It's not your fault.
I am Shawn Liu. I weigh about 145 pounds.
I co-founded Harvest.
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Shoes.
My frugal grandpa used to tell me not to skimp on good shoes. Bad shoes lead to tired feet which lead to not being able to get around and do things. He was an active man and took me out often. He always dressed up when we went out. He would put on his black leather shoes, which shone like his bald head.
While waiting for our burritos to be made the other day, me and a few co-workers stood around under the sun, outside of the Camper store on Prince Street and talked about shoes. Apparently some folks really know their feet and shoes. One person named a couple of muscles in Latin, talked about the incline of paved roads and sidewalks. I was hungry.
I don’t think there’s anything particularly strange about my feet. Then again, only two years ago did I find out that my one leg is longer than the other (which leg and how much longer? I don’t know). There might be something abnormal about my feet, but as of today, all I know is that my feet are on the wide side. Too wide for Converses and them pretty skinny shoes. What I’m wearing these days: a pair of gray Vans.
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I spent some hours padding my resume. It’s strange to see your life laid out cold on a page. There are all these tricks the resume people teach you to account for the gaps. I had a good amount of gaps. I figured instead of fudging them I should make the gaps a selling point. I’d tell interviewers to judge my employment history like a piece of music. It’s all about the space between the jobs.
Home Land, by Sam Lipsyte. -
We measure ourselves around revenue and profits and financial metrics that perform long after a spark is gone. You have this funny feedback mechanism in which you’re getting the results from something that happened a while ago. Maybe the thing that generates all the revenue was a great idea that happened in a dorm room. There’s a lot of stuff that’s gone on since then, but do you know whether you’ve had another spark?
Carl Bass of Autodesk (NYTimes) -
A quiet and sunny afternoon at Harvest HQ.
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…think like a penis enlargement spammer and you can talk about the London 2012 Olympics all you want.
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David Foster Wallace’s postcard to Don DeLillo.
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Pictures in Words
Life without an iPhone means life without Instagram, one of my favorite apps for sharing pictures. A few things I would’ve posted on Instagram in the past couple of days, imprinted in my mind and now shared with words:
- On Sunday, I found a ladybug on our kitchen floor. It was larger than usual, a red-orange, healthy thing. It came into our house from our farmers market shopping, I’m guessing. It felt like spring with a ladybug in the house. Later that evening I found a dead ladybug in the tub, while giving my boys a bath. I don’t think it was the same bug. I don’t think I would’ve taken a picture of the dead ladybug to share on Instagram.
- We had a film crew over at Harvest HQ today. There must’ve been more than four people taking pictures and filming us work. They’re sent in from Voxel, the awesome hosting company we’re with. They want to use Harvest as a customer story or case study of some sort. Bunch of friendly guys. I didn’t talke to them much. Danny, my more sociable and presentable partner, along with our marketing lead (Naama) and sys admin (Warwick) took care of all the interviews.
- After lunch, two of the film crew guys were recording Lettini playing guitar on the couch. He had a look of complete content over his face. It’s going to look staged in the final video, but this is totally real. Almost everyday after lunch, we’re treated to some good music by Lettini.
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Optimum Health, Week 1
I’m reading Andrew Weil’s Eight Weeks to Optimum Health. Some notes from the first week’s “program”:
- Use only olive oil. Oil oxidizes with heat. and it releases toxic compounds when heated (that’s why fry food’s no good).
- Avoid solid oil such as margarine, vegetable shortenings, and anything made of them (such as cookies). Dispose of anything with partially hydrogenated oils or trans fat (banned in New York City).
- Weil loves broccoli and wants you to eat it. Broccoli has a lot of good nutrients as well as some anti-cancer properties: sulforaphane. Apparently broccoli is also one of the vegetables with the lowest pesticide residue (unlike bell peppers or spinach).
- Eat salmon (wild varieties only), sardines or herring. If you can’t have fish, eat flaxseeds. Why: Omega-3, which is good for your heart and brain. Fish is a good source of protein, but overfishing is affecting our ecosystem. I’ll be consulting Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch guides for what to eat.
- He recommends that you take supplements. This part sounds contrarian to what he preaches elsewhere in the chapter, which is to eat naturally. Instead of taking Vitamin C supplement, why not advise us to eat an orange? In the appendix of the book, Weil directs his readers to his website for his branded multivitamins. That came off sketchy for me.
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Doug said on Co-op, “@danny I have a sort of urgent H4M issue I need your help with. Been trying to reproduce this with @lettini and need someone else to verify. Sending you the build now…” Then Danny went on to investigate and found this.
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Hack Week
It’s Hack Week at Harvest. I’m having a lot of fun hacking JavaScript, for the first time in my life.
The first programming language I learned was Scheme (http://plt-scheme.org/), in a class called CS212 at Cornell, where you can graduate with a CS degree without being fluent in any particular language (I’m a proof of it). I took one semester learning Java, thinking that I need a real language under my belt for the Real World. I hated it. That’s when I knew I was not fit to be a programmer, and decided that I should switch course to get a degree in literature. Turned out that while I have plenty of love for the English language, I have no talent for it. So I took a couple more CS courses, got a graduation receipt, and fled Ithaca.
After school, I’ve spent more of my time with Photoshop and Illustrator than with Emacs or TextMate. For the past few years, when I opened a text editor, I was mostly hacking on views – the markup and stylesheets. I’ve stayed away from JavaScript, until this week. And things have come far in the past ten years, with Prototype, jQuery, node.js and CoffeeScript. I’m particularly excited about CoffeeScript, which makes JS cleaner and easier to read and write.
I can’t wait till Friday to see all the good stuff that comes out of our very first Hack Week.
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