Category: Random Musings

Very interesting blend!

And I do not mean the colourful hats of De-Bono.

During meetings with potential partners and client, I always have this problem of which hat to wear. I am currently wearing multiple hats and I sometimes switch hats in the middle of a meeting.

Like last week, I had a meeting with a company where I went in with one hat and changed into another hat during the meeting. I also had a situation of visiting another company with one hat last week, and I will be visiting them again in a fort-night with another hat.

I am actually wearing several dynamic hats these days. Sometimes, people get confused as to whom I represent. I try to fix this by having multiple name-cards and presenting the one whose hat I am wearing at that point in time. I sometimes end up giving out several name-cards to people.

It is not confusing for me because I have been multi-hatting since I was young. I am used to adopting several roles at the same time. Maybe this makes me a little schizoid, which is supposed to be a good thing for entrepreneurs. So, I’m not complaining.

However, I suddenly realised this weekend that there is precedence for multi-hatting – super-heroes. Peter Parker – Spiderman, Tony Stark – Ironman, Bruce Wayne – Batman, etc. (Fools too – shhhh!)

So, it seems that multi-hatting is a norm for a super-hero, not that I claim to be one. However, I definitely have to become one if I am to succeed at what I am doing at the moment. It is not easy to be a boot-strapping solo-founder of a cutting-edge engineering company.

While I have only left my previous employer for about 4-months, my daily life has already changed tremendously – even the regular daily routines. I noticed it this morning as I was coming to work at AESTE. I thought to myself, I no longer think about where to go for lunch.

This may surprise some people but the main activity to look forward to at my previous place was – lunch!

Nowadays, I hardly have time for lunch. I have often had lunch while on the road – driving. I know that it’s not a very healthy thing to do but that’s what I do when I am pressed for time. I’ll just grab a sandwich or energy bar with one hand while I drive with the other. That’s another reason why lunch is rarely the highlight of my day. I rarely have lunch with other human beings anymore.

The highlight of my day these days is – building things. 🙂

Recently, I had the opportunity to meet a former student of mine, at the local HSBC head-office. I was attending a talk there and this student of mine was there to sell HSBC products and services to the attendees. She seemed familiar but I could not place her exactly but she did remember me – I used to scold her a lot.

She was my very first piano student. I started teaching piano at the age of 12 and she was living next door to me at the time. So, while we were teacher and student, we were also neighbourhood friends and I often played together with her elder siblings. I can still remember hanging a string across lamp posts and using that for our street badminton games.

I could also remember that she had a bit of trouble with English. She came from a Chinese educated family and in those days, they did not teach English in Chinese schools until Primary 3. However, as I registered my students for examinations under the ABRSM, all the examinations were conducted in English – including written papers. So, I had to teach her some English too.

The solution to this problem still surprises me until this day. While she could read little English, she could understand the questions after reading it for more than a dozen times. If she did not understand the question, we would skip it and come back to it later after she answered some of the other questions. Honestly, that’s all I did. I made her repeatedly read the questions until she understood what was asked. It must’ve seemed like torture at the time, but it worked. I do not understand the reasons why, but it worked.

Today, she speaks English really well. She ended up graduating with a Finance degree and working at HSBC – dealing in customer service for Premier customers. If I ever qualify to open a Premier account in the future, I’ll probably call her up to do it – let her meet her quota and earn some commission.

This is a small world, really. I sometimes wonder what happened to the other dozen or so students of mine.

I recently saw an advertisement in a local newspaper for the UM Bright-Spark programme. However, looking at the criteria, I noticed that I do not qualify because I do not have any quality publications. Frankly, my list of publications is close to zero. Damn, so I’m not a bright spark after all!!

But wait!

While I may have few publications, and those few publications that I have had are not cited at all, I have just discovered that I have quite a lot of citations elsewhere! (and these citations have other citations too!)

My work is used in academia by a number of universities. The earliest known one to me is my AE18 used at North Carolina State University way back in the early 2000s. My previous incarnation of AEMB was used at Virginia Tech and the current incarnation was used at TU.Delft and Shandong University, China. Actually, I’m sure that it is used far more widely. At one time around mid 2000s, the AEMB was the second most popular open-source microprocessor world-wide. It got about 10,000 hits a month. These are just some of the ones that I know about. Also, my work is found in commercial products already sold in the market. So, my work is also practical.

Lots of people I have spoken to wonder how can someone get cited without publishing. It’s definitely possible – using a modern method of peer-review and publication called Open Source!

However, this method is only easily accepted in the computing world because it was pretty much invented here. In other fields, it is probably not so easy to embrace open-source yet – because the proper exposure and mind-set is not there. I can easily imagine the biology world embracing it and the same goes with the other sciences but things will take some time.

Anyway, it’s okay not to be a bright spark. Like my doctoral examiner realised, I am an engineer first, not an academic nor researcher.

What matters to me is impacting lives (or saving them).