jeffchin.com

Dave just compiled a video of our trip to San Fran from a few months ago. Beware, it’s random, strange, extreme and contains a lot of slow motion videos! I guess that’s what happens when you get together with your old band from college. I can’t wait to get out there again soon. (on Vimeo)

Yesterday was my last day at AOL. After interning for two summers, more than five years as a full-timer and many dodged rounds of layoffs, I have decided to move onto the next step in my career. There are many reasons why I should stay at AOL, but there are some that make it necessary to leave. I owe a lot if not all of my development to AOL - after all it was my first job right out of college. I didn’t think that my last two weeks would be that difficult, but I have started to realize how many people I have worked and become friends with over the years.

My next company is a small ~130 person company in Rockville, MD called InvestorPlace Media. I’m not too excited about having 495 and 270 in my commute, but I am really excited about the level of responsibility and potential for influence that I can have. I will be expanding on some of my natural curiosity of internet as a Web Analyst, analyzing traffic trends and hopefully maximizing nerdy buzz words for them like ROI, Page Views and Unique Visitors. There is much to learn about web analytics, so currently I have my nose buried in Avinash Kaushik’s excellent and extremely thorough book Web Analytics: An Hour a Day. I saw him speak when he came to AOL, and that definitely piqued my interest in the subject.I’ll miss all the good times, beer bashes, team outtings, the gym, bowling, but mostly the people. It has been an extremely tough choice for me to leave, and it may end up being a great decision or a terrible decision, but I won’t know until I try…

For those of you who have just met my Grandpa, I’m sorry to tell you that he passed away at the age of 96. He was a great man who is partially responsible for bringing over our family from China in the early 1900’s and faced all the challenges and hardships of immigrating to the United States to provide a better lifestyle for his future generations.

I am in charge of compiling a collage of images of him for the services this week. I am lucky enough to be able to go through all their photo albums through the years and find great pictures of my grandparents and family members having fun times with him through the years. The one above is one of my favorites of the 100 or so that I scanned tonight. It’s a picture of him at Dulles Airport. He is wearing a suit, vest and tie, because that’s just how he dressed. He would wear suits, or at the very least, dress pants and a button down shirt and a sweater almost all the time. My grandmother is in the foreground. I’ll miss him.

Scanned Pictures of Grandparents Set on Flickr. Any comments, send them here.

It has been a while since I’ve posted a video to Vimeo. I still have yet to mess around with iMovie long enough to feel comfortable editing together some videos from San Francisco and ones of my Grandma teaching us how to make some Chinese dumplings and pastries.

This video was taken last Christmas (2006). My grandfather has a tradition of “feeding” my great grandparents whenever there’s a family get together during the holidays. It usually involves chicken, oranges, whiskey and burning incense. In this clip my grandfather on my mom’s side tells us the names of my great grandparents.

My first semester of grad school is done. I really eased into the process by only taking one class this time around but plan on taking two per semester and one per summer from here on out, allowing me to graduate in about 2 years from now. I was lucky enough to have a class with little to no homework. My grade will be based on the mid-term paper that I wrote on Approaches to Architecting Systems (nerdy!) and a 16 question final split between memorization and quantitative questions. I briefly scored myself after finishing, and I think I should get a solid to high B on the final - we’ll see how I actually did in a couple weeks though.

So far, I have only good impressions and experiences of pursuing my Masters…now onto much belated Christmas shopping.

update: I emailed my professor, and he said that I got a “solid A” for the course. So far so good…

It’s not my TV anymore. It’s my Macbook laptop. I’ve found recently that it is turning more into what TV executives fear (at least non-forward thinking ones): a world where there is no difference between watching TV on TV or watching TV on your computer. What they need to realize is that the ultimate goal should be, is to gain viewership in any way or fashion. This starts with good television shows, then accessibility. With an innovative business model, you should be able to generously supplement your commercial income from broadcast TV with ad sales from internet broadcasts. Nothing bad can happen from more people watching your show. So, make it more accessible for more people.

My first steps into internet TV started off a little shaky with Joost, and has been rejuvenated (for me), by sites like Hulu.com, or actual network sites that stream full length, high quality shows after they’ve aired for free. Each of these solutions integrate limited commercials into the show, but are still considerably less intrusive than watching it live.

Between Joost and Hulu.com, I prefer Hulu. Joost for some reason went with mandatory downloadable application that you need to run to access the programming, where Hulu, very wisely, just has a web interface with no install. The interface for Joost is not very user friendly. I realize that they’re trying to emulate old-school TV with their gimmicky TV fade out when you “shut off” Joost, and auto-play when you start it up, but I find that annoying. Just play what I want, when I want - please. Hulu.com is much more simple, requires no install and in my non-technical eyeball tests, has better video quality than Joost. Not to mention available programming. Hulu has real TV shows, while Joost has some real shows that I want to watch, but is mostly made up of a bunch of fake channels. This is definitely where Internet TV should be moving, but I just haven’t found the quality of the shows to be very high.  [Edit, don't have an invite to Hulu?  Go to OpenHulu.com]

Finally, there is Vimeo. I post videos there semi-regularly whenever I have time to edit, but there is a bevy of original, entertaining, and high quality (production & video) videos posted there regularly. It is YouTube, but done with class. Vimeo was the first major video sharing site that streams your videos in full HD. If you have been stuck hurting your eyes watching YouTube, Vimeo will feel like freakin’ Lasik for your eyes.

So there you have it, you can see why I’ve been watching my Macbook more often that I’ve been watching my 40″ LCD TV. The convenience, quality, accessibility and availability have really been stepped up in the Internet video arena. Have any of you started to make the switch to Internet broadcast TV?

…and everyone freaks out.

I did it. I completed the Army Ten Miler for the second straight year in a row. This time was much more challenging than last year mostly due to my lack of sticking to a training schedule. Despite my best efforts to post here in order to force myself to run more frequently - work, school, sleep, TV, and basically anything trumped training days. This time around I only ran 136.6 miles over 22.4 hours in 6 months. The breaks in the chart below is when I was lazy.

Unlike last year, the weather was brutally hot. You know you’re in for a long day when you’re hot before you even start running. Last year the temperature was nice and cool, almost cold, which is good because you heat up a ton over the course of 10 miles. Unofficially, I finished in 103 minutes, which works out to be 10:18 per mile. Not great, since last year I finished in ~95 mins, but I was just happy to finish at all. Unfortunately one person didn’t make it through the oppressive heat and passed away at GW Hospital. You can read about that here.

Right now, I’m not sure if I’m up to running it three times in a row. I have 6 months to sit around, get fat and decide later I suppose.

Update: Official Results are in - 92:56 total time!