It's not your fault.
I am Shawn Liu. I weigh about 145 pounds.
I co-founded Harvest. I update this blog sometimes.
@mrshawnliu
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David Foster Wallace's Word Lists
“The late-David Foster Wallace was incredibly fond of collecting words he found to be noteworthy, either by scribbling on the pages of the books he was currently reading, circling specific words in his personal dictionary, or compiling standalone vocabulary lists.” – List of Notes
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Driving, in Bay Area
We come here twice a year, and each time my body breaks down, somewhere between the third and forth day, from all the driving. Everything is just so far apart. Getting a bottle of organic milk back in Brooklyn is a matter of a few blocks. Here, we get in a car and drive for half an hour to the nearest Whole Foods. My shoulder and upper back are sore and stiff.
We drive around and sometimes fantasize about moving back here, into a spacious house with a backyard. I don’t think I can ever get into driving.
We were coming back from lunch with cousins yesterday in San Carlos. I decided to skip the major roads and just drive around the smaller ones. We ended up on Route 84 and then Route 35 – a winding, distractingly scenic route through the mountains. My life here in the Bay Area has been spent in the valley, and never in the surrounding mountains. I thought I was in a different country.
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Traveling, Soon
We try to visit our family in San Jose, CA twice a year. We used to stay with my grandma or aunt, but a year ago we decided to get a hotel room for the three of us. My son isn’t a great sleeper, and whoever we stay with is going to get waken up at night. There’s also the practical matter of where he should sleep. He can’t sleep in the same bed – he’d kick and scratch us. He can’t sleep in a separate room in a foreign house.
We also wanted some freedom from the family. So hotel it is.
Living in a hotel made the trips very different. It used to be a family thing, and we’d spend time with them from morning to night. Living away from them has made the trip feel more like a vacation. That’s kind of nice, considering that I take very little vacation during the year.
I’m looking forward to seeing my family. I also look forward to spending a lot of time with my wife and kid, seeing the sky, having donuts, and enjoying the good California produce.
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3 > 34
My son will turn three in about a week. I will turn 34 in 4 months. Most of the time I find myself behaving no more mature than he is capable of. There are things I’m clearly more advanced than he is: I can tie my own shoes, not shit in my pants, and reach things above 4 feet without a chair. I also have much better tastes in music and movies.
My emotional maturity is closer to his than I’d like it to be. I still get upset easily at little things around me, and I find myself just as impatient as he is. He paints better than me, and he has become more adept with a bicycle in the past month than I have ever, in my life. He also beats me at face-wrestling whenever he challenges me. In no time, I expect this kid to be writing, and it won’t be hard to write better than his dad. Goddamn it.
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Knowing about a tool is one thing. Having the guts to use it in a way that brings art to the world is another. Perhaps we need to spend less time learning new tools and more time using them.
Seth Godin, Tools vs Insight -
Oink vs Stamped: Two Approaches to Free Trial
Two interesting and well-designed first time user experience.
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Last night I grew a mustache for our holiday party.
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(Let Me) Give You The Money
The Brooklyn Comics Festival took place this past Saturday in Williamsburg. I was there, had fun, and bought a few nice prints and a couple of books.
My major purchase was an original sketch by Seth, one of my favorite comic artists. I had trouble paying the seller. I didn’t have that much cash, but he took PayPal. So I fired up the PayPal iPhone app, tried paying him several times, and all the transactions failed. He ended up calling his wife, who sat in front of a PayPal virtual terminal and I had to gave her my card info over the phone.
Where were Square or Dwolla when you needed them? Having experienced the newer, much simpler way of dealing with money transfer, it felt as if I’ve travelled through time where people are still stuck in a hell hole of eBay and PayPal. Or maybe I’m just delusional – let’s revisit this topic in two years.
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Whining About Donations
I’d like an app that lets me manage my donations:
- Show me what I’ve donated so far this year, and how it compares to my goal.
- Show me a breakdown of who I’ve donated to, and how much.
- It’d be neat if it shows me where my friends are donating to, and how much people around me are donating (thus encouraging me to give more).
Why? Because I want to donate, but I forget to. I either forget to write the checks, or I forget whom I’ve given to.
I would also like this app to let me donate easily. I want to put in my payment information, choose the organizations, and the app will automatically pay them monthly, quarterly or yearly.
Today I have to write a paper check and physically mail the donation. Or I have to go to each organization’s site and put in my credit card info. I’m donating monthly for 3 organizations, and the last time my card expired, I had to update my card with each place – I even had to call one of the organizations. It should not be this hard to give money away. -
Sad Faces
I love food, and I like to dine out occasionally. When I find a good restaurant, I try to go back often and support their business. And it saddens me when I have to break up with a restaurant: either because my taste changes, or the restaurant loses its luster in food or service.
Sometimes my taste takes me to a different direction from where the restaurant wants to go (or where it’s staying). Fine, I can live with that. What I cannot stand is when a restaurant starts to get sloppy. The menu changes, the food isn’t prepared as attentively as it used to be, or the cleanliness just isn’t kept up (gross!).
The thing is, I noticed each time when things started to go downhill, and I wish I could’ve spoken to someone – I genuinely wanted to offer feedback so they could’ve gotten back on track. But I got the feeling that the wait staff didn’t really give a crap. Whatever happened to those little anonymous feedback cards? I would’ve gladly filled them out, with sad faces and all.
For the record: I just had a terrible experience at Franny’s (my favoritest restaurant in the whole wide world). The host lady is new and made us wait for 15 minutes even though the place was half empty (her answer: “we’re trying to pace it”, even though we have been there every week and never had to wait if there’s an empty table). The food was uninspiring: pasta was flat, the salad leafs were not fresh, and the moz was lumpy in some places and competely missing in other areas. I hope this is not the start of a sad decline.
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