Music made together may one day heal mankind. – from “We Gather Here Together” (YT)
For music streaming nowadays I mainly use YouTube Music, because I have YouTube Premium subscription. It’s not perfect, but YT Music has a decent collection, and functionality.
YouTube and YouTube Music
When I was listening to Ayen 何璟昕 music both via YT and YT Music, as I switch between them as I was trying to conserve some data usage (partially because I lost power and Wi-Fi a few days ago). I noticed that YT Music is sometimes automatically generated by YouTube (Google), for example this channel. More on YouTube automation here.
Also, I realized there are two ways we can avoid using cell phone data.
1) Listen to music on YT Music: if we download the video via Wi-Fi in advance, and listen to it in the Download mode, not the library mode. The playlist in Download mode can play continuously, or you can actually loop the playlist if you like;
2) Watch videos on YT, if we download the video via Wi-Fi in advance. If we start playing from the last downloaded video, it will continue to the next, and so on.
If we are watching the video from the library mode, it will use data on YT Music.
YT Music Sync from Library to Download: there is a sync icon button in the downloaded playlist, press it and a popup will show up, ask you to confirm, you say yes, and it will apply the update.
Some More Tips for YT and YT Music
Loop in YT: I just found out we can loop a single song on YouTube too (move mouse over the video, right mouse click, and you see an option of “Loop”. Also, sometimes YT has the “transcript” function (I think it depends on how the creator set it up), and you can follow along with the lyrics for a song (or words/captions for a video). Note the looping works both on Desktop and in the iOS app.
YT Music: you can loop a song or loop a playlist. The icon is at the bottom right when you play a song. If you just want to loop a song, tap twice and make sure you have a number “1” inside that loop.
A bug in YT Music (italics for emphasis):
I learned this lesson the hard way a few times. I found that, “saving to playlist” in YT Music website will mess up my playlist pretty badly. Now if I can stay away from doing that. By “messing up” I mean a lot of duplicates or songs that I don’t intend to add got added when I did the “save” 🙂
Also, I found recently, for many songs, we can jump directly from YT to YT Music by press a “play icon button” inside YT (when applicable).
Sometimes we need to get to the comments and edit. Below is the link getting to the comments.
Someday I hope I can become a product manager for YT Music and I noticed a subtle bug: in the YT music occasionally the cover page (the image and the song name) is wrong. The music or the song is still correct. The video is correct too.
YT: note the YT music image and song name don’t match the song in YT
Music industry
The landscape of digital music is overly fragmented, in my opinion. For example, in China it appears QQ音乐 and 网易云音乐 (Ayen何璟昕 on 网易云音乐) are popular. In the west Spotify and Apple Music are two largest platforms. Personally, I used mostly YT and YT Music as I have YT Premium Sub. Then there are the social media platforms: which are also fragmented, obviously.
Keep in mind in last 10 years or so, the music industry has experienced seismic shift – music is increasingly being streamed online, instead of the good old days of CD, or singles sales. I think it may have something impact on Ayen 何璟昕‘s journey becoming a musician/song writer/singer. She does have one advantage: her undergraduate major is digital media – and we can see some of her work in the MV (music video) she created.
I still remember the days at Best Buy there are racks and racks of CDs on display, it was probably 15 or 20 years ago. Both our 2012 Toyota Camry and 2012 Toyota Sienna still had CD player build in – both has bluetooth and USB too, so it can be connected to smartphone.
This reminds me at St. Louis Children’s Choirs, they check the copyrights of the music or the song they are singing, and pay the author a royalty or something like that. I don’t know if they use companies such as Swank Motion Pictures or some other company. Btw, our old daughter sung at St. Louis Children’s Choirs from 1st grade to 7th grade, and we have many wonderful memories.
I recall many years ago, probably in year 2004, I heard a lot of controversy of copyrights issues at YouTube too. That’s when YouTube was bought by Google.
In terms of singers, think I am going to write about Sandy Lam (Lin Yi’lian) and G.E.M. Deng Ziqi next.
It’s hard to make a decent living as a musician
I am not talking about the top dogs, such as Taylor Swift in the USA, or G.E.M. Deng Ziqi in HK. They make money both from music (even from streaming, because of their music are being played quite a bit on streaming platforms), and from live performance.
But most musicians are not that lucky: the two income streams are usually not enough to make decent living. I saw people work on a few other things to make ends meet: teach, write customized music (song, lyrics, collaborate etc.), make/sell instruments. For example, I saw many song writers do customized music. And Ayen何璟昕 does all three. Carlos makes instruments.
(Update 05-03-2025) I confirmed above with a friend who has about 3 millions streaming (a year) on Spotify. He told the gross profit is about $10,000. But he needs to pay record label and recoding studio etc., so basically he has nothing left after that. He also said people like Taylor Swift has billions of streaming for her songs. Also Spotify has better payout ratio for people like Taylor Swift, compared to ordinary creators Joe and Jane. Last but not least, this is not new phenomena: it was like that pre-streaming, and I assume that’s applicable for the days when CD, cassette and vinyl were the main media for distribute the music. So if I could expand it a bit, it’s basically similar to the wealth distribution of the USA: the rich get richer, the poor becomes poorer. (Update 05-16-2025) This reminds me of the similar point Warren Buffett said here on YT Shorts – “a more and more specialized economy”.
(Update 05-09-2025) I looked around a bit more. I found couple places that musicans can sell their products.
(Update 05-12-2025) I found couple music platforms that act between musicians and the YT. For example, I found this one ewway.com at 痴人. And I came across another one Bquate SAC from this song 此生无憾 (国粤对唱版). I like to do a bit more research in the near future.
(Update 05-13-2025) Here is another one 敢开始 submitted by Tencent. In this case, it seems the song was submitted by the publisher to YT Music. You can watch the actual music video here –東風日產勁客《敢開始》Ayen何璟昕 原創歌曲 既有所想，就勇敢開始，不為一個結果 .
I noticed “Auto-generated by YouTube” (link goes to Reddit) in the description. From programming or software integration point of view, I speculate the music platforms have backend integrations with Google/YouTube via API. This is likely accomplished via a batch process.
Last not not least, I found the competition among Chinese songs are so tense, and for example, for 哪吒2主题曲 — 此生无憾. I am aware of 7 versions on YT. And this is only a partial list. One of them is very gimmicky, and obviously I won’t give special attention to the channel or the video. But you can guess which one 🙂
Kids (esp. 15 year old) are at an age that want material things, and I can relate to because many years ago I have been through that age many years ago – I wanted to pick out my own apparel including shoes to impress girls 🙂
But at my current age, I really think opposite: I want to use money to buy time, instead of buy stuff.
Playdate and sleepover
When kids are young, parents sometimes setup playdates for kids.
When kids grow, they want to have their own say and “sleepover” for b-day celebration seems fairly popular among teen girls.
But I realized a few things recently: my 15-year-old would not invite her friends over because out home is much more modest compared to some of her friends. I think to some extent my soon to be 11-year-old felt this way too. So, after about 40 years, my kids end up in similar boat as me – during my middle school and high school years I never invited my friends over too. Different circumstances, obviously, but economy was a factor.
It’s not the end of the world though. On the side of “buying stuff”, if I could go back to it. I felt I am more lenient, or I gave my kids more flexibility compared to what my parents could do back in the day. I told my 15-year-old a story, it was probably when I was a 3rd or 4th grader in the elementary school, and I needed those white tennis shoes for perform (those shoes are somewhat like the low ankle Converse here nowadays, and they are white). I didn’t have those: it would probably cost my parents to sacrifice something else to get the shoes. So my mom borrowed new shoes from a classmate (a girl), and after we used the shoes, my mom washed them and put on some white powder on them, so that they looked like new (or as much as practical). (Update 12-30-2026) Today I told this story to my old daughter when I was teaching her to drive.
The other day, I just noticed a girl, friend of my 15-year-old, had the same $100 a pair adidas 🙂
Priority
So, the other day, my 15-year-old mentioned she doesn’t have graphing calculator. I mentioned that I offered it to her multiple times. She said she put a hold at the library (I assume the high school library). So, there goes the priority: she put apparel and shoes before the calculator.
The IT software engineer job market seems warmed up a little bit recently, from my observations. I am getting some emails from the recruiters, and they looked like real jobs or openings.
I think during the middle of last year (June 2024) I came across the software engineers job chart from (FRED) Software Development Job Postings on Indeed in the United States, and the chart could be a bit misleading because the start date is Feb 2020. Basically, we can say it just showed the dramatic increase of software engineer jobs and subsequent declining of job openings due to the pandemic over-hiring earlier, big tech big cuts following Elon’s huge cut at Twitter post his acquisition.
I believe this hiring boom and bust trend is similar for the related area such as quality assurance (testing engineers), localization and translation, platform and dev ops engineering, product development and project management and so on.
Indeed and LinkedIn
In recent years, I mainly use Indeed and LinkedIn for job search: for my last 2 jobs (Mastercard and Ascension) I found them mainly through Indeed.com. I remember the days (year 2010) when I found my job at local craigslist, those days are long gone. I found my current job in year 2021 through a recruiter btw – I know the recruiter (recruiting company) through previous engagement (year 2011), and we kept that relationship over the years 🙂
A note on LinkedIn, LinkedIn has DESTROYED the job market (in 2024). I tend to agree – because LinkedIn aggregates a lot of jobs nowadays, and for one job especially the remote job, it’s quite easy for the recruiter to received hundreds of resumes in a day or two. For example, this staff software engineer job at GE Healthcare, I saw “(posted) 23 hours ago · 62 people clicked apply” right now (03-25-2025, 2:17 pm central). So this is a real problem. And I don’t know how to get around it – unless you know the recruiter or hiring manager.
Typical process (St. Louis based dev jobs)
Phone screen, technical screen and manager interview. Offer or being ghosted, or if they are nice, they will send you the rejection email. Note in STL we don’t do the leetcode stuff which is common among Silicon Valley, Seatle or Austin based tech companies. They needed those quizzes to filter out candidates – in a way it’s like the Gaokao in China.
Interview
There are usually two types of questions: behavior and technical. For behavior sometimes you can go to glassdoor.com and see if there are any. I guess we can do similar for technical questions too – but at the same time I think it’s probably more unpredictable.
Whatever the question you receive, try to be calm. Over the years I have interviewed at places, in rare cases the interviewer will have some sort of undesirable attitude – for example, I recall once at Tomson Reuters in year 2009, the guy commented towards the end – you are not the most ignorant person coming in in terms of technical knowledge 🙁
Occasionally you will meet some super nice people too: people with decency and true empathy. Once in New Jersey, I was interviewing at Ingersoll-Rand office all day, one interviewer said, let’s make it informal, so he took me walk around the cafeteria. It was winter, and we didn’t go outside.
Don’t be defensive, as much as practical obviously. Once my big boss at current place, asked me: it seems your tenure is not too long in this and the place, note the implied question here – are you a job hopper (I talked about this topic here too). More on job hopping for practical purposes, there are data to back up that for many people, salary or compensation increase is from “job hopping” (Forbes). A few of my job changes (not hopping 🙂 confirmed this trend too.
Some other tips
Background check
Don’t lie on your resume. At the same time, don’t stress over the background check. Sometimes at some old-fashioned companies or out of date places they will ask a question such as “have you ever involuntarily lose your job”: I would say No regardless the situation. Or ignore those places if they are truly “out of date“. Because you may feel out of places when you join them.
Usually, background check is a part of the pre-employment process, and you would need to give two weeks’ notice at the current place. That’s also sometimes people have stress – what if anything goes wrong with background check?
My experience with this is: as long as you don’t break laws, etc., you should be fine. It seems to me the background checking companies are mostly providing a service anyway, and in the process making some money. I have done quite a few background checking in last 5 years or so. In fact I did three (or 4) background checking in this school year: depends on how you count it.
First: the volunteer background check for the school district I volunteer. They have two background checks: one requires fingerprint (and I assume some sort of FBI database lookup) Missouri Automated Criminal History System (MACHS); another one is for Missouri educator sort of check called FCSR, stands for Family Care Safety Registry, this can be done online exclusively.
For Uber: it’s done fairly quickly. Cannot find the background checking company from my email now.
For Lyft: it seems they used checkr.
For my current job, I did background check via clariti (now a part of DISA Screen). Btw, I noticed they had a securityincident recently 🙁
Drug testing
This is required sometimes. Nowadays they usually only require urine sample. And you can go to a specimen collection place such as Quest Labs, or other special places such as occupational health clinics, etc. In the old days when I got my 1st job, I recall they will cut some of my hair for testing – those are more rigorous testing in my opinion. Anyway, don’t do illicit drugs, marijuana and/or cannabis included. I recall when I was working for coal mining companies: they even said the company can ask for urine sample anytime.
Reference check
It seems this is rarely done nowadays.
Microsoft Teams – multiple Microsoft office 365 accounts
I learned my lesson the hard way during real interview. I clicked on the Microsoft Teams link on the Chrome browser that I usually use. But I forgot that I recently used that browser for outlook (another email account, different email from the link I was clicking). And the Chrome browser gave me an error right away. So I copied the link, and open a new incognito window and pasted my link there, it prompt me with some new information. I was not sure what to do. So I opened Safari as I believe I haven’t used that browser for a while, and got information similar to the new Chrome incognito window (at least they are consistent), and I just clicked the link there and it worked.
喜茶 : last few years (2023, 2024) I noticed their store in Shanghai Hongqiao Hub (see below), after I listened to this Apple podcast. They (疯投圈) actually did two more episodes on milk tea – one and two. My impression is they are the high end, consider this as Starbucks of Chinese fruit tea. Btw, I know it’s useless but fun fact: do you know which area in Shanghai has the most coffee shops? (Hint, see this pop-up store inside Hongqiao Hub). Once I counted there are 7 well known coffee (brands) shops in the area: Starbucks, Canada’s Tim Horton (Tim’s), Man Coffee (Shanghai high end brand), Luckin coffee, etc.
霸王茶姬: 霸王茶姬（英语：CHAGEE）是一家中国茶饮连锁经营品牌，主打“原叶茶+鲜奶”的“鲜奶茶”饮品。霸王茶姬于2017年6月由张俊杰创立，品牌名称源自京剧经典曲目《霸王别姬》，标识为水墨风格的虞姬形象，主要售卖水果茶、奶茶等现制茶饮饮品。同年11月17日，首家门店在云南昆明五一路开业，其后发展为中国西南地区的知名茶饮品牌。2019年，开始进军海外，先后进入马来西亚、新加坡、泰国等东南亚市场。2021年6月，总部由昆明迁往成都。2021年9月，霸王茶姬对品牌进行升级改造，使用全新英文名称“CHAGEE” ，标识改为白底红色的京剧花旦脸谱，参考奢侈品门店风格设计新门店，并加入中国古建筑中的榫卯结构，全国首家旗舰店在成都春熙路开业[1] 。(Update 2025-12-01 Just noticed they are listed in the USA and Nasdaq now, with ticker symbol CHA). If you looked at the stock price history, it’s a good way to lose money if you bought the stock at the debut.
Look around you will see a friend, a family, we are brothers and sisters too.
======
(I forgot the exact grace before dinner at Fraternity. I recall there may be something about brotherhood. If I look carefully enough, it may be in some of the materials I still have)
Our Father, which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy Name; Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven: Give us this day our daily bread; And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us; And lead us not into temptation, But deliver us from evil; For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, For ever and ever. Amen.
I came across this prayer on a Sunday at a friend’s friend’s house: baby shower (Nov 2013). I was just told by my recruiter that my contractor position would end in 2 weeks on the Friday evening prior. And I suspect someone at the company I worked at, may have said bad things about me then. I don’t have proof, just suspicion. Now I think it’s more a business decision, change of direction basically. The prayer made a difference on how I feel about the situation, or at least how I wanted to approach the things.
I got a job offer a few days later 🙂
Prayer before bed
Probably not as common as the prayer before the meals. But when our older daughter was younger, I usually say a few prayers before she goes to bed. A few years ago, she would say “love” to everyone before going to sleep. Now our younger one does the same.
I didn’t do well in my last 2 years of investing or trading. I think the overall performance in my main IRA (trading) account, for last 2 years (2022 and 2023) is slightly down.
This year, I lagged behind the S&P 500 index in terms of performance (mine 11% vs S&P 500’s 25%). And I think one reason is probably I had too many stocks.
A related issue is the overall short holding period, and traded too frequently. The last point was a bit subjective, I think one example is I bought $ANSS and hold it for a few days, before it jumped due to the buy out (on the market) rumor.
This is subjective because in my Robinhood account, in which I do trade most frequently, I got 49% YTD return which matchs $APPL performance YTD, and is about twice as good as S&P 500 index fund. I wish I have put in more money into my Robinhood account – which I will do it in the new year.
Going forward
I am going to put >= $10k on a stock: put eggs in a few baskets and watch them carefully. For existing stocks, I’ll ask: if the position is over 10k, should I keep it? If the position is less than 10k, should I add more? If yes at what price. Keep this new mind when initiating a new position too. #majorsThoughtsOnStock #newYear #newMindset
Also, I am going to be more patient. Easily said than done on this, but I am going to try. I think the mindset of long term investing goes like this: we don’t know or it’s very hard for us to know in advance whether an investment (a stock) will work out or not. But given time, and if we do our homework, we got a better batting average. And if we can live longer enough, this snowball effect (compounded interest) will help the asset grow.
My comment: the +30% growth in 4Q20 till 3Q21 seems mostly pandemic driven – think school adding devices for virtual learning. Btw, my daughters’ school district use Mosyle – it seems Jamf is a more expensive and comprehensive product (Jamf vs Mosyle). I used Jamf while at Mercy for my MacBook (remember I had a special command to get around the fact that I was not admin). I am not sure what MDM software I used while at MasterCard and Ascension.
My comment: Mac is usually a more secure OS compared to Windows. I don’t remember we had antivirus (or end point protection) software back in year 2014 using Jamf. And at Asc I recall they installed Blackberry Cylance. A comparison between Cylance and Jamf.
More on MDM software
Years ago (in year 2012) I heard about Mobile Iron, which was bought by Air Watch, which was in turn bought by VMWare (and VMWare was recently bought by Broadcom).
Microsoft Intune, now Company Portal app, it seems right now I used it more like #BYOD (bring your own device) instead of #MDM (company owned device, MDM stands for mobile device management).
Paypal is in the payments industry. This article explains some of the competitors. I recall PayPal did paid a hefty sum for the Honey coupon site acquisition. Not sure if this works out or not. Other competitors in this arena include ebates (Rakuten.com) and Dosh, plus credit card offers such as Amex and Chase. This is a very competitive market.
Some more thoughts – no silver bullet
I don’t think there is a silver bullet or a multi-bagger, at least not for me. Most likely I will continue to plug along, trading the stocks that I have some success in my past trading. Again I will learn from other people including Warren Buffett, but I won’t mimic other people.
Update 01-07-2024: I got another idea, that’s Zoom $ZM. I heard from my younger daughter’s violin teacher that he taught lesson to kid (family) travelled to Indonesia during the holiday break. We did one lesson with him during last year too when my 9 year old was sick. From 1st look, Zoom stock is very cheap now. I understand the growth may not be there because we passed the pandemic growth.
(Below was written in 05-31-2014, about 9 and half years ago, when our old daughter S was at Hope Montessori Academy in Creve Coeur. We love both our daughters’ teachers since then too 🙂
There is a cliche, saying we learn a lot from our kids (being parents). And I would like to add, we learned a lot from S8’s teachers too. Actually many times we can see teachers’ teaching from S8’s daily behavior at home. Sometimes when my partner lost patience when asking S8 to do something, S8 will say “be nice to friends”. Or other times we joked about something, she will say “mommy/daddy, no potty words”.
Our little S6 followed her big sis’ path, for the most part: she went to ILSO 1st when she was 2 and 3 years old. At 4 year old we sent our little S to the Hope Montessori in Creve Coeur. Now she is a 4th grader at the Spoede Elementary.
And I also volunteers at the school regularly, and had a glimpse of teachers/staff’s work behind the scene, including but not limiting to the work shortly before the pandemic shutdown, during pandemic (do you still remember the Zoom and virtual learning? :-), and post pandemic. I know many teachers and staff because of my volunteer work: it ranges from being a chaperon in the school (kids) field trop, serve on the Parent Teacher Organization (PTO, our PTO is SSA and LMSPA, btw), or the Math Fact Scholars (MFS) program.
To put it in a more tangible way, I have seen PE coaches putting away the tables for us post the MFS morning testing sessions. I have seen music teacher left her sick kid to grandma (her mom, btw, her mom was Spoede teacher too :-), and shuttle back and forth to make sure the kiddo’s musical rehearsal is still on. And teachers volunteered their time and their spouses’ time (and kids’s time) to help move to the new building, and organize, or prep for kids’s musical or Lego League expo (competition); after school academic and other enrichment clubs too.
Today I made a pretty bad mistake on my presentation. Basically, I messed up my audio shortly after I got started, and I was not aware of it for about 6 minutes or so: until I realized I was kicked out the meeting. The audio issue was caused by my airpods losing battery, and I switched to the bluetooth headset. But it appears the airpods is still connected as I did not put the airpods in the pod (partially due to presenting, and I was a bit overwhelmed). Because the airpods was making noise, my colleague dropped me from the meeting, which I did not realized as I was switch between the tabs on Chrome web broswer: the meeting was just a tab and it was not obvious.
Going forward, I am going to implement two changes: no two bluetooth devices at the same time (again due to not complete switch over or disconnecting issue); also I am going to pull out the google meet tab to its own window so that I can be made aware.
Remote working brings a lot of convenience, and it brings a lot of challenges too (remember the lawyer’s I am not a cat incident on Zoom?). One thing I think it’s important is the empathy. I think the place I am working is okay, but not perfect. Without getting too much details, I feel I did not get much support, rather received some criticisms instead. There are better ways to handle that. If I am a leader, I would handle it differently.
