I have written much about my relationship with video games. Over the past few years, I have found a few stand-outs such Bioshock Infinite, Braid, and the Mass Effect series. However, I have found it more and more difficult to just sit down and play a video game by myself. I tried to diagnose why. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]