Toluu : stream of random things

stream of random things

Goodbye 2008, Hello 2009!January 4

While the past few years have seemed to just zoom by, 2008 really stands out in my mind as one of the most eventful ones. It saw me as an MBA student at MIT Sloan, working at FriendFeed, visiting Japan and Germany, moving back to the west coast, and get back into regular WingTsun teaching and training.

In the second week of the year I was interning at a 3-month old startup. I quickly realized that FriendFeed was a special place and that I'd love to work there full-time. Which is what I'm doing now (a little sooner than expected). After spending much of my four years living in NYC and part of my first year of business school trying to figure out what job would be right for me—something that has the potential to impact people's daily lives, that I could be passionate about and that wouldn't make me depressed to spend most of my waking hours doing—I'm happy to have finally found such a great fit.

This year will inevitably be a historic one because of Barack Obama. I found myself engaged and curious about the U.S. election process and government policies. It was inspiring to see this man who had blazed his own path make history as our first African-American Commander-in-Chief. I truly believe this to be an important

Swollen Uvula (aka hanging ball thing in the back of your mouth)January 1

So i awoke on the morning of January 1, 2009 really dehydrated. Mouth and throat were ridiculously dry, and worst of all, the hanging ball thingy in the back of my mouth was swollen. It was pretty much in contact with my tongue, which made swallowing hurt (since I was trying to swallow the hanging ball thingy). So i searched Google (on my iPod Touch) for "hanging ball throat" and found out that it was my uvula (from latin root uva, meaning grape).

Then i searched for "swollen uvula", and the first result was: http://swollenuvula.blogspot.com. It has just one post that perfectly described what i felt and said that I should eat ice cream! Now i'm not especially crazy about ice cream, but having to consume it for medical purposes is a pretty awesome concept. :) It said orange juice and throat drops are good too.

What I've Learned in 2008December 31 2008

Esquire is my favorite magazine, and what first got me into the magazine is when I first read one of their "What I've Learned" interviews, where they interview prominent people about the things they've learned in life. So here's my "What I've Learned" in 2008, either through my own experiences or those of friends:

Do what you want to do, not what you think you're supposed to do or what you think others want you to do. This has been a work in progress for me, as I used to fall into the trap of doing the latter. But this year I've made big strides in this department.
When it comes to tough decisions, going with your heart can't be wrong.
The best way I've found to de-stress or clear my head is with good music.
Sleep is good. If you can make time for it, sleep more. My dad advocates 8.5 hrs—I've found that being closer to that number is better than being further.
New York is the best city in the world. I've believed this for a while, but now that I'm over a year removed from being a resident, it rings even more true.
Macs are better than PCs. I've had one of my most frustrating years as a PC user, and finally decided to give Macs a try. It was a good decision. (@MichaelMorrissey–this recent development has no bearing on our disagreements on Apple VS IBM in 5th/6th grade.)
Always, A

Follow-up thoughts on being a Mac (1+ month in)October 26 2008

Just wanted to follow-up on my previous post with some things I forgot to mention and my impressions now that I've been using my MacBook Pro for over a month.

One of the biggest positives of OSX is no longer having the lame Flash bug I had on both Vista machines I was running. This annoying bug only played flash videos for 2 seconds and without sound. It effectively made it impossible to watch most online videos, including YouTube! It's amazing when things work as you expect them to.

The lack of a right-mouse button on the notebook itself hasn't been as bad since I use a USB mouse at work that has a right mouse-button that works fine (without any configuring on my part).

I was frustrated that tabbing with the keyboard seemed to always skip dropdown boxes. Thanks to writing this post, I forced myself to finally try figuring it out and a google search helped me find some help in changing this. I just activated it so haven't used it in normal browsing yet, but one thing i've noticed is that when tabbing to the dropdown box i don't seem to be able to expand the list of options, only cycle through them. Hopefully there's a way to do that, but i'm too tired to search for that answer right now.

All-and-all, i'm pretty surprised how quickly i adapted to using my MacBook Pro and OSX, and it's amazing how clunky PCs feel to me now. So far,

Learning to be a MacOctober 9 2008

It's been about 2.5 weeks since i got my MacBook Pro for work, and so far i've been mighty impressed. As a quick background, i've been a PC user since i was 6, and a ThinkPad user for the past 11 years. I absolutely loved my T42 (running the stable and usable Windows XP). Last year i got an X61 running Vista Business and have been very disappointed. I love the form-factor and size of the X-series ThinkPads, but it was crashing constantly, among other issues. So when i got the choice of choosing a laptop for work, my decision wasn't too hard:

ThinkPads are no longer IBM machines
I've been punished by Microsoft for way too long already
Most of the other people at work use MacBook Pros
I was fairly clueless around Macs/OSX and felt kinda stupid as someone who's supposed to be relatively tech savvy

So how's it been so far? Pretty awesome. :)

The goods:

It is so freakin' fast to boot up, sleep, wake. I remember my X61 took about 5 minutes to hibernate or resume.
Its sleep mode is so impressively battery efficient (as Paul had told me before)
OSX (10.5.5) is really stable. I've had one or two programs freeze up, bu