General

Most people will tell you that the key to a lasting marriage is compromise. I agree. But it goes deeper than that. Compromise is just one component of a bigger attribute. I’ve been married for more than 13 years. We’ve had ups and downs. Let me tell you, compromise alone would not have kept our […]

I know most of you don’t care about what music anyone else listens to. You might not even listen to music. But this post is not really about the music I listen to. It’s more about the process I go through to discover new music. How I Listen to Music I used to have thousands of […]

  I bought my first iPhone back in 2009 because I thought it would be useful on an upcoming West Coast road trip.  Since then, new apps and new capabilities have come along to make the iPhone an essential piece of travel gear. Here is a list of apps I currently use when I travel: […]

In 1979, there were only 89 breweries in the United States.  Beer had been in steady decline in since its heyday in the 19th century.  However, beer has been making a dramatic comeback in recent years.  There are now over 6,000 breweries in the United States alone.  Combine that with all the breweries in the […]

  Over 16 years ago, I wrote a Chinese-English translator in PHP.  I learned a lot from the project (including a lot of Chinese slang).  It was frustrating getting the encoding conversions right, but the end result was an understandable translation.  I stopped working on it when Google rolled out their own translator, which appeared […]

  As Google grows, the products they produce are continually changing my life by changing how I organize and gather information.  The next decade should be even more exciting, as Google and its parent company Alphabet continue to push their boundaries into new fields such as home automation, artificial intelligence, and life sciences.  Here is a […]

If the domain name you want is taken, sometimes you can tweak it a little to find a version that is available. You can add prefixes or suffixes like -blog or -site. Engadget.com added the en- prefix. Friendster.com added the -ster suffix. You can also add an article like the- (theoatmeal.com) or a- (alistapart.com). Sometimes, […]

  Although there are no official standards for blogging, many conventions have come into widespread use.  Most blogs are treated as online journals, where the author writes thoughts and post them to the public.  It doesn’t have to be done this way though.  It is your blog and you can follow whatever conventions you see […]

  These days with recipes so readily available for free online, fewer people are willing to pay money to buy a cookbook.  Cookbook writers have to up their game. For a cookbook to be successful now, it needs to offer something the free online cookbooks do not.  Either the print book has to be beautiful […]

In 2002 on my way back to the United States from Taiwan, I took advantage of a deal from the airline where I could stay in Osaka for a week before I took the connecting flight back.  I stayed in Osaka and made a foray into the neighboring towns of Kyoto and Nara.  Unfortunately, the […]