Theodore Nguyen-Cao

I'm messy and happy. My room is a mess. I'm happy. My desk is a mess. I'm happy. My thoughts are a mess. Let's not get it twisted. I didn't say I'm disorganized. I'm messy. What's the distinction? Being disorganized implies I can't find something when I'm looking for it and things can lost easily. Being messy is simply portraying surface-level chaos. But it's a chaos that I understand. Have you ever been told to clean your room by your parents? I walk into my room one day and looked around. Clothes (both clean and dirty), books, magazines, hangers, coins, music CDs are all over the floor. You can see carpet for about only 1/5 of the floor. I shrug my shoulders and don't see the big deal. I know exactly where to find my favorite sweater and the overdue library book I was looking for. I grab the sweater and book and go to the library to return the book. I come back home and enter my room again. My wonderful mom cleaned up my room. While I do appreciate the work she puts into keeping the house clean, now I can't find the new CD I just burned that was under the pair of jeans I had on the next to Money and Small Business magazines. My messy room is now clean, but I can't find anything. Isn't the purpose of cleaning to make it easier for me to find things? I find myself putting off cleaning things that aren't essential for my day to day activities. My mom hates it. She always wants the kitchen sink empty with no dirty dishes. She wants every room clean and tidy. This has always presented a problem for us. We continue to get into arguments over cleaning. I don't see the point and she sees it as a necessity. I'm not saying I won't do the dishes. I'm just saying I don't want to do the dishes right NOW. The way I see it is, if there are dirty dishes, why do I have to clean them now when no one is going to use them at the moment? Why can't I clean them when I need them? Is there some harm in doing them later? Some may argue that doing them now allows you to not have to do them later. But from my perspective, that's terrible inefficient. I'm wasting time and energy doing something with no positive outcome. I'll clean the dishes now and they will just sit on the dish rack with no one to use them. Isn't cleaning the dishes when I need them and putting them to use right away so much better? The same can be said about making your bed. Lots of kids are taught to make their bed in the morning when they wake up. Only to undo what they did when they go to sleep. It's like putting yourself in an endless cycle of futility. I have this theory that the messier you are, the smarter you are. While I'm sure this is a ridiculous notion to some, please allow me to explain myself. First off, it's difficult to define what a "smart" person is because there needs to be context around what a person is "smart" about. A whole other post would be required to even skim this surface. For argument's sake, I'll define being smart means to have periods of continuous train of deep thought. What I mean to say is that smart people are constantly thinking about something or other. They are easily preoccupied in thought and love new ideas. While the thoughts may be random, the person is thinking very hard or deep about it. This is the primary reason why smart people are messy. They are too busy with things that interest them to bother with trivial things like dirty dishes. In addition if you put things into perspective, having a messy room or some dirty dishes and laundry has no impact on a person's accomplishments or quality of life. I rather attempt to create a new way to solve some problem and fail than condemn myself to keeping my room clean. I think there's even a larger idea here. By cleaning and keeping things neat and tidy, the most you can only be is content with the status of your house. By investing your time in thought and your interests, you can be happy with yourself and your life. I want to be happy, not content.

Yes, I know. I'm a little late on the wishing of Happy New Years. Nevertheless, Happy New Years everyone! I hope everyone had a fun/safe holidays and new years. The family trip up to Canada was awesome. I got to see the cousins and catch up on good times. It's really cool to see how all of our lives are coming together. People graduating university, getting jobs, taking those next steps in life. I finally really noticed I see how hard my parents (really just mom) work to keep in touch with relatives even though we live so far away from any family. We better keep that kind of communication going. Christmas was blast. Two most memorable moments:

1. My 10 year old cousin spazing out, screaming "OOOH SANTA, I LOVE YOU!! SANTA! SANTA!!" when Santa Claus comes through the front door.
2. All the young adults busting out doing hardcore math while everyone else is opening up presents. (I'll post the math problem later)

New years was cool. I went out to dinner with a friend and we hung out all night. This New Years definitely sneaked up on me. My mind was on so many different things I didn't even realize it was New Years Eve until people started asking what I was going to do that day. Oh, well..it's just another day, right?

I'm glad it's Christmas time again because that means I get some time off to go up to Canada to see family. Oh, and getting presents...that's sweet, too. I must say, working in McLean at this time of year is not fun. The traffic is ridiculous with all the people trying to get in and out of Tysons Corner Mall. Tomorrow, I get to avoid most of it, but I'll be fighting the crowd traffic inside the mall with my side-kick Sura. Yeah, that's right. I'm not done with the shopping of the presents. I think the past couple of years, I'm used up all of my good ideas for presents. In trying to figure out why I'm having so much trouble thinking/finding presents for the people I usually get presents for, I came to the following possible reasons:

1. I am losing touch of knowing the people that matter to me, their wants and needs
2. Industry isn't being innovative enough to come up with the products worth getting anyone
3. Everyone already has what they want/need.

I feel that in the past couple months, I've been in a sort of a funky state-of-mind, disassociated from family and friends. I don't know if this was because of work or not but when I realized this, I didn't like it. Which brings me to my New Years resolution is to renew past relationships and refresh current relationships. I don't usually do New Years resolutions, but I figure now is a good time as any to set those things called 'goals' in my life. Looking around the mall, I don't see a lot of "Oh, My God I Gotta Have That!" things I want for myself or anyone else. Even with the explosive popularity of the iPod, I really just saw a CD player that could hold more songs than before. I guess it has to do with the way I listen to music. I always just play my music collection with Shuffle/Repeat on. I like not knowing what song is coming up next :) I think today's technology has got to a point where it allows us to do things we do everyday faster than yesterday. Moving forward, I'd be more interested in using technology to define a whole new way to do something. It's not a matter of making something faster, it should more efficient. These two concepts are not one in the same. Building off of the iPod example, Apple didn't define a new way to listen or organize music. We still use headphones/earplugs to listen and organizing music under genres and albums/tracks was not novel to iPod. ID3 allows us to easily describe our music and media players like WinAMP are able to organize it. Sure, I can do things faster on an iPod than I could on a CD player such as look for a specific song. In this case, technology introduced a fad. It doesn't take away from the fact that the mp3 players like the iPod are great products. But other than the visually-appealing 'oohs' and 'ahhs', there isn't a feature in the iPod that differentiates it from anything else we've had in the past 10 years. What would turn the mp3 player into a "Oh, My God I Gotta Have That!" thing for me is the ability to add social learning to it. Let's call this new product the ZweeVoo. As an owner of the spankin' new ZweeVoo, I can say I want to chill out. The ZweeVoo will start playing music it thinks is 'chill' music and if I don't like it, I skip it and the ZweeVoo knows that the song is probably not what I want to be listening to when I'm chill mood. Repeat this for when I'm feeling happy, sad, mad, frustrated, sleepy, indifferent, etc. The more I use my ZweeVoo the more it knows about it's owner and the type of music to play when I tell it how I'm feeling at the time. I think this would be an awesome feature to have. Something like pandora.com for the portable music player focused around user state-of-mind or emotional state versus user preferences. As for the last reason why I'm having trouble finding presents for people, I made that one up because I thought a list of only two reasons was lame and I needed a third. Everyone wants and needs at least something. Once they get it, there's will always be a new thing to want. Probably a ZweeVoo.

As promised, click here the solution.

There's only one way to pay the stone mason after the first day of work and that's to cut the gold bar into two pieces, a 1/7th piece and 6/7th piece.The pharaoh gives him him the 1/7th piece. At the end of day two, the pharaoh is able to make one more cut and must pay the mason 2/7ths of the gold bar. The only way to do this is to use the larger (6/7th) piece and cut out a 2/7th piece. The pharaoh takes back the 1/7th piece and gives the 2/7th piece. Now the pharaoh has all made all of his alloted cuts and there are 3 pieces of gold bar: a 1/7th piece, a 2/7th piece, and the remaining 4/7th piece. With these three pieces, the pharaoh is able to pay the mason every day the fraction amount of the entire gold bar that corresponds to the number of days work. I think the trickiest part was realizing that the mason can give back pieces as change. Day 1: Pay with the 1/7th piece Day 2: Pay with the 2/7th piece Day 3: Pay with the 1/7th and 2/7th pieces (1/7 + 2/7 = 3/7) Day 4: Pay with the 4/7th piece Day 5: Pay with the 1/7th and 4/7th piece (1/7 + 4/7 = 5/7) Day 6: Pay with the 2/7th and 4/7th pieces (2/7 + 4/7 = 6/7) Day 7: Pay with all the pieces (1/7 + 2/7 + 4/7 = 7/7) Of course, this is only possible if the mason doesn't go off and spend his pay before the end of the week :)

I've always known myself to be a very ambitious person. The only problem is that I'm ambitious in more ways than one. This results in conflicts of interests. As the saying goes, you can't have everything. In my case, I always thought I would go back to school to get a Masters or MBA. I also always wanted to advance my career as fast as possible. Oh, and that's the goal of getting married and starting a family fairly young (~3 years?). There are people out there that juggle all of these things at the same time. I just don't see how I could do it. Everything conflicts with each other. Going back to school makes you take time off from work. If you think about doing school part-time, it's difficult to find a university with a good part-time program that's worth getting a degree from. Maybe that doesn't matter, if you're just going for the piece of paper that says M.B.A. or M.S. but if you are going for the highest quality education you can find, I think you have to commit yourself full-time. And for me, I would want to go to the best school I could get into. If I start a family too soon, I will want to have a very good work-life balance to raise my child. This results in being seen as one of those people who don't put in those extra hours of work to get ahead. It's silly but it's true. People who work more hours are often seen as more dedicated than those who clock in at 9 a.m. and out at 5 p.m. And if I don't have enough time to do more work, I certainly won't have enough time to go to school. I've stressed about this kind of stuff ever since I graduated. It'll be really interesting to see how everything pans out. I came across the blog linked and I thought I would give it a show to help me to put things into perspective. I know what's most important to me and everything else is icing on the cake. However in doing the exercise for about 10 minutes, I got writer's block. But I guess I'll use this blog to keep a running list of my (possible) life purposes: What is my true life's purpose?

1. make money
2. start a family
3. become rich
4. support my family
5. take care of my parents
6. take care of my family/relatives
7. have kids
8. teach my kids
9. raise good kids
10. have kids not worry about money
11. bring joy to those i love
12. spark a idea
13. keep my family happy
14. keep my family close
15. see my grandchildren
16. love and raise my family
17. fix the bad things that happen to those I love
18. get rest
19. create something new

I guess I'm not really converging to any particular purpose so I'll try again later...

I've always been a big fan of Craig David. I don't really know why he never really blew up in the United States. He's real talented and it's music anyone can really listen to. The guitarist in the video is wicked, too.

This is a good video if you are ever in a sour mood and need some lightening up. It always makes me smile after watching it.

I'm so tired. Work has just been crazy. Aren't things suppose to die down during the holidays? Not so in my case. Deadlines are coming up and there's still a lot left to do. I feel like I did in college before a big CS project was due. Only now, there are no A's, B's, or C's. There's only success and failure. This leads me to some of my grips with the current education system in America. Why are there so many grading systems? And when did it become OK to be mediocre? Students are taught and trained to be evaluated on this teacher-biased scale of letters that mean different things in different places. An 'A' in an inner city school is probably not the equivalent as an 'A' from say, a Fairfax County school. In addition, there's this ridiculous notion of people going to college with 4.0+ GPAs because they took AP, Honors, or GT (Gifted/Talented?) courses in high school. These grading policies are different all across the country. The standardized tests like the SATs try to solve this problem, but these tests do not evaluate the knowledge or comprehensive abilities of a student. It simply tests how good you can take the SATs. As a by-product of this problem and on a more individual level, a student develops, what I believe is, a false impression of what level of aptitude is acceptable in society. I cringe every time I hear some kid say 'I got a C on my math test!', like they're proud of it. Sure, maybe it's a big improvement from the F they got last week but to initially set the standard this low advocates mediocrity and even worse, sets yourself up for failure. I don't think anyone should be aiming to be average or content with just 'getting by'. Personally, I am continuing trying to better myself in all the ways I know how. This is predicated on the active realization that in order to better myself, I can't be content with being only adequate. I want to surpass expectations, mine most importantly.

I was recently given this puzzle and I thought I would share it with everyone else. So the puzzle starts... There's a pharaoh who wants to build a huge pyramid to compensate for his lack of self confidence. He hires a stonemason to build his pyramid in 7 days and agrees to pay the mason one gold bar upon completion for his work. The stonemason doesn't like the pharaoh very much nor does he trust him. So, he demands that the pharaoh pay him at the end of every day an equivalent fraction of the gold bar as the number of days that he worked. That is, after the first day of work, the pharaoh must pay him 1/7 of the gold bar, 2/7 at the end of the 2nd day, 3/7 on the 3rd, etc until the end of the 7th day where he will receive his full payment of the gold bar. The kicker is the pharaoh may only make two cuts on the gold bar. Reluctantly, the pharaoh agrees to these terms. The question is "How does the pharaoh do it?" As with a lot of puzzles, it helps to talk it through so feel free to post a comment or question. :) I'll post the answer later for everyone or I can answer it for myself...depending if anyone else is reading this. Hint: There's only one way to pay him the first day.

Hey, everyone. If you're reading this, you probably was told to check this out by me. Alas, there is not much to see yet. If you don't already know, my name is Theo. I'm a twenty-something year old software engineer. I would describe myself as someone who has yet to define himself. I'm not one thing or another. I would say I'm different from those are different. In some ways, I chose to be different, in others, I had no choice. More about this at some other time. In the mean time, welcome to my blog and I hope the readers can use this blog to gain some insight into who I am and maybe even inspire some other thoughts or ideas. I'm a big believer in whole chain-reaction of thoughts. If I can say or write something that influences someone else's thoughts which inspires a new idea, I think that is one of the best things in the world. I previously tried to do the whole routine blogging thing but life gets in the way. Here's my third try at this with a brand, new twist! Not only will I blog about things in my life but my personal goals and thoughts on interesting subjects (at least to me anyway) . Some topics I have in mind:

• Jobs
• Finances
• Movies
• Books
• Programming
• Life

Not that I'm an expert in any of these topics, but I think I can at least share my experiences and thoughts about them. If anyone has any suggestions as to what they want me to ramble about, please let me know. Till next time...sooner than later I hope.