Bigger on the Inside

A few years ago, I attended an out-of-state wedding. I stayed with the bride-to-be and the groom-to-be. Not knowing the groom, I engaged in what I thought was an exploratory discussion into the groom-to-be’s life. I asked questions and let him talk about himself. Standard stuff you find in books on how to make friends.

I too have a problem. In real life (as well as online I suppose) I’ve built a reputation of being a stickler for accurate details — often to the point of pedantry I am told — there were quite a few things that he had mentioned that wasn’t quite right (as a lot of the things discussed had already been updated in the latest journals). A personality flaw of mine no doubt, was to point out that there was already updated knowledge about it.

I was later informed that the couple hadn’t been very happy with my visit. I was also told by my fiancee that I would constantly use the phrase “you mean you didn’t know?”. This phrase had become so ingrained to my speech that I hadn’t realized I had said it many times.

The problem with “you mean you didn’t know?” is that it sounds really condescending, even though I was genuinely surprised that someone didn’t know. Of course it could be meant to say that the other party is ill-informed, but it often was an expression of surprise, not one of condescension. Or so I thought anyway.

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I have a confession to make. It had been slightly more than a month since I last committed any code to Fork the Cookbook. In fact, the whole team hadn’t contributed to Fork the Cookbook in about a month. Only the scant updates here and there. If you were to have a peek into what we were doing, you would think it was abandonware. Only that it wasn’t. For two weeks now, I have been actively writing code for Fork the Cookbook again. [Read More]

Short one today. In a previous post, I mentioned a simpler metric can be used to gauge civil liberties. A few days ago I found the Harper’s Index for April 2013. Here’s what I like about some of the things tracked: Percentage of the U.S. population that is foreign-born : 13 Percentage that was foreign-born in 1913 : 15 Change in the number of undocumented immigrants living in the United States since 2007 : –900,000 [Read More]

This morning this video caught my attention:

It is a heart wrenching tale of a man so passionate about his ideas and gave up so much. Yet despite all his convictions and effort, he pretty much failed.

I posted this video not to point and laugh at Marc, nor do I intend to elicit pity for him. Rather, I’m sharing this video because it serves as a cautionary tale for the intrepid entrepreneur.

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There are many changes afoot Pressyo, my startup. This afternoon we were discussing business models, in particular, a deep discussion of the ad-supported business model. It is by coincidence that I work in online advertising as well, so here I will share some insights to the ad-supported business models. I will discuss other business models in future posts* If you’re a long time reader of this blog (one of the two who are not my parents), you may note a change in writing styles. I am writing this on my own free will. I swear Larry Page is not standing behind me with a gun pointed at my head.

Say you want to start a startup. Your investor asks you: what’s your business model? And you answer: oh it’s simple – advertising. You see your investor’s face go from 🙂 to :(. You wonder what’s up.

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I had an interesting discussion with a bunch of people earlier today. Don’t really remember their names now. But we had an interesting discussion over beer any how. We started talking about the typical dalliances of running a startup, but as any hacker will tell you, such discussion inevitably end up being a wankfest over what languages are the best * It’s clearly Haskell /sarcasm .

The discussion eventually went there. And one of the people in the group talked about how he had switched stacks from a Python stack into a node.js stack and is now considering moving back into the Python or Go stack. When asked why, the response was simply “Javascript sucks”.

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I use a lot of image-macro-like emoticons in my group chatroom in Hipchat. In particular, I tend to use rage faces a lot in my chat. These internet memes have spread way past 4chan and reddit into the pedantry of 9gag and your mum, and upon introspection I found it quite interesting I use rage face memes a lot in my chat. I’ve never really bothered with the memes on the internet. I’ve been around since the days of the dancing baby * yes I will admit that I am guilty of having gif images of dancing babies in my early websites... that and hamster dance gifs , and I’m not really interested in chasing more memes - I am aware of most of them, but I don’t use them. My rather excessive use of rage faces in my chats, however, presents a totally different reality.

I joked about this a few days ago on Facebook - that I use internet memes so much in my daily communication that I might as well go around shouting “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra”.

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I had just came back from a mini Chinese New Year getaway and the missus is still away. Coming home to an empty house, I had the free reign to do whatever I like. Having been previously feeling rather in the dumps, I decided to pick myself up - do something for myself a bit more.

So I took time off working on my multiple startups. I cooked, played some games and did some thinking.

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Today has been a generally dark day for me. Today, for the first time in almost 6 years, I lost faith in humanity completely. This sounds terribly pompous of me, but this is my blog and I can say whatever the fuck I want, although these sorts of posts are usually kept private and later deleted. Today will be different. Today my rant will be public.

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So we were just having a chat about programming languages. I was telling my friends, coming from C/C++/Python, how wrong javascript felt, despite having worked on node.js before. PHP felt the same.. something is just… off about those languages. So we decided to compare programming languages to driving cars. Here’s how we compared them (these are the languages we know and have written in them): Programming Language Feels like... C driving a old powerful manual sports car C++ driving a newer model of a powerful sports car. [Read More]