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.
[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.
[Read More]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.
[Read More]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”.
[Read More]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”.
[Read More]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.
[Read More]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.
[Read More]