It's not your fault.

David Foster Wallace's Word Lists

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

“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.

“Frodo Is Great… Who Is That?!??”, a...

Sat, 26 Nov 2011 22:00:23 -0500

“Frodo Is Great… Who Is That?!??”, a documentary by Hannah Clarke.

On Food

Sat, 26 Nov 2011 21:47:00 -0500

About six years ago, I went through a period of constant fatigue. It came over gradually, and I noticed it because I was feeling tired everyday and nothing helped. I was worried and a bit scared. I went to the doctor’s but there was nothing wrong with my blood test.

I was living in Hoboken at the time. Iridesco, the design studio Danny and I started, was in its third year and we were getting by. We worked long hours and ate out a lot. I consumed a lot of cheap pasta, pizza, fried rice and Indian food.

A friend of mine heard about my diet, and suggested that I tried cooking and eating more home-cooked meals. She explained to me that restaurants often use cheaper ingredients and bad oil, and our body needs to work extra hard to process all that junk.

So I started cooking again. I heard about the farmers’ market in Union Square. I bought a loaf of peasant bread for the first time in my life (from Bread Alone) and was amazed by the taste (and still am every weekend when I have their bread fresh). I started to watch what I eat. And gradually I got better and felt fine again.

After getting back to cooking, I became interested in the ingredients. I started to notice the difference between produce from the farmer’s market and those from the supermarket. These days, I favor organic and local food not just for moral and health reasons, but mainly because they taste (a whole lot) better. My wife and I enjoy trying out the different varieties the market offers (who knew there are so many kinds of potatoes!). There’s also something about just going along with whatever the season offers, even though it gets kind of sad and boring during the winter.

nbaoffseason: Yes, please.

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 23:14:01 -0500

nbaoffseason:

Yes, please.

My wife recently commented on how slow our iMac is, and I said to her, “What do you expect?...

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 23:11:42 -0500

My wife recently commented on how slow our iMac is, and I said to her, “What do you expect? It’s an old machine.”

Old? This computer has been with us for not even three years, and we barely use it. But it’s been crawling like a snail, as if all that web surfing and emailing have worn down the hardware. I hear the Intel Core Duo making creaking noises.

Maybe it’s the recent Lion upgrade. Are we still at that stage where every major OS upgrade means a leap in system requirements? How about instead of new features, make the OS more efficient so that it can run faster on older machines?

Or maybe my iMac is running just fine, but my sense of speed has warped by using a newer and faster Mac at work.

The Disneyland Memorial Orgy (1967) originally published in...

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 20:05:23 -0500

The Disneyland Memorial Orgy (1967) originally published in satirical magazine, The Realist. By Paul Krassner and illustrated by Wally Wood.

Classic.

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 23:17:48 -0400

Classic.

cloois: Richard Feynman - the key to science Wow… A...

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 08:43:08 -0400

cloois:

Richard Feynman - the key to science

Wow… A video of Feynman. Well edited - must be staged?

"Google is working on self-driving cars, and they seem to work. People are so bad at driving cars..."

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 09:17:21 -0400

“Google is working on self-driving cars, and they seem to work. People are so bad at driving cars that computers don’t have to be that good to be much better. Any time you stand in line at the D.M.V. and look around, you’re like, Oh, my God, I wish all these people were replaced by computer drivers. Ten to 20 years out, driving your car will be viewed as equivalently immoral as smoking cigarettes around other people is today.”

- Marc Andreessen - NYTimes.com

"There certainly isn’t a shortage of offers. You wouldn’t believe how many watch..."

Sat, 09 Jul 2011 18:18:49 -0400

“There certainly isn’t a shortage of offers. You wouldn’t believe how many watch manufacturers have sent me their models. Just like that. I give them all away. I am satisfied with what I have. How crazy do you have to be when you can afford everything but still clutter up your life with all sorts of advertising appointments? No thanks.”

- Dirk Nowitzki, in a SPIEGEL interview. It’s hard not to like him, yes?

"Dear Sir, I am Mr. Prince Hamlet, rightful heir to the throne of Denmark. I have an important..."

Sat, 09 Jul 2011 18:10:53 -0400

“

Dear Sir, I am Mr. Prince Hamlet, rightful heir to the throne of Denmark. I have an important business proposition for you.

My trouble is hard, as you may know from the international media. My father, King Hamlet, was killed via ear poison. His brother Claudius did the ear poisoning and now he has seduced and married my mom, the Queen. I know this to be true because my father’s ghost told me. I tried to revenge my father, but Claudius prayed so I couldn’t. Later I stabbed the wrong man. Now I need your help.

”

- McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Sweet Opportunity in the State of Denmark!