Hackathon Project: Drafts

Posted by Sebastian on November 5, 2011 No comments

So as the hackathon enters its fifth hour, I’ve decided to do a mini historical project.

I have 175 drafts that I want to delete so that I can use my drafts folder for another utility.

So here we begin at the oldest one from 9/28/2006, Over 5 years ago!

The actual sent e-mail “The club was approved with no hitch, and I’m attending the club rush
meeting. I was wondering if I could meet with you wednesday
afterschool or thursday afterschool.

Thanks”

The draft has the messages “So on the things to do list for friday, I think a setup, ”

Referring to the the fact I in fact created a TLC/isafe club at my high school.

————————————————————-

Next item is incredibly deep. Circa 10/06/2006

“Healing can come to different people through different mediums. Through life, one may encounter tragedies that lead to sadness, occasions that lead to joy, and moments that one can not forget. All events can then be applied as healing catalysts where one accepts and moves on as a result of its occurence. Conrad achieves his own healing as he regains his ability to communicate, attends therapy sessions, and valuable interaction experience.
”

———————————————

The next deleted e-mail was from the test answers to AP World :P

——————————————–

11/26/2006, Dreager_Ex sent a PDC deck to me!

———————————————

On December 21st, 2006, clearly during a debate over some decklist, I said “now that’s my quote” in response to

Firemane is still alive and strong!

——————————————–

On 4/12/2007, I have confirmation I won the interact election and my first e-mail as a president (That wasn’t sent). (Fun game, take a drink every time I use an exclamation point!)

”
Hello Everyone!

This is your Interact President-to-be Sebastian Park and I can’t wait for how awesome next year is going to be! However, we still have 8 more weeks this semester, so let’s make the best of them!

Anyway, I just wanted to remind everyone about Spring Fest this Friday (This of course means extended lunch yay!) and that Interact will be selling delicious ice cream sundaes! Come out with your friends and support the club while enjoying these cool treats (the weather forecast predicts that it’ll be a sunny (80 degrees) day by the way!).
Also, there was a lot of interest expressed in regards to volunteering at Spring Fest this Friday! It’s awesome that a lot of people want help but, unfortunately we’re only able to take four people in the booth. Also there was some confusion about whether or not there would be shifts for the spring fest event. Because the event is only one hour, there will only be one shift. The following people have been selected to be working at the booth (sorry to everyone else who wasn’t selected…)

Brenda Gunola? (Maybe Gurrola, sorry if I misspelled your last name!)
Christina Choi
Sebastian Park
Kristal Oveido
Also! We need one person to design

Anyway, I hope for a great finish to this year, and feel free to e-mail me (at this e-mail address), talk to me on AIM (rune*****), or call at (818) ###-####.

Hope to see you at spring fest,
Sebastian Park

”
——————————————–

Shortly after that, I had a bunch of e-mail addresses in an e-mail that’s absolutely ridiculous (like 40 e-mails).

followed were these incomplete thoughts:
“More and more confusion comes in.

I got another e-mail saying that they WILL BE OPEN TOMORROW for tutoring.

Good luck if you’re goin”

——————————

More coming on the way as we move from my freshman/sophomore year of high school to the junior and senior year of high school.

Sebastian

The Blog Paradox

Posted by Sebastian on August 12, 2011 No comments

It would seem that anything I tell myself I’ll do in blog form never gets accomplished…

I completely forgot to upload the pictures yesterday. I have a feeling there must be a correlation of me telling myself in a public platform that I’ll do something without committing it anywhere else and inaction. I generally am the kind of guy who jumps to action pretty immediately so it makes sense that my action patterns resemble a stack instead of a queue.

So those pictures will go up eventually. Just has to be added onto the stack and removed before something else comes up (like laundry and dinner did yesterday)

-Sebastian

Today I will…

Posted by Sebastian on August 11, 2011 No comments

Actually upload those pictures from the summer onto Facebook and potentially onto this blog!

And this counts as a blog post.

-Sebastian

One of those days…

Posted by Sebastian on July 27, 2011 No comments

It’s one of those days for me today. A day where I’m inevitably going to waste most of it…

Occasionally, I have days where all I really want to do is sit around, read in bed, or watch anime. Today is one of those days haha. It’s funny because if I were to make life decisions based on days like today, I’m pretty sure I’d end up an extremely lazy person haha.

Not sugarcoating anything, I just feel like absolute crap. Not physically, but my emotional levels are very low today. I would epitomize the phrase “waking up on the wrong side of the bed”, except this started before I went to bed, nor am I easily irritable… Hm. On second thought, I do not epitomize that phrase at all.

Luckily though, I have a bandaid for days like today…

Back in 2008, I went to Anime Expo with some of my best friends at the time. At that anime expo, I experienced for the first time the full blast of anime music videos, AMVs for short.

Here’s an example of an AMV:

There’s definitely something magical about music to me. When I began this blog post, I was feeling pretty miserable. However, the music I’ve been listening to has lifted my spirits so that I could return back to work. This is the playlist, compliments of Anime Expo 2008′s AMV contest, that’s serving as my 5 hour energy for the day :P

1. How Far We’ve Come - Matchbox Twenty
2. A Thousand Miles - Vanessa Carlton
3. Girlfriend - Avril Lavigne
4. Be a Man - Disney’s Mulan
5. Caramelldansen (SpeedyCake Remix) - Caramell
6. High School Never Ends - Bowling for Soup
7. Bad Day - Daniel Powter

This is obviously a very eclectic list haha. But it works for me.

Now the only question remaining is what triggered this sudden drop in emotional energy. I have a guess, but in the spirit of being an engineer 1, I’ll test this hypothesis (ie, repeat whatever the action was again2).

-Sebastian

  1. http://xkcd.com/242/ ↩
  2. And potentially again and again and again and again and again haha ↩

Getting a consistent blog…

Posted by Sebastian on July 26, 2011 No comments

So as I shift through my own blog and realize that I haven’t made a public post in over a week, I realize that the trick to this blogging thing is to be consistent.

Either set yourself to blog on a specific set interval or don’t. I for one have runs when I pound out 5-6 blog posts in a day and then realize “oh crap, I’ve written too much” and then stop blogging for a little bit. This happened two weeks ago and I have the drafts sitting around to prove it.

As for where I stand right now, I’ve uninstalled the video games that have been sucking my time away from my laptop. Between Matt, Vanya, Russell, and Kan, I’m constantly tempted into jumping into a game with them. Doing so costs me hours of time (I do have some fun with the guys, but it’s still just Heroes of Newerth). So yeah, enough of that. I also am watching Doctor Who due to some unfortunate friends.

Enough of this post heh.
-Sebastian

DRAFT SERIES: It made no sense till the end.

Posted by Sebastian on July 14, 2011 No comments

So I was doing some thinking and I believe I should go through my drafts folders, clearing it out and posting what useful things I’ve found. So far, I’ve gone through about four of them and this is the only one that I wanted to make public.

My thoughts right now about the Draft Series is that I’ll add on to them, completing the thoughts I had when I originally wrote the post with my own. The way I’ll go about this is with the frequent use of “—–” as line breaks to indicate the beginning and end of my former versus current self talking.

There are some 14 other drafts, many of which have completely incomplete thoughts which I’ll delve into whenever I need something to write about1.

This particular post is very short and has an encapsulated message that I really don’t need to expand upon. Honestly, almost two years later, I think I still feel the same way about that manga haha.
——–
This post was originally written September 30, 2009.
——–
Seriously. Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles started off as a great series and continued to be so, but there feels like there’s a lot of meta-meta-meta (that is to say ideas above the ideas above the ideas above the idea) stuff going on here.

Maybe I need to read xxxHolic. Who knows.

Anyway, Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles is over. Finally.

—-

-Sebastian

  1. Which basically means this will probably be the only Draft Series post anyone will see for quite a bit ↩

The problem with drafts, my moleskines, and a new mini-project (non web related!)

Posted by Sebastian on July 13, 2011 No comments

Since the last set of posts dashed together on Monday, I’ve dabbled with a series of blog posts with catchy titles like “Being the initiator/connector” and “The Friend Purge”. Unfortunately, they entered the dreaded draft folder, a location where blog posts go to DIE.
But in all seriousness, I do intend to finish these (somewhat) more insightful posts. They have legitimate1 themes and make (hopefully) decent points. When will they get posted? God knows when… Hell, they might even end up in the “private” post pile, which is where blog posts go to die until I get really really bored and want to read about stuff that happened in the past heh.

In any case, the crux of this post starts now! As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve lately taken to using two moleskines in my daily life to write down any thought I have right away. As a result, I always have at least one moleskine on me at all times. This has been very useful for when I remember random things like buying a waiter corkscrew so I could learn how to use it to writing down useful insights I learn from other people. I was contemplating recently starting a new moleskine specifically for coding features and programming material. However, I’ve decided against it. I really like how my moleskines just represent different parts of the day all the way through. The only question now is how will I one day parse my moleskines into understandable language I can reflect on…

Last but not least, I’ve decided to start a slightly random project. I was cleaning out my downloads folder the other day, when I stumbled upon this ecookbook. I downloaded it over a year ago when I saw it on LifeHacker and never thought of it again. I’ve decided since I do eat meals by myself on occasion (it happens to the best of us), I’ll take this opportunity to both save some cash on delivery and cook these rather simple dishes. Frequently, I find myself with a ton of leftover ingredients from much bigger cooking projects2. I figure if I can get through this book, I can add to my cooking knowledge (thus improving my overall cooking ability), add small delicious dishes that I can whip up with the leftovers from the main course (serving my “god damn, let’s not waste stuff” inclination) and feed myself relatively quickly (10 minutes is a pretty small amount of time for cooking things other than fried rice in my mental cookbook). And since I got to hear all about Julie and Julie from Lawrence Dai (of the Lawrence and Julie and Julie fame), I will picture blog my attempts at making the various dishes in the stonesoup ebook in a similar fashion with the hopes of one day having Lawrence Dai blog about me indirectly.

Now back to “real” work,
-Sebastian

  1. Well, more legitimate than some of the things I talk about on this blog ↩
  2. I had a good quarter pound of gourmet cheese at the end of the school year, slowly being eaten away with the junk food. Not a good use for gourmet cheese in my opinion. ↩

Blocked websites!

Posted by Sebastian on July 11, 2011 No comments

So I’ve decided that I’m going to go ahead and mentally block a number of websites from my general use.

#1) Reddit.com – It’s just a huge timesink and my marginal happiness doesn’t increase that much. Besides, if it’s good, I’m sure someone will send it along. Also, the rather extreme liberal bias is wearing on me and I’m from Los Angeles…

#2) ESPN.com – I really don’t care about sports enough to justify the amount of time I spend on this website. It’s exciting when I’m randomly browsing and see that the USA’s women’s soccer team is playing Brazil, catch the entire game in its entirety and walk away amazed at the great game I just witnessed1… but that was still a couple of hours down the drain and again I don’t care that much.

#3) NBA.com – Same reason as above, except I really do enjoy the NBA that much, unfortunately with the lockout, I may not be enjoying it anytime soon. Did anyone else notice that the NBA website got rid of all of its awesome coverage on players who are still in the league? shrewd move.

#4) Kongregate.com – This is an edited entry! I’ve decided to get rid of kongregate.com because well, it’s a bunch of awesome games and I have over 5000 Kongregate points. I spend way too much time beating games and not enough time reading stuff I enjoy. So let’s cut this out too!

By doing this, I hope to recoup a lot of my time, which I’ll promptly waste on things like this blog.

-Sebastian

  1. seriously. I’ve seen few games that come close to the amount of drama in that one. ↩

Footnotes: Now a mainstay on the blog

Posted by Sebastian on July 11, 2011 1 comment

So in addition to the new theme, I’ve added a new feature to my blog posts: footnotes!

For those of you who don’t talk to me regularly, I love my tangents. I also love specifically defining specific words, explaining what’s going on in that specific passage1.

The reason I’ve implemented this footnoting feature on this blog (beyond the fact it’s super cool) is that I plan to write more posts about some of my non-persoanlly related thoughts (ie, my thoughts on startups, business, poker, etc.). For those things, I strongly feel a need to explain the inner assumptions I’m making with every point2. So there you have it, foot notes!

For those who actually have this blog on an RSS roll, let me know if the footnotes work there. I purposely chose this specific plugin over the Javascript based ones with the hope that it translates well into RSS.

-Sebastian

  1. One of my favorite writers is the late David Foster Wallace who was known for writing some great novels with more footnotes than “actual text” ↩
  2. This being the actual reason why I go on so many tangents. I like to establish the point of reference from which I make a claim. They occasionally come off as unrelated/random, but I like to assure my friends that all of those words have purpose. At least I hope they do. ↩

A new theme and a need for schedules.

Posted by Sebastian on July 8, 2011 No comments

So for anyone who actually reads this blog (and among them, the ones who actually visit the blog) will notice that I have a new theme. Those who’ve read the blog even closer would realize that I proclaimed having a new theme along with a new about me page about a month ago.

Well that was a half lie. In actuality, I had tried a new blog theme, but it didn’t gel well with my plugins. After breaking my blog momentarily yesterday as a result of a faulty Tweet-this plugin (luckily, I know how to mess around with SQL databases so crisis averted), I figured I didn’t need all of my plugins. So I got rid of some and then found this nifty theme in my “update this!” queue and so decided to update it with my WordPress 3.2 to have this new nifty looking blog. This is actually the first change made to the blog design in about three years (the length of time I’ve had this blog for).

Now I want to quickly address the need for a schedule in my opinion. So I’ve gone these past couple of weeks without a schedule and have been royally screwed as a result. I haven’t been able to get a lot of what I’ve wnated accomplished simply because I didn’t put in the time necessary to get said things accomplished. Why didn’t I? I need to work out and I need to read up on Rails, but I just found myself wasting time with one thing or another.

So my resolve now is that with the new update to google calendar, I shall add events to it and schedule in my free time to meet up with people and what not. Given that I’ve moved from full-time at August Capital to part time for the remainder of the summer and I’m devoting the rest of my time to working at Speakergram, this will inevitably lend itself to finding myself with more time to do this or that in the morning and a more flexible sleep/workout schedule.

In any case, I’m finishing up my notes from a pitch I just heard and about to run out of the office. Hopefully I can dodge traffic with my amazing get home quickly abilities!

I’ve been such a kid lately, it’s time to grow up.
-Sebastian