Scott Yang's Playground

Jason Freedman on how to email busy people, as we all know busy people don’t have time for all your emails and they do say “crap, Ctrl-A, Delete and let’s start again”. Subject Lines Matter Use Your Company Email Address Remind Him of Context Limit Your Entire Email to 5 sentences or Less Make Your [...]

Via James Yu’s farewell blog post on his startup employee life at Scribd. This brings us to the most important quality that enables impact: trust. Without trust, employees aren’t empowered. And without empowerment, there can be no impact… This is exactly the reason why startup hiring is difficult: the amount of trust required in the [...]

Went and watched Unknown with Vivian at Westfield Eastgarden today — something that I would never been able to do with a day job. 10:40am in the morning with bunch of oldies in the cinema, and almost felt like one as well. As of the movie — acting was good and Liam Neeson was great. [...]

According to Google Analytics, out of 6 web properties that I have the tracking script, they receive a total of 26,170,964 visits and 72,950,295 page views in 2010. Some sites went up and up, and some sites went down and down (like this very blog). Managing all that has certainly burnt all my mid-night oil [...]

Bought an ATA from Cormain back in January. It’s ugly, but it works. Connected to our new Billion 7800N ADSL2+ router and makes calls via PennyTel. No problem what so ever until a week ago. Suddenly VoIP stopped working. I am also unable to connect to ATA’s web admin interface to figure out what might [...]

Derek at CD Baby talking about delegation. Basically one man cannot run everything, and you either delegate or you die. A good reminder to a control freak (me in some aspect). Also looked at Exodus 18 on Friday (management lessons for Moses). Now just need to find trust worthy people to delegate to.

Nichol Alexander on deleting Facebook account and making a goodbye, after watched The Social Netwokr and read this article by Zadie Smith. Now ask myself whether I am just one of “500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore”. That’s the phenomenon of this generation — it’s Facebook today, [...]

Bought a new toy today. Thanks to Shan-Shan for babysitting the kids while me & Vivian went to pick it up from JB Hi-Fi. Since I moved to Sydney in 1995 (gee, that was 16 years ago!) we have never really had a TV at home. I guess I never really felt the “need”. The [...]

WSJ: Amy Chua as Chinese Parent. That article reads like it’s written almost sarcastically. Really put me off as a Chinese parent.

Inequality in Equalland — an interesting look on the wealth distribution.

Via Siliconbeach mailing list. On Quora — What is the perfect startup team?: The perfect startup has all three founders: someone who understands how to build technologies and systems to solve problems; someone who understands the human factors behind those problems, why they exist, what it takes to fix them and how to shape the [...]

Just received an email about an upcoming meeting. Then I noticed that date of the meeting is… Monday 22nd of November, which was yesterday. So I thought it must have been a typo. It should have been 29th, which is next Monday! Then I looked at the email more carefully, and noted that it was [...]

Via Hacker News, Chad Austin: 10 Pitfalls of Dirty Code. Dirty code does not scale to larger teams. Dirty code reduces team morale. Dirty code makes programmers slower. Dirty code inhibits the formation of an ownership culture. If product concepts are not reflected in the code, programmers might implement features in ways that don’t make [...]

2 days after the election and we still cannot sure who will be Australia’s next Prime Minister. Most exciting election in Australia over the last 50 years? More like most disastrous to me. Although I did vote for that Mid-Night Oil guy (who else is worthy in Kingsford-Smith?) I gotta say that I am really [...]

From Leo Laport: Buzz Kill. It makes me feel like everything I’ve posted over the past four years on Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plurk, Pownce, and, yes, Google Buzz, has been an immense waste of time. I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting [...]