Simon's Space

Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get.(Forrest Gump)
And this time, it's really special.

It doesn't happen to everyone, in a manner of speaking, I'm recruiting my boss.

Below is part of the mail from my CTO:

Simon,

I'd like to start looking for a technical director for the Beijing office. ....  So here is what I'd like to have happen:

   1. Candidates:  The person should have the following abilities:
         1. Technical experience: have created web sites using our technologies (i.e., Hibernate, Spring, Tapestry, etc.). They should have as broad a background on web technologies
         2. Recent Experience : led a development team in building web sites based on this technology focused on consumer space
         3. US experience: worked in the US and understands US corporate culture
         4. Fluent in English : needs a good working knowledge of English.
         5. Education: comes from a good schools with a BS and hopefully a MS in Computer Science
   2. Position: The person will be the manager for all the developers in the Beijing office and will report directly to me.


CTO

Further more, my CTO mentioned the candidate should be from really good school. I didn't ask the criteria, but according to requirements 3.
An IVY degree will be a strong plus.

It's not easy to find such a candidate, so I will take some responsibilities for the time being. This will be another interesting experience.


P.S. This is a translated version from my Chinese blog, but I can't help posting it here for it's too interesting.

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Posted By Simon Li to Simon's Space at 3/14/2007 06:16:00 PM

This morning, I asked my wife:"It's Wednesday, isn't it?"
"No, it is Thursday. You hear that? IT, IS, THURSDAY."
We looked at each other, and laughed.

This is a little secret between us.
Last Friday morning, my wife said to me:"Tomorrow is weekend, do you have any plan?"
"But it's Thursday, let's discuss it tomorrow." I said.
My wife smiled and said nothing.

And that night, I looked into calender by chance and found it WAS Friday, actually I'd made a mistake!
"Why didn't you correct me this morning?" I asked my wife.
"I'd thought you were just kidding."
"Oh my, have you ever remember me kidding on you?"

But the result was, I had to go office last Saturday to stop a running software.
I don't know why I always make such mistake these weeks, maybe a sign of I'm lost in my work.

Anyway, the Spring Festival is coming!
I'm not kidding.


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Posted By Simon Li to Simon's Space at 1/25/2007 12:39:00 PM

I noticed that in Dec I posted only 1 blog entry, and the title reads "I hate ...".
That doesn't reflect my current status.

Well, I'm not getting lazier, nor do I have any complaint for my life.
Instead, this year is extremly happy and enjoyable for me. Everything is perfect. And I'm  still on my way to be a better man.

Yes, I'm much busier than last year. But I enjoyed my job and learned a lot. The most important thing is, when I went home late at night, as I looked at the face of my sleeping angel, nothing bothered me at all.

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Posted By Simon Li to Simon's Space at 12/31/2006 07:14:00 PM

I called my parents recently. I felt my mom was not happy. She refused to tell why until I asked it the second time.
"Do you still remember what the date was yesterday?"

Oh my, it's my father's birthday!
I always remembered my parents birthday and called them. But one thing troubles me a little bit is they use Chinese lunar calenders.
It changes every year for solar calendar.

I can do nothing but keep saying sorry. What can I say else? Just because I don't have a lunar calender?
In fact, I've set an alert on my cell phone. But either it didn't work, or I didn't noticed it.

I'm sorry, father. I love you.

Tags: calender family

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Posted By Simon Li to Simon's Space at 12/04/2006 06:17:00 PM

This month, I helped a website to change its hosting service provider.

China is a fast growing market for virtual hosting, foreign hosting
providers have good business opportunities because:
1. In general, many Chinese hosting providers are not good enough. They
either provides low price but poor service, or simply high price.
2. There is a lot of regulations. Many personal webmaster feel uncomfortable
to file personal information in police office. My friend was requested to
enroll a class which cost RMB 610, just because he placed the server in
Guang Zhou city. That's really too much for a non-profit personal website .
3. For silly reason, the net speed between north China and south China is
slow as snail. But the connection to other countries are good enough for
simple Internet service.

Sure there are risks to choose a foreign host provider. As the rumor tells,
there might be an "unknown" wall. Any IP might be blocked without any
explanation. But the benefit worth the risk.

When choosing the host, price, hardware, security, service are most
important factors to compare.

We selected 4 candidates and let the users poll on them:
bluehost.com
ipower.com
www.dreamhost.com
www.hostgator.com

Although it's a small community, the site has a lot of users from all over
China. To test the hardware especially the network connection, we asked our
users to launch the homepage of each host provider and report the time cost.
So it's very smart to use a simple homepage!
www.bluehost.com and www.hostgator.com are fast for most our users.

I heard www.dreamhost.com is good but they give very poor result.

www.hostgator.com allow its customer to store adult material, which might
attract some webmasters, but we don't want to get blocked just because our
neighborhood is blocked! So we chose www.bluehost.com at last.

The website has been running on bluehost for about 20 days. The service is
good. But I must warning you bluehost only allow you to use 20% of the cpu
time. If you own a hot website, you have to buy better service from bluehost
or just consider other companies.

Tags: vhosting, virtural hosting, bluehost, ipower, dreamhost, hostgator

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Posted By Simon Li to Simon's Space at 11/20/2006 10:27:00 AM