Category: about me

Pure Vanity.

It isn’t Thanksgiving without the kimchee

22 November 2007.

The dishes are being passed around the table: turkey, white and dark meat, cranberry sauce, gravy, mashed potatoes, sweet potato, stuffing, kimchee…

Maybe at your Thanksgiving there is that dish that is not like the others—the one that reminds you that no matter how twinkie you’ve become, there is still a hint of your ethnic heritage you just can’t get rid of.

At the Korean-American Thanksgiving table, that dish is kimchee.

The sight of kimchee reminds me that in the last two decades, this is only my second Thanksgiving spent with the family. I recall the other one…

[Two (first) thanksgivings with the family after the jump]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 8

My short career in modeling

There are a couple guys in the tech world who are models, have been models, or could be models. A friend said that the combination of tall, dark, handsome and geeky was “totally unfair” to us. (I assume she meant to us guys, but I suppose it could go for girls also—maybe for them it’s like some five year old kid pushing down on all the attraction buttons at once.)

It happened at a party that one of these model-geeks was saying, “The first thing they taught us in modeling class…”

At that moment, I almost said, “The first thing they taught me in modeling class is…” *raises hand high above head* “…you have to be this tall to get in.”

Luckily, I managed to hold back that thought—I wouldn’t want to mess with model-geek’s game.

And thus ended my short career in modeling.

Emphasis on short.

Posted on by tychay 4

I’m popular, attractive, and self-confident!

Great news today! Halle blogs another gem about some social “research” results:

“One involved the creation of mock Facebook profiles. Researchers learned that while people perceive someone who has a high number of friends as popular, attractive and self-confident, people who accumulate “too many” friends (about 800 or more) are seen as insecure.”

High number of friends == attractive? Score! And what happens at 800? Does the Facebook CS team come and beat you with an ugly stick? I thought you’re supposed to troll their tagged pictures to decide about this one. And now that they’ve ajaxified the photos page, it’s oh so easy to do!

Unlike Halle, I’m under 800 friends, but I think it’s getting close. I better stop accepting friend requests…

Okay, one more friend.

Okay, maybe one more friend. 🙂

Posted on by tychay 5

The sound of western medicine working

Antibiotics are a pretty amazing thing.

But in my life, I’ve never seen it work, only read about it in books such as All Creatures Great and Small or heard stories about how the amazing things that happened when my grandfather was a pediatrician.

It’s now more of a preventative, or to make our cattle a little bit bigger, or keep our chickens from dying in their horrible living conditions. But every so often you’re reminded…

Being sick

Being sick

I’ve been sick off and on pretty much continuously since June. This time, it was really unusually bad. A fever brought back the cold symptoms. But the fever was a clue, that maybe, this time, it might be a bacteria also. So when I finally got well enough that I could make it out of my apartment without dying (three days), I scheduled an appointment and got my meds again—the same antibiotic as last time. It wasn’t hard when you have a hundred degree fever plus the same symptoms as before.

On the MUNI ride back, I opened the package, looked at the first two caplets. “My little, red tactical nukes,” I sighed to myself, and popped them into my mouth. By the time I got home, I was so tired from the exertion I fell straight asleep.

Three hours later I woke to noises: a rumbling, a ratatatat, then a whale sound in my stomach. What the fuck? As consciousness returned, this was followed by assorted burping and farting and all manner of disgusting symphony.

I took my temperature: 98.6, spot on. I hadn’t had that temperature in over a week.

So that’s the sound of western medicine working, I nodded appreciatively.

I still have the cold to deal with, but now was the time to eat as my appetite finally came back…and to think, with a small regret, I could’ve really gotten some payback on my brother, some of my housemates, and assorted guy friends.

And this made me think back to a phone conversation I had over a decade ago.

[more sounds, after the jump]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 5

High maintenance

Two of my friends over dinner discussing a third…

“I wonder if she’s ‘high maintenance’.”

Then he immediately adds, “She probably is. Women that pretty usually are.”

I quietly smiled to myself. Not because she was or wasn’t “high maintenance”—I hadn’t a clue either way—but because it reminded of a friend I had in graduate school…

[Experiments in maintenance]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 4

Thoughts on graphic design: colors

Ironing my clothing is always always a reminder that I have an obsession with the color blue that borders on unhealthy. And not just any blue: really dark navy blue. Good thing dyes are synthetic because all of India would still be under colonial rule to keep up with my need for blue clothing.

Blue and me seem to always be brought together. In evangelical summer camp, I was assigned to the Galatians—if I told you that the other team was the Romans who were red, you can guess what color the Galatians were. My high school colors: Blue and gold. My house colors: Page blue. Heck, even that running joke that is the “south bay uniform” wasn’t my choice: my entire wardrobe of blue oxford button downs are actually hand-me-downs from my brother.

I’ve known this for a while now. That’s why when I made my resume five years ago, I chose… red and yellow. The resume is littered with other little design jokes (like the use of rules instead of white space, or the css “resume” garden markup.)

[Favorite colors in design after the jump.]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 1

Collapsing the female wave-function

The solution to the greatest paradoxes of the twentieth century physics is the realization that the observer cannot be separated from the experimental design.

  • General Relativity? The observer can’t tell the difference between gravity and an accelerating reference frame.
  • Maxwell’s Demon? Even the observer’s computation cannot be separated from the physical system that implements it.
  • Quantum Mechanics? Observation collapses probabilistic wave-functions.

There is a simple irony in the above.

A 21st century paradox, shared among my friends and with constant teasing, is how someone like me could both emphatically claim and successfully test as a heavy introvert.

The solution to this slightly less prestigious paradox is: I carry a camera.

Like quantum mechanics, my data collection device changes the experimental design.

[How a camera collapses the social wave function after the jump]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 17

Brain error

Choco-phrenology

19th century German neurophysiologists successfully map out the brain after a transcontinental flight

Researching my last article was amusing, but doing so made me realize an error in something I said last month.

I didn’t recognize someone I should have because I was jetlagged and hungry. She was non-plussed with my behavior and threatened to “take me off her Facebook.” Now, if I were Scoble, I’d be just happy to have room to add a different friend. But I’m not, so I value every person I’ve managed convince into accepting a friend request. This led to this apology-cum-excuse:

“I’m sure you know how it is: visions of chocolate after a transcontinental plane ride will take over the entire parietal lobe of your neocortex—temporary prosopagnosia is an unwanted side effect. It’s a survival thing.”

Since you’ve read the last blog entry, you see the obvious error in my excuse. Clearly the fusiform gyrus is located in the temporal lobe, not the parietal. Doh!

Still, since she hasn’t unfriended me yet, I’d have to say, that it amounts to as good an excuse as any: when in doubt, blame the chocolate.

[Chocolate blogging and another nitpick after the jump]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 0