I have been incredibly fortunate to have developed some cool and valuable side projects. Most notably, Spawning Tool went from an all-nighter hack to a much beloved and very significant resource in the StarCraft 2 community. However, most side projects don’t work out that way, and I too have a litany of failures. I usually […]
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COVID-19 Lingo
To start, I am no expert on the COVID-19 pandemic and can’t offer recommended behavior or predictions on any aspect of it. I know roughly as much as anyone else reading on the internet and talking to friends about it. And that’s all the time because this pandemic is a big, global deal that has […]
Fish and Chips in London. Croissants in Paris. Pizza in Rome. Sausages in Bavaria. Gelato in Florence. On our trip across Europe, we gathered plenty of food recommendations to truly experience the different cuisines. Some we missed. Some were as expected. Some were duds. Some were great. However, we did have a couple surprise hits […]
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Working from an iPad (updated)
Last year, I wrote a blog post about trying to work using only an iPad. During our recent travels, I had a chance to try out the setup again, but with new hardware. My previous trip was with a first generation iPad Air (2013) whereas I’m now using a third generation iPad Pro (2018). It […]
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Life in Berlin
So far, I have lived in three places: Toronto, Houston, and the San Francisco Bay Area. Specifically, I have lived in the suburbs of Toronto, the suburbs of Houston, and the suburbs of the Bay Area. That’s why we spent five weeks living and working remotely in (unprefixed) urban Berlin.
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Butchering French in Paris
Over three years of high school French class, I spent a lot of time learning conjugations and tenses. I memorized how to combine aller (to go) with I, you (informal), and so forth. I memorized the same for the past tense and so forth. And I forgot a lot of it, and by the time […]
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The Jigsaw Puzzle
One fun part about renting a vacation home for a weekend is discovering the amenities. What’s left in the spice cabinet? How many channels do they have on cable? What’s the wifi password? Many are also stocked with games. Sometimes they have a ping pong or pool tables. Usually they have board games (though only […]
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Munich, Vienna, and Prague
After Julie and I finished traveling through the big cities in Italy, we met up with my mom and sister in Central Europe. I covered my big thoughts on Italy in my last blog post on Venice, but for completeness, I’ll provide two paragraphs on Rome and Venice, too. Rome is big and full of […]
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Traveling Through Flooding Venice
A week before our scheduled visit, we heard that Venice had record flooding up to six feet deep. Three days before, we called our hotel, and they reassured us that the water had receded, and our accommodations and sightseeing would be just fine. Skeptical of their motives, I asked locals in Florence, and they also […]
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Seeing the Future in London
Since I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, one might presume that I have seen what the future looks like. With so many startups, venture capital, tech company headquarters, shouldn’t we be living like the Jetsons? I sometimes fool myself into thinking that this is truly the best that technology and society can provide.