sunpech.blog

SoCal Code Camp is tomorrow

noreply@blogger.com (Steven Suwatanapongched) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 17:59:04 PST

SoCal Code Camp is tomorrow. Sessions have been posted, as well as the schedule. It's a two day event, January 28 and 29 (Saturday and Sunday), full of sessions on a variety of software development topics.

Did I mention that it's FREE?!

It will be hosted at Cal State University Fullerton. Here is a campus map to help you.

I will be there bright and early volunteering and probably taking photos. Should be a good time!

The sessions I'm interested in checking out:

Jan 28 Sessions:
08:45am
- CSS3 for Web Designers - Let's Design a Visually Appealing Website
- Working for Startups - What you need to know
10:00am
- Grid Systems - Picking the right CSS Framework for your Website
12:15pm
- Free
01:30pm
- Volunteering
02:45pm
- Volunteering
04:00pm
- Writing Maintainable Javascript (Part 1)
- BI/Big Data - Is it really all about the Cloud?

Jan 29 Sessions:
09:00am
- It is Time to Rev your Javascript Skill
10:15am
- Quick and Dirty jQuery
12:30pm
- Introduction to Jode.js
- Intro to Mobile Development for Web, iOS, and Android Native Apps using PhoneGap and HTML5
- NoSQL for Beginners - Part 1
01:45pm
- From CodeMonkey to CEO: Part 1 Leadership 101
- NoSQL for Beginngers - Part 2
03:00pm
- How to Survive the Technical Interview
- From CodeMonkey to CEO - Part 2 Innovation Literacy

Finished reading: In The Plex

noreply@blogger.com (Steven Suwatanapongched) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 10:18:09 PST

I just finished reading In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives on my Kindle Fire.

Overall it was a good book with some insight into Google, but I wouldn't say that the book was well-written. It does jump around a lot and the material wasn't presented chronologically in story-fashion. It's currently the most up to date book on Google as it includes recent stuff such as Android, Eric Schmidt's stepping down as CEO in 2010, and it's failures to enter as a social network. There are a lot of Amazon reviews giving praise to the book. I think it's a little over-rated, but still informative. I just can't get over how the writing wasn't fluid.

The last techie book I read was, Steve Jobs biography. It's interesting to contrast the companies such as Apple and Google. The former, Apple, very much treats the work they do as an art form, as beauty and simplicity. While the latter, Google, treats everything based off of numbers, as data-- science.

I wouldn't strongly recommend this book if you've kept up on Google through blog posts and editorials online over the past five years. I have read up on them, and I found myself skimming certain sections just because I was familiar with it already.

Other books I've read on Google:

My next book to read is The Design of Everyday Things.

Designer's Hub Meet and Greet

noreply@blogger.com (Steven Suwatanapongched) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 04:11:37 PST

Last night I went to LA's Designer's Hub Meet and Greet event hosted at Kleverdog, a co-working space located in Chinatown. This was their first event. It was a very nice meetup about essentially building a community of designers. There were a lot of ideas thrown out about what the group could be about. I personally would like to have a community to turn to, in-person, for me to learn more about the tools and techniques in graphics design-- notably Photoshop, Lightroom, and Aperture.

I had a great time and look forward to the next meetup that I can attend. Thanks to Kleverdog for hosting and sponsoring the pizza!

Kleverdog Coworking
418 Bamboo Lane, Suite A
Los Angeles, CA 90012

A picture dump of all pictures I take at meetups this year can be found here. Here are some pictures I took:

SOPA Blackout set for January 18 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Steven Suwatanapongched) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 18:15:26 PST

Tomorrow, Wednesday January 18, 2012, I plan to block this website out in support of SOPA Blackout. Technically it won't be completed blocked out, as the javascript is only a black message overlay on top of the website. Users will still be able to click through once the popup comes up.

Here is the javascript that will be used in the header:

<script type="text/javascript" src="//js.sopablackout.org/sopablackout.js"></script>

On one of my other sites, spong.org, will be blocked out completely using:

<script>var today = new Date();if((today.getDate() == 18) && (today.getMonth() == 0) && (today.getFullYear() == 2012)) { window.location = "http://protestsopa.org"; }</script>

There is a github project for the above: SOPA-PIPA-Protest-Page.

Pictures from LA Ruby/Rails January Meetup

noreply@blogger.com (Steven Suwatanapongched) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 19:03:59 PST

Last night went to the LA Ruby/Rails Meetup hosted at AT&T Interactive. There were two presentations followed by three lightning talks.

Using Ruby with R by Sean Marcia

Rack Middleware as a General Purpose Abstraction by John Bender

Some of the pictures I took are posted below. You can view the picture dump from all pictures I took here.

As a reminder: LA RubyConf is coming up February 2-4, 2012.

Pictures from LADOTNET January Meetup

noreply@blogger.com (Steven Suwatanapongched) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 19:02:42 PST

Last night I went to the LADOTNET January Meetup. The presentation was: Unit Testing/Architecting Apps for Testing with Paul Sheriff.

The turn-out for the meetup was pretty big, maybe fifty to sixty people, with a fair amount of recruiters. The LADOTNET meetup was held at Blankspaces. There is an upcoming SoCal Code Camp coming up on the weekend of January 28 and 29, 2012.

I have a new album where I will dump all pictures I take from Meetups for this upcoming year. You can view all the pictures here.

Here are some images I picked out:

Steve Jobs biography

noreply@blogger.com (Steven Suwatanapongched) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 05:05:21 PST

I really enjoyed reading the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson. I bought both the hardcover and the Kindle book version. Isaacson's writing is superb and flows very well. However, if you read articles or even watched some Steve Jobs documentaries, it covers a lot of similar ground. I am reminded of the TV movie, Pirates of Silicon Valley. If you haven't watched it, I highly recommend it.

I think it's fair for people to compare him to Thomas Edison, as Jobs was our modern day inventor and businessman-- a visionary if you will. Perhaps it's a stretch to even consider him an inventor as he was more of an innovator. I personally find that Jobs gets a little too much credit, considering all the people he used and collaborated with, to get Apple to achieve the success it's found today. That's something that does bother me. That and the fact that he was an asshole to quite a few people throughout his life. But I suppose, as humans, we're all assholes at some point in our lives.

Apple does owe everything to this man and his vision. I consider Steve Jobs to be the greatest CEO to date. I think Apple today can survive without the business savvy of Jobs, but we'll see where they are at five years from now. I personally think Steve Jobs should have been Times Person of the Year 2011.

Here are a few of my favorite Steve Jobs clips from youTube:

Canon Powershot S95

noreply@blogger.com (Steven Suwatanapongched) — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 15:49:56 PST

I bought the Canon PowerShot S95 for my trip to Hawaii. As much as I love my Canon EOS 60D, I find that there are times when I don't want to lug around a DSLR around, and would prefer a simple point and shoot camera.

I really wanted the Canon PowerShot S100, but they've been sold out for quite some time and I couldn't wait for reorders. To me, the big selling point of the S100 is the built in GPS. I think all cameras, sooner rather than later, should have such a feature built right in.

So I thought I would compare some photos taken with my Canon Powershot S95 with the 60D (with Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8L II USM Ultra Wide Angle Zoom Lens and a simple UV filter). Note: on my 60D, I shot in P mode with auto-ISO, and on my S95, auto.

S95 (f/4, ISO 100)

60D (f/8, ISO 100)

S95 (f/4, ISO 200)

60D (f/7.1, ISO 100)

S95 (f/4, ISO 100)

60D (f/6.3, ISO 100)

S95 (f/4, ISO 200)

60D (f/7.1, ISO 100)

Overall, I'm very happy with the quality of the S95. The colors are vibrant and sharp in the well lit pictures. Although I would say that compared with my 60D, it doesn't quite pop some images out as well. It's still exactly what I want, a small point and shoot that performs well for the times when I want to leave my DSLR at home.

Western Digital WD TV Live Streaming Media Player

noreply@blogger.com (Steven Suwatanapongched) — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 00:51:37 PST

Since I moved to LA, I've been without my old PC that runs XBMC. For a Home Theater PC (HTPC), the PC is decent, but it's large, loud, and not in California. So I went on Amazon and bought the Western Digital WD TV Live Streaming Media Player for $90 US. Behold, my new HTPC.

I've been using it for a few days, and overall I'm pretty happy with it. I was able to hook up my external USB hard drives to a D-Link DUB-H7 High Speed USB 2.0 7-Port Hub, and connect that to my new HTPC. It detects all the externally connected drives, but it won't mount them all at once-- you'll have to swap through the user interface, which is pretty simple.

Oh, I also recommend getting some HDMI cables, to make wiring simple.

So now I can watch all my movies, TV shows, tech videos, and so forth, on a big screen LCD TV. For those of you that own a lot of digital content and don't want to build your own HTPC, this is an incredibly cheap and simple solution. I highly recommend it.

Goodbye 2011, Hello 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Steven Suwatanapongched) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 04:16:36 PST

The new year has come. Time to say goodbye the past year, and hello to the upcoming one. 2011 was an amazing year for me in terms of travel, photography, and trying out new things.

I spent four months living in Thailand up until the end of April. I was able to celebrate Thai new year, songkran, among other Thai/Chinese holidays. I traveled in September through November using the JetBlue Bluepass.

I got the chance to swing by Singapore for RedDotRubyConf. Once back in the states, I checked out a few more conventions (Chicago Code Camp, RailsConf, Wizard World, and BlizzCon to name a few). Also discovered a few more interesting ones here in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

On a more personal level, I was a best man at a friends wedding, and a groomsman in another. I finally moved out to California as I've always wanted to. I also bought a black 2012 Volkswagen Golf TDI. And I just got back from Hawaii, visiting all the islands and saw my first double rainbow.

So here's to a wonderful 2011, and an even brighter 2012!

UPDATE (Jan 1, 2012 9:19 PM): I've moved back to using Blogger! I've also merged my spong.org blog posts into this one. This blog will now consolidate my technology posts.

Pictures from SF Ruby December Meetup

noreply@blogger.com (Steven Suwatanapongched) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 04:00:06 PST

I drove up to San Francisco from LA to check out the SF Ruby group. The drive was long, but worth it as I got to meet some interesting people. The meetup was hosted at ZenDesk. Being from Chicago and now living in LA, I never before heard so much talk about venture capital (VCs) coming from developers. I think there really is a culture difference in SF compared to other cities. Just an observation.

Here are the pictures:

Pictures from LA DotNet December Meetup

noreply@blogger.com (Steven Suwatanapongched) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 04:00:30 PST

I've been in living in Los Angeles for two months now. About a month ago I finally bought a car to get around in. On Monday, December 5, 2011, I was able to attend my first the Los Angeles .Net Developer's Group hosted at Blankspaces.

There were two presentations:

Daniel Egan presented on Diving into Windows Phone Market: Should I make the jump?
Henry Lee presented on Making Money with Windows Phone.

Great presentations and socialable group of developers. I look forward to attending more events like these here in Los Angeles. I also found out that there will be an upcoming LA Code Camp (SoCal Code Camp) coming the last weekend of January in 2012 (Jan 28 and 28th). Can't wait to check that out next month!
Here are some of the pictures. Full set of pictures can be found here.

Kindle Fire Review

noreply@blogger.com (Steven Suwatanapongched) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 04:15:18 PST

I pre-ordered my Kindle Fire in early October. I've wanted an eReader device for a long time, ever since I've been traveling so much. Carrying books around is such a pain.

Like many others out there, I got my Kindle Fire on November 15, 2011. After a few weeks of using the Fire, I felt I could give it a good review. I've used it for playing Words With Friends, some basic browsing on Amazon, and I finished reading the Steve Jobs biography on it.

Overall, I like the device. I like the size, weight, and dimensions. It's easy for me to throw in my bag on the go, and the battery life is pretty decent.

I'm a very happy Amazon Prime customer. I buy just about everything off Amazon as well as use their Cloud player. The device is ideal for someone those who uses Amazon's services. It's so easy to buy books, music, movies, and other items on Amazon. The device is inexpensive itself at $199. It's also literally half the size of the iPad2-- which I think is a good size as it's very portable.

There are some improvements I'd like to see, both hardware and software.

For hardware, the touchscreen isn't as smooth or responsive as on Apple's iPad2. This can be seen when touching the screen buttons. Often times I have to tap several times for it to register. There is no hardware volume controls. The volume is buried one level deep under the top right menu setting-- which is absurd from a user-interface perspective. Also, the power button, which is the only button, is located on the bottom of the device. It can be pushed accidently very easily.

For software improvements, I'd like to see Amazon wishlist integration. Also, the bookshelf home screen doesn't sit well with me. I wish there was an option for the regular Android desktop feel. The Facebook app that is installed by default, isn't actually a Kindle app. It's actually is a link to the Facebook mobile site in a browser-- very disappointing. And finally, I'd like there to be a setting to lock landscape and portrait mode. I tend to lie on my side reading, and hate it when my Kindle reader app switches to landscape view.

I know I've made comparisons to the iPad several times already. But I feel that I should formally say that the Kindle Fire isn't quite an iPad competitor, let alone a full fledged tablet. I think of it more as a really nice Kindle that has touchscreen, based on Android, and is cheap by today's standards.

If you are looking for tablet with tons of apps, this device probably isn't for you. If you are looking for an eReader, love shopping on Amazon, and play only a few app games, and don't want to spend $300-700, then you should consider the Kindle Fire.

How to have multiple remotes for you Git project

noreply@blogger.com (Steven Suwatanapongched) — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 19:36:58 PST

When I found out that BitBucket added support for Git, I got pretty excited.

Just this past year I started to use Git as my DVCS for all my projects. More importantly, my older projects didn't have any version control whatsoever. They were projects spread across multiple computers that only merged into a single external USB hard drive when I started to retire some computers because they were just too old (six plus years!).

Anyway, when this external drive began to make noises (clicking sounds), I decided I wanted to have my old projects stored in the cloud in case the the hard drive should ever fail.

Github was my goto host as it was immensely popular. At first I was on the free plan (unlimited public repos), but I decided my ugly legacy code shouldn't be public, and went with their micro plan ($7 per month for 5 private repos). These projects are retired and there is no plan for future development. I just want them hosted with my other active personal projects.

I signed up for BitBucket not too long ago just because I wanted to play with Mercurial. That didn't last very long. But with the new additional support for Git, and with the free unlimited private and personal projects, I knew I wanted to add this as a remote to also host all my projects.

But how was I to add another remote since I was already using Github? I wanted to add BitBucket as a remote along with Github. With a simple search on StackOverflow, I cam across pull/push from multiple remote locations (answer).

Here is an example .git/config setting, with the bolded text the example text to add a remote:

[core]
repositoryformatversion = 0
filemode = true
bare = false
logallrefupdates = true
ignorecase = true
[branch "master"]
remote = origin
merge = refs/heads/master
[remote "origin"]
url = git@github.com:sunpech/project_foo.git
url = git@bitbucket.org:sunpech/project_foo.git
fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
[remote "heroku"]
url = git@heroku.com:project_foo.git
fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/heroku/*

Now when I push changes, it pushes it to both Github and BitBucket. Simple, and it works. Hope this helps.

Of course you'll still need to set up the project on each respective host, in which case I'll point you to this Github setup tutorial (also see Using SSH to Access your Bitbucket Repository).

I have this setup because I may choose to abandon my Github pay account, and just host my public repos there, and all my private repos on BitBucket-- saving me $7/month. Plus, I think it's great for Github to have competition.

BlizzCon 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Steven Suwatanapongched) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 04:01:17 PST

Over the weekend I went with my sister and friends to check out BlizzCon at the Anaheim Convention Center. Obviously we're all fans of the games that Blizzard Entertainment make, and it was everyone's first time attending. We had a blast!

It was a very tiring two days (Friday and Saturday, Oct 21-22, 2011). Doors opened around 9-9:30am, and the events lasted until midnight! I went around and snapped photos as much as I could, while attending some panels and Starcraft 2 tournaments. Some of the costume designs were extraordinary. Major props to the fans that hand made their own costumes.

On Friday, was the day attendees wore the intricate costumes. Major announcements were made as well as the GSL (Global Starcraft League) finals. IM_MVP and SlayersS_MMA were the finalists with the Terran vs Terran matchup. I was cheering for the underdog, MMA, who won.

On Saturday, the lines for the game demos were much longer. A lot more kids also came out too, as the previous day is a school day. I took it easier and watched more SC2 matches until the BlizzCon finals came up, pitting IM_MVP (Terran) against IM_Nestea (Zerg). Of course I cheered on the underdog as well as the Zerg player. The closing ceremony was fantastic, as the Foo Fighters came out to perform!

Overall, a super fun convention gathering the largest set of loyal game fans under one roof. I plan to attend next year!

The full album can be found here.

Here are some of my favorite pictures I took:

More pics from other photographers (source):

Pictures from Objective-C and iOS for .NET Developers

noreply@blogger.com (Steven Suwatanapongched) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 04:01:46 PST

Last night I went to my favorite local user group, Chicago Alt.net (@ChicagoAltNet).

Eduardo Scoz presented on Objective-C and iOS. Great talk and a very big turnout. I haven't seen this many developers show up for an Alt.net meetup here since Uncle Bob Martin did a presentation.

Here are some of the photos I took. If you are looking for a full set of photos I took from various meetups I attend, including this one, I dump them all in this Picasa album.

Pictures from Los Angeles Ruby/Rails Meetup

noreply@blogger.com (Steven Suwatanapongched) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 04:02:39 PST

Last week I used my JetBlue BluePass to head out to Los Angeles to attend the LA Ruby Meetup (@laruby) hosted at CoLoft. I was impressed with the turnout, the speakers and presentation, and the audience participation. The format of the meetup was pretty long though. I'm used to maybe thirty minutes to one hour of a presentation. They had four presentations lasting about two hours! All very good of course, but I have to admit that it was a bit tiring. I found out that the group tends to move the meetups all over Los Angeles to attract new members.

I introduced myself to a few members, and let them know that I'm a Chicagoan that's new to Ruby/Rails, and that would be moving to LA in a month (early October). I look forward to their next meetup and maybe their study group!

The presentation lineup:

JavaScript Testing in Javascript by John Bender
Life as a Ruby Developer by Hubert
Two-way Database Synchronization in Ruby by Evan Dorn and Judson Lester
Learning Ruby language and TDD culture through Ruby Koans by Kanak Malshe

Wizard World Chicago Comic Con 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Steven Suwatanapongched) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 04:03:19 PST

I'm suffering from San Diego Comic Con 2010 withdrawal still. This year I wasn't able to go as a good friend was getting married and I was his best man-- which turned out to be the best wedding I've ever been to. But anyway, you can see my post and pictures from that here.

So this year I made a last minute decision to go to Wizard World's Chicago's Comic Con. I believe the last time I went was in 1998. Thirteen years! Back then I was way more into comics, anime, manga, and bad Hong Kong kung fu movies. Okay, some of the HK movies were good. It was actually a big deal back in 1998 too. When I went in 1997 or 1996 for the first time, it was purely about comics basically. There was no representation from big companies like Marvel and DC. But in 1998, they all showed up. There were panels, discussions, and bigger names in comics showed up.

I thought things would still be like that in 1998 when I went this year. I was wrong.

In a way, it's a good thing it's not like that anymore. It's a different time now. Back in the mid to late 90s, the comic book industry was riding off The Death of Superman gimmick. It made big headlines in the news, the industry got an influx of a lot of new comic book fans (including yours truly-- me), and they could only top that by having more gimmicks. But that's a much longer story than I care to tell right now.

The Chicago Comic Con is back to more of how it was in 1996, pre-Wizard World. It's back to being about local retailers selling their comics. It's just fans dressing up, artists having their space to showcase their work, and it's just more basic now. In that sense it's good.
But it doesn't change the fact that I want to experience the glitz, the glamor, and even the Hollywood that the San Diego Comic Con is! Next year, July 12-15, 2012! I'll be ready!

Here are some of my favorite photos. Full set of pictures I took, here.

Some Thoughts on Photography, Blogging, and Coding

noreply@blogger.com (Steven Suwatanapongched) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 04:18:25 PST

It was the summer of 2010 that I decided I wanted to dust off the DSLR I bought in 2006 and put it to good use more often. So throughout that summer, I made an effort to bring my camera with me everywhere I went. I brought it to work, to my various meetups I attended, and even when I walked around Chicago. I just kept taking photos of whatever I thought was interesting.

I discovered that I really enjoyed taking photos and sharing them with everyone on my social networks. I felt that I wanted to share the things that were going on around me. From comic conventions, a friend's night out, someone presenting at a meetup or conference, or the food I was eating-- I enjoy publishing it for all the world to see.

I've realized that photography, like blogging, is a form of story-telling. At least that's how I like to photograph. It's no surprise then that photography would become one of my new favorite hobbies. Like writing/blogging, photography is a craft I want to get better at. I recently came across a blog post: Want to be a Better Photographer? Become a Better Writer by Scott Bourne. That post points out that all these things have a strong correlation.

But it also occurred to me recently, that coding has a lot of similarities to photography and blogging.
Software development is basically a form of communication. I am reminded of the post: Coding: It's Just Writing by Jeff Atwood. When a developer writes code, it's basically writing. The developer communicates to the computer, what the developer wants the computer to do, in the form of code. A developer also communicates to other developers, project managers, and clients verbally, through emails, or even instant messages. Check out Jon Skeet's answer to Are good programmers good writers? I very much agree with his statement:

"clear thinking leads to clear code" - Jon Skeet

I must thank Stackoverflow, for helping developers to combine writing and coding together. For me, the very act of writing out a question on any of the StackExchange (SE) sites, helps me get closer to finding an answer. To write a question so that others could answer, requires thinking and organization. It needs to be concise, show effort, and it has to be clear. There were probably a dozen or so questions I was going to post on some of these SE sites, that I ended up answering on my own because I sat down to clearly think and write what I needed help on. Of course I didn't bother posting the question once I figured out the answer, but in hindsight, I guess I should have.

So in essence, photography, blogging, coding are all forms of story-telling and writing. They provide a means to achieve clarity. I really enjoy doing all of the above. What's awesome about it is, there's no done-learning to any of them. You can just keep doing them for months, years, even decades, and still find ways to improve and enjoy the art.

Pictures from Chicago Alt.net: Coffeescript

noreply@blogger.com (Steven Suwatanapongched) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 04:03:50 PST

Here are the pictures I took from tonight's Chicago Alt.net August 2011 meetup on Coffeescript, presented by Fawad Halim.

Some Thoughts on Traveling

noreply@blogger.com (Steven Suwatanapongched) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 04:20:48 PST

In July of 2010, I quit my full time job as a software developer. I wanted to break away from the nine-to-five, travel a bit, have fun, and teach myself new things in the process. I was able to visit San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, New York City, Denver, Bangkok, Chiang Mai, and Pattaya.

In 2011, I kept traveling, I visited Hua Hin, Phuket, Phang Nga, Singapore, Las Vegas, and Baltimore, before returning to Chicago for a time period greater than one week. Chicago is where I am right now. It's been such a rush getting on and off a plane, knowing that there's a different upcoming destination, just hours away. I've actually grown to like being in airports.

I am reminded of a blog post I read before I left for Thailand, back in October of 2010: 20 Things I've Learned From Traveling Around the World for Three Years by Tim Ferriss. I think it very much holds true.

The ones I found to be very true:

People are generally good. Most of the people I've come across have been very friendly, helpful, and well mannered towards me. This was especially true once I distanced myself from densely populated cities. Honestly, there seems to be a correlation between population density and people being unhappy or grumpy.

People don’t hate Americans. Actually, many people are either jealous or curious about Americans in general. I think their exposure to American culture is through television, movies, and what kind of technologies sprout up from the US. I often got asked the question that starts with, "Is it true that in the US..." Which leads to the next point.

Americans don’t travel. I realized this point when I was in Singapore for a conference. I met so many people from so many different countries/continents (Germany, Malaysia, Vietnam, Phillipines, Austrailia, Portugal, etc). Pretty much all of them traveled a lot or were expats. As an American, I found that my knowledge of other cultures, customs, and general map-awareness to be weaker compared to theirs. Everyone knows so much about the United States, but most Americans doesn't really know much about the rest of the world. It made me want to buy a map of the world to hang up on my wall.

You don’t need a lot stuff. This is incredibly true. I remember a general rule/saying that was posted somewhere. It goes something like: Before you pack, lay out the clothes and money you want to bring. Pack half the clothes, and bring double the amount of money. Some of the clothes I brought, I never even used. It became clear that certain clothing were favorites to wear.

Traveling doesn’t have to be expensive. It can be expensive, but it certainly doesn't have to be. The American dollar is strong, and generally goes a long way for simple basic things in other parts of the world. I highly recommend staying away from tourist traps.

Culture matters. I would add that keeping an open mind matters too. I learned that not everyone was raised with American culture. It's unreasonable for them to quickly understand jokes, references, history, and other cultural nuances Americans are used to. It really helps to be patient, to listen, and know when to talk and be thoughtful on what to say.

English is becoming universal. At least in Thailand, very basic English is taught in school. Much like how I was taught Spanish, but I never used it so I have only the very bottom basics. But with more usage, I could probably relearn it again.

But I have one more that I would add to his list:

Social Technologies matter. I used Meetup.com, Facebook, and Twitter to meet so many interesting and passionate people. Often times, they were travelers or expats. Combined with the English language, this is a great means to communicate, learn, and reach out to a local communities/individuals.

Next month I'm looking to do some more traveling with my JetBlue BluePass. I'm still learning new things too, such as becoming a more experienced Rails developer, a better photographer, and a decent writer/blogger. I do wish to rejoin the workforce, but only once I feel comfortable and confident in what I've learned.

Why I'm excited about Spotify

noreply@blogger.com (Steven Suwatanapongched) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 04:22:18 PST

I'm so excited and I just can't hide it. - Pointer Sisters (reference)

I've been using Spotify now for a few weeks already. I've enjoyed it so much I upgraded to a premium account the very same day I signed up for it, so I could enjoy it on my mobile smartphone. Overall it's been a great service that I use almost daily. For a long time I've been waiting for music to hit the cloud, and this year alone it's really been a hit.

I once was an iTunes user, back in 2005 and 2006. I bought all my music exclusively through them. That is until my PC's hard drive crashed and my latest backup didn't contain a lot of the music I bought. Previous to this crash, I had another hard drive crash that caused me to lose a decent amount of my music collection. In fact that was what turned me on to use iTunes, I was almost at zero anyway, may as well have a fresh start!

I wasn't just upset with my PC for crashing, but also Apple's iTunes system. I bought all this music through them, and there wasn't an easy way for me to retrieve it all back, despite that I bought and owned them. And back then Apple had DRM on all of their songs. They have limits to how many CDs a song could be burned to as well as how many devices iTunes could run on!

I'm aware that I probably could have contacted Apple via email or phone, and they might have given me the opportunity to re-download my music. But I just didn't feel like doing that. To me, that feature should be built into the software.

In 2009, I discovered LaLa. I actually wrote a blog post about them back then: LaLa.com: A Better Alternative to iTunes. I loved the service. It was great because I could not only download and own my music, but I could keep it stored on their servers (the cloud) to listen to anywhere I wanted. Plus it was DRM free, I could listen to the whole song as a preview before deciding if I wanted to buy it. This was a great alternative to iTunes and a great taste of freedom.

Unfortunately, later in 2009, Apple bought Lala. The following May of 2010, Apple shut them down. I was so infuriated. A great service I liked and was using, was shutting down and I was given credit to Apple's iTunes. Like I wanted to go back and use iTunes! I was so sick of how much Apple wanted to try and shove Quicktime down my throat! Many of us speculated that Apple wanted to have a cloud storage system for their iTunes service. 2010 passed and nothing was released.

So for months following LaLa's demise, I fell back to using Songbird and Winamp, and managed my own music over a Windows Explorer once again. I also became more adament about backing up my data regularly.

I also used Amazon MP3 mostly, which was DRM-free. It was great back then but it wasn't until May of 2011 that they came out with Amazon Cloud Drive/Player. I was excited again. Once again I could buy/own/stream music to my heart's content, with the warm fuzzy feeling, knowing that my music purchases was stored safely somewhere else, and that I could access it anywhere, and re-download them all if need be. Plus there was no device limit.

Not long after, Google came out with a beta for Google Musi. I think it's great how it has a 20,000 song limit. I'm currently only at around 13,000 or so. But I personally have a few problems with it. One, there is no option to buy music from Google, this is a missing workflow currently. Two, unless you have your music's meta data incredibly organized, it can be a mess to look at. For instance, I have a lot of Thai, Chinese, and Japanese mp3s, where the Artist, Album, and other ID3 tags are incomplete or just plain messed up. This music management mess was enough to turn me off from using the service currently. Of course this is all still in beta, so by means is it a refined service for public consumption.

In June 2011 Steve Jobs revealed the iCloud service, but it won't be available until Fall of 2011. It would maybe be of interest to me if it would retroactively let me download all the previously purchased music from 2005/2006. But it doesn't change the fact that I stil do no like using iTunes even on my Macbook Pro.

In mid July 2011, Spotify says hello the the US. Hello Spotify.

Here's what I like about Spotify, despite other great music cloud services from Amazon and Google: I don't have to own and manage my music. No need to do regular backups or worry that I will lose the music I purchased, because I don't own them anymore. This is a huge relief on my part. Even the freemium desktop service allows me to listen to songs I don't own, in full. I simply pay my $9.99 per month, and I can enjoy all the American music I like, hassle free.

The social aspect is great too, but it still needs time and improvement. Public playsists was something I really enjoyed about LaLa, which was also easily discoverable by users browsing content. This isn't easily discoverable on Spotify, yet. Also, they don't have support for a variety of languages yet either-- Thai, Chinese, Japanese for instance.

Sure there are other similar services like Spotify out there like Grooveshark, Rdio, and Pandora. I admit that I haven't fully tried the alternatives fully, at least not recently. But regardless, by letting go of my need to own music, I can easily switch services as need be. To me, with all this competition for my business, that's worth getting excited about.

Getting ready to Jet Blue with Blue Pass

noreply@blogger.com (Steven Suwatanapongched) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 04:23:12 PST

Last year, in 2010, I took off with JetBlue with my All-You-Can-Jet (AYCJ) pass during the month of September/October. I visited Boston, New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Denver. Five cities! Friends, food, and fun! It was such a fantastic journey!

On my plane rides, I met many other jet-setters flying around the US. I remember having interesting conversations with them, and even on one flight, sitting next to a dog!

Sadly, they're not offering that pass this year. Instead, they're offering the Blue Pass. Unlimited travel for THREE months. I chose to go with the Long Beach Select option. The cities available to me to/from Long Beach are: Seatle, Portland, Oakland, San Francisco, Sacramento, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, Austin, and Chicago. So during the months of September, October, and November, I will be visiting some of these great cities.

My goal is still to make it out to California and find a great job and live a good life chasing down all my other dreams.

UPDATE (8/8/2011 6:44am): I bought my tickets last Thursdaay, August 4, and have yet to receive my confirmation email, which was supposed to arrive within 24-48 hours. I called JetBlue (1-800-Jet-Blue) yesterday (8/7/2011), and they told me that they are going to send me my confirmation email within 24 hours. They did give me a confirmation number over the phone, but I'll feel better once I get an actual confirmation email, hopefully today.

UPDATE (8/9/2011 12:53am): Still no confirmation email from JetBlue. What gives? I see the charge on my credit card. Why won't their system send me a confirmation email? I'll give them a call later on today.

UPDATE (8/16/2011 3:22am): Logged into my JetBlue, and saw that I have my Blue Pass. Awesome.

Purchased a Herman Miller Aeron Chair

noreply@blogger.com (Steven Suwatanapongched) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 04:24:26 PST

A few weeks ago I purchased a Herman Miller Aeron chair from Home and Office Solutions up in Northbrook, Illinois. I've wanted an Aeron for the longest time, but just never felt comfortable spending a thousand dollars on an office chair. My seven-year old Ikea chair was falling apart and wasn't comfortable anymore. To be honest, it started to fall apart after two years. I really needed to get a new chair.

Not long ago I came across a blog post written by Joel Spolsky. From the post he mentions Herman Miller Aeron chairs for developers:

They are much more comfortable than cheap chairs. If you get the right size and adjust it properly, most people can sit in them all day long without feeling uncomfortable. The back and seat are made out of a kind of mesh that lets air flow so you don’t get sweaty. The ergonomics, especially of the newer models with lumbar support, are excellent.

They last longer than cheap chairs. We’ve been in business for six years and every Aeron is literally in mint condition: I challenge anyone to see the difference between the chairs we bought in 2000 and the chairs we bought three months ago. They easily last for ten years. The cheap chairs literally start falling apart after a matter of months. You’ll need at least four $100 chairs to last as long as an Aeron.

So the bottom line is that an Aeron only really costs $500 more over ten years, or $50 a year. One dollar per week per programmer.

I think that blog post pushed me over to finally take the plunge and buy one. And so I did.

And I'm really happy I did. The chair is comfortable, sturdy, and encourages good posture with excellent support. It's a real joy to sit in this. At first I got a blue medium sized one. It is fine, but then I decided to give that one to my parents and get the large, as I am able to fold my legs comfortably in that size.

If you are thinking of getting a better chair because you sit in front of the computer all day long, I recommend you go try out a Herman Miller chair. I've looked at the Mirra line, which is slightly cheaper than Aeron, but I really felt more comfortable in the Aeron. I think you'll be glad you did.

Google Plus is for Geeks

noreply@blogger.com (Steven Suwatanapongched) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 04:24:47 PST

Google Plus (G+) is for geeks. It's how it is now, and I think that's how it's going to be going forward, more or less.

I've been using G+ now for about a month. I scored an invite early on, and a few days later invited a good chunk of people from my Gmail contacts. I went through the process of making circles, refining the circles, installing the add-ons into my Chrome browser, and so forth. Basically, I did just about everything most power G+ users would do, minus adding thousands of people into circles. I personally don't see how Robert Scoble can read and sort through the tens of thousands of posts he must be getting daily. But he's a true G+ freak power user.

The first few rounds of invites really went out to the bloggers, social media giants, and digeratis. For the most part, they like it. I certainly like it. And this group all should. The community and ecosystem resembles FriendFeed (FF). For those of you who are unfamiliar with FF, it was basically a once popular real-time feed aggregator that pulled from many social media and networking sites. It was popular among the very same crowd that's using G+ now. Many call it FriendFeed 2.0.

I see that many people that I invited, just don't use it. They either don't get it, don't care for it, or don't want to bother with yet-another-social-network. Whatever the case may be, I can see that they're not generating visible content. Facebook (FB) and Twitter seems to be doing business as usual. But G+ has the very niche users: the geeks. Bloggers, photographers, software developers, entrepreneurs, techies, etc... are all generating content daily.

Honestly, this all feels very familiar to me. It's as though I've been here before....

I remember back in 1998/1999. I was an undergraduate still. Many of my friends were either in high school or also in college. I really liked ICQ as an instant messager (IM). Their software was far superior to AOL's AIM in terms of functionality. But it didn't get widely adopted amongst my American friends. Too many people were stuck with AOL as an internet service provider (ISP). By default they didn't adopt ICQ because AIM was already available to them, which all their friends were using. Instead AIM became the popular standard, and AOL eventually bought out ICQ, which turned into a bloated software with less support.

Remember when Gmail first came out in 2004? Previous to this spectacular email service, there was AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, and various other options. I remember the tech elite being the first to jump onto Gmail beta and use it. Sure Gmail in 2011 is popular (and out of beta since 2009), but despite that, there are still plenty of people still on AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, and even Comcast for email. Sometimes I wish I could stage an email intervention for those still using non-Gmail services. For the most part, people didn't switch to Gmail because of the cost of losing their email, the burden of updating their contacts, unable to think of email as conversations, the different user interface/experience (UI/UX), or even trusting Google, and I'm sure other costly reasons.

Going back into FriendFeed just a few years ago. I considered FF to be one of the best web apps that no one used. The weakness that FF had was that unless a user generated content from Twitter, their own blog, or other not-so-popular social network with an RSS feed, the service wouldn't be of much use. FriendFeed got bought by Facebook in 2009, to which it then turned into a ghost town because development and support ended.

From these three cases, we have examples of:

Popularity beating functionality.
Switch-over cost being perceived as being too high.
Inability to fully utilize a great service because it's not a fit.

And they are all valid reasons. Well, maybe not the Gmail one... Sorry, I'm incredibly biased towards Gmail, I love it so much!

I see all these reasons being applicable as to why Google Plus may not be a true competitor to Facebook or even Twitter. As a G+ user, I think it's already a better ecosystem than FB and Twitter. G+ has better interactions and a richer UI/UX than Twitter. The content is far better than what most FB users posts-- at least in my experience, which may differ from yours. But none of the examples would apply to geeks in general. Geeks are natural early adopters of new things and technology.

G+ a fresh start that improves upon Twitter and Facebook, althougth it still has quite a few kinks to work out and improve on. As far as I'm concerned, the G+ can just as easily stand for Geek+.