13 Jan 2013
Last Friday, I met Kevin Dewalt for lunch. Kevin is super helpful and has valuable advice from his many years working in and with startups. He encouraged me to set aside an hour or two each week to help other people as well.
09 Jan 2013
Hot pot is the perfect cure for Beijing’s cold winters. Judy and I had a great time with our friends Alex, Leesh, and Meichi last week.
08 Jan 2013
Last week, I rewrote this website so that it’s now based on Jekyll and hosted on Github Pages. The advantage of Github Pages hosting is that it’s free and more easily scalable than the server I had before.
26 Dec 2012
I was watching an interview scene in Mad Men last week - the interviewee, a new copywriter, was about to be kicked out, when he tried his last argument: “Look, you’ve got to give me this job, I’m down to my last penny!”
21 Oct 2012
I read Smart and Gets Things Done by Joel Spolsky a few weeks ago at the recommendation of a smart entrepreneur in Malaysia. Overall, I liked it, though I wasn’t surprised by most of its content.
12 Sep 2012
Judy and I were married at 2pm on September 1, 2012 in Madison, Ohio, at Debonne Vineyards.
17 Aug 2012
I woke up today at 5:11am on the night train from Dalian to Beijing. I’m here with 30 other people, all traveling around China, meeting entrepreneurs, startups, and businesses in Beijing and Shanghai. Last night, we were the last people asleep because we were smart enough to bring beer and snacks for the trip.
20 Jul 2012
Since I read Paul Graham’s essay The Acceleration of Addictiveness recently, I’ve already recommended it to three people in conversation. That’s a good number to indicate I should probably just recommend it to everyone.
16 Jul 2012
When I first moved to Beijing in 2010, there were no coworking locations, and I had to start my own email list to find places with friendly people to work from. Now, however, things have changed for the better. I work at Buro.Asia every day near the DaWangLu subway stop. It’s very professional, with big desks where I can put a big monitor, and not too many people.
15 Jul 2012
This year, I have set up a number of Wordpress sites with custom themes for friends and family. Like any good engineer, after the third one I realized that I needed to stop treating them as one-off projects and start having a single process for managing all of them.
12 Jul 2012
I didn’t intend to do two pictures of fish in a row, but Judy and I saw these fish in Chengdu last week, and I really liked the colors and patterns in the resulting photo.
07 Jul 2012
I’m using AngularJS for a few pages on HackerBeers.com, and it’s truly been awesome so far. In fact, I just finished modifying the create challenge page to use a completely different UI, and I didn’t have to make any significant changes to the supporting Javascript. That’s what I call abstracting the layout from the logic.
29 Jun 2012
I took my camera to LaiTai flower market with Judy a few weeks ago. Normally, pictures of fish in tanks don’t work out well because of reflections, etc.. This time, however, I was sure to take a lot of photos and with a little bit of cropping and a few adjustments in photoshop, I’m pretty happy with this one.
25 Jun 2012
Of course, this is old news by now. However, I finally finished the website for my wedding with Judy, so you can check it out!
05 Jun 2012
Over the last two weeks, I’ve been working on a new project with my friends Nicky, Konrad, and Amaca. HackerBeers.com!
28 May 2012
I spent a long time today struggling with a bug in my application. I was using django-timezone-field and whenever I tried to assign ‘UTC’ to the field and save it, I received an `IntegrityError: myapp_mymodel.timezone may not be NULL` exception.
26 May 2012
I recently found Blake Master’s writeup of Peter Thiel’s startup course at Stanford, and have been reading it on my cell phone every chance I get. Honestly, it’s like an incubator in a blog – really amazing content, and there’s a new one every week. Highly recommended.
18 May 2012
Yesterday, my Acheev.it cofounder Nicky forwarded me a question on Quora, “What makes a good engineering culture?”
16 May 2012
I forgot to take my camera out this weekend, so here’s another picture from our trip to Guilin a few weeks ago. This one was taken out of an open-air cart as we zoomed down the road after a raft ride. I took about 30 photos, which was enough to get just one good one between the trees, electrical wires, and people on scooters.
14 May 2012
I often want to know what directory one of my bash scripts is in so I can refer to other scripts with relative paths. When you execute a script on the command line, this is relatively straight-forward:
11 May 2012
This week I read a fascinating article from Dustin Curtis about a downside of vector-based graphics. Because the straight lines in them don’t necessarily match to a pixel border, they’re anti-aliased, just like the curves, which makes them look noticeably less clear.
09 May 2012
This tiny kitten belongs to Judy’s friend Li Hong and lives at her new teahouse. I’m still playing with my new 50mm lens and really love the narrow depth-of-field it enables.
08 May 2012
For Acheev.it, I’m currently building a Django application that integrates with GMail. We plan to distribute this via the Google Apps Marketplace so it will be very easy for organizations that are already using Google Apps to install.
03 May 2012
The locals refer to the morning fog in the mountains as 云海 (yùnhăi), which means “Cloud Ocean.” Judy and I visited Longshen on Saturday with our good friends Nick and Alice.
27 Apr 2012
Earlier this week, I received an email from Jason Calacannis. I always look forward to his emails because, regardless of whether I agree with him or not, he always has a strong, well-researched opinion about how current trends will impact life and entrepreneurship in the future.