roy

Edit: eBay buys Skype for 2.6 mbillion. First post.

. . .

The alarm clock glows 2:24am, but my computer says it's 5:36 AM. 144 minutes ago I tried to sleep and failed horribly. I'm only up because I have no idea what I'm doing with my life.

Quite surprisingly, I'm feeling optimistic while listening to A Day in the Life by the Beatles. I'm not entirely sure why I feel optimistic - here is a depressing song about the desensitizing effects of the insignificant and distracting tasks that compose the Modern day - and I'm somehow feeling positive.

Well, maybe it's not really positive. Maybe it's just a wry understanding at the ludicrousness of the world - or maybe it's just the residual anger I'm feeling towards the lies, inaction, and failure of the government to provide for the Katrina victims. Most likely, my weird mental state is a culmination of listening to the aforementioned Beatles song and the stress I've been feeling as of late.

I've surrounded myself with ambitious people. Everyone wants success, but no one is quite sure how to attain it. It's almost like everyone is reaching out for anything ... just to find that singular thread of success that lead to some sort of self-satisfaction. I feel like I'm being pulled in many different directions by different people, and I just can't say no.

I've spread myself too thin once again.

It's not that I'm unhappy with my situation - it's not that at all. I'm entirely grateful with my friends, my family, my financial situation (I met my savings goal for this year a few months early!), and my accomplishments. But I've never had the mindset of living in the past - I've never looked back on accomplishments from the past and found any sort of satisfaction with them. It's almost sadistic, but the only times I can be wholly satisifed with myself is the immediate period after I finish a big task. After that short period where I feel like I've done something, I always feel insecure about my life and so I push forward with some new grand project to keep my mind occupied.

I've never done drugs before in my life, which contrasts nicely with my Libertarian-esque anti-drug legislation views. I'm not sure if the propaganda of McGruff had something to do with this, but I grew up literally scared of drugs. Of course, my compatriots in middle school and high school showed me that drugs really aren't as bad as the establishment makes them seem. In any case, there are still a few drugs that I am literally scared of taking ...

I'm sure most of you are aware of the fact that I think. A lot. I think about the most random crap at the most random times. I can't stop thinking, which has led to sleeping disorders in the past (these disorders have also been rearing their ugly heads this past weekend, which means a trip to the doctor might be in order). The biggest fear I have in my life is losing control of my mind. I fear the destructive power of the mind to create images and generate fear. I've always had a pretty active imagination ... and I fear what a slight chemical imbalance in my brain may do ... which is why I actually have a real fear of taking any type of psychotic drugs. I honestly can say that I have very few fears in life ... and this is one of them.

I fear growing up and losing my mental capacity. I've made references to it before, but I sometimes wonder if the best way to go out is to die young, before your body and your mind start degrading. Billy Joel has said that the good die young, but does that work in reverse?

Anyways, I was talking with Yush about my frustrations with Tabulas. I'm not a coder by heart; the coding for me is a means to an end. I don't enjoy coding, and I don't enjoy CSS hacks. I've been hacking away at the new site for almost 4 months or so now, and I'm just not horribly happy with the amount of progress made. When Yush asked for a metric of how much progress I've made in terms he could understand, I fired up Microsoft Word and pasted the library I was working on ... and by incredibly rough calculations, I estimated that I've written roughly 200 pages (12pt Times New Roman, single space, normal margins :P) worth of "logic" that will power Tabulas 3.0.

But you know, the logic isn't even what bothers me so much. It's my never-ending unhappiness with the UI of the Tabulas control panel and the View/Edit methdology that I'm the most unhappy with.

When I first started using Xanga, one of the biggest mistakes I thought they made from a user-interface point of view was mixing the "view" and "edit" modes. Your private control panel looked exactly like your normal Xanga ... and that is confusing for the end user. Lately, at work, we've been pushing the concept of "edit where you view" which makes sense for our product, but does it make sense for something as complex as Tabulas? Is the View/Edit methdology outdated?

And even if I could be technically and aesthetically happy with a Tabulas that is logically solid and has a solid UI ... then my concerns would shift to the business viability of Tabulas. As much as this is a hobby, I would like to see it be taken to the next level in terms of financial sustainability. Any model that is not sustainable needs to be Darwinized so that Adam Smith can help create a more efficient model.

Sometimes I wonder if my education is simply causing me unnecessary grief. Ignorance truly is bliss; things were so much better when I didn't know what I was doing was incorrect. It was better when I just didn't know any better.

I think it's completely sad that the only thing that brings me hope is the fact that once I finish Tabulas, I can get started on my next web project (which I promise will be totally kick ass). The new site is even grander in scale and scope than Tabulas (hard to believe, I know), and I think will be a great example of what can be possibly by a morally conscious business (yes, my next venture will be a real business) that is technically competent and can really build cool technological tools.

So what's the problem? I've spread myself far too thin.

I just can't say no. If a friend wants me to help them with something, I simply cannot say no. I've recently starting tutoring a SAT class for a few Korean parents - the pay is great, but I really didn't want to do this class because it's draining to tutor them, especially with my day job and Tabulas flitting away my time.

What am I to do? Pursue my own selfish interests and let these kids suffer subpar SAT scores? Forget going to Kaplan or Princeton Review - those things are just money suckers that don't help 90% of the kids who enroll in those programs.

And when a friend asks me to help them out because they are starting a new venture, I can't say no. What am I to do? I want to see my acquaintances succeed. If I can take a few hours (or a few weeks) to help them out ... isn't that worth it? Isn't helping people out with skills that I have what I'm supposed to do? The reality is that my inability to say no is probably just making things worse. I simply spread myself far too thin on commitments so I have to start backing out of some of them.

And of course, I need to fit all my commitments around my day job, which is the biggest source of stress for me. I'm not sure if I'm doing a good job, I'm not sure I'm adding any value to their company, I'm not sure if they're happy with what I'm doing, I'm not sure if I'm selling myself short, I'm just not sure of anything. Sometimes I feel like I'm being taken advantage of, and sometimes I feel grateful that I have a job that lets me expand on my own skills and pays me. The reality is somewhere in between, and I just can't figure out where, and it drives me nuts. It's so hard to interpret how people feel about you through the Internet, and as I've written before ... working from home is simply incredibly lonesome. Especially for a recent college grad who lost a huge chunk of his social safety net and is desperately seeking a new one.

You know that guy who you would place your money on for being successful? I'm apparently that guy for many people, which I don't understand. I haven't notched ONE business success yet; all I've done is made a cool websites which have coincidentally increased registrations when I whore out free features. That, to me, does not equal success at all. I have almost absolutely no interest in maximizing profits for any enterprise I run. I'm not bad with money, I just have no interest in generating a large amount of it. When people talk to me about stocks and bonds and investments and venture capital and stuff, I sometimes have a hard time paying attention. People always want to hear what the business side of Tabulas is - but there never is one. I've always said that this is a hobby of mine, and my primary goal is to create a product that I personally find fun and easy to use. That's it.

This is a bit paradoxical if you remember my previous statement of making Tabulas 3.0 more of a "business-oriented financial success." But the main ways I'm trying to achieve that in Tabulas 3.0 is by creating a consistent brand and by creating a good UI that makes things clear - the end goal isn't to make money, it's to create a good brand and a usable site. I have a inkling that if I succeed at these two tasks, then the site will be a financial success as a consequence.

But I feel a constant pressure to succeed. It comes from almost everybody in my life - parents, friends, barely known acquaintances, people I've just met who've heard about me ("Oh, you're Roy?" ... dissappointment ensues). I think this pressure had bred a strong sense of fatalism .... I was chatting with Julian a few nights ago about how amazing the human race really is.

We have the ability to reason. Not only that, but we have and understand the concept of free will. If you've heard it enough times in school, you begin to take it for granted. But we, as humans, have the creative and intellectual gifts to do ANYTHING. ANYTHING at all.

Sometimes I feel that free will is more of a burden than a blessing. Having endless possibilities ... I fear that if I choose something that is not what others expect from me, then I've failed them. I've had the free will to do anything ... and they'll think, "He chose this? How dissappointing." I think humans are utterly incapable of handling free will. Those who embrace and take full advantage of this gift are incredibly rare.

Even I make subtle attempts at passing the burden of responsibility that free will has by being a fatalist. Religious people pass that burden onto God and His will. A group of people I have the deepest contempt for are those who go through the educational system and somehow believe they are superior to everybody else. They think because they went to school, college, then medical school for eight years, that they're somehow better human beings than other people because they've accomplished more with their lives.

I've seen this mentality primarily against religious people who worship God and spend their lives in the service of the church - these educated people can't believe that those religious people pass up their free will and put everything in this invisible deity. Of course, I personally feel that people who go through the medical school route as a default measure are just as bad; obviously if you're going to these graduate schools, you're pretty intellectual. So you're going to go through a predefined route where someone tells you exactly what to do? Doctors aren't the most creative bunch of people - if anything they're not so different from mechanics, except they make an assload more money. Don't think you're better than somebody else who didn't go that route or that you've exercised more free will - you were told what to do for 6-8 more years. You stayed within the rigid structures of academia.

Obviously my ability to reason and argue effectively is diminishing (assuming I was ever persuasive to start, hah!).

I just don't know what to do, who to work with, how to finish up my grand projects, and what I should be doing with my life.

Fin.