Author Archives: kung

About kung

Was born. Ran around a bit. Death to be expected in the future. Will keep you updated.

Pre-Flight Procedures

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This post is going up because I’m headed to Boston tomorrow, and that will constitute Monday’s update.

I survived a nasty flu while squaring away my trip to Boston for PAX East. I’m volunteering as an Enforcer, and I’ve already made awesome [E] Chicago friends! Hope to meet awesome people along their lines at PAX East. Anyway, two very nice people volunteered their couches for me via CouchSurfing.org and I chose the one closer to where I will be most of the time – the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. Printed out my tickets, and I should be good to go. I leave tomorrow morning D:

I also got my first shipment from Gentlemen’s Square, which attempts to be your stylist from afar. They send you clothes and then charge you for what you keep, otherwise everything is free. My selection was pretty bad. I think the website quiz worked out pretty badly. I don’t actually know what I like until I see it, so the checkers and formal style were not my thing.

Thankfully, I also checked out Trunk Club in Chicago, which is a similar startup that’s been in operation for 2 years. I met up with Mike, who actually saw me in person and was able to recommend some really awesome clothes. I will definitely be back there when I can afford it.

Oh! I was also terribly offended by my visit to a Doctor of Osteopathy for prolotherapy. She told me that humans weren’t evolutionarily intended to walk on two legs, they were meant to crawl and I was like, “Maybe you were meant to crawl, but I was meant to fly!” Besides which, I had serious reservations about many of the assertions she made.

Well, off to bed. Boston in the morning.

EDIT – Oh! I almost forgot:

Chicago, Week 1: You’re the One for Me

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How I feel about Chicago:

You’re the one for me, you’re my ecstasy, you’re the one I need
-BSB

I’ve been having a blast, but I think I’m living too fast for my body. Got sick doing this:
  • Monday: Moved in. Immediately went to Dance Dance EVOlution.
  • Tuesday: First day of work. Danced with Troy Darnell/Showoff/Angelina/Liliana.
  • Wednesday: Second day of work. Met real Rails consultants. Met up with Paul Holmquist. Code Academy Demo Day. Holy shit. Mind blown.
  • Thursday: Time off after work? No way! Still dance with EVO
  • Friday: Tricking my ass off with Raizen, Dyamond, and Armani

Even though I’m learning a lot about SQL Server, Rails, and the city at my internship, I’m not counting work as “getting things done” anymore. There are a multitude of things that I want to get done, besides learn Rails.

Code Academy’s Demo Day blew my mind with how much everyone got done, and I can’t wait to get started on the million or so ideas in my head. I hope I’m paired up with a brawler as a mentor!

Dancing has been a huge blessing, for the people I’ve met and the outlet it provides. I’m in UIC’s ImaginAsian show for a single dance, which is unfortunately all I can commit to, and I’m also dancing with Troy Darnell, who is a rising pop star. Be skeptical – listen to his music. It’s surprisingly good. If you disagree then come at me, bro ;p

Finally, rounding out the week with tricking and the long ass commute in the cold, which probably made me sick. I don’t care what the science says, cold can make you sick if you’re not used to it (shoutouts to Justin Rosales and Wim Hof, who have shown me that that doesn’t need to be the case).

Sick, sore, singing, dancing, coding. Such is life.

Timeless

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Chilling with Jie Jie 'n kids

Chilling with Jie Jie 'n kids

Last week was a nephew/baby/driving filled blur. My little sister, her friend Amanda, and I all drove to Iowa to visit my sister and her family for three days. My sister runs a daycare and there were kids everywhere. It was awesome.

Something about hanging out with my nephews (and the other children) was incredibly timeless. It was as if time contracted and expanded, looped between lifetimes before coming to a final state of statelessness. I had to slow down and get used to the fact that we were in Iowa for three days, while speeding up in other ways in order to keep up with the kids. My sisters and I reminisced about our childhoods while watching the kids live their own. One day, they, too, would look back on these days with the same nostalgia that we indulged in. Meanwhile, we watched and commented on things the kids did that we had once done.

It struck me that everything I had learned, everything I had experienced, would, for the most part, be experienced again. And so, everything that I had learned would be useless unless I managed to pass it on, in some form or another. There was so many important lessons to teach, I felt, and yet there was so little that was truly new. Each lifetime was like zooming in on a fractal pattern, going though the same patterns with slight variations.

That was a really long-winded way of saying the kids splashed in the mud and peed themselves. We went out to eat with Brad and then Bailey and Riley rode bikes in circles in Walmart.

<3 being an uncle

Code Academy, Day 0

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Code Academy hasn’t even started and I’ve already had my doubts: Couldn’t I learn Ruby on Rails myself? Couldn’t I find my own mentors, Draw My Own Map? Couldn’t I network through Ruby meetups and the burgeoning Chicago startup scene?

All of these questions boil down to, “Do I need Code Academy?”

No. I don’t need Code Academy.

Then why I am still going?

For years, I thought I would have to move to California to surround myself with entrepreneurial, technologically savvy people. I thought that I would have to work tirelessly at perfecting Software Craftsmanship until I was recognized as more than just an idea guy. I thought that I would be alone until then.

“I don’t need Code Academy because I can do it all myself,” isn’t enough to explain why I’m still going simply because I don’t want to do this alone. I want to learn with the most passionate, the most creative, the most surprising individuals I can find. I want to do this in Chicago, for Chicago, with Chicago, to give back to the city that will always be home to me no matter where I am.

I’m going because I want to go. I’m going because I believe in the people. I’m going because it’s my city. And when the Spring 2012 class converges on Chicago, it’s going to be fucking awesome.

Let’s do this thing.

Ideas of March – #IdeasOfMarch

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Blogs are a great way to understand a writer on a personal level. For instance, I'm all about movement arts. That was a really poor justification for using this awesome photo.

This is my semi-participation in Ideas of March, a blogging revival effort. But I’m going to take it in a different direction and just mention thoughts I’ve had during March:

  • Getting back into filming stuff (I hate the word “videography”)
  • How to be more artistically creative/productive
  • Productivity and Facebook (they’re not necessarily antithetical)
  • How thinking about “being” a certain “type” of person is utterly unhelpful to personal growth
  • Facing my fears with Cojourneo
  • Code Academy (more on that on Wednesday)

Finally, Kickstart My Code Academy is going pretty strong. I couldn’t expect anything to come of it, and the fact that people have showed their support is really incredible to me.

Meanwhile, I’ve figured out a way to shove everything onto my credit card. Woo! So the payment will go through for sure. I just need to pay off the minimums until I can secure a source of income. Help me decide what to do!

Fill out my online form.

EDIT – Totally forgot to add that I am starting a paid internship pretty soon, as well. Everything into Code Academy, woot

I thought nobody listened

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Kickstart My Code Academy!

Help Kickstart my way into Code Academy!

But I found more people listening than I could have hoped for. Last week was about getting a fighting chance at going to Code Academy. I have that chance now, thanks to the generosity of 11 people who believe in the magic of learning to code.

The struggle isn’t over yet, though. With almost $2,500 and less than a month to go, any little bit helps. You can help me get to Code Academy by clicking here. Share it or drop me a comment on this post if you have any questions. Even if you just read it, I appreciate your taking the time to do so.

Read, share, and comment on it by clicking here.

Thank you,
Brian

PS, I am going to be announcing a fundraising event soon. It’ll be fun! Drop your email in the subscription box below or follow me on Twitter to stay on top of things.

Ouroboros

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Ouroboros

Last week was about productivity – spending more time creating than consuming. With three tools, it was surprisingly easy: RescueTime, F.lux, and StayFocusd.

RescueTime tracks what windows you keep open and in focus and assigns a productivity score to each activity. It tracks URLs, too, so it knows the difference between Facebook and Ruby-Docs. It’s also extremely helpful to feel like your time is constantly being watched and reviewed. Thanks to RescueTime, I know that I was on the computer about 40 hours last week and I was 80% productive. Most of that time was spent programming for an application.

F.lux dims the light on your monitor at sundown. You can make it stop for an hour at a time. This is handy because it reminds me to go to sleep every hour and I’ve heard that blue light keeps you awake:

StayFocusd blocks websites. I actually spent a week training myself not to go on Facebook or Reddit with this. Watching the timer count down while you’re trying to waste time on Facebook is stressful and works to dissuade you from checking again.

Separately, these didn’t work to focus my scattered attention. Together, they seem to be enough.

There’s something I haven’t been telling you.

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There’s something I haven’t been telling you in these posts. A few weeks ago, my dad got laid off from his employer of 30+ years.

Since I graduated in May, I’ve been dependent on my parents for housing, food, and money while I experimented with alternative sources of income. While I was still financially unstable, my dad’s losing his job was always financially the worst-case scenario in my mind. There are a lot of people dependent on my dad, and he worked 7 days a week to support us. I’m proud of him for his work ethic and for how well he’s taken the lay-off, immediately working with me to apply to new jobs online. At 56, he’s as ready and willing to work to support us as he was thirty years ago.

Last week, I was accepted into Code Academy, the academy for learning Ruby on Rails and web development. I see it as an incredible opportunity to learn with and meet people in Chicago’s blossoming startup community. It’s my dream. It’s what I should have done instead of amassing debt in college. More than just a dream, though, it’s a practical career choice – RoR developers are in high demand. But is it worth $6,000 right now, when it could go to the mortgage instead?

I asked them over and over and this was their answer: “Don’t worry about it. Go to Code Academy.” They can lend me the first $3,000, for sure. The second $3,000 is unsure – with employers still getting back to my dad, we don’t know what our situation is going to be like.

I have been unfairly blessed with parents who have been more generous and understanding than I can ever repay. Someone asked me what emotion I would ideally react to this with, and my response is: Determination. I need to come up with at least $3,000 in a month, but preferably more for my parents’ sakes.

Your help would mean a lot to me. I would appreciate any effort:

Stories

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Last week was story week.

I was worried, at first, because sitting down to tell a story is extremely hard for me. I’ve tried writing 9-5 and my creative process just doesn’t work that way. So, I actually gave up on this goal. But in the middle of the week I realized that storytelling is a part of everything that I do.

I would show you examples in my cover letters, but that’s pretty boring. I did manage to knock out the intro to my next short story. This is another story that no one is supposed to “understand” – rest assured, if I did it right, it should still be pretty to read.

A serpentine dragon coursed across the sky, its glittering scales composed of every star in the heavens, its claws rending the air. Its mouth opened to reveal a giant white pearl, perfectly round. As its maw gaped wider and wider the pearl grew larger and larger, revealing oceans and dimples.

Smoke rose from the wreckage of a tiny cottage on the edge of the forest, a casualty of the dragon’s wild rage. The man stumbled out of it, dazed, but glanced only in passing at the home he’d built with his own hands, fixating instead on the sinuous twists of the dragon above him. He wasted no time climbing on the stacks of firewood in the back to mount the roof.

The dragon soared and coiled in the night sky, a living constellation that the man had no choice but to gape at, in awe. He gave no mind to his safety, so entranced was he by the serpent’s beauty. It roared and shook its lion’s mane, whipped the ground with its fiery tail. The sky shattered, the earth shook, and fire sparked in the forest depths.

The building below him creaked precariously as fire licked up its walls, weakening them from the inside. Still, the man gave no notice. Instead, he reached a hand out slowly toward the dragon. It turned toward him and screamed in fury. Still not satisfied, the man reached up higher and higher. The beast’s tail whipped out, ensnaring him. Its bristling scales grated his flesh as its grip tightened. His scream escaped as a puff of air crushed out of his lungs. His ribcage cracked under its grip, but his eyes never left the dragon. His questing fingers still reached for its eyes.

The cottage burned beneath him and the roof caved in from the heat. His eyes began to glaze over as blood ran down the scales of the beast. Finally, his hand dropped, flopping weakly in the dragon’s grasp. It screamed celestial rage and triumph and dropped him into the flames below.

But his gaze never left its eyes.