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DoodlesNovember 3

It’s been a while since I posted any of my artwork here. Here are some of my latest drawings.

A pretty boy. He turned out rather angular.

Kate Bosworth. The proportions are a bit off but I managed to finish this one very quickly.

She was supposed to have freckles, but I chickened out at the last minute and decided not to draw them for fear of messing up her skin.

This was an exercise in drawing hair. I HATE drawing hair.

The assignment was to draw a mechanical bird. I attempted to do a steampunk hummingbird. I’m not sure I’ll ever finish this piece, because I prefer drawing people.

4chan on Obama/McCainOctober 16

I was curious to see if there was any election commentary on 4chan (the darkest corner of the internet) after the presidential debates. Here’s what I found in /b/ in one of the Photoshop threads.

If the candidates were search engines…

If the candidates were phones…

If the candidates were Star Wars characters…

If the candidates were video game consoles…

If the candidates were characters from Heroes…

If the candidates were 4chan memes…

If you recognize any of these obscure memes (I did not), you are a true /b/tard. The answers are IM

Weddings, Weddings, WeddingsOctober 14

Attending weddings is fun. Planning weddings does not seem fun. If / when I get married, my wedding will be held online in IRC, so as to minimize planning. This is the conclusion I’ve arrived at after attending a ton of ceremonies this year, all of which were beautiful but seemed hellish to plan. Best wishes to the happy couples and I applaud you for orchestrating such beautiful ceremonies!

Irene and Shaw (thanks for letting me be in the bridal party even though I didn’t help organize anything :-)

Jonathan and Atsuko

Sheena and Eli

Daisy and Leon (for some reason I don’t have any pics of Leon…)

Robby & Jeanne (the wedding proposal rap)

Polyvore UpdateSeptember 19

Wow, it’s been six months since I last updated this thing. Polyvore has been keeping me super busy! Thankfully, the startup life has turned out to be everything I hoped it would be and more (I’ll write more about that in a future post).

Polyvore is now at 8 full-time employees — 5 engineers, 1 bizdev person, 1 PR/marketing/community/office manager, and 1 PM (that’s me, although I spend most of my time writing code nowadays). Here’s a picture of us crowding around Jianing’s computer, celebrating the dropping of a table that reduced our overall db size and made the site much faster.

The other big update is that after almost a year of squatting with FriendFeed (thank you guys so much!), we finally got our own office on Castro St in Mountain View. It’s a huge retail space with floor-to-ceiling windows and lots of light. It’s definitely unique and the rent’s cheap, but the downside is that it lacks a kitchen and random people keep walking in because they think it’s a store.

Here are some shots of our new office. Keep in mind that we’re not done with decorating yet, so it looks kind of empty.

Why Polyvore?March 24

Last week I quit my job at Google to join a small startup called Polyvore. A lot of people have asked me how I discovered Polyvore and why I decided to join.

My friend Thai showed me Polyvore back in October. “Check out this site my friend Pasha is building,” he said. I instantly fell in love. It was like a combination of online Photoshop and Flickr, but for art instead of photos. I was fascinated by all the cool things people were creating using Polvore — fashion, interior design, artistic self-expression, caricatures, logos, postcards, etc. I started making my own sets and was surprised by how quickly they got comments and “Likes” from the user community. I ended up winning Polyvore’s Halloween contest.

I got so excited about Polyvore that I sent a long email full of comments, suggestions, and complaints to Pasha, e