Internet, I was reading "7 habits of highly effective people", again.
At night, I discovered a few new websites, here is how:
1. TC mentioned eroshare.com, a porn counterpart to flickr.com; it's really cool, I like it "spy" feature where u see live update from any other users, neat!
2. I uploaded a few real cool photos with added "groupmingle.com" on it in hope to get some attention on eroshare.com, and I thought of a new simple idea that is similar to hotornot but enabling user to advertise their websites or services on most popular photos;
3. So, I entered "adornot.com" to see it's taken; of course; then "adsornot.com", of course; Funny thing is adsornot.com sells ringtong for all major carrier, while I clicked on cingular it takes me to a dada.net whose marketing program was designed by adzoogleads.com; isn't that something. I clicked on love portion of dada.net and was amazed by this new breed of mobile dating services.
Rington, mobile dating, ads supported photo rating are something bugging my mind tonight.
