Katherine and I have been a part of each other’s lives for 3 years.  She is the most intelligent, kind, warm and thoughtful woman I have ever met.

During the first few months of dating, she introduced me to most of her close friends.  Her friends are kind, friendly, inclusive and all have a little bit of Katherine in them.  After meeting her friends, I noticed something different about my feelings towards her.

After 6 months of our dating, I was invited to spend a week with her family in Tahoe.  I fell deeply in love with her during that week.   After the family trip, I realize that Katherine gives a lot of herself to her family, friends and she is a sum of all the great people she surrounds herself with.

I look forward to building a meaningful life with Katherine by working hard together, sharing life’s good moments and shouldering life’s challenges as a couple.

I look forward to making our hopes and dreams come true by supporting each other and communicating constantly.

I look forward to building a family by including everyone in our lives with open arms.

T

My daughter has her own laptop and for a while, I’ve told her that she can use up to 30 minutes of screen time on her laptop, my iPad or any electronic devices.

Recently while chatting with a family friend, he mentioned that he believes we should embrace technology in schools and if used properly for education it could be very powerful.  One example he gave was using a tablet or laptop during class and have students answer questions in real time and then the teacher gets immediate feedback about how many students understood, or whether students mis-understood what was taught right then.

Also I’ve noticed that when Cate is limited to 30 minutes of screen time, the time becomes coveted forbidden activity.  It becomes a precious time that she has to choose between watching her favorite show (pokemon), Steve Spangler science, checking her school email, checking wiki for school, writing a story/poem or learning programming with me.  And those are not all equal.  My goal is to have her use the computer wisely and use it as a tool for learning as well as entertainment.

The computer also becomes a negative point of contention.

So I looked into various parental control software and saw that the one which came with the Apple laptop has some simple controls for white listing and black listing web sites and simple time control.   So I turned it on for her account.  I talked with her that the control for website is for her to accidentally stumbling on content that was inappropriate or searching for ‘pokemon’ but finding something else that was not appropriate for kids.  The goal is not to prevent her, but to understand as a family what sites she is using.

As for the time control, the purpose is not to limit her time on the computer, but for my wife (future) to understand what is she spending time doing.  If she used an entire hour on Pokemon, then that should be enough screen time.  If she spent 1/2 on Pokemon, and 1/2 hour typing up a creative story, then absolutely, more time is fine.  It’s a also a reminder if I don’t know what she did on the computer to pay attention.

I’ve also started to let her use the computer during the morning if she has finished brushing her teeth, hair, feed the rabbit, and it’s a positive reenforcement for good habits.  Between school, homework, showering, she doesn’t really have that much free time anyways to be on the computer.  So 1 hour during the weekdays seem be to perfectly fine.

The end goal is for Cate to browse age appropriate web sites, use her time on the computer for both entertainment, learning and creative endeavors.  A secondary goal is for the adults in her life know what is reading and participate actively in talking about the content she is reading.

Is there anything you find yourself doing repeatedly that gets in the way of your happiness?
Because I spend a huge amount of my time thinking about it (it’s my job!), I often find myself feeling regret for past mistakes or worrying about the future. Neither of those two activities makes me happy. It’s pretty clear why. Worrying about the future or feeling regret about the past takes me out of the present and then I miss the joy that comes from living now.

Is there a happiness mantra or motto that you’ve found very helpful?(e.g., I remind myself to “There is only love.”)

Two things come to mind:

[1] I breathe! It’s amazing to me how much peace you can find in focusing on your breath. I guess there is a reason so many of the ancient spiritual traditions focus on it. When I find myself getting anxious or upset, I just take a minute and breathe. If my mind wanders back to the problem, I gently pull it back to my breath.

[2] I work through a little Q&A with myself:
Is this an issue or “problem” I’m having with something that really matters?
Is it something I can control?

I have found it helps (particularly with financial decisions) to focus on those things that matter and that you have at least some control over.

To get BlackBerryR Podcasts for free please visit http://www.blackberry.com/podcasts “vision without execution is hallucination” -
http://tonytam.wordpress.com/

OPINION: The Joy of Quiet

Trying to escape the constant stream of too much information.

http://nyti.ms/u7fIA5

Here it is: I Believe in Consistency And Persistence « Tony | This I Believe.

Many aspects of my life are based on 2 simple concepts: consistency and persistence.

SCHOOLBOOK: How I Became a Teacher

A first-year teacher writes: “As a high school student, I never once considered the training my teachers had received or what their personal teaching philosophies may have been. I did not know what a lesson plan was.” Now she knows.

http://nyti.ms/w4rH4A

Sent from my iPad

App: Goal With A Friend
You:

• Set a goal
• Pick a charity, schedule a payment
• Invite a friend to help
• How much is it worth?
• Pay 10 percent first
• Pay 90 percent when done

Friend:

• Accept to help a friend
• Email, call friend to help
• Get instant 10 percent fee
• Get reminders to help ‘you’ to achive goal
• Get final payment in cash or paypal when done

At the End
If goal is not done, final payment is donated to a charity

Why this is useful

• We ignore reminders
• Things get done when a friend knows and remind you
• There are incentive for the friend and incentive for you

I love working for my manager’s manager, my VP. He is strong, careful, a good listener and thoughtful.

I love my co-workers, they are good, smart, passionate and caring.

This is what makes me love my company, Yahoo!

Treat people looking for work with basic acknowledgement of receiving their resume, follow up quickly after the interview.

There are many articles and personal experiences of how people are using the GTD method to get things done stress free.  I think the human bring is not built to not remember things and when you should do them.  Hence the use of tools, paper to capture information is helpful.

Here is what works for me using these 2 tools.  Evernote and Remember The Milk.  You can search for Evernote GTD and Remember The Milk GTD

The important thing is for you to use the method that works for you every day, regardless of how it’s done.  I’m using the following as an ideal, but there are flaws in my executing them (as Katherine could tell you about following up on scheduling a doctor’s appointment)

Evernote

• I setup a private email address in Evernote so that I can email notes to myself from anywhere
• I do not use bookmark services when I come across something to read, I email it into Evernote with the #read tag.  Then I setup a smart folder for the tag ‘read’ in order to read it later
• When I’m on my laptop and want to capture something, I print it to PDF into Evernote.
• I follow this method of GTD with Evernote with 9 notebooks.   The most important folder is my 3_ASAP folder of my important projects
• All notes I capture using any other tools eventually goes into Evernote, that is my single source of truth for anything that is not time sensitive.
• I also have a 91_Passwords folder where I put in all my passwords but for a password, I either encrypt it in Evernote or if it’s one of my 10 or so passwords I use, I put the first and last digit but everything in between, like L…….1 just a s a reminder.

Remember The Milk

• I love the web interface for Remember The Milk to capture tasks and group tasks together.  So I create my personal projects and work projects and create tasks that is needed complete the projects.  I first create a search #project, #NNN then save the search.  Then every task I create falls into that project
• I also setup a private email address in Remember The Milk so I could email myself tasks with tags #project, #NNN, where NNN is the name of the project
• When I have something to read and if I think it’s time sensitive I would also email it into Remember The Milk with #read tag or with #project, #NNN tag

Daily Ritual

• On my Firefox bookmark, I have a Daily folder where I put in all the links I should visit at least once a day.  Yahoo!’s corporate portal, my bug list that I’m assigned to, the list of un-triaged tickets, 3 of my personal blogs that I should write something for, NYTimes.com, Mint.com to check my finances, Remember The Milk for my task for that day.
• Everyday I’m trying to get my Inbox to zero, anything I need to get to a later time, is forwarded to RTM or Evernote
• I schedule slots on my calendar to work on my tasks so no one can schedule meetings into those slots

Weekly Ritual

• Friday’s I tend to organize my Evernote, Remember The Milk list.  Review what I’ve done over the last week and make adjustments.

Monthly Ritual

• I review my job description and adjust if I’m not doing what I’m suppose to, or I may need to add/subtract something from my job responsibilities and write down an agenda to talk to my manager about

Tony: “Hey L., how come you were able to get your ticket resolved?”

L: “Oh I commute with G. and he did it for me”

G: “Happened to walk by, yeah, it was easy”

Tony: “But if someone else asked you G., what would happen?”

G: “It goes into my queue, because I trust L”

——
So, if your queue of things to do is too much work to do. How do you prioritize the queue?

I assume your queue is

1) Your Inbox
2) Your bug list
3) If you are using scrum, then your current sprint
4) You have some stuff in your brain
5) Favors you do for people you trust
6) Your goals that you set for yourself
7) Other todo list

I’m curious how do you figure out what to do next?

How much of your actual time are you spending on the following 4 bucket

1) Important non-urgent
2) Important urgent
3) Not important, but urgent
4) Not important, non-urgent

Do you have a way to determine which bucket your queue item falls into?

John became the leader for Yahoo! Media during a transition of the leadership position a few years ago.

From the point of view of the rank and file, he looked to be young, high energy but an unknown from our perspective.

I worked with him closely for 2 years to build the new Yahoo! Publishing Platform. He mentored me quietly through the life cycle of conception, buy in from executives, prototype, design validation and finally execution.

All along I appreciated that he never micro managed. Instead, he paved the way for me by evangelizing my role as the architect and encouraging different approaches for me to double check my assumptions.

One of the most important intangibles qualities John demonstrated is his commitment. Famous quote (I paraphrase) : “I’m not going anywhere, I’m here at Yahoo! for the long haul. Let’s do this right!”

He probably has no idea how reassuring and rare it is to hear the commitment spoken out loud and be believed.

T

The Livestand from Yahoo! iPad app launched on Nov 2nd and became the #1 News iPad app and #2 overall app on the iTunes AppStore in 1 day.  Today on Friday Nov 4th,  it became the #1 app in 3 days on iTunes.  You should try it yourself and compare it with Flipboard and Zite and see for yourself which one you like.  Perhaps it’ll be another app on your iPad to satisfy your reading needs alongside those other great apps.  There is always room for 3.

It’s  testimonial to the great work done by the Livestand team, Alison, Jin, Mike, Ric and the engineering members whom I don’t know personally.  I know internally it was great feat for the following reasons.

1. It’s a BHAG within Yahoo! not just to build YAA (yet another App).   It’s forward looking to build a platform for our users, our advertisers and our publishers.
2. Along with this launch, Yahoo! also launched a platform to deploy HTML5 applications called Cocktails.
3. The entire iPad experience runs on HTML5 (CSS, Javascript), inside of another Yahoo! platform which provides the native iOS services to Livestand.  This Yahoo! platform will also be ported to Android as well a open sourced in 2012
4. Pause:  The Livestand app launched alongside 2 brand new platforms!  3 launches at once!

Why am I re-energized to work for Yahoo!?

1. I haved worked on a project for the last 2 years on rebuilding Yahoo! publishing system call Yahoo! Publishing Platform and I have seen our ability to excuted on BHAG.  We have launched almost 100+ Yahoo! media sites (OMG, News, Movies, TV, Sports, Finance) in more markets that I’ve seen in my 12 years at Yahoo!
2. Livestand is another example of launching a product and platform at the same time and our ability to execute in less than a year shows that we can execute as an engineering community
3. I found the internal docs to setup a Livestand development environment, I ran the scripts, got Livestand built on a iOS simulator and open up Safari and was able to run Livestand on my browser, in .. less than 1 hour!  What?  that is just awesome!
4. The Cocktails platform is just a start for Yahoo! to build more native-like apps in less time and at scale
5. Even with all the crap going on in the press, internally our leaders are focused, supportive and willing to tackle more BHAG
6. We have been working hard at 2012 planning and I’m even more excited to see what we can excute on in the next few years

Thanks Livestand team for injecting more energy in this 12 year Yahoo! veteran !

You might also like: Why I Came To Yahoo! And Why I Am Still Here?