Some hold this ritual annually; I manage to only do it every other year. Around midnight on a September evening, a mob of folks huddle around a handful of websites to try to get their …
Review: Covered Calls Made Easy
A good friend of mine recommended this light reader a couple of weeks ago: Covered Calls Made Easy: Generate Monthly Cash Flow by Selling Options It’s a fairly short book, written and published recently, about …
You Don’t Deserve a House in the Bay Area
Time to check-in on the Bay Area housing crisis in 2016. … Yep, still as bad as ever. The latest controversy is that, contrary to silly ideas back in 2015 that two working professionals could …
The Race to Define the Most Important Technology in Cars
I’ve been driving my new Volvo XC90 for two months now. It’s an impressive car; Volvo has done a great job cramming this revision of their flagship SUV with great design and technology. And though …
Review: The Inevitable
Wired launched in 1993. It was a magazine and a website which came about just as modern computing had started to make a difference beyond academia and into everyday life: computers were small and cheap …
Donald Trump and the Job Interview Gambit
I ran across this tweet a couple weeks back, on Donald Trump’s platform as he accepted the Republication party’s nomination for the presidency: It reminded me of a job interview tactic I read about years …
The Folly of Stack Ranking and Measuring Impact
Recently I came across a brief statement on Facebook about the well-explained evils of stack ranking, with a half-hearted Devil’s Advocate argument about how impact can absolutely be an objective metric, measured and ranked. I …
Communicating a Complex Emotion Through Video Games
The bifurcation of game development into big studios and independent developers has empowered indie developers to try all different types of gameplay. There’s a game simulating border control for a make-believe Eastern Bloc country; a …
Returning from a Blogging Hiatus
I’m typing this while glancing at my almost exactly, down-to-the-hour 4-week old daughter, as her older brother sleeps a room down with their mother. In the months leading up to this predicament, I’ve received plenty …
Review: Fearless Salary Negotiation
America loves itself some self-help and self-improvement. Whether it comes in the form of endless LinkedIn Pulse posts, self-help (and self-promoting) articles on Medium, or the vast industry of self-help books, we are all suckers …
The Surreal Urban Sprawl of City: Skylines
Simcity 2000 was a hell of a game for a 10-year old. It introduced me to the idea of using computers for simulation. That there’s wonderful complexity in the interaction of systems. And that cities, …
Review: Little Rice — Smartphones, Xiaomi, and the Chinese Dream
I’ve read my share of books and articles on the current economic and political phenomenon that is China. I’m interested in part because of my own ethnicity and complex relationship with the country, and in …