I finally create a fluff in Facebook of my own. The idea of fluff is not new, Tamagochi pioneered the market of virtual pet. Linking up your virtual pet with virtual the pets of your friends over the internet is also not new, Sony had made the now defunct Post Pet in the Web 1.0 era. On the surface, fluff offers nothing new. You have cute cartoon animals, you can buy various virtual food or habitant with virtual money. You can earn virtual money either by petting your friend’s pet or place bets in virtual pets races. It is just a plain old boring virtual pet.

I have quite a number of friends is obsess about petting and feeding the virtual pets.  I try to understand why fluff is so popular and many people are addicted to this simple 2D virtual pet. Cute graphics definitely helps, girls love cute things and then pressure their boyfriends to play along. Piggy-back on Facebook is also a major factor. Many people logon to Facebook quite often, so playing fluff and recruiting new members is very convenient. Fluff catches their eye-ball and it is only a mouse click away.

I think the most important factor is the racing system. To be exact, it is not the race itself, but the speed attribute of the fluff. You can increase this number by feeding your flutt. In order to do so, you have to pet your friend’s flutt to earn virtual money to buy food.  Your friends will pet your flutt in return and hence complete a never-ending pet, feed and race cycle.  If there  exists some sort of score, it is just human nature wanting to get a higher score. When the score goes up, it will give the mind a sense of satisfaction, even the score really doesn’t mean anything. This mentality applies to fluff players, applies to online RPG gamers who pursuit high level and stronger weapons.  To some extend it also apply to those who accumulate wealth but never spend a dime.

I am elected the VP of education of the Toastmaster club at work.  The role of VP education is to help the club member become a better speaker.  Although I am half way through the advance speaker bronze program, I don’t think I can make particularly good speeches comparing to the native speakers.  I am not very convincing to teach others how to deliver a good speech.  Anyways, if I am just comparing to myself, I can see the progress I have made over time.

One of the responsibilities of VP education is to give presentations to the club members on how to give better speech or make the club better.  The Toastmaster has lots of resources to help my role.  The education series manuals are prepared speeches with slides ready to use.  Today, I just inherit a box full of education materials from the previous club president.  I volunteer myself to give the first education session, hoping that it will inspire other executive to step in for later sessions.  I quickly went through the stuffs and picked a manual for next month’s education session.  Maybe I couldn’t do everything right that is outlined in the manual when I am giving a speech.  I strongly believe in the best way to learn is to teach.  By giving a presentation, the points will engrave deeper into my mind and help me become a better speaker subconsciously.

A 17 years old kid hacked the iPhone, making phone call using networks other than AT&T is already old news. There is also an alternative hack fooling the iPhone using a turbo SIM that pretends to be a AT&T SIM card. I have quite some friends at work who bought the iPhone readily tried the hacks and eagerly showing off their fully functional iPhone.  As an engineer, I am genuiely interested in the technical details of hacks, but I am more interest in responding to an comment from a friend who condemns the hacks.

She is complaining all the hacking deprive the profit of AT&T and hacking in general cause the lack of investment in R&D because company cannot turn a profit. I have to disagree with her argument. AT&T is making a wrong and stupid business decision for locking up the iPhone.  It is our consumer right to tinker with whatever product we purchase by making it a better product that suits us better. If the company put in anti-user features that alienate the customers by making the product hard to use, we have every right to remove those unwanted features ourselves.  The invisible hand will punish those who act against the force of the free market.  The only way to make a profit is by giving the consumers what they want, not stupidly going against the consumers’ will.

In terms of business ethics, the consumers should only be responsible to pay for whatever they wish to buy. It is unjust to exploit the consumers by bundling sub-standard product with a high demand product.  The consumer should be given the option of not buying things they don’t need or wanted.  Everyone knows AT&T has the worse cellular network in US. If AT&T wants to gain more market share, it should provide a better service, instead of holding iPhone users as hostages.

Today was the old boys annual summer picnic. The president is owner of an organic farm and he let us use his place farm for BBQ. After the BBQ, we had a tour inside the farm. Modern farming is a capital intensive business with lots of agricultural technology. The organic farm is a 10 acres of green house, growing two hundred thousand plants with about 30 vegetable on each plant. That worths more than $1 million of vegetable in retail value. The temperature and water is computer controlled. The farm grows only organic pepper, cucumber and tomato, since organic food can sell at a premium.

I always thought growing organic food must be very dirty, but I was totally wrong. The farm use organic fertilizers that looks just like normal fertilizer, except it is made by organic materials. Since the vegetables are growing indoor, there is less pest hazard. The farm use organic means for pest control, having some good insects that hunt pests and growing plants that drive away pests. The farm buy bees in carton boxes for pollinating the plants. Harvest is labor intensive, although there are rail system inside the green house to help transporting the vegetable. During the tour, the owner pick some fresh pepper off from the plant to give us a try. Since the vegetable is pure organic with no harmful chemical, we can eat the pepper picked right off the plant. It tastes very good. This tour totally change my perception on farmers and found new respects to them. I always think farming is so boring and so out of fashion. In reality, farming is an engineering challenge to grow enough food to feed everyone.

10 acres of green house

  Rows of vegetables under the glass roof

Newly planted

Rail trolley for harvest

Big red pepper