Pigeons are cute, lovely creatures. They seem to be always perfectly harmless and peaceful. They are not created as killing machines.

Lions are dangerous and vicious predators. They could kill you in an instant. They are lazy, arrogant and proud.

However, when pigeons are caged together, at times when they are upset they might attack each other, with their tiny seemingly harmless beaks. In that case, things could get really, really messy easily, in many cases the conflicts will not be resolved until deaths or severe injuries occurred.

They know they are weak, so they tend to become over-protective of themselves.

Meanwhile, most of us have seen young predators such as lions fighting / playing with each other on the TV. One thing they always do is they will make sure they never truly hurt each other.

They know the power they wield, and understand the consequences if the power get unleashed unintentionally.

Every time I tell a lie to make myself look better, do something to act as if I am stronger, hold back when I should stand out and move forward, I feel that deep inside my heart, there’s a tiny pigeon, afraid of getting hurt.

That sucks.

Letter to Abigail Adams (12 May 1780):

I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.

What if you have full control over your time?

Around the end of the last year, I finally found myself have a rough understanding what I want to do in this life.

Then I started to break down my long-term goals into small steps, and execute them one by one following the plan.

Apparently my most valuable asset is my time, and how well I can achieve my goals depends solely on how effectively I can spend my time. So I built a pet project code-named Sandglass to do some sort of recording and measurements.

It’s still very early and very rough, maybe later I will polish it and make it an online service, or maybe I will open source it, or maybe it will stay a private project forever, I haven’t decided yet.

More than 2 weeks have passed since I started to take records, and some interesting data have already surfaced. Obviously I am not doing very well :)

Naturally I think, the next steps are to make changes, and measure again. Rinse and repeat.

This aligns pretty well with how you (should) do software performance optimization:

Bottlenecks occur in surprising places, so don’t try to second guess and put in a speed hack until you have proven that’s where the bottleneck is. - Rob Pike

Just now when I was reading Freedom from Fear, all of a sudden a tweet posted by @fisio several days ago popped into my mind.

Mind you, that tweet might hurt your eyes.

It’s confirmed that 95 Tibetans have self-immolated inside Tibet since February 27, 2009.

Most of them are younger than me, yet they had done what they thought was right.

Once I burnt myself with a cigarette butt, trust me, it hurts.

It’s so funny to watch people claiming that they are individualists, love Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead, or believing in Austrian School of economics running around in groups, meeting random people on the Internet, and enjoying themselves by singing Karaoke together.

I am not against Karaoke BTW.

Wait, maybe they are just not self-confident enough?

It’s been more than a year since I took a leave from a startup I helped founded.

After my departure, I decided to dedicate my time to seek answers to a lot of questions, the questions which have been haunting me for a long time already.

I want to know more about the world. I want to know more about everything. I want to know more about myself.

What is the meaning of life? What are my purposes of living? What about my future, the future of the people I care about, my parents and my extended family? What is the future of this country?

I don’t have any idea.

Good thing is I know money is not my goal. Although I don’t have a lot, I found that I had enough to sustain myself for a while, so I decided to let it go, and see what would happen.

Since I’ve never really played enough when I grew up, first I found myself diving into video games. Quickly I found the pleasures of them mildly at best.

Then I took a trip into movies and TV shows. At first I learned a lot from them, namely casual English, western culture, different beliefs and different lifestyles.

But soon I realized that they are the products of pop culture and driven by consumerism. The information and knowledge you can find in them are shallow at best. They are designed so that the majority of the people can grasp them. I denounced pure consumerism.

Also, there is a chunk load of nihilism in games, movies and TV shows.

Then I submerged into the information overload, and found Twitter to be the heaven of immediate, fragmented, overflown information. Relentlessly I looked for and followed a lot of wonderful people, some of them become my heroes. I observed them closely. I was obsessed with every bit of information they spit out. I want to learn from them.

Also, there is this site called 9gag, and through 9gag I discovered Reddit. Where pop culture meets information overload.

But later I realized that being a bystander is not fun. And I found patterns emerged from the informations. There is a bigger picture. I moved on.

I smoked and quitted. I tasted weeds. I took risks and experienced a lot of mindless physical pleasures.

I sneak-peeked into religions, and found no peace of mind there.

I bought stuffs, and now I find myself heading back to minimalism.

I realized that this is an age of entertainment. To protest, I enclosed myself with books. Several times I found myself spent consecutive sleepless days and nights reading. Just DEAR (Drop Everything And Read).

I found philosophy. A whole new world.

But still, in the community of book lovers, I found a lot of people retreated into escapism or defeatism.

And now I am so puzzled.

People of the world, I have questions for you:

Working people who are proud of being professional, are you just believing in hedonism, working hard just in order to play harder? Are you an excellent human being or just fighting to become a really, really excellent sheep? Are you self-liberating or just enjoying self annihilation?

Social activists who claim that you are to make China a better place, do you really know what you are doing? Do you know how to build as well as how to pose mass destruction?

Celebrities in China, do you really believe that you are controlling the media, or are you just submitting yourselves to the mass, to this age of entertainment?

Party leaders of the Communist Party of China, have you thought about that you are mortal and just a small chapter in the human history?

Engineers, entrepreneurs and all the producers who are trying to push the human race forward, do you know that you might be doing just the opposite and helping the evil? Are you planning to help the people or just enjoy yourselves?

Everyone else, do you have a purpose of life? Have you given a serious thought about that you are going to die some day, and your time is limited?

Sadly for me, I found that most of my types of people are in the U.S., but my roots remain here in China.

I also found that no matter how wonderful a person was, when he labeled himself as a group member of whatever it is, he often degraded quickly.

Therefore I decided to stand for individualism and fight against any kind of collectivism for as long as I can sustain.

But I still haven’t found what I am looking for.

Recently I read a lot of open source code, some of them are really nice, some of them suck.

Since I have my TextMate 2 set up so trailing whitespace and \t in Ruby files are highlighted, every now and then when I stumble upon those patterns, I find myself fixing them locally, and depending on my mood, I might send them a pull request.

Though I have a keyboard shortcut set up in my TextMate so it’s just a trivial task for each file, but it’s really annoying to see them coming up again and again, right?

When yesterday my pull request to capistrano was rejected and was told by this nice guy called Roy Liu, that rather than fixing them file by file, it’s preferred to do it in batch.

So today I literally went through the entire project, read through the code, trying to understand them while fixing the styles. Oh man it hurts my eyes.

Obviously some tasks are better done using automation. Thus in a hurry I wrote this little ayi gem.

Basically it clean up codes for you, and I intend to make it do this one thing and do it well.

Of course It’s now still very early in development, but let’s hope it will become more and more powerful as time goes by.

Go take a look at it if you are interested.

I blogged about simplifying my life and mentioned about a list of my stuffs, since I know some of you might be interested, I am now making it public.

Here is the list.

It’s undergoing constant changes of course, I may try, but I make no promises to keep it up-to-date here.

This world is full of thoughtful thinkers who don’t speak out loud enough, talkative hyperactive doers who don’t think enough, passive nihilistic people who hate this world and hate themselves, and mindless lazy people who know nothing but to lamely entertain themselves.

So I say, hey sexy world, I am here to make you a better place.

I intend to think out loud till I feel I’ve satisfied myself.

So I blogged about me taking online MBTI tests again and found myself have changed from the ENFP type to INTP type and might become an INTJ without telling you guys what MBTI is and wtf are ENFP and INTP and INTJ.

Okay I know most of you are either too lazy or too busy to look into those jargons yourselves, so I am here to give a brief talk about MBTI.

So basically MBTI is an indicator which reflects your psychological preferences and how you perceive the world and make decisions. It’s based on the work of Carl Jung if you are wondering.

There are many free online MBTI tests in languages of your preferences, just Google it yourself. I took several quick ones in both Chinese and English just to make sure the results are consistent.

The MBTI basically categorize people into 16 groups based on 4 sub-types (2 ^ 4 == 16, hence the 4 character type name ENFP or INTJ).

Those sub-types are:

• Extraversion (E) – (I) Introversion
• Sensing (S) – (N) Intuition
• Thinking (T) – (F) Feeling
• Judging (J) – (P) Perception

Extraversion (E) – (I) Introversion

Basically extraverts feels more comfortable when spending time with people, while introverts get their energy from spending time alone.

Sensing (S) – (N) Intuition

People who prefer sensing are data oriented, they prefer to look for details and facts, while intuition people tend to seek the meaning in the underlying theory and principles which are manifested in the data.

Thinking (T) – (F) Feeling

Thinking and feeling are the decision-making functions. Those who prefer thinking tend to decide things from a more detached standpoint, measuring the decision by what seems reasonable, logical, causal, consistent, and matching a given set of rules. Those who prefer feeling tend to come to decisions by associating or empathizing with the situation, looking at it ‘from the inside’ and weighing the situation to achieve, on balance, the greatest harmony, consensus and fit, considering the needs of the people involved. - Wikipedia

Therefore thinkers are often perceived to have a bigger ego.

Judging (J) – (P) Perception

Judging and Perception represent the lifestyles you choose. People who prefer perception are generally more passive, seeking to understand the world as it is, while judging people prefer to act, to make a difference.

About My Types

I was an ENFP hence I was more of a product manager / program manager type of guy. Oh, and many passionate revolutionaries are of this type.

Since I realized I was not satisfied with that, therefore I changed myself from E to I and from F to T, and now I am an INTP.

By becoming an INTP I find myself in the same group with most scientists and philosophers, but I don’t like it as of this moment.

Thus I am becoming an INTJ.

Simply put, I prefer to become more like Elon Musk than Larry Page or Sergey Brin or Albert Einstein.

Final Notes

MBTI is just a method to group people into sub-groups. Don’t take it too seriously.

After all, there are only 16 groups, and even if you are in the rarest group, or you may prefer, the most elite group, 1% * 6 billion is still a very large number.

And there are still people like me who are well aware of the system and are willing to hack their own minds, and are capable of taking actions to change their types on demand and have succeeded.

Take that.