I <3 Green Tea

I did promise in my last article to begin my articles in the future with a brief description of my favourite music. Well, forget that promise.

I have a great story to tell now. It's about green tea.

Green tea has a long history behind it. And I'm humbly decline to explain any further because I am not a verifiable source of information for tea. All I know is the following:

1. Green tea is good for you;
2. Zen Buddhist monks in Japan employ them to stay awake during meditations;
3. It does not have the side effects of coffee, which incidentally are:
1. fever, nausea, headaches, and flu-like symptoms if you skip even one cup for one day;
2. extreme poverty, if one does not have the salary to support Starbucks.

So last Wednesday, me, Flyzzx, and Peter have decidedly abused our friendship with Tommy, and crashed over at his placed to watch the following morning's Champions League match between Chelsea.

Peter is a loyal Red Devil, while Tommy is a pre-Abramovich Chelsea supporter. Flyzzx doesn't watch football.

Me? Everton.

A quick recap:

Peter supports champions, Tommy is a fan of the rich, Flyzzx doesn't care, while I have a preference towards underdogs punching above their weight.

Before the match, me, Flyzzx, and Tommy went over to the Sunrise McDonald's outlet, where for the first time in probably a decade, I bought a meal from McDonald's with my own pocket money.

Me and the big yellow clown have a history. I ate stuff from McDonald's when I was 7 or 8 years old, and threw up.

Basically, the plot of Batman versus the Joker.

Anyway, our first industrial tie up with a college (KDU) would officially begin. And after some discussions during the past fortnight, we decided to arrange an informal meeting with the college candidates who would begin working for us.

It's strange how thing's turn out, don't they? We started our company when we were finished with the SPM in 2005, and now, we would be supervising people at least one year older than us.

Since we have yet to receive confirmation for new projects, Flyzzx proposed a mock project for the college students. Since we trust they will do everything they can to find out which project we have modelled this trial after, I'll keep silent on the name of the project here.

The proposal was well received, and being the social-experiment nut of the bunch, I immediately dropped brash hints to turn the mock project into a cut-throat reality-series style game where the loser would have to vote someone off the island.

Fortunately for the students, Tommy overruled me and arranged a potential split of 70/30 to the winners and losers respectively.

For this mock project, all of us will be judges, but really, only Flyzzx knows best. The winner will be the team that does a better job than the other. As simple as that.

We bade adieu and went over to Peter's place to pick him up.

Back at Champions Leagues central, we still had five to six hours to kill, which I immediately invested in my loyal companion, Enceladus.

Enceladus is the name I've given my Compaq Presario F762AU.

And I have installed Ubuntu Linux on it. Look out for an article on my blog.

As usual, Enceladus refused to connect to Tommy's WiFi's network. Something about WEP really bugs Enceladus.

Meanwhile, Flyzzx began implementing Project Torrential. A very secret project (now a viable business) that will receive no promotion at all except through word-of-mouth.

Here are a few clues, you can probably postulate the answer:

1. We have a lot of extra server storage and bandwidth;
2. The server fees are relatively high, making the investment fairly disproportionate;
3. We found a way to sell the extra storage and bandwidth.

If really want to find out what we are talking about, or if you ;-) know what we are talking about and want in on the action, send me an email at jpchansauterncom (add the @ and the . at the appropriate place).

Using the broadband connection, I eventually obtained a podcast I had wanted to try for quite some time: Podtoid-san.

You can find the latest versions of this podcast on japanator.com.

And so I played it out loud on my laptop's Altec Lansing, much to Peter's annoyance.

“It's very distracting,” he says.

Meanwhile, I was editing Tommy's proposal to request for seed funding for another business project called Cember.com.

It was slow work, and something was anchoring my spirits to the ground.

Thankfully, Flyzzx decided to test my intelligence by giving me this IQ question, heavily embellished by me so you won't misunderstand the question:

In a room on an island on the planet Neptune, a mad scientist invents a machine that ranks computers by performance. Nobody knows why he doesn't just invent a machine that spits out raw numbers to compare the performance of the computers, maybe that's why he is a mad scientist on Neptune. The machine has five arms, with five corresponding one-LED displays that only show the rank of the computers in relation to one another.
In another part of the room, a group of students from MIT have concluded that Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle would result in differing performances in the 25 MacBook Airs waiting to be tested by the mad scientist's machine.

The question becomes: What method would you use to employ the least amount of tests to determine the top three performing MacBook Airs?

Suddenly, Tommy interrupted our very important work by suggesting we kill some time at a collegiate party.

Without missing a beat, I assaulted Peter and Flyzzx with orders to go, because they still wanted to breed.

I guess that speaks of my preferences.

Peter agreed, Flyzzx stayed back to configure Torrential. Which was just as well, because for the first time in a very long time, I watched an excellent Japanese animé series in Japanese.

Clannad is not being shown anywhere in Malaysia, so I'd encourage the fansub route. Very soon, you will be asking to import the DVD from Japan.

*** I will now give a brief education on fansubs.

Fansubbers are animé aficionados who write their own subtitles for animé fresh out of Japan, to spread the good word. They employ an honour system, whereby people who have downloaded fansubs (and loved the animé and want to keep it) agree to buy the animé as soon as it's licensed and available for sale in the respective country.

Of course, that's the best case scenario where people actually want to reward good work and not steal it.

Since this is Malaysia, nothing animé related here is confirmed legal, you have no choice but to import them; if you are truly an honourable and trustworthy person.

End of sermon***

In anticipation of a long night, I asked Tommy if he could provide some green tea to last the night, and with that simple request, began the most productive 40 hours of my teenage life.

Just like wine, tea has different grades and quality. The difference may be as apparent as the taste, or in this case, the measurable quality of the tea leaves.

As surprising as it may seem, none of us fell asleep during the match which dragged all the way from 0230 hours to 0600 hours.

I only watched the first half of the match, where two goals were scored by each team; while the rest of the gang watched the second half, the first half of extra time, and the second half of extra time, where no goals were scored.

Thus proving I have some form of circumstantial luck I like to call my bloody Irish luck.

In all sincerity, I wish to thank all 22 men on the field for not scoring any goals while I wasn't watching.

The penalty was a torrid affair – for Peter and Tommy.

All bets were off, and Tommy began shouting football curses aloud. Possibly ripping apart the fabrics of space-time wide enough for Cristiano Ronaldo to miss his penalty kick.

Peter trusted the power of Lucky, Tommy's dog. And as if Lucky were god, caused John Terry to slip and miss during his kick. (What's dog spelt backwards?)

To prove that man and dog are the best of inter-species friends, Anelka missed his kick to send Peter into frenzied one-armed taunting air boxing in front of Tommy's wide-screen television.

Throughout it all, Flyzzx was in a semi-sleep state, utterly unmoved by the proceedings.

All in all, I was just pleased Tommy didn't have to bust out the champagne, a distinct possibility if Chelsea had won.

And then, off to bed, at least, that was the plan.

The lights were off, and everyone went to rest. Only Enceladus was up.

The green tea kicked in.

I felt strangely energetic, and after failing to drown myself in dark dreams after two minutes, got up and checked up on Enceladus.

Not long after that, I moved Enceladus to the modem upstairs to attach an Ethernet wire from the router directly to herm (I can't decide yet whether my laptop is male or female).

For a brief moment, I saw Peter on-line and available for chat. And dismissed it as a technical mystery. After all, he was sound asleep in the house right?

With nothing better to do, I started editing Tommy's business proposal while Enceladus downloaded stuff.

Very soon, sunlight entered the room, and the household began to stir.

I completed the editing, only to find myself facing Mr Ooi who had some things he wanted to add and change to his website.

Hmm... At this point, I have had only half-an-hour's rest in 24 hours.

It wasn't the most stimulating of conversations, but though sleep was lacking, I never felt encumbered by it during the discussion and managed to pull it off with everything (especially my credibility) intact.

“Must be the green tea,” I thought.

And very soon, it was 1000 hours, and I went down to join Flyzzx for some breakfast. Fresh milk, cereal, and ham sandwiches. Arguably the best breakfast I have had in years.

I asked him where Peter was, since I didn't see him anywhere in the house. Flyzzx told me he left after the match, which must have been when I had retreated to the kitchen for some cleaning up.

“I saw Peter on-line,” I said.

“He probably didn't sleep either,” Flyzzx said.

“You didn't sleep too?”, I asked.

“No, I rested for a while, but couldn't sleep,” he answered, “it was your green tea. I have never experienced anything like it before. I even sleep through coffee!”

Thus began an avid discussion on the humble tea leaf that created this astounding scenario.

After breakfast, we went upstairs to do some productive work.

First to cross off the list was a viewing of Clannad Episode 1, which totally blew me away with the extreme and obsessive attention to detail in every scene. The storyline is rather complex... well, you can Google it.

After which we set out to create a complete mock project for the KDU students, which took up all of our time until 1600 hours.

In total, we generated probably three days work within those hours.

And were powered on by green tea.

Seriously, if you have problems concentrating on school-work – green tea.

If you have an examination tomorrow morning and have yet to finish revising – green tea.

If you have a few hours to kill while awaiting your non-green-tea-drinking-CEO to awake from a late late night of football and wish to spend those hours doing productive work instead of sleep – green tea.

By the end of the day, we had delivered the documents to the students, completed the successful Beta test of Torrential, and had even sold three slots for Torrential on that day alone.

I almost felt sorry I had to leave that day, since I was still being powered by a full pot of green tea and was experiencing the mind-altering effects of broadband.

Geek drugs.

Anyway, we ended the day at Pizza Hut where Tommy and his girlfriend treated us to dinner with coupons. Just before the day was done though, Flyzzx asked me another IQ question:

Using an unlimited supply of water and two pails which hold 4 litres and 9 litres respectively, produce 6 litres of water in the most exact fashion possible through the actions of pouring alone.

And after solving that, with some hints from Flyzzx, we reached Bayan Lepas, where he went home, while I awaited the bus.

By the time I got back to Balik Pulau, the effects of green tea had worn off. Significantly.

With a quick explanation of my lack of sleep, I excused myself from dinner, retreated to my room, and slept for 12 hours.

Upon awaking, I solved the 25 MacBook Airs question to officially end what must be the most productive 40 hours in my teenage life.

Talk, talk and more talk

Much has happened since the last post, for Sautern as a whole and for certain individuals too. For starters, our favourite geek has succeeded in getting the much coveted ASEAN scholarship. His achievement is all the more impressive considering he was the only successful applicant among his party of 3 that was selected to attend the interviews. If you are still not satisfied that this is an impressive feat, do note that the 3 of them were the only ones considered 1337 enough among the top scorers of Chung Ling. So do please give Chong Yang a slap on the back or two, just don't overdo it and flatten him, or we will flatten you.

Moving on to the company. We have been involved in some top secret machinations involving repeated calls on the telephone and having Jupes masquerade as a pseudo-telemarketer. Thankfully though, the success rates we got for this does not happen to real life telemarketers, else more telemarketing companies sprout out. Most of you readers will probably be lost at this point, and I don't blame you. Maybe a slight recap is in order.

To counter the consequences of the impending loss of our Chief Programmer as noted above, we have had to make some unconventional choices. We decided to cast our sights to the vast untapped human resource of, drumroll please, college students. Getting the ball rolling has entailed the abovementioned phone calls. That task naturally fell to Jupes, who could probably talk about controversial issues in front of an unfriendly crowd and not get killed, oh wait, he did do that. If worse comes to worse he can still count on his superlative ability to steer the conversation off topic should things get dicey.

Turns out the few white hairs we sprouted were for naught though, as things went surprisingly well. At least we had no one slam the phone on us. Of course the bonus of getting a few appointments to discuss our proposal was appreciated too. The first meeting will be on a Friday afternoon and the next one will be right next morning. At least we still had 2 days to prepare.

2 days however passed really fast, and before we knew it Tommy, me and Jupes were putting on some last minute preparations at Tommy's place. The trip to the college, Disted by the way, took all of 5 minutes, and the interview took... barely longer, 7 minutes in fact. Yes, I timed it. Don't get the impression that we tanked though, as it was quite positive and a good start. We spent the time explaining and clarifying our idea and the lecturer said that she will discuss with her superiors.

The timing for the next meeting was a bit tight though, but what can you do, blame it on Saturday morning sleepiness. Thanks to some astute driving by Tommy we weren't that late, maybe 1 minute at most ( yea, I checked). Anyway, that's where the fun starts. The college (KDU this time) building was waaaay larger and we were required to go up a few floors and turn into a few corridors and... that's the part where we get lost.

At this point we had 2 options, either go wandering around like idiots or head into one of those creepy rooms they have as resource centre/lecture hall/whatever. Having not seen too many horror movies, we chose the creepy room option. We chose to enter a room marked resource centre to try to get some directions. Lucky for us, the person manning it wasn't a deranged axe murderer and so we were soon on our way.

Once we got our bearings straight and finally arrived at the correct room, we were greeted by 2 lecturers and ushered into a nearby classroom. The discussion took longer than the previous one, and we really went through our proposal thoroughly. Our day didn't end with the discussion though. As luck would have it, the classroom was also occupied by a class of IT students cramming for their upcoming exams. The lecturers allowed us to get straight down to business and pitch our idea to them.

Finally, we were actually seeing some concrete progress. After composing ourselves for a few minutes, we just went ahead and just talked, and talked, and talked. Trust me, we really did have to talk a lot, about our proposal, Sautern, heck Tommy even threw in some Dota for good measure. The class wasn't big, maybe about a dozen or so students, but encouragingly they were responsive and hopefully receptive. Throughout the hour or so spent talking with them (not timed this time, but it's a close estimate), we managed to get most of them to leave their contacts. All in all, quite a fruitful morning's work.