That’s why I don’t go to many networking events. Talking to the new social media expert startup entrepreneurs can be quite stressful sometimes.

Startup life is hard on families. We just welcomed two new members into our family, and running as fast as you can isn’t sustainible for parents of multiple small children.

His comment resonates when I looked at some of the decisions I’ve made over the last 12 months. Not necessarily quitting a startup. Actually, I quitted my corporate job of 10 years, turned one of my hobby site into a “startup” (despite being already 5 years in existence). Hired my first employee and keeping cash flow positive. It got more and more demanding to a point that I have to let my other hobby site go. “Quitting” was a painful decision to make, especially when you perceive yourself in the middle of “achieve something”. But at the expense of your family? No. Never.

These days people often asked me what’s my future plan for my business. It’s easy to get excited to talk about all the expansion plans & world dominations, etc. I need to remind myself that running a startup is a life style choice that gives you more flexible time to look after your family, help out at church, etc, rather than letting the startup world takes over you.

One day I shall come back to write about the last 12 months. One day, when things settle down a bit.

There’s a bit of sadness in me, but on the other hand I was glad that they were over. Hopefully both projects will continue in safe hands. Hopefully.

1. Subject Lines Matter
2. Use Your Company Email Address
3. Remind Him of Context
4. Limit Your Entire Email to 5 sentences or Less
5. Make Your Ask Explicit
6. Respond Immediately
7. Include a Short, Professional Signature

Need to remember that the next time I email.

This brings us to the most important quality that enables impact: trust. Without trust, employees aren’t empowered. And without empowerment, there can be no impact… This is exactly the reason why startup hiring is difficult: the amount of trust required in the candidate is magnitudes above that of large companies.

It is so hard when you are evolving from one to two.

As of the movie — acting was good and Liam Neeson was great. It was a bit boring at the beginning, where you know about it all from the movie trailers. Dr. Martin Harris went into coma for 4 days, and everything changed for him when he woke up. Identity stolen, wife stolen and being treated like a lunatic in Berlin. Then the action starts — that’s how much the trailer has told us. There is however a big twist in the plot in the final act, which tells us why everything happened the way it happened, which was a surprise. The ending is a bit weak, but strong deliverance of the story nevertheless.

Moral of the story: don’t ask the taxi driver to load your suitcases!

Interestingly though, that when I disconnect the ATA from WAN interface, I could connect to its admin interface via the LAN port. However right after I connect LAN port to my ADSL hub, any request to admin interface would timeout. That’s weird, so I turned on syslog to log the system message to my external syslogd, and then connect the LAN port. Wow — heaps of log messages. Here is a snippet:

Mar  3 22:26:24 CDUaUdpStack::OnReceiveFrom(803fa460, 334)
Mar  3 22:26:24 from:50.22.171.5, port:5112, len=334, REGISTER sip:xx.xx.xx.xx SIP/2.0^M Via: SIP/2.0/UDP 50.22.171.5:5112;branch=z9hG4bK-1614305573;rport^M Content-Length: 0^M From: "152" ^M Accept: application/sdp^M User-Agent: friendly-scanner^M To: "152" ^M Contact: sip:123@1.1.1.1^M CSeq: 1 REGISTER^M Call-ID: 2269038874^M Max-Forwards: 70^M ^M
...
Mar  3 22:26:24 CUserAgent::SendTo(806f9750, 234, 5112, 50.22.171.5, 0, encryptType=0, udp, 0)
Mar  3 22:26:24 to:50.22.171.5, port:5112, len=234, SIP/2.0 403 Forbidden^M Via: SIP/2.0/UDP 50.22.171.5:5112;branch=z9hG4bK-1079254239;rport^M From: "152" ^M To: "152" ;tag=2cfa115b^M Call-ID: 807709011^M CSeq: 1 REGISTER^M Content-Length: 0^M ^M

Repeat the above for around 15 times per second! What appears to be happening is — this host 50.22.171.5 has been sending me SIP registration message at the rate of 15 times per second, and my VoIP ATA is merely replying back with 403 forbidden message at the same rate. My ATA is pretty much DoS’ed — I am denied of my VoIP service, because it has been too busy servicing bogus requests!

So once I firewall’ed the requests (dropping all packets from that IP), my VoIP ATA got back its sanity again. Hooray!

However, the “attack” did not stop. Large number of requests are still hitting my ADSL router every second. It is also chewing up quite a bit of bandwidth that counts towards my ADSL monthly quota. Here is an MRTG graph.

Not a lot of things I can do.

• I have sent an email to Softlayer’s abuse department (that IP address belongs to Softlayer). Did that a few days ago and still waiting for the reply.
• I could request a new IP address from Exetel to switch to. A lot of hassle especially with some IP-based authentication.

will update once there’s a solution. This kind of SIP-based DoS attack seems to get very frequent now — what are they trying to achieve?!

Since I moved to Sydney in 1995 (gee, that was 16 years ago!) we have never really had a TV at home. I guess I never really felt the “need”. The closest thing to a TV would be this Dell 19″ monitor that we connect to a desktop box with TV tuner — in fact we were still using that yesterday! Anna & Elsie have to literally stand next to the “TV” to get a clear picture. So enough is enough. We saw this being advertised at JB Hi-Fi for $999. Went to check it out yesterday, and took one home today. Without negotiation the sales guy gave us $30 discount, and we purchased $129 extended warranty so hopefully it would be good for 5 years.

So — Okano LTV5500F is a 55″ (139cm) Full HD (1920×1080) LCD TV. No LED backlit. No fancy thin profile. “Cheap” and “Big” are about its only two virtue. Picture quality is good enough (as we were comparing to a 19″ Dell UltraSharp the day before), although it probably won’t compare to a Sony/Samsung LCD or a Panasonic Plasma in the shop (that are 2x or 3x the price). It has 100Hz refresh rate, 2x HDMI inputs, USB inputs to attach external storage, and built in PVR function to record DTV shows.

Okano is a rebadged Soniq I heard. But I guess it’s the same with other Chinese brand — you get what you pay for, but we are fine with that :) Now I am just waiting for a new Xbox 360 and a Kinet bundle bargain…

The perfect startup has all three founders:

• someone who understands how to build technologies and systems to solve problems;
• someone who understands the human factors behind those problems, why they exist, what it takes to fix them and how to shape the experience;
• someone who understands how to reach, talk to and sell to the people who’s problems are being sold – and keep finding more of them

The ideal startup has two of the three founders, but all three skills are present between them.

I have been looking at “starting something” but realised it is just impossible to have all 3 attributes. I am a proficient developer, struggling designer and hopeless distributor.

Using “Show original” on Gmail gives away more clues on why this email is 5 days late. Here’s an excerpt of the email header:

Received: from [124.108.111.128] by nm1.bullet.mail.hk2.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 23 Nov 2010 04:50:34 -0000
Received: from [124.108.111.126] by tm1.bullet.mail.hk2.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 23 Nov 2010 04:50:33 -0000
Received: from [127.0.0.1] by omp1001.mail.hk2.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 18 Nov 2010 11:49:46 -0000
X-Yahoo-Newman-Id: 501708.68722.bm@omp1001.mail.hk2.yahoo.com
Received: (qmail 8748 invoked from network); 18 Nov 2010 11:49:46 -0000

So somehow this email was sitting on a Yahoo mail server for bloody 5 days! The hostname also resolves to [127.0.0.1] which might be the culprit there. Looks like a major fault to me. I only missed a meeting — but imagine missing a much more important message!