I’m a huge fan of alleycats (unsanctioned bike races inspired by bike messengers, where riders choose their routes to complete checkpoints in open traffic). You get handed a manifest and part of the fun is picking a smarter, shorter route than your competition, so even though maybe you’re worse in raw power/speed, you still have a chance at beating your opponent. Recently I and a bunch of other Cakers raced in the Supermarket Street Sweep, a charity race that benefits the SF-Marin Food Bank. Racers receive a manifest that looks something like this: ...
Introducing Converscope
A new way to analyze your personal chat history In the last decade, I’ve sent and received over 460,000 messages—that’s an average of 126 messages per day! For photos, Google and Apple have both introduced a “Memories” features in their respective photo apps, which lets you look back on photos that the almighty machine learning algorithm has deemed meaningful to your life. Why not do the same for messages? ...
The Coast Ride 2020: Ride Report
What it’s like to bike from San Francisco to Santa Barbara in one weekend day 1, mile 64: all smiles on the western front The Coast Ride is 380 miles of cycling and over 20,000 ft of elevation gain, split over 3 consecutive days. That distance and elevation is kind of insane when you think about it, and that’s exactly what I thought last year when deciding whether to do the 2019 edition of the Ride. Then, I had only just returned to cycling and I wasn’t sure if I could finish the whole ride. So I settled for only doing Day 1: “just” 133 miles and 6,800 ft of elevation gain. ...
ten months with the boosted board
me versus the mean streets of San Francisco My Amazon order history tells me that I bought my Boosted Board on July 18, 2017. Less than a year later, I swore to never ride it again. Look around any major American city and you’ll see some dude zipping around on one of these supercharged electric longboards. The striking orange wheels are connected by a belt drive to a powerful electric motor, which means these boards can hit speeds of 22mph, sometimes higher. ...
2019 Retrospective // 2020 Goals
Bigger. Badder. Twice as much content as the 2018 retro. a good chunk of my 2019 “have fun” goal group was defined by cycling and photography. this is #shotoniphone It’s that time of year again! Continuing my tradition of goal-setting and self-evaluation (previously: 2018, mid-2017), it’s time to see how I did on my goals for 2019, which I picked a year ago rather haphazardly. Here they are, with scores in square brackets: ...
Shanghai: A Review
Face recognition, fast trains, crazy mopeds, rooftop lust Shanghai Nightscape: seven photos stiched together because my wide angle lens is broken My dad and I were walking into a metro station when we noticed the crowd of police officers. “It’s a pop-up security checkpoint,” my dad explained to me. I had been riding the (excellent) metro system for a couple of days at this point, and while I knew they scanned every backpack before you could go through the turnstile, I hadn’t seen this type of security check yet. ...
2018 Retrospective
I gave myself a performance review these circles represent 2018 First, a disclaimer. I’m incredibly privileged to be able to write a piece like this. By and large, 2018 was a terrific year for me. The toughest hardship I faced was when I was mugged and had to buy a new iPhone. Or maybe it was when a not-so-nice landlord tried to gyp our security deposit. The point is, many people in America and around the world are struggling. (By the way, you should definitely read all three of those longform stories.) This post is purely an analysis of the personal development goals I had set for myself.At the beginning of the year, I set some goals for myself in 4 “buckets”: fitness, work, social, and fun. So how did I do? Here’s my self-assessment: ...
13 Countries in 3.7 Years
I was scrolling through Twitter the other day and I came across this tweet: Conquer Earth looked pretty cool, but as Dustin himself said, to get it to work you actually need to manually input every place you’ve been to. Sad! Since I’m a huge dork, I check-in to every restaurant, shop, park, etc. I visit using an app called Swarm (by Foursquare), and I’ve been doing this for years. And guess what? Swarm/Foursquare has an API to fetch every place you’ve ever checked in to. So I decided to build my own map-with-dots-indicating-where-I’ve-been, and in a couple of hours, I was able to whip up this: Wow, a map with dots! Amaze ...
color study
How to get them smashing colors Getting the colors right in a photo is super important. It’s how you’ll differentiate yourself from most people who just shoot whatever with their phone and don’t edit afterwards. You should be thoughtful about what to shoot and then carefully consider what colors you want to bring out when you post-process. And I’m no expert—I’ll point you to these Instagram profiles so you can get a sense of what I mean: ...
Which iPhone X should I buy???
iPhone X preorders are right around the corner (October 27 @ 12:01 AM) and if you’re a privileged AF tech worker with 1K to burn, you have that date saved in your $50 todo list app and you’re gonna do it, because why not? Same. Screen Size There is only one screen size, you dolt. Carrier Probably whatever carrier you currently have. Color You obviously need to get it in white, because that color provides the most contrast with the new vertical dual camera configuration, which means that more people will know that you have the iPhone X, and therefore are a privileged AF tech worker with 1K to burn. See paragraph 1. ...