Monthly Archives: March 2007

All-Nighters Suck

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And also, the night after sucks even more… because you feel like you still have much more work left to do for that day… but you know for a fact you’ll be more productive if you sleep it off at start fresh the next morning.

What ends up happening when I pull all-nighters is that either I crash and burn, or I either crawl and make it through the 48 hour mark. However, when I do crawl through that 48 hour mark, it’s usually a caffeine-induced insanity.

I really need to stop doing this. It’s not too healthy. And I’m sure the 2 liters of Dew I keep on forcing myself to drink isn’t all too great for the workout regimen either.

Time for some fruit. Yummy strawberries.

I’m currently trying to balance work and “play”, meaning blogging and learning more Ruby. I promise to have some good content tomorrow. Worthy of the 22 feeds subscriptions that somehow magically appeared yesterday night.

Lessons From Yet Another Reformat

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As I’ve discussed earlier, I love reformatting my computer… At face value, it might seem like a waste of time, but in the end, lots of lessons are learned. That, and, you get faster every single time… and you get a squeaky clean computer.

Let me just go through where my data lives, and how it made my life so much easier to get back on track after my reformat.

  • Email

    • Gmail: I think I’m going to start using Gmail as my sole email application. It seems like for some reason, this time around, SMTP doesn’t want to work in Mail.app. Also, since I’ve already gone Google for RSS feeds as well as my budgeting/documenting/spreadsheet-ing, might as well commit to… er… submit to the Google overlords.
    • I have to go and somehow find a way to match the folder structure I have on my desktop to Gmail’s labeling structure.
    • Is there a way to move all your mail from one service provider to another? Is Yahoo really going to provide unlimited storage? This really isn’t a selling point, though, since I don’t think I’m even hitting 10% of my storage space yet.
      • But, of course, through the wonders of gDisk, I’ve begun backing up my most important documents, like blog post rough drafts and such.

  • Contact Information

    • Plaxo: I love it. It’s free for us normal users… plus, there’s a little bit of the social magic built into the app: you can send “eCards” to people with their information and such.
    • I don’t use Plaxo much, but I do use the synchronization tool with Address Book, and you know how I love to think that syncing is going to be one of the many killer web apps.

  • Calendar

    • This is next… to go with Google Calendar? How about Plaxo? How about something completely new?

  • Bookmarks

    • What? Delicious? The only thing I needed to reinstall to get back into bookmarking was the bookmarking extension for Firefox and Safari.
    • I’m satisfied with delicious to even think about moving to ma.gnolia.

  • Feeds

    • Google Reader: I love it. I think I might start integrating the “Starred Items” on the blog like Alex Argo has done.

After all… they’re all bits and bytes. It’s the application that brings that information to life. With web apps, though, you get a handy method of not having to deal with keeping track of your own data: the system does it for you.

Actually, more like… the system administrators of the web applications are doing that management of data for you.

Hey, it’s less work for me! But… alas, advertising revenue for them…

Why… Hello there, Sun!

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Blast it. It’s another all nighter. And for what?

After a rousing exercise routine (backs and shoulders), I decided to go home.

I was nearing ISR, then suddenly… I decided to poke around a bit. A “little” bit turned into “quite” a bit.

I felt like I haven’t seen these guys in weeks. Two weeks, actually, since last week was Spring Break for them, as well as the week before… well… I was busy.

The first thing I run into… what the heck… it’s a group of people trying to imitate Bae Seul Gi’s Bokko Dance. Quite random. Then I visited the Knox/Das/Liao palace in Wardall. Then stopped by the business major’s studying in Wardall lounge.

Oh, the funny thing is how two random strangers pointed out that my earbuds were Sennheiser CX-300′s. I guess it pays to be… particular about your earbuds. Indeed, I’m loving these.

Then… I ended up debugging Brian Chung’s MP for a few minutes. Man, I missed the good ol’ days when I had to get down and dirty with C in ECE 199 (now called ECE 190). I’m not lying: I actually do. It’s kinda funny, but it seems as though you think you’re not going to miss it ever… and you end up missing it quite a bit.

But all my garbage electrical engineering classes? Yes. I will always not miss them. Ever.

It seems like the ECE/CS course load at UIUC is getting weirder. I don’t know if I should say harder or easier, but I think it’s becoming more relevant. Looking at the CS coursework: I feel like I want to go back for a BA in CS… all the classes look so fun!

And… indeed… it is 4:30 AM.

I have yet to write a good entry… this is getting quite annoying…

Headaches… and Randomness…

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Things aren’t going so well with one of my projects… I’ve completely ran into a wall, trying to learn a technology I have not know about before.

Other than that, this crazy weather is kicking me in the head. I’m intermittently bothered by coughs and headaches.

I’m tossing around the idea of shaving my head. Maybe a nice April Fool’s joke that’ll last for three months.

I’m slowly realizing how pointless these daily personal updates are. Hopefully, tonight, I’ll have something worthy of your eyes.

WIMPE. It has returned. I will no longer go during the day, but at the end of my day… I like staying until close, since that forces me to be done with exercising by a certain time, no matter what. I’ve had too many cases when my workouts have gone past the 2 hour mark… and that’s just not what I want. At least for the next month, I will go daily.

Siebel. I’m going to visit daily, as well, before I go off to WIMPE. Just a lovely place to get work done, as well as see my good ol’ friend, Derek.

Diet. Oh, that’s an interesting post I could make… people have been asking me what I eat, and since I took pictures as I was grocery shopping, I’ll be able to share that information happily.

Relient K and Shutdown Day? More like… Shutdown 1.5 Days

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Chicago. Ah.

Inadvertantly, I kinda celebrated Shutdown Day a half day early. Supposedly, today was supposed to be a day without using the computer, at all.

For me, this happened because I was without Internet. You see, without Internet, my computer ceases to be a computer in a lot of ways. I can’t check my email, talk online, check my feeds… I need my data!

I finally drove over to Panera near Woodfield for some lovely wireless bits.

Now I probably have like 300 stories I have to wade through (Google Reader, why don’t you tell me the exact number and NOT “100+”… what, is it that CPU intensive to give me the right number?) I have about 10 emails I have to reply to (lengthy… ahhhh!). Posts upon posts to write…

Here are some post ideas I have right now, sitting at Panera.

Mae at House of Blues

  • Relient K Concert (with Sherwood and Mae) at House of Blues
    • The Actual Event: Whoo hoo! First non-classical concert ever!
    • RIAA and Music: I thought this topic through while they were playing their new songs, the ones that I didn’t know.
    • City of Chicago: How INSANE it is to drive in the city
    • 14 Year Old Girls: DAH. “Sadie Hawkins Dance! Mood Rings!” still rings in my ear…
      • I always thought Relient K was more geared towards college kids… huh.
  • Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston
    • How incredibly awesome it is
    • How amazingly the author Jessica Livingston could have easily been Josh Kim
      • She writes… the Intro. The rest of the book is basically her asking questions at the founders of each respective company covered in the book. I could have asked those questions, and typed out 450 pages. Heck, I’d probably type that sucker faster…
      • Meh, maybe she asked the right questions… we’ll see as I keep on reading
    • How much I want to write a review PER CHAPTER
  • Consulting
    • How I keep mistyping “consulting” as “consluting”… ew…
    • Things I’ve learned with the clients I’ve had in the past
    • How I want to grow it: How to create an effective portfolio
  • Blog
    • Categorizing vs Tagging: I think I’m getting it…
    • Redesign process: How to effectively design a WordPress Theme

Yeah, insanity.

I have a feeling, April is going to be insane.

Are you guys wondering “I mean… dang, Josh Kim… how much more insane can it get”?

You’ll see.

Lesson of the Day: Just DO IT.

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Not trying to sell shoes or anything, but seriously… if you’re in doubt, if you’re in pain, if you’re depressed, if you’re not wanting to, if you’re lazy, if you’re bored, if you’re sick and tired, if you’re actually “sick” sick, if you’re unable to…

Just do it. You’ll feel better. I know I’m feeling better.

My motivational speech to myself for the day. Huzzah.

And man… there goes the feed subscribers because of my mistake…

New Goals: Pre-Month in Review

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Before the month’s over… and I have to do yet another one of those crazy Month in Review’s… I think I need to take this time to refocus a bit.

Lent Commitments… Uh oh…

Originally, it was:

Initially, for Lent, I had given up things like YouTube, TV shows, and movies. Then I started to play Quake… ONE. Oh man, how much fun. I think I must have sunk a good chunk of time into it. Well… I’m going to say this here: All forms of electronic entertainment is forbidden until Easter.

This includes: ANYTHING Flash, ANY passive media… It’s quite hard, seeing how almost EVERYWHERE I go, there’s a TV on or a browser open to YouTube. Time to strategize how to avoid those situations…

Bible reading is going well. Kinda getting behind (I think… I’m not sure…), because I’m really trying to learn Philippians before Easter… but that’s only an excuse. By the end of this month, I want to be fully caught up. I need to do some math in terms of how many chapters I, then, have to read to catch up. We’ll see, at the end of the month.

Let’s just say I’ve broken… a few of them. I probably pulled a JK^extreme again and went overboard on making up incredibly difficult and unnecessary commitments. For example, I picked up playing StarCraft again. It’s fun. It’s not nearly as addicting as before (I’ve matured, hooray!), and so I’ve been playing to get my mind off of things… I didn’t really feel guilty about playing it, but after thinking about a little bit, I feel bad that I didn’t feel guilty enough to not start it up.

So what do I do… Do I go into insane failure layer mode, give up everything and just forget about Lent? Well, I have to question my motives in even setting up these incredibly insane goals for myself.

I don’t want to give up something that I don’t do normally anyway. So something like watching TV… I don’t do it that much to begin with. I might do it occasionally, but giving that up to…

You know what? From the time I joined Covenant Fellowship Church until now, I’ve never been a fan of Lent. I’m still very much unsure of why we even do this thing. While going through the Internet, I ran into this interesting page: The True Meaning of Lent. While it is from a different denomination than mine (PCA), it definitely brings up many great points.

So before this turns into a post that I should create a new category “Religion” for, I’m going to end this here with this:

I’m going to get rid of all the things I’ve abstained from. This doesn’t mean that I’m going to go start getting addicted to gaming or movies or whatever, but that I won’t be feeling guilty whenever I break the “promise”, or at least, the illusion of it that I’ve created for myself.

However, the things that I’ve decided to add to my list of “things to do”, I’m going to keep. Reading the Word as well as memorizing Philippians has been incredibly helpful for me (even though… I’ve fallen behind quite a bit). I’m not doing these things merely because they’re on the list, but because I genuinely believe that they are helping me in my walk with God.

As soon as I focus on doing the positives, these unnecessary things will fall by the wayside anyway. I just need to make sure I follow through with the things I know will help me grow.

And seriously, Josh Kim, it’s your pride for setting up these insane goals. You wanted to feel all high and mighty if you kept them, right? You idiot…

I love setting up myself for failure. Yummy.

Summary: Read Bible. Memorize Philippians. Keep fighting. Don’t waste time.

Books

Definitely want to finish up Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age… I think I might do my first ever book review on this blog on this book. Heck, it’s the first non-programming book I’ll be finishing up in years.

The book Textmate: Power Editing for the Mac (Pragmatic Programmers) doesn’t seem that useful… at least… $20 useful. This book definitely adds to the online documentation at macromates, but I feel as if the pdf version of this book should have been included with the crazy price of TextMate. Definitely want to take my time with this book, though… seeing how I use this app hourly.

Agile Web Development with Rails (Pragmatic Programmers): What is wrong with the manufacturer of this book? The text is printed on a slant. It’s readable, but it bugs the crap out of me. And also, THIS?

Binding Issue

It’s not just this book, but it’s also the case with the TextMate book (it’s not as noticeable because that book is thinner and the pages are thicker). I hope it’s just this batch of books of the Pragmatic Programmers series. I asked for a return on this one… so I won’t be able to dip into the Ruby on Rails just yet. Besides, I want to learn more Ruby before I go deeper. Should I just go and buy Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide, Second Edition?

Waiting for Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days to come in the mail. I know for a fact I will love this book.

Summary: Read Hackers & Painters by end of the month. Textmate, take your time. Founder’s by the end of next month.

Consulting/Freelancing/Blogging/Entrepreneurship…ing

I felt like all these things go hand in hand. This is basically my life, or at least, it should be.

I like my “job”. I like having a steady income from a part-time job with College of Education at University of Illinois: Urbana-Champaign. I like having clients to work for. I like setting my own hours (as you can see with the insane timestamp of this post). I like working wherever I want… from my apartment to the library…

I like my blog. I love being able to write about whatever’s on my mind on whatever subject I please. I love being able to strategize about how to best present the content, the information… how to monetize… ahem

I love thinking about the company I’ll be starting soon. I love doing market research. I love being my own marketing department, almost tearing my hair out trying to come up with a cool company/service names. I love imagining all the services I could provide through the company. I love thinking about the tax benefits of incorporating from one state compared to another.

The only problem I see right now… is the lack of health insurance. I don’t bring in enough to have a personal plan for myself, nor do I have health issues to begin with… it’s just something that bothers me from time to time.

But in terms of things to get done before the end of the month:

  • College of Education
    • Get Active Directory working in ColdFusion
    • Templates for moodle working
    • Fix moodle bugs, submit to moodle CVS repository
  • Freelancing
    • Finish up drupal customization
    • Finish up portfolio
    • Actively seek out clients
  • Blog
    • New template, new categories, new… old posts… blah blah blah

Summary: Get work done. Finish redesign on paper by end of the month. Finalize what is to be done with hanmeta.

I Can’t Sleep

I’m currently sick. And yet, I don’t really feel like going to sleep.

I really hope I don’t start writing another post tonight…

Couple More Things About Google Reader

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A few more things about Google Reader.

Shortcut Keys: Space and Shift+Space

I think the best way to use Google reader is to use space and shift+space to go through stories.

I thought that the space button went through one post each at the time, but I found out that it either does one post at a time OR if the post is longer than a screen’s height, then the behavior of the space key changes to a “page down”. It’s ingenious. I can go through all my feeds with one hand… kinda… which leads me to my next point.

Need a Shortcut Key for: Opening up Links

Currently, I’m having to command+click a title of a story to open up in a tab. There needs to be another key that opens up the story I’ve selected in a target=”_new” window.

I tried the enter key but all that the enter key does is open up the story in “list view”, and it does nothing in “expanded view”. Blah.

Another Feature Request: Sort Options

I like to read my posts backwards than how Google has set it up. I like to read the posts that were posted earlier than those posted later. I’d much rather go directly to the post: I don’t want to hear some garbage summary on the original post. (I love posts that add thoughtful and meaningful content to the original post… but that rarely happens in this digg world.)

So going back to the first point: I have to use shift+space rather than space to scroll through my stories… Kinda clunky, but it works.

Overall: Satisfied

It’s quick. It’s painless, to a certain extent. It’s not as clunky as Vienna…

Plus, it’s a web application. Half-minus, it’s Google. (Google is neither on my list of companies I love nor on my list of companies I hate…)

Wow… WoW?

I swear. Sometimes, writing on this blog turns out to be something like leveling in World of Warcraft: I can’t stop it. I gotta level up just once more or turn in one more quest.

Silly Mistake: Redirecting

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I didn’t know this, but there’s a tiny movement against having “www” subdomain in links. Just visit no www to read up on some of the reasons why.

>Succinctly, use of the www subdomain is redundant and time consuming to communicate. The internet, media, and society are all better off without it.

The reason why the site was “down” for the better part was yesterday was that I installed this: no-www wordpress plugin. The silly mistake I committed was that I forgot when I set up JoshKim.org, I had asked for any request to “joshkim.org” to be sent to “www.joshkim.org”.

If you visited either one of those links, you would bounce back and forth… and back and forth… and back and forth… until the browser gave up on the request. I don’t know about you, but I got this strange looking error that wasn’t a 404 or anything I’ve seen before.

I realized this error after finding out that there wasn’t any server outage reports on the Dreamhost Status Page.

Just a heads up to those that might want to follow with the rest of the Internet in making it a “www”-less world… and so that those people won’t make the same mistake as I did.

Time to Change the RSS Reader: Google Reader

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I’ve decided to ditch Vienna for my RSS feeds. It’s been getting on my nerves with a lot of little bugs (double downloading, “recent post” count problems), and I decided it’s time I should make the web app jump for this type of application.

I’ve written before on how a problem encourages me to move and try something new. Here’s what’s relevant from that post.

Feeds

  • I dislike most online feed readers. I love Vienna, because it’s free and open source and fast and responsive and does EXACTLY what I need.
  • I can go through feeds in very quickly, by being able to delete articles that are completely worthless (about 90% of which are Digg crap stories that link to the blogs I’m already subscribed to…)
  • I still want to be able to set it up so that OPML file is still saved somewhere…

Looks like I’m going to be going against my own words. I still don’t like online apps for certain things, but for feeds, google reader is quickly becoming something that… just works.

Short-cut keys for Google Reader

Only a subset of the advertised short-cut keys work for me, since I turned on “start searching when I type” feature in Firefox (BonEcho for the mac users). But these seem to work:

  • s: Star an item
  • n: Navigate to next item without opening it
  • p: Navigate to previous item without opening it
  • j: Open next item
  • k: Open previous item
    • Oh sweet vi keys…
  • o: Open / Close item (In list view, doesn’t do anything in expanded view)
  • r: Refresh
  • t: Tag it

I think there might be more, but this is more than enough, I think.

What would be really nice is if I had the ability to scroll down an article using a shortcut key also. For example, if the post I’m reading is longer in height than the window it’s in, I want to be able to scroll down on just that story. I’d much rather have j and k be the “scroll key” and have l and ; be the “next/previous post”… thereby solidifying Google’s love for vi. I’m probably asking too much.