It's not your fault.

"We measure ourselves around revenue and profits and financial metrics that perform long after a..."

Sat, 26 May 2012 16:32:39 -0400

“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.

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 15:06:25 -0400

A quiet and sunny afternoon at Harvest HQ.

"…think like a penis enlargement spammer and you can talk about the London 2012 Olympics all..."

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 12:07:17 -0400

“…think like a penis enlargement spammer and you can talk about the London 2012 Olympics all you want.”

- Getting around the London 2012 branding police | John Graham-Cumming

David Foster Wallace’s postcard to Don DeLillo.

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 16:10:21 -0400

David Foster Wallace’s postcard to Don DeLillo.

Pictures in Words

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 20:53:33 -0400

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.

Optimum Health, Week 1

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 21:54:57 -0400

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.

Doug said on Co-op, “@danny I have a sort of urgent H4M...

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 14:38:58 -0400

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.

Hack Week

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 21:04:00 -0400

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.

harvest: Flow chart for our super intern, Joschka.

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 15:05:11 -0500

harvest:

Flow chart for our super intern, Joschka.

"They’re not fanboys. They’re not brainwashed by “marketing”. Your competitors’ customers aren’t..."

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 19:44:00 -0500

“

They’re not fanboys. They’re not brainwashed by “marketing”. Your competitors’ customers aren’t passing on your product because they’re stupid or irrational.

They’re choosing your competitors for good reasons, and denying the existence of such good reasons will only ensure that your product never overcomes them.

”

- Marco Arment on competition. How can you not love Instapaper?

David Foster Wallace's Word Lists

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 22:58:55 -0500

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

Driving, in Bay Area

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 00:41:34 -0500

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.

Traveling, Soon

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 21:54:08 -0500

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.

3 > 34

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 22:09:18 -0500

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.

"Knowing about a tool is one thing. Having the guts to use it in a way that brings art to the world..."

Sat, 10 Dec 2011 17:49:00 -0500

“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

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 09:23:00 -0500

Oink vs Stamped: Two Approaches to Free Trial:

Two interesting and well-designed first time user experience.

Last night I grew a mustache for our holiday party.

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 15:51:24 -0500

Last night I grew a mustache for our holiday party.

(Let Me) Give You The Money

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 15:10:57 -0500

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.

Whining About Donations

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 21:49:52 -0500

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

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 19:19:02 -0500

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.