Dave Choi - My Distraction (Page 3)

My Distraction

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Dave Choi

Deliberacy

Was chatting with Lori a little bit recently, and she talked about someone who seemed to favor certain designs over others, based simply on time of creation. Said they couldn't articulate what was good about it. She went on to say that if you don't know

Current Events

Part of the reason I blog is because I'd like to leave something for posterity. The way that kids find bundles of letters that their parents write, and it changes the way that they think about them. Like they're real people, in a way they couldn&

Posterity

I grew up in a broken home, and when I was younger, I worried a lot about what I'd be like as a father, and how I'd be when I consumed alcohol. As a kid, I had no experience with it, and I thought it might

Health

I am historically pretty lousy at taking care of myself. I tend not to sleep enough. I'll eat terrible food. I'll skip meals. I've fasted whole days, unintentionally. I'll sit at my desk for like all of my waking hours. When I

Progress

When I first started blogging, or something I think of as equivalent, it was while I was interning at a company called CentrPort, and I was learning Java, to write Java Servlets, and some Perl and first learning about SQL. I wrote e-mails to my friends talking about what I

Design

Designers don't get to decide that the user, complaining about the experience of using their product, is wrong. You can claim whatever design expertise advantage you want when you're in planning. Certainly, what the user asks for isn't always what they actually need, and

Hooked

I've been reading a bunch of books lately. I have a little plastic zip top bag for snacks that I taped to the outside of my shower curtain liner, and I put my phone in it, and use the Kindle app to read while I shower. If you

Sharpening

I cook a lot, and consequently use knives a lot. When you use knives a lot, you have to do something to retain usable edges. Some people buy cheap knives and just toss them when they get dull. Some people buy sharpeners, or systems with jigs and stuff that hold

Voting Strategy

In the US, we have a lot of political problems. I don't mean problems with general policy (which we have plenty of), but systemic problems regarding our political system. We have first-past-the-post voting [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting], voter disenfranchisement via the electoral college [http://en.

Ember CLI 0.0.37 API Stub Change

In the Ember-CLI changelog [http://iamstef.net/ember-cli/#changelog], there's this note: > [BREAKING ENHANCEMENT] Change the expected interface for the ./server/index.js file. It now receives the instantiated express server. #1097[BREAKING ENHANCEMENT] Change the expected interface for the ./server/index.js file. It now receives

Boom

I watched World War Z with Crystal, on Netflix, and we were both kind of taken aback at how poorly handled roughly every situation in that movie was. People not watching their steps and kicking cans when it's been stressed like crazy how important it is to be

Diversity

I've been pouring my spare time into one specific side project for a while now, and part of that is learning to work with Ember CLI, and remembering how to work with Ember Data, but sometimes I progress so slowly on that project, it really gets to me.

Writing

Originally written 5/29/2014. My mom moved recently, and I had to go through a bunch of my old stuff that was still in her place. I found a few old notebooks, which I used to write in all the time whenever I was riding the train or had

Discipline

Originally written 5/28/2014. I think if you think of anything you ever did that you were proud of, it involved some amount of discipline. I don't think discipline is terribly complicated, but the way I think of it is, you set rules, and then you follow

Inspiration

When I hate using a product and don't have a better alternative, that inspires me to make a better alternative. When I love using a product, that inspires me to extract what I love about it, and apply it to other things. Use everything.

Wet != Dry

originally written 5/12/2014 If you listen to the America's Test Kitchen [https://www.americastestkitchen.com/] podcast, this week, in the "Test Kitchen Tip" segment (around 1:30 in), they say, "If you asked 100 people if hot oil will cook food more quickly

Ethics

There are a few famous patients that have advanced medical understanding, particularly in neuroscience, where it's difficult to do methodical analysis without doing damage (see: Henry Molaison [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Molaison], Kent Cochrane [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KC_(patient)] -- I read about these

Martial Arts

originally written 3/20/2014 I am, generally speaking, a pacifist. The caveat is, if real violence is initiated against me, or someone I feel compelled to protect, I won't think twice about killing the aggressor. I became interested in martial arts, partially because of its prominence in

Circumstances

Steve and Cindy came over for dinner the other night, a little bit out of the blue, but I like that. I'm always happy to see them. They brought over some White Castle, to keep me out of the kitchen, so we could actually hang out. Steve is

Delegate

New blog. I've been meaning to write up a new blog engine for myself, but I'd been waiting on my hosting company to upgrade its Ruby version. They promised it back in November, and it's the better part of a year later without so

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