Thinking about Switching to WordPress

Posted on May 12, 2012 by Jian Shuo Wang

I am a one with emotions. I have been using MovableType for almost 10 years – daily. There are many great memories with MovableType. I know their founders (well, met briefly during my first Silicon Valley trip), and I know many of their people (well, early employees, not sure if they are still there). They even hosted a 6 year blogging anniversary for me in their office. I am using MovableType daily for so long. To be short, I loved MovableType, and the team.

However, recently I really got pissed off by the slowness of MovableType and its almost stopping on development. There are still bug fixes, but it is not interesting. In a Saturday morning, I started to think, shall I still stay on MovableType?

My whole 10 years of daily blogging started with a post named: MovableType Successfully Installed on Windows XP. I didn’t expect the 10 year journey started there. Today, I had the idea to install WordPress, and give it a try (with a little bit sense of guilty deep in my heart). It turned out that the installation went well, and it did complete in 5 minutes.

I am going to test run on this blog for a while, and decide whether I want to migrate the site to WordPress. That may be another journey. I’d like to take the chance to thank MovableType team, for allowing me to use the software for so long and to spend thousands of hours on it, to create something I am proud of after many years.

P.S. This post was posted on WordPress first, and copied here.

Over Optimistic and Over Pessimistic

Posted on May 11, 2012 by Jian Shuo Wang

Based on my observation on the International companies in China, which failed, or failing, they are swinging from the over optimistic mode to over pessimistic mode. eBay is an example, and Google is another.

They start with big ambition to get the whole country in few months, or 1 year, but it quickly find out that it is mission impossible and then they quickly switch to the over pessimistic mode and claim the failure. They are actually not.

What they need is neither of the two – they just need to be realistic.

New Traditional Industry Leaders Meetup

Posted on May 10, 2012 by Jian Shuo Wang

This is an interesting gathering – a group of CEOs of Internet companies in Shanghai agreed to meet quarterly. We joked the industry has become a new “traditional industry”, because it has been labor intensive, unlike the traditional internet business model.

Here is the final photo:

From the left to right are:

Afu, CEO of JJDD.com

Zhang Tao, CEO of Dianping.com

Bill Yao, CEO of PPTV.com

Mike Liang, CEO of Anjuke.com

Jian Shuo Wang, CEO of Baixing.com

It is good to catch up, always.

Drawing

As expected, people don’t come promptly, so I used the time to draw the corner of the room.

The Question to Ask on Dinner Party

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Jian Shuo Wang

Check out Auren Hoffman’s blog post: TPQ – Thought Provoking Questions. This answered the question about “The Awkwardness of Meeting Someone in Person” I mentioned yesterday in this post. It is the lack of a good question.

Dr. Andreas Weigend’s TPQ was, “What was your biggest surprise in the last year?”

I got another one, it is asked by Adams Lashinsky: “How you can make big money in the next 20 years?”

The Top of Paul Graham’s List

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Jian Shuo Wang

A short quote from Paul Graham’s to do list in this article The Top of My Todo List:

Don’t ignore your dreams; don’t work too much; say what you think; cultivate friendships; be happy.

Paul continued to be the most amazing writers that I read – he have some genuine thoughts, and guide him and many of his startups. I would highly recommend you to read his blog.

The Awkwardness of Meeting Someone in Person

In one book, Alan De Botton mentioned that reading is better than talking because it allows pause, and deep thoughts, and more well structured thoughts. You cannot fall into deep thoughts when you are at the conversation with your favorite author. Just as echoed in this article: Writing and Speaking, talking is not the best way for intelligent and thoughtful people to exchange ideas. I can imagine I have not too many things to talk about if I meet with Alan de Botton, or Paul Graham one day.

I had a conversation with Yu Ying, the famous doctor in Beijing who write micro-blog – a weibo with 800,000 followers. Her Weibo is interesting, and her talk on TnDao was great. But to when to bar with and chat, it is hard to calm down and really talk. That is the awkwardness to meet someone in person.

World Financial Center

The most interesting in Shanghai is maybe the 52th floor of the World Financial Center in Pudong. I visited the tower today because I had too meetings in the same building. People need to transfer to another elevator at the 52 and 53th floor. If you are someone who likes to climb to tall buildings, you can get to the 52th floor lobby without having to making any appointment with people working there. Below is the photo of the lobby.

Over the window, you can see the new Shanghai Tower is in good shape already.

TnDao, Shanghai’s TED

Posted on May 7, 2012 by Jian Shuo Wang

I attended the TnDao forum. It was great.

TnDao forum was inspired by TED, and was initiated by Mr. Dai Jianbiao and many other great people like Miss Jian Fang, and Mr. Jian Changjian. It is a monthly talk of great people and offers an opportunity for few hundreds people to escape from their busy lives to get inspired by new ideas, especially from different industries.

You can get more information and the past video from http://tndao.com.

It is free to attend, but you have to register on the website when it opens to registration. The next time should be around the early of June. I am invited to talk on the forum but I don’t have any idea what to talk yet, so likely to skip.

Longjing is My Favorite Village

Posted on May 6, 2012 by Jian Shuo Wang

“40-year-old is the time to form one’s value system”, He Ying meant it when we had coffee tonight, after I am back from Hangzhou (the fourth consecutive weekend).

The mountain area of Hangzhou is very good place for exercise, to drink, eat, to stay and to think. Among the villages, I love Longjing 龙井, Manjuelong 满觉陇 and Yangmeiling 杨梅岭 most. I climbed the mountains, and drinker the tea, and rate it as my favorite village in China. (Well, this is a very biased view, since I only visited very few of them. But anyone has the right to do the rating anyway, right?)

Here are some photos from the trip:

Above is the picture I drew at Longjing.

The Jiuxi (Nine Creeks) area:

Going to Hangzhou Again

Posted on May 5, 2012 by Jian Shuo Wang

After being in Hangzhou for three consecutive weekend, I decided to go to Hangzhou again, today, with Wendy and Yifan.

This is an action to break the laziness and make some difference in the normal life.

IF, I mean everyone can imagine the IF part, we set our home in Hangzhou, and we will commute to Hangzhou every weekend. I know many people, at least 10 of them, have their home in a different city and they have to do the same thing as we do today, for years. Many of them have homes in Shanghai but work in Beijing or Shenzhen, or Hangzhou.

IF, we can sometimes understand others life, some strange behavior started to be normal. Thinking is the process to make those abnormal to normal.

Shanghai Real Estates Still Under Control

Posted on May 4, 2012 by Jian Shuo Wang

The Chinese government always have more methods to control whatever they want to control. They can control how many child you are allowed to have, and it is not surprising to see how many houses you can buy.

According to the House Purchase Restriction order:

For local residents who already have one apartment, and non-local residents who have been paying tax for two years, they can only purchase another one.
For local residents with two or more apartments, or non-local residents with one or more apartments, they are not allowed to buy any houses/apartments.
For anyone who buy second apartment, the down payment have to be as high as 60%, and the interest rate has to be 10% higher than average.
Tax for transfer of houses purchased less than 5 years are significantly higher.

There are many other restrictions. These are the powerful rules to keep buyers out of the market, and the house market kept flat and down ever since.

Wangjianshuo's Blog

Events (in Shanghai) that affect my life (and others')

Monthly Archives: May 2012