I just reached across my entire cabin and grabbed my phone to start this blog post. My cabin is like 6 feet wide and it’s one of the bigger ones. We did get upgraded to one with a balcony, so there’s that. This is my first cruise ever. We are in the Baltics for 10 days with a few days starting in Stockholm and a few days in Amsterdam at the end. We’ll be gone a total of 14 days. I guess I’ll just write a bit about each place and slap some pictures in here for the fans. ...
Apparently the BBC doesn’t let you watch their TV shows if you’re not in the UK. I was trying to watch This Country but I was greeted with this prohibiting banner: No worries, I have a subscription to Nord VPN and they have servers in the UK. I switched my location to the UK and reloaded the page. No luck: I read their help page and they have some VPN tracking software in place that seems like it blocked most of Nord’s IP addresses already. ...
I’ve never been this consistently stressed out for this long in my life. Six weeks ago, my business partner and I entered into a verbal agreement with a group of angel investors to fund our company. The cofounder relationship This is as hard as they say it is. I am very lucky to have Race, who is honest and humble and smart and motivated and confident. He compliments me well by having a lot of qualities that I don’t. He is a great talker and can go on passionately about our product for as long as you let him. I am criminally understated and often leave out details. We make a good team. But we are very different. It takes a lot of honest communication on both of our parts to get on the same page sometimes. ...
Intro to Asia The primary reason I wanted to teach English abroad was to introduce Kaitlyn to expat living, specifically in Asia. I credit a lot of who I am today to the fact that I was able to spend five years of my childhood in China and two years of my young adult life in Cambodia. I wanted Kaitlyn to see first-hand what I have been raving about basically since the day she met me. Our time in Thailand was a perfect introduction to living abroad for her and for us as a couple. ...
A video adventure
I. The Night Train The night train is the best. For the low price of $22 you can take a six-hour train ride from our city of Phichit to Bangkok. The train leaves here at 12:40 AM and arrives in the capitol at 7:00 AM. I love it so much because it feels exactly like what I assume being on a spaceship is like. You get you’re own little compartment with a blanket and a pillow. The air is blasting cold, so you shiver like you’re in outer space. You go to sleep and you wake up on basically another planet (Phichit and Bangkok are that different). Overall a great experience, even if a flight is only $35 and takes one hour. ...
Microsoft has a program for all engineer employees to get some free Azure credit to play with. Having been with Microsoft for two summer internships I have accumulated two separate accounts with $150 of credit/month each. Growing up pinching pennies, I am not one to let anything free go to waste, so for the past couple years I have been using my Azure credit for some fun stuff. 1. NextCloud Personal Cloud Storage NextCloud is super cool if you haven’t heard of it. It’s basically open-source Dropbox with some extra features, and you can self-host it. When I got my free credit, I thought I’d try and save some money on Dropbox by self-hosting NextCloud on Azure. Here’s what I used: ...
One of my college courses required me to build an application as a semester long project. I wanted to build an application that could solve a real world problem. I had heard about a problem that doctors were having from a friend of mine. Doctors get sued. A lot. 75% of doctors in low-risk specialties have faced a malpractice claim at some point in their careers. For doctors in high-risk specialties, that number skyrockets to 99%. I decided to make a webapp to help doctors solve this problem. You can check it out here: patientpreviewapp.com ...
I am actually a ten-year-old boy. A couple weeks ago I traded teaching schedules with another teacher. I still teach some of the small kids but now I get to teach elementary school science as well. My students are seven, eight, and ten years old. I found they are much easier for me to teach because I understand them better. Basically, I am the same as them. We all like playing videogames, making stupid fart jokes, and playing soccer after school. I am ten years old at heart. ...
** This post didn’t really take shape like I was hoping. I might come back later and rearrange it to be more coherent, but as it currently stands it is an imperfect combination of memoir/note to former self/love letter to my workplace. ¯\(ツ)/¯ I would have never hired myself. Bless the people who threw me a bone and let me learn to be a programmer at their expense. After sophomore year of my CS program, I was looking around for a job that would put my years (two is still plural) of programming “experience” to work. I thought that by going to school and half paying attention in my classes that counted as experience. I was wrong. The first two years of college did not at all prepare me to work on a real dev team as I would soon find out. ...