Life

Feb 28, 2013

Happiest of Birthdays

Jon Lim birthday, cake, happy Life 0 Comment

Yesterday was my birthday.

Typically, I don’t acknowledge it or make a big deal, but yesterday was really fun. It was a work day, but it was just so… satisfying. Here’s the gist of it:

Midnight phone call from my better half
Stepping out of my door and sinking into a full foot of snow
Seeing the stark contrast between our game today and our game two weeks ago
Logging onto Facebook, seeing dozens of messages, and logging right out of Facebook
Awesome birthday cake (as pictured above) from the team
First win at Pandemic, after two false starts, during game night
Arriving home to find my Kindle Paperwhite had arrived, two days after ordering

Just a happy, happy day.

Thank you to everyone who spent the time to say hello and send their love, I will respond to everything. I swear.

Eventually.

Dec 31, 2012

2012: Year in Review

Jon Lim 2012, Year in Review Life

“Oh what’s that, the new year?”

Yes, you know it, it’s time for that ever clicheed end of the year blog post/review/brain fart!

Well, I didn’t do one of these for 2011, and I was only setting goals with my end of 2010 post, so I thought it would be nice to start the tradition of looking back on the past year.

2012 was quite the tumultuous year for me: I left an awesome job with the smartest people I know to attempt to make a product, floundering with no direction and focus, and taking another serious swing at furthering my marketing career. On the flip side: I’m in the best shape I’ve ever been, I dipped my toes into the world of video game development, and I’ve created a solid plan for what the next year is going to look like.

The Good

While not numerous, the bright spots of 2012 were there, and they are long term changes that started this year and will continue to be a positive aspect of my life going forward.

In March, I decided to get back into shape. During university and the working years afterward, I let my physique and physical health slip a little too much. Sure, I was still a force to be reckoned with on the basketball court, but I was starting to feel pudgy and slow, and even worse: I was starting to feel a lot of joint pain.

I re-started my membership at the YMCA and made a commitment: go swimming every weekday morning, and get at least 30 minutes in the pool and continuously push myself to go farther, go faster, and be more efficient. While I didn’t end up going every weekday morning as promised, I went for 115 days and swam a total of 77.9km, which is significantly more than I imagined I could do. The swimming waned near the latter half of the year, but it was because I was rapidly shifting from weight loss over to strength gains, and was spending less and less time in the pool and much more in the weight room.

In addition to consistent time at the gym, I changed my diet. I made a few simple changes: switch from white rice to brown rice, eat equal parts rice and vegetables for every meal, and no more drinking except social situations, limiting myself to two (or four) drinks at the most. This switch accounted for a significant portion of my weight loss, I am sure, because I lost about 20 pounds over 8 months, and have been able to keep it off despite my many binge days of both food and alcohol.

Besides physical health, I also made a dream come true: I built a video game from (mostly) scratch. My buddy Wayne Sang and I built a game for GitHub’s Game Off 2012 competition, creating Octocat Attacks in a little over a month using an open source game library called Flixel and an open source pixel art app called Pixen. Our game isn’t anything revolutionary, but for two rather inexperienced game developers, it was a fantastic experience.

Lastly, it took a while, but I seem to finally have a plan in place for the future. I spent most of this year really soul searching, because it was extremely difficult for me to accept that I could take “just another job” and not take personal stock in what I worked on. I am still narrowing down exactly what I’d like to do, but at least there’s a coherent direction: I want to work for a product that I personally find interesting, building and testing marketing campaigns to drive users and conversions for a sound business model. It still sounds like a lot of junk coming out of my mouth, but I’m working on finding that perfect fit.

The Bad

I spent much of 2012 feeling rather disparaged, and I will be honest: waking up in the morning was tough.

I left The Working Group because I needed that focus on products. It always felt like our products didn’t get the love they deserved, and it was thoroughly affecting my work on said products, so I decided to cut my losses early and move on. I owe those guys everything for giving me a chance and really believing in me and pushing me to grow and become a better person, and so thank you to the partners at TWG and the rest of the team for being one of the best experiences I have ever had professionally.

With my departure from TWG, a very cynical side of me came out. I distanced myself from the community, from friendships I had forged over the years, and from companies and products that I long supported. I can’t really pin this cynicism on anything in particular, I just know that I withdrew into my shell, and I am sure it negatively affected me in ways that I can’t even fathom.

With this cynicism, I managed to lose focus. For a long time. I spent at least 6-7 months in a state of complete shell shock, for lack of a better term, not knowing what would come next and what I even wanted to do. It feels really funny to even write this down, because it feels silly, but it was what it was: I felt like complete shit because I had no idea what was going on. I felt like I was twiddling my thumbs waiting for an idea to strike or for a company to come calling, and fortunately, these feelings of sadness and melancholy sparked what came next: determination to succeed.

This determination is still in its growth stages, and has always been around, but has been beaten to a pulp with my attitude this (and previous) year.

I also can’t discount any of the friends and family that stuck by me, despite not having a thing going for me and being completely abysmal to be with for most of this year. To the true friends who let me be sad and did their best to cheer me up, who knocked sense into me when I needed it most, and who cheered me on regardless: thank you. A million times thank you.

The Ugly

Focus. Still not enough of it. Ever.

What’s next for 2013?

Well, to be honest, I don’t exactly know.

I have laid out a plan to get from where I am to where I want to be, but plans and situations change. It’s something I’ve come to accept.

One of the first things I’m focused on doing: finding a place in the professional world where I fit.

It’s been a really difficult and humbling month and a half of job searches, but I figure that the only place to go from here is up. We create success through failure, right?

Regardless, if you read this, thank you. I appreciate you taking the time out of your day to read what my year has been like, and I hope you take the time to share your own thoughts of the past year. It’s always interesting to look back at the past year and see what memories and feelings jump out at you immediately, versus what requires concentration to recall.

You’ll also note that this was very non-personal. I like to keep the personal stuff to myself and a select number of people, and I hope you understand my reluctance to overshare.

Finally, one thing I definitely need to change in 2013? Writing. I don’t do very much of it anymore. Never mind photography and videography, so 2013 is going to be the year of content.

Happy New Year, friends and family, here’s to you and yours.

Nov 26, 2012

Thoughts on Ubiquitous Photography

Jon Lim Life, Photography

Photography is Fun!

If you follow my blog (hello, all five of you!), you’ll have seen a post I made in October talking about scaling back in social media. Funny enough, there was something else that I subconsciously scaled back: capturing moments with my camera.

I like to think I’m a photographer. I bust out the camera, whether it is my phone or my SLR, at every opportunity and I enjoy snapping a few photos. Perhaps capturing a video while I’m at it.

But lately?

I couldn’t put my finger on my hesitation to use my camera as of late. I enjoy capturing moments, especially with friends, that I don’t get to regularly enjoy. Even when I eat meals that I don’t normally eat, I used to take photos.

So… what’s happened?

I could make excuses like some abject sadness that’s taken over my life, or that my iPhone’s camera no longer wishes to operate without heavy persuasion, or even the very unlikely scenario of extraterrestrial life showing up on Earth to steal my camera.

None of these are true, but I think I finally figured out what’s happened: I’ve shifted my priorities from “capturing moments” to simply “experiencing moments.”

It’s one thing to be able to look back on all the great photos I’ve taken of really unique experiences, but it’s completely different to be entirely immersed in your experience and simply enjoying it. My guess is that ever since Instagram blew up, was bought, and everyone started posting photos of their food and some random brick wall they found (which I was also guilty of), I’ve grown an aversion to wasting valuable experiences by being focused on taking photos of it rather than actually participating.

Sure, I can take photos of food that I am eating, but I will immediately put my camera away after the shutter snaps and pay complete attention to my meal and my eating companions.

I’d rather enjoy what little time I devote to my friends, my family, and the experiences that we share, over being able to show strangers on the internet what I am currently doing.

I raise my glass to you life bloggers and sharers, but it is definitely not for me.

Oct 5, 2012

Being Lost

Jon Lim Business, Life

Hi, my name is Jon, and I’m a bit lost in life.

*pauses for greetings*

I’ve spent the last month flip flopping between ideas, contemplating re-joining the working force, and generally being unhappy. I started September with the idea that I could take a serious attempt at becoming a good developer and building a web product that would give me some level of monetary comfort. Progress was good, until one day I sat down and just did not feel right.

I beat myself up for pursuing ideas purely for the sake of a piddly amount of money, ideas that did nothing to better the world. In short, I felt that I was selling myself short and I was underachieving.

From there, I set out on the hunt for ideas that could make a meaningful impact on the world, to society, or at least better the lives of those who really needed it. However, this started this rather vicious cycle of falling in love with an idea, realizing that I don’t have any sort of expertise in this space, and becoming dejected at the idea of being “just the business guy” in a venture, and then being sad and frustrated that I haven’t figured things out yet.

Right now, there’s no happy ending in sight.

So why would I bother writing all this out and telling people? Because, as awesome person Guy Gal told me when I told him this story randomly: “Success is all in the recovery.”

Things will get better. Eventually. And no, it won’t be because I wait patiently for an idea to strike home; things will get better because I will work hard to create opportunities for myself. I am going to go out there and pound the pavement, meeting new people and learning about problems, and taking a crack at creating the solution. It’s going to be disheartening, frustrating, and difficult.

But who said success was going to come easy?

Sep 4, 2012

On My Actual New Venture

Jon Lim entrepreneurship, new ventures Business, Life

Yesterday, I wrote a post, On New Ventures and Making the Right Decisions. I received an unexpected amount of feedback because, well, it sounded like I was starting a new venture and was announcing it to the world.

Well, I am, but I didn’t mean to use that post for that. Darn.

To the many people who took the time to read the post and personally reached out to offer their support: thank you. A million times thank you to Dessy, Brian, Duane, Jay, Aleks, Rob, and Ray for being the kind and supportive souls that they are.

However, I figured I should probably elaborate a little more on what’s going on.

That sounds like a good idea.

The Next Three Months

Make no mistake, I am definitely starting something new, but a business may not sprout for the next couple of months.

The reason is that when I left my last job, I told myself that I’m going to take a serious crack at making a product. Never mind what, I needed a way to build it in the first place, so I’m taking the next three months to seriously learn development. Seriously.

I’m starting with Python because I’m familiar enough with it (thanks to first year university comp sci and Codeacademy) to get started quickly enough, and it’s a popular enough language now that there are plenty of resources to learn from should I get stuck.

So how will I be learning?

I will be creating small apps that solve little problems I have, or are just plain cool.

Yes, seriously. The first thing I’m working on is a script that connects to the Last.FM API to pull my entire play list throughout the years (approaching 50,000 plays over four years!) to categorize them by genre and separate by the year it was played in. I just want to visualize the change in my musical tastes over the years.

That’s it! Nothing entirely special, but it will give me a good foundation to start with using Python, including figuring out what functionality each piece of the script will need as well as the libraries I’ll need to import to even connect to an API.

I budgeted this week to code and design the main parts of the app, but I refuse to determine the app for the second week because I do not know exactly how much time I need for this. However, I will basically be building apps on a weekly basis until I get to the point where I can create a much larger scale project and feel comfortable taking it from start to finish.

In The Bigger Picture

Three months isn’t a lot of time to accomplish much (despite what my wallet thinks) but I figure it will also give me three months to create a project that I will be happy to work on for the foreseeable future and has a sustainable business model from the start. I’m not entirely sure what it will be yet, and that makes me a bit nervous, but we’ll tackle that problem when we get there.

These three months will be a time for the creation of a solid development process as well as a solid idea generation process. It would be foolish to think that an idea is just going to find me and smack me over the head.

At the end of the day, I just want to spend every single day of my life working on projects that excite and challenge me. This is the beginning of the foundation that I am building.

The unknown can be a tad frightening and intimidating. I can’t say I’ve made the right decision right off the bat, but I know that this is the decision I wanted to make anyway. Besides, what’s the harm in venturing into the unknown?

Let’s go exploring.

Sep 3, 2012

On New Ventures and Making the Right Decisions

Jon Lim entrepreneurship, new ventures Business, Life

For the past week, I’ve been struggling to verbalize (on paper, mostly) how I feel about making the plunge back into starting my own venture. It’s a life filled with highs and lows that always makes you question everything about what you’re doing, so it can be a bit difficult to write about.

Well, as with everything else in life, someone else wrote it better than I ever could.

In a thread on Hacker News where someone announces that they’ve done the scariest thing they can imagine: resigning from their job and starting their own company in the Netherlands, Ed Weissman posted this wonderful comment on what’s to be expected:

The good news: If you think you’ve done the right thing, then you have. Congratulations!

The other news:

Your runway is probably 50% of what you think it is.

Your task is probably 200% of what you think it is.

It will take 200% of what you expect to get your first customer.

Your wife will get scared before you do.

Some customers will take forever to pay.

You’ll probably have to backtrack on your design / architecture.

When you need to sell, you’ll want to code.

When you need to code, you’ll want to sell.

Your MVP will be missing something critical.

At some point, you’ll question your decision.

At some point, someone will discourage you.

You may need to pivot your entire business.

In a year, you won’t be who you are now.

I don’t mean to discourage you. I just want you to bottle that enthusiasm for later use. You’ll probably need it.

Best wishes!

Here we go.

Aug 27, 2012

A Cautionary Tale for PC Builders & A Sad Rant

Jon Lim custom PC, customer support, gaming, NCIX Life, Technology

Almost two months ago, near the tail end of June, I had made the decision to purchase all of the parts I would need to build a computer rig that would be strong enough to play the latest and greatest computer games that were coming out. That’s all I wanted out of it.

That’s right, I was joining the ranks of PC builders everywhere.

I chose to purchase practically everything from NCIX because they have convenient locations for me, their prices were great, and I’ve purchased some gaming-related peripherals from them before without any issues. Sure, there was that initial snafu of “your motherboard isn’t ready yet, so… wait a week, thanks” which was fine by me, I was off to Los Angeles for a week, so I could afford to wait.

I came home and picked up all of computer parts on July 11th, a day after I got back, and promptly assembled my computer. It booted up, I installed everything onto it, and it ran like a dream.

An hour after I finished installing all the right drivers, I was off playing the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive beta. Perfect.

Problems? Let’s get some.

Fast forward three weeks: I had been playing co-op Borderlands, when I started noticing some weird artifacting on the screen. I didn’t think much of it, maybe chalking it up to a one time glitch or the graphics card, an MSI Radeon HD 7950, may have been running hot that one time, so I slept on it.

I woke up, they were still present, to the point that my Flash player was no longer working and any sort of process that involved the graphics card could (and would) crash my computer. Checked the temperatures and the graphics card would run at 35 degrees MAX, so it wasn’t overheating or anything.

Crap.

Sent an email to my local NCIX to ask what the hell is going on, and they suggested bringing it in. I brought in my entire tower into NCIX on August 7th, being told almost immediately that my graphics card was defective (was showing artifacts ALL over the screen during testing) and that I could exchange it.

Fun fact: did you know that you can’t do a straight exchange without a box?

I did not know that, being used to just dumping my Apple computers onto the desks of those Geniuses at Apple Stores and being given replacements, so imagine how awful I felt after learning this and having thrown away the boxes the week before. Yes, exactly one week before.

After learning that fun fact, they said an exchange was still possible. Oh good, good good. The real problem: they didn’t have any MSI Radeon HD 7950 Twin Frozr cards in the store. Or in Ontario. D’oh!

Good news: they could take my card (as my 30 day warranty wouldn’t last until the cards came) and hand me a new one as soon as they got them in the store. Their predicted date was August 13th, as they had already placed their orders.

Awesome, I could wait five days. Five gaming-less days. No problem.

Oh, today is August 27th. Where has the time gone?

In the span of the 21 days that I have had a useless gaming computer, I spent 11 of those days (weekdays since the 13th) calling my local NCIX to check if they have it in stock yet (nothing in Ontario still!) and I have tweeted and have been in contact with their Customer Care department.

Nothing has happened. At all.

This week marks an interesting intersection in lengths of time: I have been able to use my gaming computer for just as long as it has been non-operational. I take full responsibility for not having the box (which prevented me from getting a replacement card) but I could have flown to Vancouver, picked up a new graphics card from NCIX, and flown back here to make the exchange.

So a few lessons for those of you who want to build a computer:

Do not throw away boxes. I had no idea this was an actual issue, but I guess when you’re just the retail part of a supply chain, you don’t have much say in the matter.
A 30-day warranty is not enough. If this graphics card failed after the 30 days that NCIX gives each purchase, you can definitely bet that I would be completely out of luck considering I had no box.
Customer Care cannot do a damned thing. They are all great people manning the phones, emails, and Twitter at NCIX, but all they can ever do is investigate. I have had zero progress through any of these channels.
Compensation wouldn’t mean much for this. Maybe my situation is a bit on the super-rare side, but I’m not even sure how to feel anymore. An apology would be nice, but I don’t think I could even ask for anything to compensate. What are they going to offer, the crappy AR drones their phone system keeps advertising?

If you plan on building a computer anytime soon, I hope you can avoid the frustration that I have had to suffer through. This isn’t a cautionary tale against NCIX, just an example of some of the stupid things that can happen.

Best of luck.

Aug 20, 2012

Why Can’t I Focus?

Jon Lim Business, Life

I take pride in being realistic in my abilities, my goals, and my confidence. I live my life with this knowledge: I am probably not smarter than you, I am probably not stronger or faster than you, but I make sure that I do my best to work harder than you. However, working harder than someone else doesn’t necessarily translate into doing better than them, or even doing better than mediocre levels of success.

I think that most people are driven to succeed. They want to provide for themselves and their family, and feel proud of their accomplishments at the same time. Myself included. However, we also want to create balance for important aspects of our lives like family, friends, love, and extracurricular activities like sports and hobbies.

Given that we usually use 8-10 hours a day for “work,” how can we maximize what we accomplish within those hours?

Throughout my years of attempted greatness, there has been one thing that people tell me to do, every single time without fail: focus. It usually comes in a few different flavours: hustle, stop slacking off, be relentless, focus on one thing and one thing alone. You get my drift.

Every time I hear this, I cringe and remember why I don’t succeed at a lot of things: too much aimless focus. I have an idea, get really excited about it, pour on lots of energy into building the foundation for it and simply fizzle out as soon as the work starts to happen.

Sound familiar?

If I were to go back in time and have a talk with younger me, I would tell him this: everyone will tell you to focus, to put your head down and get shit done. It’s important that you do, but the step before focus? Planning.

You can focus all you want, but remember that if you have nothing to focus on, you’re basically ramming your head into the wall and hoping that something comes out for you to focus on. You need to be able to wake up in the morning and say “Alright, today is awesome, here’s what I need to do for today.” because you’ve planned the entire thing out months and months (maybe even years) in advance. After all, how can you put your head down and focus if you’re just making it up as you go along?

Time Management from xkcd
From: xkcd – Time Management

I recently left my job (despite my short time there) with one goal in mind: build something. As vague as that sounds, I wanted the freedom to work on something fun and challenging, that puts food on my table, at my own pace, my own schedule, on my own terms. That’s the long term goal.

To get there, however, I need three things: the ability to build, the ability to design, and the right ideas to build. Given that, I’m in the process of creating a three month curriculum for myself to become a better developer (I’m currently terrible), a better designer (couldn’t design my way out of a box), and to spend ample time creating a process to brainstorm the right ideas to build. In addition, I’ve set a demanding set of goals that I must accomplish by September of 2013, exactly one year from when I start my curriculum.

The important part of this whole process is that given the long term goal (build something fun and challenging, put food on the table), I created a goal for the medium term (one year), and then I created a month-by-month set of goals that incrementally get me to the goals I set for one year, which then spawned a week-by-week set of goals that get me to the monthly goals.

At the very worst, I will have given myself plenty of time to learn new skills, hone my craft, and take a serious crack at “building something.” After all, now that I know what I need to do for the next year, the next logical step?

Focus.

May 12, 2012

On Saying Goodbye

Jon Lim Life

Tonight, I found out that my grandmother has passed away.

I’ve mentally prepared myself for this since I visited her in the hospital in San Francisco with my family, and yet this is not any easier. I’ve never had to deal with this in my life, so to put it bluntly: this is not easy.

While standing by her side in that hospital, I realized that I was getting angry. Very angry. Angry at the world. Angry for taking a loved one and putting them under such duress. Angry for bringing concern and worry to the lives of her children. Angry for bringing an entire family to tears.

How could the world do such a thing?

And then I took a look around and realized: my grandmother is a part of each and every single member of my family. Her children, nieces, and nephews have all created wonderful families. Each of us possesses a bit of her in our blood, in our minds, and in our hearts, and that will never change.

You are a part of all of us, grandma, and that gives me peace. Please say hello to grandpa for me.

I love you.

Rest in peace, Elisa Q. Lim.

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