Jan 23
I’ve written about this before.
Customer Service / Customer Relations is one of the absolute most important things a business can do. When I worked as a server, it was always drilled into our minds that a happy customer tells a handful, but an unhappy customer tells a dozen or more.
I’ve got three stories here, one about good customer service and one about bad, and one that has yet to be resolved.
All three of them happened today. Read the rest of this entry »
Jun 4
A while back, I wrote a post about biking to work, which still stands. Having biked to work the past two days, I still agree with everything I said back then. The main difference is that now I am wearing business-attire (necktie included) at the office, and so I bike to work in a t-shirt & shorts, and change when I arrive at work. I pack a towel just to be safe (Ford Prefect would be proud!)
On my commute today, I was thinking about the similarities between bike commuting and using linux. It just floated into my consciousness, I swear. I’m not grabbing at straws for blog topics. 
Anyways — the reason I thought of it is because I noticed that the freedom I feel while riding my bicycle is similar to the freedom I feel when using this open-source platform.
I know, I know, it sounds cheesy, but I mean it — there is something legitimately liberating about being able to use your computer and not feel so constrained by it. Mac users probably have an idea what I’m talking about. Bear with me here — I’ve thought about it a lot today: Read the rest of this entry »
May 20
It was a warm day, late summer, in the early evening. The sun was out, deep in the sky, and I had just finished packing. I had my plane ticket for Allentown (ABE) to Dayton (DAY), with return trip two weeks later, in a hip bag. I had a few sets of clothing, some CDs, a framed photo I had taken earlier that year, and a few random bits of paraphernalia; nothing particularly notable.
I had just finished applying beeswax to my hair to really spike it out; it was bleached blonde and cut to be choppy and a little long in the front. They weren’t quite bangs, but there was enough to tie off into Anime-style spike-bangs. I wore my dark brown Kikwear jeans with 42″ leg-openings, my blue/white/silver Airwalks (the later “clodhopper” style), a white t-shirt with DeNiro from taxi driver front-and-center, and my black Kikwear jacket that I thought looked rather dashing with its shiny metal zipper.
I had my mom take a photo (pictured right); It wasn’t that I thought I might not be coming back, I just felt like that was a moment that I wanted to have captured on film.
In retrospect, I may not have known it, but my decision to get onto that plane was probably the most life-changing choice I had made up to that point. Read the rest of this entry »
Below is a copy of my term paper written for my Cell Biology course. I wrote it in a slightly less-formal style of scientific journalism, but didn’t spare on the technical details. Feedback, good or bad, is appreciated.
Every year, humans around the world consume an estimated 10 to 20 billion pounds of coffee. (Gale) While some may drink it for the flavor, one can imagine it is probably the psychoactive stimulant, caffeine, that is the puppetmaster, beguiling we Americans to consume 200 mg (approx. 2 cups of coffee), and our northern European counterparts, up to 400 mg, every day. (ibid) For most people, it provides a useful mental edge: sharpening their focus and providing a subtle kick-in-the-pants of chemical motivation. Caffeinating over that sharpened-edge, however, can lead to disorders of sleep, anxiety, and even a jittery anxious quasi-hallucinatory state known as “caffeine intoxication”, all noted by the DSM-IV. (ibid) The other dark side is the silent escalation of tolerance to caffeine’s beneficial effects. Prolonged, regular exposure of caffeine can set up the consumer for an uncomfortable withdrawal period, ripe with headaches, myalgia, fatigue, and anxiety. (Ramkumar et al.) Read the rest of this entry »
In the first part, I talked about Curious George, and in part 2, The Neverending Story.
In this part, I’m going to cover one of the most popular movies from the early 90s: The Little Mermaid.
I remember seeing the Little Mermaid in the theaters. It was back when movies were released every few months, and movies stayed in the theaters for a LONG time. (Our theaters back in PA had it for well over 6 months)
I’d like to preface this post by saying that I think the movie is quite good, and that it represents a paradigm shift in Disney’s movie production — the music score, screenplay, and animation were all done phenomenally and were pretty revolutionary for their time.
But even so… Read the rest of this entry »
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Game Design Workshop, Second Edition: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games (Gama Netw