stlplace1) Confident, independent (not blindly follow other or influenced by others opinion), strong (not easily quit, grit, or perseverance) ;
2) Empathy, humility, know how to wear other people’s shoes and feel other people’s pain (同情心);
3) 不卑不亢（english translation? It seems bullet 1 covers this too. List it here as this is my father taught me, likely from his own life experience.);
4) Grounded, down to earth. Don’t take self too seriously, have a sense of humor. 平易近人, 幽默感。
Did my first root of Android phone. I had two Android phones before, but I never rooted it. This time I had a need for root to add the Chinese language to a Samsung Galaxy S3. The specific model is T-mobile SGH-T999 (shown in the Download or Recovery mode, but the model number on the settings says AT&T model number, which caused some issue for me later down the road).
The main reason for doing this is to add Chinese language support. It looks like by reading the article we can only get it work by rooting. I also looked at another article on the language support that suggested both MoreLocale2 and Language Enabler. Tried MoreLocale2 first but it seems needing root. So I started looked at the root tutorial. Because of the “wrong” model number, initially I thought this is an at&t device (model number at&t samsung galaxy s3 i9300, and here is an tutorial for that). Note the two tutorials are similar (t-mobile root tutorial here), the main difference is the at&t one is more verbose, and it has a link to the mod5 file for the at&t model. The odin program did not work for me initially because I was using the latter mod5 file (mismatch between hardware and mod5).
After that mistake the device was stuck in the Download mode (link to get into the Download mode), and could not reboot. I googled I have to download a Samsung software to get it restored. There were other hiccup too, one being the device cannot connect to my Windows 7 laptop (a bit old HP elite book), even after I install the driver. Had to reboot to make sure they connect. Back to topic, I was able to root after I switched to the mod5 file for t-mobile device. And it worked like a charm. After that I installed the rootCheck and SuperSu app from the Play store.
After the root, reboot I installed the Language Enabler app by Wanam from Google Play store (again refer to the language article above).
Final impression: the Samsung s3 is a relatively old device by today’s standard, but it works as a basic smartphone and adding the Chinese language to it, in my specific case, could potentially save an iPhone purchase (SE starts at about $400 in the states). It just takes some work to get it work, from enabling the developer mode/USB debugging on the device, to the odin software root.
Happy rooting 🙂
I first learned the “production environment” in 2010, when I worked as contractor for a major railway company. Before that I was mostly in CAD software development and consulting environment the word “production” did not come often. To be precise at Siemens PLM/UGS as developers, we did have access to various production releases and did validation for bug and bug fixes from time to time. Our code goes to release per year or per quarter. But production is not as significant as the maintenance releases, so this is the world of shrink wrap (engineering) software world.
Came to the world of business applications, or web. The first thing I learned is it’s not a good idea for newbies to touch production data. Or for that matter, not good idea for devs to touch that either. Very few people has production access, besides admins (database, web), the few people have access are usually product owner, business analysts, or product support people. And fast forward 5, 6 years, I became one of the latter. This is a privilege. Something I learned over past year:
1) Start from baby steps: e. g., if we want to update 1000 records: start from one or two records, do the update, validate and if everything looks good, do the mass update. This goes th way of divide/conquer too: so for example, if I need to delete 3 or 4 million records in one script (one run), I know it will be a long operation, and I don’t want the operation hang or fail in the middle. So what do I do? I divide the deleting operation into a few, each operation deletes half a million, much more manageable, and I will get the it complete much faster or get feedback much faster.
A common question for software developer is to be an employee (full time, perm) or be an contractor (W-2, or 1099). Strictly speaking the 1099 is more like a small business, and I have not done it personally. I heard some experienced people did the 1099; I will share if I have that exp. down the road.
I spent most of my career so far being an employee (8 years for Siemens PLM/UGS was the longest); I also spent some time being an contractor (total 3 places, about 28 months). Each option has pros and cons. A few things I learned from my own exp.
1) People have all kinds of expectations for contractors, usually the higher pay, the higher the expectation. For employee, they are a bit more patient.
2) Contract to hire. I found this is usually promised or at least suggested at the beginning, as personally I still prefer to be employee long time. But in two cases, I found they were not the case. All types things happen at client, but in one case looking back I felt the client may never had intention to convert. So this is something to keep in mind as for some people the longevity/conversion is important factor.
I am a soft spoken person. I got to know this word when a recruiter gave me feedback in 2000, when I applied for a consultant position at software company. That’s ok most of the time, except in certain cases we need to be clear: we cannot be vague, and we cannot waiver. Some examples include communicate with clients or customer when we work on a project, we need to be clear about the responsibility of each party, the expectations and the timeline or milestone.
A related topic is the “killer instinct” or “killer attitude”. We all know “killer apps”, the apps that knock the ball out of the park. Similarly, by killer instinct I meant in certain cases, we have no choice but to fix the issue, and we have to deliver. An example is the crisis situation, customer was already unhappy with the situation, we need to turn it around. I had couple instances like that recently. The solution usually involves putting head down, looking at the code, ask question or solicit help as needed. The solution will come eventually.
On the other hand, I have seen very intelligent people that are soft-spoken but don’t have the killer-instinct, or the drive to solve or fix a problem. This is ok, as long as the team has other people with the attribute above. But for the person without that trait, he/she may hit a career glass-ceiling soon. Because in real world, stressful situation/conflict arise and it usually needs that skill.
I decided to switch my wireless carrier again, from H2O wireless to Ting. I stayed with H2O for over a year, mostly satisfied, except recently I started using its per minute data, which seems burn my money quickly. I heard about Ting from friend before, but I forgot to do the referral. 🙁 Anyway I switched my wife’s T-mobile prepaid to Ting last week, and I just did mine this evening. The only thing Ting needs is the IMEI number of iPhone, the account number or the pin from the older carrier. In the case of t-mobile, it’s last 4 digits of phone number; the the case of the H2O, it’s the last 4 or SIM card number. Here is how to find it on iPhone: Settings => General => About => ICCID number. IMEI number can be found in similar fashion.
By doing this, essentially I combined my phone and my wife’s phone into one account. Besides that, my wife also gets some data usage, which she does not have previously.
Car accident and the rental coverage in car insurance
I used to have the rental coverage in my car insurance. But in recent review, I decided not to keep it for my 2012 Sienna to save some money (about $13.25 per 6 month), as I thought the extended warranty (service contract) will cover in the case of repair. A mistake on my side. Yesterday my wife got into an accident while driving sienna, and I need to bring it to car bodyshop, which also means I need a rental car. The cost is about $30 per day from Enterprise. So I think I will shell out about $200 (assume 7 days) while trying to save $13.25. 🙁
Also, looking back I really should not have bought the extended warranty (EW) for the used certified Sienna. For 3 years besides the routine maintenance, the main cost is to fix the squirrels chewing the cables, and replace four tires. Both were not covered by the EW. Obviously they don’t cover accident either 🙁 I would put my money in my own pocket next time.
PS: the minivan is already in shop. It’s a bit surprising that I mostly used the Geico app for appointment and status checking.
PS2: it appears Ting is using T-mobile network, the signal is not as good as AT&T which is used by H2O wireless. There is network degradation or no signal near my work place 🙁
I used to listen APM: Market Place (NPR) and the Nightly Business Report (PBS => CNBC). I was a business news junkie, and was into stock market. I also listened to a more in-depth podcast: the weathtrack by Consuelo.
More recently, I expanded my podcasts a bit, as you can see from below.
NPR hidden brain: I grew interest in psychology in recent years. It’s very much applicable in the business, work place, and the home.
Developing Perspective: david smith, note he moved on to the under the radar with Marco recently. But very good stuff from indie dev perspective.
Under the radar: by david smith (web, twitter) and marco arment (web, twitter). This is the new podcast launched by David and Marco (the lead developer of tumblr and famous tech blogger).
Release notes: this one is more geared toward developing iOS/Mac apps for business.
raywenderlich.com: I used to listen quite a bit, but have not followed as close as before since I am no longer doing iOS apps.
Followed this instruction move away from bluehost; and move domain into godaddy. Most instructions are accurate, except one needs to ping pong couple times, started from bluehost first, then at godaddy website, after that I received email from godaddy asking about the transfer, go ahead and use the information in the email to start the official transfer, at last I go to bluehost website and approved the transfer. The interesting part is the entry of name server on my web host (digitalocean) gets updated automatically once I approved the transfer by clicking the link on bluehost. This really surprised me as I was expecting to make changes manually on my own 🙂
You may ask why I bother to transfer? I have actually moved my web hosting from bluehost to digitalocean (shared host to dedicated hosting) a while ago. This is the last step before moving completely away from the bluehost. No ill feeling towards bluehost (although couple years ago it did give me some headache). It’s just the cost between the two are comparable and I like to have more say on the web hosting.
Last but not least, if you have Amex card, check if you have the godaddy $20 off $50 offer. I found it from one of my Amex card, and I used it for domain transfer ($9.99 x 5 years plus a bit tax/fees). So the total will be about $30 after Amex offer. 🙂
Talking about tests exams and realized I made a big mistake, this happens quite often when I was in middle school. My solution to that was not talk about or think about it after a test. But that did not work for Gaokao. As we had to estimate how we did after the test, then decided the schools we wanted to apply (or realistically speaking, they will accept us). In Chinese it’s called 估分和填志愿。
Working days 开始工作: leaving work and on the car thinking about the automatic job running could have issues, and don’t know where I can find a useful wifi hotspot (like this afternoon). This is a bit like second guessing myself, which in many cases turn out my 1st attempt was good (including this afternoon). This is also a bit like in an exam, when I had time to review and was not sure about the answer to some question, I could make some change and basically changed some “correct” answers to “wrong” ones. Also keep in mind even in a few cases it did turn out I made small mistake initially, the mistake was mostly harmless, excepting waste some of my time or slow down other teammate (one example was the integration job during ugs/Siemens days). On a related topic, about working after hours. Try to stay away from those unless absolutely necessary. I know we are knowledge workers, in a sense we never stop working, we can think about work related stuff all the time. Don’t. Don’t pull out work laptop and start coding (or something else) if we think of some good idea. Instead put a note to yourself on a phone. We can pick it up the next day. That’s called work life balance.
Other situations (family related), when I call my parents at regular time and they were not there, I would start worry: are you getting sick, or something; once I missed the call from my daughter’s school bus driver, I was really worried kid may have issue on the way from school to home. Other kids related topic, I recall once I dropped my daughter on the ground (on her back, or back head), I heard her cry, and was very worried and felt guilty did not holding her tight enough 很遗憾没有把她抓住. After talking to a doctor, she reassured me in most cases a kid would still be ok. 🙂
This reminds me for my on call (pager duty), many times when alerts go off, the wolf did not actually come. The real situation usually is not as bad as we initially thought 🙂
十几年前我回国在上海一般就住一个如家或锦江之星，挑一个离地铁比较近的酒店，这样上班办事都比较方便。那时候没有小孩，旅馆主要就是睡个觉，干净清爽就可以了。快进几年，有了两个小孩，住的酒店要求也稍有提高。托酒店信用卡促销的福，攒了些点数或是free nights, 我也升级了住的旅馆。在上海常住的旅馆有，徐家汇的万丽酒店（courtyard Shanghai xujiahui), 她家所在的楼叫西藏大厦，出租车司机如不清楚可提这个名字。另一家是浦东的喜来登福朋酒店（four points by Sheraton, Shanghai pudong, 又叫由由酒店，楼的名字），注意她家旁边有喜来登酒店（Sheraton Shanghai pudong, 5 star vs four points 4 star), 不要搞错。这两家的房间起价大概是800人民币左右。
最近一次有幸住了回陆家嘴的柏悦酒店（park hyatt），这个标价是大概300多美金，我用的是hyatt卡的开卡free nights. 看了下用chase ultimate rewards points 的话是2万点一晚。小孩很喜欢，因为有一些没见过的features. 我的头被淋浴喷头砸了一下。Uncle Major 进大观园。:-)
在美国最近住Hampton inn 比较多。还是觉得Hampton inn 接地气一些。这家Hilton 系列的中档酒店设计简单，实用，且包早餐。一般我这样小兵级别的人出差就住它家。对有小孩的家庭包早餐是一个挺有用的feature. Other hotels have similar feature include Hilton garden inn, holiday inn express and clarion. Last but not least, hhonors is the Hilton hotels reward program. Hampton inn usually costs 20,000 points (roughly $100).
Last but not least, tips. I know it’s a sensitive topic, but typically I gave $2 tip for the maid at Hampton (or equivalent hotels), put the note stating “for the maid” on the top of the bill so there is no confusion. Interestingly, in China I noticed the tipping culture is popular in Shanghai foreign brand hotels (4 star or above), I do give tips for people who handle my luggages (roughly $1 for a piece, which is similar to US standard). But in less developed areas, there is no such things as tip. People will laugh it off and give back the money.
