From 06.16.2003 - Can money buy happiness? UC Berkeley researchers find surprising answers:

"Perhaps making a lot of money in your job can actually cause you to question why you are working at the particular job you have, even if you chose the job for intrinsic reasons," Malka said. "There's a substantial psychological literature showing that receiving monetary rewards for doing a fun task can make the task seem less enjoyable. This past research suggests that your sense of how fulfilling and personally rewarding you find a task is very fragile, and money can shake this delicate sense of enjoyment."

"Individuals have a fundamental psychological need to feel as though their actions are freely chosen," the authors wrote. "In other words, we all need to feel that we are not just doing the work for the money, and intrinsically motivated individuals need to feel this even more so," Chatman added.

A quote from A Blogger's Big-Fish Fantasy that resonates with my thoughts on blogging (blog daily; keep in mind that my parents can be reading what I write):

If quality is the ultimate reader magnet, what makes a blog great? One ingredient is to write daily, according to Mr. Sifry, who said Technorati's rankings showed that daily bloggers tended to draw more readers.

Ms. Hourihan said she made postings to her blog (www.megnut.com) as if she were writing for a small group of readers, while being aware that a larger group might end up reading it. "My guiding principle is always to write with my grandparents in mind," she said. "It keeps me from being too personal or too technical or too complainy."

How do you deal with what you read and learn in your local newspaper? My household has subscribed to the San Francisco Chronicle for years. For a while, one of my housemates also subscribed to The New York Times -- which I much prefered but found to be too expensive. I typically read The Chronicle over breakfast. If I'm out of the house for breakfast, I don't tend to read the paper that day -- the Chronicle is almost always a morning-only companion for me. I sometimes wonder whether this means that reading the Chronicle is mostly a waste of time -- like channel surfing or mindless web browsing.

Still, I learn stuff when I read the paper. And they certainly provoke various reactions in me.

Articles that make me think that I should watch my bank very closely: Banks defeat privacy bill yet again / Speier vows to put stricter measure on state ballot and Wells dishing out bank data

Article that makes me think that the current administration is really as bad as I have suspected:
E. J. Dionne's Framing the issue and the lastest column by Robert Scheer: "What Did He Know and When Did He Know It?" (no permalink yet)

An article that makes me want to organize a group of friends to go to the Oakland museums: Powerful glimpses of black history in Oakland exhibition

Something that helps me think about what I can do for the many homeless in Berkeley: John Carroll's Well, sure, a house can be a home, about the Berkeley Food and Housing Project

A techno-lust inducing piece: Handspring unveils Treo 600 handheld / Wireless device to be available in the fall

Forcing myself to respond to what I read, I hope, redeems some of my morning time. (But isn't it just enough that I have fun reading the Datebook?)

It's about 10:30pm now and I am dead tired. I will go to bed soon. This is probably the worse time to blog since I am not thinking terribly clearly. Yet I don't want another day to pass with adding something to my personal blog.

When I'm not in front of my computer, my mind races with ideas for my blog. But right now, I'm at a loss as to what to write -- save this self-referential drivel.

Just got the latest issue of The New York Review. Started reading Freeman Dyson's review of James Gleick's new book Isaac Newton. (Quite fitting to have a great physicist review a book about the greatest physicist of all time....) I'm also looking forward to reading Clifford Geertz's second part of his megareview of new books on Islam. Indeed, I might read it in bed tonight. I'll read the review and think about the new books -- though I am getting small hints that what I'm really after will not be found in the books. Not quite sure what I'm looking for though.

I hope that all of you out there are having a great time celebrating Father's Day -- as a father yourself or as someone who has a father. Since I sent my Dad a card a few days ago, it probably hasn't arrived in Toronto yet. It's not the usual type of card I send -- it's actually sillier and more sentimental than usual. But I hope he'll like it.

I'll give him a call in a few hours, wishing him a wonderful Father's Day, hoping that I'll be able to convey even a small part of how much I love him.

So far on raymondyee.net, I have some entries for my blog. Now it's time to think about how to fill out the site with more context. A good resource to help one think through how to do so is Patterns for Personal Web Sites.

The wonderful thing about being part of a great blogging community is that there is so much good material written by friends, eliciting many thoughts and reactions. The bad thing is there is so much to respond to, and I never quite have the energy to do so immediately.

I'm now getting around to thanking Chris for his reflections on his visit to the SF Asian Art Museum. Once I read Chris' observations, I immediately thought, "hey how can I totally miss out on how the building affected the viewing of the collection." We're in agreement that the collection at the SFAAM is fantastic. I've just been wrapped up with the individual objects. Chris has changed the way I now see the relationship among the objects; he articulated what I had not verbalized.

I too am very interested in what electronic media can do for presenting the materials of the SFAAM. A topic for posts to come, I hope.

On a Berkeley Saturday afternoon marked by weather that is the envy of friends who don't live in the Bay Area, I trotted over to my local branch of the Berkeley Public Library to pick up the latest book on hold for me: Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science The book first entered my consciousness when I encountered an essay in The New Yorker by Atul Gawande, the book's author. When my friend Grace then emailed me some of her thoughts about Complications, I threw the book on my Berkeley Public Library hold list (a la Netflix), looking forward to reading the popular book whenever it happened to come my way.
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Last night, eight of us went to see Nicholas Ray's King of Kings. As I have written previously, I would not have seen this film save for the fact that it was by a great film maker; I'm a Christian who is prejudiced against Bible films. I write and speak out of ignorance, however, since I have actually seen very few films drawing from Biblical stories (and specifically the life of Jesus). But that hasn't stopped me from writing them off as schlock.
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"But I love Bach."

"You don't love Bach -- you analyze Bach."