When I was reading book this afternoon, not directly related to the its content but somehow it inspired me to realize some of self improvements I've accomplished through past couple of months or the past year. Most of them were changed subconsciously, like a good "by-product" thing.

Improvements

• Taking stairs(mentioned before)
• No more junk food, do more cooking
• Sleep earlier, resist to temptation
• Reading more often(thanks to Kindle Paperwhite)
• No games at all(I'd like to have some)

No More Junk Food

I can't remember the last time I grabbed a burger at McDonalds. Maybe for you it doesn't sound like a big deal, but for me it's totally a different story.

When I was still a poor student in China, having a McDonalds burger is like a "highs in the month" event. It was quite expensive compared to the salary, or the pin money I could get from my dad. Plus it was, and still is so so delicious, way better than Japan. So at that time, my image of an ideal life was I can at least afford to have McDonalds every day.

Then after graduated from university, I came to Japan to work as a full-time software engineer. My salary was good enough to have as many burgers as I want. Even though I knew people call it junk food, but for me it was not. I could eat McDonalds for one week straight.

I enjoyed it, I was happy. It seemed like that this was one thing impossible to change, not to mention I was not willing to change at all.

But what really changed me was after I joined cookpad, my current company. The company's goal is to make cooking more fun, make people healthier. So more or less I got the point of why processed food is bad, then one day my boss sent me a link to Jamie Oliver's talk in TED. That 20 minutes talk was amazing. Then I searched him in Youtube about his "Food Revolution", and I watched all of them. That thing really changed my mind.

So from that moment, I started to review my pst, I found myself willing to change the habit of eating junk food.

Do More Cooking

But change is never easy. Even though I wanted to do more cooking, work fatigue, working overtime and a failed relationship made me feel extremely drained, exhausted and frustrated. Every time I got home I felt so powerless that I'd rather just skip the dinner. Shopping ingredients, looking for a simple enough newbie friendly recipe and cook it felt so unreal.

But thanks to some good books I've read, I adjusted my attitudes toward work and relationships, I managed to keep myself stay positive and made some changes in working environment. Now I go home earlier than before, rarely any overtime, I'm still a little tired after I open the door but I get the energy to go shopping and cook. Even though my cooking skill is not good, I can only cook several recipes and sometimes the taste is awful, I enjoyed it, I'm happy to serve myself, understand more about foods, balance diet nutritions from various ingredients, try out some new recipes in the weekend, etc. I feel content.

And what amazed me is that this change was much easier than I expected, especially judging from my past diet habit and "dreams". I didn't track my activities and mark them on a calendar. More like happened subconsciously, so, congret to myself! (But I'm still uncomfortable to cook with someones else cuz I'm clumsy and slow in the kitchen >_<)

A Must Watch Video

OK I'll stop here today but I want to share a very touching video with you. I'm 100% sure it's worth watching so don't miss it! You won't regret! No spoiler here~

When my friends and I went out for lunch today, I was asked about these 2 Japanese kanji: "炙り", "挽肉", since I'm Chinese and I'm supposed to be the "Kanji Reader" in the Gaijin group.

Hmm, but I let them down.. What I said was "I don't know because we don't have those kanji in Chinese". But I was wrong! We do have "炙" and "挽" in Chinese, it's just these kanji have highly fixed usages so I couldn't recognise them in when they combined with Japanese Hiragana.

Any here are the meanings:

• 炙り(あぶり) - grill
• 挽肉(ひきにく) - ground meat

Even though I've lived in Japan for over 5 years, I still find myself rarely know any Japanese vocabularies related to cooking or food.

Off the topic

Sometimes when I find something in the internet that is really interesting and inspiring, normally I'd like to write a blog post about it, but then I may get lazy and just somehow give up or totally forget it. That's one thing I want to improve.

So from today I'm gonna try this "light weight" post, just share a link and perhaps plus one phrase of my comment. Sure it could be done in a tweet, but I just wanna keep it in my blog.

The first step is to start

The first step is to start by Jason Z. of 37signals

Many times the reasons we don’t start something have nothing to do with lack of skills, materials, or facilities. The real blockers are self-criticism and excuses.

Totally non related to the quote above...but if you read the link you'll understand what am I talking about next..

When I was a child I used to draw a lot, I still remember an afternoon in Summer I just sit there and kept drawing for 5 hours, I was completely in the "flow", if I put it in the current popular terms, and totally forgot how could time pass so fast. I also organized an event to get my friends together in a weekend to draw together, at that time I was trying to draw my own manga story of Doraemon. But when passing into adolescence I didn't remember why but somehow I stopped drawing.

Oops that is more than "one phrase" =_=;;

Recently I added photo uploading feature to quoty.me, then yesterday after I watched a Chinese movie 一代宗师(The Grandmaster) I uploaded some quotes with photos. It looks pretty good!

Here is a screenshot of it.

The movie is directed by 王家卫(Kar Wai Wong), my favorite director, his movies are always full of deep, inspiring words. It’s a movie, but taste like a novel. I’m so glad that I read Chinese so that I could fully enjoy the good work.

Another thing is, I was a little confused about how to make quoty, what it is, where it goes. But this experience, after watching a great movie then upload those quotes and photos, I can really recapture all the great moments in the movie, feels so good. Besides, be capable to improve the tool I’m using is another way to enjoy the life.

Taking the Stairs

Around 1 month ago I started this new habit: Taking the stairs instead of elevators. A simple habit to help me at least have some “exercise” every day, I’ve been “sitting” too long. With only 2 exceptions:

• when on the way to work, always feel sleepy and powerless in the morning, maybe that’s an execuse or lack of motivation
• when with other people, just trying to fit in, although I raise my hand for tea or juice in a drinking party…

I use Lift app to track my progress, even though it was not a 30-day streak(forgot to check-in some days or had no out-door activities on the weekends), still I’m happy for the last 1 month. Feel stronger than before, wouldn’t be out of breath after climbing a long long stairs, and most important thing is I’ve established this mindset to always seek and choose stairs rather than elevators, this “choosing” process never occurs actually, since I’ve repeated so many times my initial response is just to find the stairs.

Tiny Achievement

This habit doesn’t require many efforts like other activities such as reading, running or practicing an instrument. But still I consider this a tiny achievement for myself. When I look back the past days or months, I can’t see myself making progress in neither professional nor personal life. I’m still kind of struggling with life. Compared with my past I spent less time on learning new things, writing blogs or even playing games.

Been thinking a lot recently and just like everyone I want to improve myself in various aspects but never really put them into actions. Thus I’m glad at least this habit made me realize there’s still things I can accomplish.

Next Habit

I want to commit myself to create a new habit every week, and if it works for me I’ll keep doing it. By “works for me” I mean like “get up early” can work for somebody but not for everyone.

I think this 1 week interval should work for me. It reminds me of the “1 percent improvement per day” method but finding out what improvement should I do today could be difficult, and what I’ve learned is repetition really matters. Define it, do it, repeat it. Your body would reflect that way without going through your brain.

So my new habit will be: Getting up at 8 am every weekdays and before 9 am on weekends. Ever since high school I’ve never made it, and I still have this thought or ‘fantasy’ that by getting up early I can make a difference in some aspects of my life. Every morning is in a rush now, sometimes I have to drop breakfast and dash into the station to catch up the train. I do not memorize many peaceful mornings in my life.

Time to reread some parts of the book: The Two-Minute Challenge: How to Reach Goals and Finish What You Start written by my friend Charles, it has very good strategies of making and keeping your goals.

Just got home from work, really exausted. It was supposed to be a team Bonenkai, but all engineers ended up working very late. Four of us had ramen together after work. I could go home earlier or to that Bonenkai actually, but I dont’ wanna leave friends there knowing they will work so late while I just enjoy the meals. They all looked very tired, so did I, I think all of us deserve a better life. Something is wrong.

I don’t wanna end a day like this, try to find something meaningful to do before go to bed, things that won’t take too many efforts. So here is another diary post, with some random pictures I found from my iPhone.

Contents

1. Prologue
2. The Five Love Language
3. Misunderstanding and Misguidance
   • Model of Marriage from Family
   • Say Thank You To Family Members
   • Sins of Current Media
4. Negative Words
5. My Little Contributes

Prologue

The Five Love Languages is such a great book. When I was reading, from time to time I have to stop and think back, review my last relationship and imagine what if at that time I have done something different…

As you guessed in this book we’re talking about love. Don’t be shy, don’t think “oh come on I’m a man who will read that kind of book”. You will learn something very important here. It doesn’t teach you any tricks to “manipulate” your mate to let her/him love you more while you just sit there spending tiny little efforts but can enjoy being loved. It doesn’t work that way.

Actually I was so hesitate if I should write this post, because I haven’t really cleared my mind yet. When I look back, I find out I had made so many obvious mistakes just like any other guys in the book, too many to organise them nicely and logically. Even at this moment I don’t know what am I gonna write, normally if I can’t figure out the agenda I would not start. Also I don’t want you miss this great book because of my poor writing. But this time I’ll just follow my fingers.

The Five Love Language

The author, Garry D Chapman, is a relationship counselor. His theory about love is very similar to natural language, like English, Chinese and Japanese, we all have a primary(native) language, and then maybe we will choose to learn a secondary language. Every single person has his/her own primary language, he divided those to 5 categories, which are:

1. Words of Affirmation
2. Quality Time
3. Receiving Gifts
4. Acts of Service
5. Physical Touch

You may feel a little confusing at this point. Now ask yourself, in which way your mate acts toward you will make you feel be loved most? If you are really happy when she tells you how she loves you, how important you are, and how you’ve done great work to keep the family functions well, then your primary love language is Words of Affirmation.

If you just want to spend time with her together, taking a walk after meal hand in hand, having conversation in dinner not just eat in silence, don’t spend all the time in TV shows or computers, instead you want to talk about how you feel from work today, how your boss pissed you off, etc. Then it’s Quality Time. It’s totally fine to ignore these terms for now.

If you are in trouble in the relationship, in cases you will hear something like “I don’t know how much you love me, I don’t know if you love me at all, am I important to you? Why I can’t feel it?!”, while you feel you are so sincere and serious about the relationship and you think you’ve done your job correctly yet still get negative feedbacks. If you’re sincere that’s good, but that’s absolutely not enough. The key point here is, you have to speak her primary language, treat her respect her in the way she can feel the love. Most of time people have different primary love language, even it’s same language it can have different dialects.

Misunderstanding and Misguidance

What’s your attitude to love? How many would you “sacrifice” for her? Would you change yourself for her even if something is so against you, you think that’s your bottom line, your principle, if you change that you’ll not be yourself anymore?

No one teach you what’s love and how to love, in school we forbid any kind of love. Even not allowed to talk about it. I think there are 2 primary ways we get the idea what is love when we grow up, one is from our family, the other one is through media: books, music, movies, etc. I could be wrong.

Model of Marriage from Family

I think this could be the root reason to how we think what marriage is.

From my experience, my parents had a very terrible marriage. In my childhood, I don’t remember any intimate scenes of them being together. Since I can remember things, all I remember is they just do their own things and never spend time together. My father was so into electronic, every night I woke up I saw him sitting in front of the desk reading books and making things, our first TV was made by him. And my mother was busy taking care of me, besides that she also had to do the housework, in her rest time she will watch love story TV shows. I didn’t see any joint of them.

They argued a lot, sometimes very big, they broke dishes and furnitures, life itself was threatened as well. To be honest, I really wanted them separate, I wanted them to find their own happiness and perhaps a different family. Fortunately and unfortunately, they both loved me and they still wanted to give a complete, unbroken family. So they tried so hard to keep it, but eventually they divorced. Actually I felt relief.

All my relatives “seems” have their happy family at that time, but as I grow up I started to realize each family has its own issues. They just don’t show you, but it exists.

Although I received the love from my parents respectively, neither did I learn what a happy marriage is from them, nor from my relatives or friends. But I did remember when my father was studying and my mom was watching TV, they both doing their own things, that was the most peaceful time in that house. Maybe that’s the one model I’ve followed so far.

Say Thank You To Family Members

When I was still in high school, many times I would be invited to several friends’ home to help them solve some computer issues. There was one friend I remembered very well, it was such a different experience. Because that’s the first time I hear the family members say “thank you” to each other, so frequently, full of smiles. At that time it was a little strange to me, why would they do that? Shouldn’t we only say “thank you” to friends, relatives, teachers or even strangers but not family members? It never happened in my family, I didn’t get used to it, although it didn’t mean I don’t feel thankful for them. No wonder why that friend behaves so different from us, very polite, well educated, I can tell.

Sins of Current Media

I feel current media is trying so hard to implant the idea of how great love is, why we come to the world is to find true love, looking for prince or princess. It’s a very profitable business, people are driving under the temptation of money, they tend to create something people tend to buy. Love fits it.

Well love is great, but the way it presented is, I think is a little “harmful” in some points of views. Too dreamy, not practical.

Most of love stories either end when they be together or be separated for ever. Not that many will describe the issues after they get together, people have to believe in those beautiful things, in fairy tale prince and princesses never argue, that’s true love, when they finally be together they will just be happy forever. So this kind of technic make youth naive, “if we’re meant to be together, we’ll be together”, I’m not gonna deny it, I still have some beliefs in it, but that doesn’t mean you can use that as an excuse and stop putting efforts in love.

Desperate Housewives, the American TV show is quite different. It describes the very details after people get together, after they married, shows you how happy they were when they were “in love” and how they’ve been experienced different kinds of difficulties during the marriage. Love, hurt, anger, frustrate, hate, regret, choose to love again. That’s life. I do hope there will be more TV shows like this to “educate” how hard love is to the public. Maybe majority won’t buy it, maybe they already suffered enough in their real life now they just want to charge some hope or believe to keep moving, but I do consider myself lack of these lessons.

The Real World

Welcome to the real world of marriage, where hairs are always on the sink and little white spots cover the mirror, where arguments center on which way the toilet paper comes off and whether the lid should be up or down. It is a world where shoes do not walk to the closet and drawers do not close themselves, where coats do not like hangers and shoes go AWOL during laundry. In this world, a look can hurt and a word can crush. Intimate lovers can becomes enemies, and marriage a battlefield.

Maybe all the writings till this point will give you a negative feeling, but actually I don’t feel that way. If you were already in trouble with your relationship, you should read this book. For those who are still enjoying their intimate “in love” experiences, I just want to give you a heads up, a warning.

In the book it says there are 2 phases in love. The “in love” phase is like driving in the high way, excited all the time, both of you love each other and feel be loved. This should be very easy to understand, we’ve all experienced it. But normally after 2 years people will be off that high way, and most of the time it’s asynchronous, maybe you’re still thinking everything is perfect but she already feels empty of love.

So that’s why I want you to be prepared, at least mentally. There are many real world examples in the book, read it you will find people with exactly the same problems as you do. When you think your love “fade off”, when you are hesitate about if this one is “true love”, go find this book, The Five Love Language.

Negative Words

“maintain”, “sacrifice” these words may sound negative when we talk about true love. Isn’t true love means they are perfect match, no matter what they do they just can be connected, know each other’s thought without talking at all? Admit we are 2 individuals doesn’t mean your love is less “true”, we all come from different families, with different education and background, what we experienced construct our personalities, we may get different beliefs. When we do something purely to make our mates happy, to see their smiling faces, isn’t that love more pure and great?

Actually I was very surprised that none of theses words were used in the book. I don’t know if it’s intentional but it does explain what a healthy, positive attitude we should have toward love.

My Little Contributes

I’d like to gift this book for you if you’re interested. The book is not expensive, the kindle version is just around $6. I’m sure everyone can afford it, but just in case you’re not sure if this is the right book for you, I will be very glad to help.

Just send an email to fantasyday at_mark gmail.com, or leave a comment below. My only request is after you read the book please send me a feedback :)

Most Kindle books available for purchase in the Kindle Store can be given as a gift to anyone with an e-mail address. You do not need a Kindle device to send or receive Kindle book gifts, and the recipient can read their gift on a registered Kindle device or any free Kindle reading application.

I don’t think I have many readers and guess no one can read the whole post, set a limitation seems not necessary. But I’ll consider it success if can deliver 10~20 books.

Hope you all had a good christmas.

Hope you got some companions yesterday, sorry I can’t be there.

There was a discussion in my team about how to increase the user engagement, we want more and more users to register account, participate in several ways, use our service, etc.

But then we realized that we didn’t really do anything to help them get started, basically after they registered we just left them alone, live or die. Because we always have to build some “major” features we consider more important.

With that in mind, when I browse website or try new services, I keep an eye on how they respond to new users. And I’d like to share some screenshots to demonstrate my point.

Linkedin

I guess this is quite familiar to you. There is a huge “attention” textbox with random questions to help you complete your profile. Often to fill out a “complete” resume needs lots of time and people are too lazy to do that, but I don’t mind just answer one simple question.

And the progress bar tutorial on the right side shows the progress, and gives your links to jump directly to that action.

App.net

It’s more like checklist to help you get started, it appears on the top of the main action: postiong a tweet. As you guess once you completed all it will disappear.

UserVoice

To be honest I was very confused about what’s next when I registered the account, the UI contains too many information. But the “Getting Started” button with a counter badge helped me. Every time when I’m lost, I’ll click that and it will show the actions with details information.

Also the “Need help?” block in the right side feels very user friendly. Support email address, demos, phone calls(though it’s said “for sales”), basically everything you need when you are lost.

Emails

The email came the next day I registered, “Ted Choper”, “I’m always here to help”, feels like there is a person rather than an automachine can help me, nice impression, I didn’t just look for the “unsubscribe” link for this one.

In Conclusion

Of course there are some other ways to help your users, but I think the key point is think more about your users, don’t just be busy making new giant features.

I’d like to use this quote to end of this entry.

We want to make money when people use our devices, not when they buy our devices.

Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, in Amazon Kindle Press Conference.

Ad: This one is also on quoty!

I found this video from my old hard drive, thought it would be nice to write something about it.

About World of Warcraft

WOW - World of Warcraft, a MMORPG created by famous game company Blizzard. I had played it for maybe 4~5 years in total, had a very successful “career” there. Heh anyway I’m already AFK(away from keyboard, also means stop playing the game) but from time to from I still miss it, it may sounds stupid to you but I really learned some important life lessons there, no matter in what “world” only consistent efforts and practices that can make you progress. I’ll cut off here otherwise there is no end of this story.

About This Movie

The video was made at 2008, 4 years ago, contains some World of Warcraft Arena PVP games I recorded at that time. It was my first and last “product”, besides this one there are also some clips in my hard drive but I never made the second one.

I assume no one here(if there is any) knows about World of Warcraft PVP, it seems impossible for me to find a way to entertain you with this video. I think I can only share some stories and experiences behind it.

Such Fun to Make a Movie

Record each game, categorise the clips, pick up songs, add transition animations, add subtitles, figure out a story line, add slow motion to fit the songs tempo… Everything was new to me but I really enjoyed, it was very different from the daily programming work, a good relax and exercise. The software I used was Adobe Premiere I think, not very sure.

Slow PC, Slow Internet

I was still using a quite low spec PC at that time. To record the game and don’t affect the play I have to turn off lots of graphic effects to lower down the overall resource consume. And exporting the movie normally took over 1 hour, if I found any tiny mistakes, damn I had to go through it again…

Low Quality As A PVP Movie

If let me rate my movie I will give it 4 out of 10, completely a failure. There are several aspects I don’t like:

1. Network Lag. I was playing in the Taiwan server from Japan and normally the latency was 200-300 ms. That’s sooooooo critical in a high level game, even though I have 100% confidence about my reflection speed, that 200-300ms usually just sentence me and my teammate to death.

2. Bad Team Player. The Arena games are team plays, even if you are a genius most of the time you have to corporate with your teammates, communicate and adjust the strategy against your opponents. As you can see in the movie most of the time I was just chasing my opponent and totally ignored my teammate, his position, his vision, his life point… So recording your game and watching later is a very good way to improve your skills, you can find so many flaws of yourself.

Enjoy the Movie

Enough talking, hope you can enjoy the movie. It’s around 24 minutes I don’t think anyone of you can finish it :)

Video on Vimeo

风七 - Battle Memories from fantasyday on Vimeo.

At Last

The 2 teammates in the movie are my college friends, they are both married now and one guy will soon be a father. It’s nearly impossible to play this game or any game with them anymore. Just like in a romantic relationships normally people will take lots of photos and videos, if you ever really into a game, I suggest you make yourself a movie as well.

I think I should be proud of myself to resist any alcohol in today’s party. It’s almost a month since I started this habit.

I never consider myself as a alcoholic, even though in certain sences I do want a beer. Like when meeting with friends, when exausted from work, when in friends’ welcome/farewell/whatever party, when feel weak and lonely during the middle of the night. I thought it would be quite easy for me to stop drinking, but the reality told me I was too naive. I did feel the threaten and temptation. Alcohol is a very foundamental thing for socialization, as an adualt sometimes it’s hard to say no. Especially like today, “All beers!”, “Sorry please give me tea…”.

But I survived, for whatever the reason I started it, I don’t wanna give up, I’m gonna try my best to keep the records.