(Note: In the past two years, I have sent a written notice via DHL to Dean of Student Life, emailed JHU President, contacted my acquaintances in US Embassy Beijing and The New York Times (I nearly got hired by The NYT, once upon a time… And nearly by Bloomberg as FSD, weird career path…), filed an OCR complaint to US Department of Education. I think I might just going to upload a song to YouTube… Though I am truly a lousy singer. PS: We do have YouTube in China, and Facebook as well. Or at least I do.)
(Note 2: It just came to me that Prof. Yanif Ahmad did recommend me to some three month internship at ETH, 800 euro/mo. I politely rejected. I also politely turned down the offer from JHU to issue a letter of recommendation for me.)
(Note 3: Never mind the YouTube song idea. Totally stupid. These guys do a way better job than me.)
(Note 4: Yeah, I can work with mpm-worker, PHP 7.07.1, WordPress Site Network, or rsync and cron (for hot backup), but I would never come up with this “online activism” idea on my own.
So you see back in late 2010 and early 2011 I was working with this one-man fake American technical consulting firm which could not really do business with America. I charged my clients as much as I could, delivered results to the best of my ability. Everyone happy. And I did not pay any tax for I doubt IRS has any say on this. Chinese government simply does not care.
So one day, I just came across this bid on a crowdsourcing website. Seemed that a navy veteran who was living on food stamp wanted to get a website made for something like cop-killer and parole hearing. He’d offer $150, saying he had been saving for half a year and wanted to make it a birthday present to his old man. $150 for a website, interesting, huh? Indians would not do it and I’d say they charge a pretty cheap rate. I could do website, but I just did not do website for money cause it was so inefficient.
“How pathetic! People can’t be successful if they are not bright or do not work hard.”
One week later, I realized the bid was still there for the taking, and the birthday was closing. “Cop-killer” or “parole hearing” were all too American and did not make much sense for me, but I did understand the family value part. So I made an exception and took it. Within 10 minutes, I’d fix the guy up with a Joomla installation on GoDaddy. Then I realized the guy wasn’t much of a webmaster. So I spent 30 more minutes to pull off some customized RSS feeds from Google News, so the site could update itself and could do search by geographical regions. And then I told the guy, “It’s your lucky day. You get to keep the money for I can’t work for you as an international student according to the laws of your government. Take it as a gift.”
What he replied, I could not exactly recall. It was roughly like “I don’t know much about the laws of men, but I do know about the Law of God. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. A gift for a gift, fair enough.”
You know what, I had been attending a church for three years and still a 100% atheist, never thought that I would be turned into a God-fearing Christian with $150. Indeed, Bible has answers for every problem in life. I have seen deliverance, predestination, and providence with my own eyes. I used to be an arrogant man, but I understand now all my gifts come from Him and shall serve Him. And there’s my Exodus from Johns Hopkins, as there is no new thing under the sun.
By the way, “luck” is never the source of my strength, but I don’t really want to offend anyone. I got to say whatever I want to say for I can’t really fire myself, right? Guess this is an evolved form of the freedom of speech.)
(Note 5: You see I am not a native speaker, and my command of the English language is, in fact, quite poor. Guess this is the reason I did not get a job from The New York Times. Or is it because my Chinese is actually even worse?
Anyway, I would like to clarify things a little bit for the readers of the site. As a God-fearing Christian, I now believe good people do not succeed because:
One, not bright;
Two, do not work hard;
and Three, are not treated as people by their own kind, like what Egyptians did to Jews (the “ubuntu” mojo, baby!).
Of course, as you can clearly see now, I am hopelessly stupid and will not succeed unless some higher power intervenes.
BTW, I actually negotiated my severance without a lawyer. Even an American could use one, right? I guess God did like to play lawyer once in a while.)
(Note 6: It seems that JHU did not wish to admit any of this ever happened, and actually I do not have any quarrel with JHU anyway. The agreement is in fact invalid in China, and suing me in a U.S. court would be futile. But the point is I am an upright businessman. I really hate breaching a contract, but if I have to breach it, I willingly face the consequences. So yeah, I am ready to return my scholarship.
Anyway, when the university negotiators drove a hard bargain aiming at $25,000. I just told them not to waste my time, stormed out, and later wrote an email saying that any amount beyond $65,000 would be considered as venture capital. Missed a great opportunity, eh? I don’t have the email anymore but hope you’d still keep it.
I am doing this inside my private Beijing CBD office, not some psycho ward. Dunno it’s good news or bad news.
Never mind the haze.)
(Note 7: It was a good negotiation, if you don’t take the shrink, the campus police, and the “we’ll pay you after you get back to China” parts into consideration. Would not treat an American (not to mention a Jewish American) like this, would you?)
(Note 8: Weather is good. Five to ten years I will move my office across the street to that tower.
It’s a shame to admit that once I was indeed a believer of the American dream. Nothing but mirage. If one cannot seek happiness through honest labor, what good is that?)
(Note 9: I did get my MA in Physics diploma one month after returning to my motherland China. So you were giving me the transcript of Mr. (or Dr.? I will do with Mr. for now) Chen, Yin because you thought all Chinese were related or else? Yeah I’d use the nickname “Alex” because people in this country usually do not pronounce my first name right. Not zin, not sin, certainly not tsin. It’s Xin! And do you even know what the $65,000 scholarship was for? It’s for killing my company with no fault on my end, and your PhD degrees certainly do not worth that much, physics or computer science.)
(Note 10: By the way, Alexander is not British or Russian. It’s Greek, something that is shared by the West and the East. And to answer a certain assistant director in the admissions, I was bitter like any American who would be deprived of a $20,000/mo tax-free income. I could not really tell I was making threats or not then, but I am certainly not threatening anyone now… I am doing what must be done.)
(Note 11: I have informed the Chinese government about my doing. For the moment, they decide not to prosecute or persecute me for my belief, my speech, my owning of private servers all around the globe, my old tax issue, and my social media campaigns.)
(Note 12: I do understand this practice is not unlike those of what your Americans would call “collection agency.” The previous owner of my old cell number in the U.S. certainly had some debt problems, so I ended up constantly getting called. Such problems are rare in China, for any decent Chinese rarely owes anybody anything.)
(Note 13: Just helped my would-be colleagues in The New York Times fix another translation error. It’s in the last sentence.
And asked for their help. Guess it doesn’t hurt to beg for help once in a while, even as a millionaire.)
(Note 14: So The New York Times would not help me for they can tell I would be a secret Trump supporter and admirer, if I were an American? Well make this sorry country great again, and good luck with that!)
(Note 15: Oh, I don’t hold any grudge against The NYT and certainly do not think they are obligated to help me nor my story is newsworthy. I didn’t really get the job offer from Bloomberg, but I did get one from The NYT before I turned it down for certain trivial reasons. I read the Times everyday, it’s just I am a critical reader…)
(Note 16: Regarding Prof. Yanif Ahmad or Dr. Yanif Ahmad, this is nothing personal. I mean the guy is totally cool and I liked him a lot. I still do. He tried to sell DBToaster to Israel, during a conference held in Israel, or to some Israeli fin-tech firm. How cool was that? And I almost decided to share some of my tips with him. Not to mention I even caught a glimpse of him testing the database engine with tick data.
And how was I able to complete that compiler? Of course by working 16 hours a day and teaching myself everything that was required to get the thing done. Would be much easier if it were CUDA or assembly, but I am quite sure that many high-achieving young pre-meds at Johns Hopkins can manage that. It is totally normal and does not imply any mental health issue.)
(Note 17: So Prof. Yanif Ahmad, when we did our first benchmark, we found that the results from your K3-OCaml compiler and my K3-C++ compiler were not consistent. I ended up fixing the bugs of the K3-OCaml compiler. I don’t know you did the OCaml compiler or it was someone else, but consider my service complimentary.)