From the Featherdale Wildlife Park in Doonside, New South Wales (west of Sydney).
Apr6
Author Archives: Matt Chan
Nov25
Garden Eels
Ripley’s Aquarium of the Smokies / Gatlinburg, TN / July 6, 2012
Aug18
Seahorse
One of the best photos I’ve ever taken.
Mar25
A Melted Candle
And that’s why…. you don’t leave candles unattended.
Anyway, I thought it looked cool when I saw this. You could peel back the layers of melted wax (the lower ones being more settled and solid). My kitchen also just happened to have those objects there at the time which gives this a nice splash of color.
Mar16
RunKeeper Healthy Button Plugin for WordPress
Earlier this year, I was made aware of a partnership between Stack Exchange and RunKeeper to install a Healthy button on the Fitness & Nutrition Stack Exchange site. As a member and moderator of the site, I thought it was an excellent idea to help promote good and healthy content to a fitness audience in addition to other major social media channels. RunKeeper made an official announcement on their blog about a month ago, and the button was officially unveiled on Stack Exchange. I thought that since it was such a neat idea that it would be great to also have it on the Fitness Stack Exchange blog.
Mar8
Warrior Dash for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
I’m running the 2012 Warrior Dash event in New York for fun and to raise money for St. Jude Children’s Hospital. For more information and to donate, visit my donation page:
Why am I running the Warrior Dash?
Feb27
Asking Questions on Stack Exchange
I’ve been an active member on Stack Exchange for almost a year now, mostly on the Fitness & Nutrition site (for which I was appointed a pro tempore moderator). Other than that, I passively browse Stack Overflow whenever I have a programming related question. The whole Q&A format of the site makes it so simple yet the philosophy behind it is what really sets it apart from other Q&A sites.
What I’ve learned so far about Stack Exchange is that thought-out, well-written questions are of “higher quality” and tend to produce better answers. It’s fairly straightforward communication — being to state something clear and concise so that others can understand and properly interpret the question at hand. Just reading what other people have written has taught me to read things a bit more carefully and also really try to dig deep at what people are really asking.
Feb20
Playing with JavaScript, Twitter Bootstrap, and Rails
Over the past few weeks, I had been playing around with various JavaScript frameworks namely node.js and backbone.js. I was trying to see if I could recreate my company’s web application (which is built on a Rails/Flex stack) entirely within a JavaScript environment and create a single-page app. I got the inspiration for doing this from Fog Creek’s blog post on the Trello tech stack.
Node.js was pretty nifty, but rewriting a whole server to do all the (sort of) complexity our current web application is doing was just a little too daunting. I had also looked at express.js for doing some of the heavy-lifting for me, but ultimately decided in the end that this was still too cumbersome for what I wanted to do. After stumbling on some backbone.js tutorials, I thought it would be best to try and integrate that with the Rails stack we currently have.
Feb11
Mechanical Keyboards Rock
I am now the owner of a Das Keyboard Model S Professional, and it rocks the socks off any other keyboard I have ever used. For years and years I have used keyboards that were either rubber dome or membrane switches. When I discovered mechanical keyboards from Jeff Atwood’s blog, I was intrigued but scoffed at the high price of a such a keyboard. Last summer, I upgraded my keyboard from a plain, old keyboard that comes with a Dell computer to a Logitech Illuminated Keyboard.
My typing was never very good. I can sort of touch type, but my fingers a slightly more tuned to hit my keyboards in certain patterns for gaming or coding. The rubber dome Dell keyboard I had been typing for nearly 10 years showed a lot of wear. Switching to the Logitech keyboard was a slight improvement, but getting used to a low-profile scissor switch keyboard was a bit of a hurdle. It took time for me to get used to typing on it, but I was never truly comfortable with it. Sometimes I would miss keys, or my accuracy would be off because I was typing too quickly. It was the closest thing I could have to the Apple Aluminum Keyboard that I use at work. However, even I was getting tired of that keyboard.
Feb8
Guess Who?
Playing the Guess Who? board game:
Me: Does your guy… look like a terrorist?
Friend: Stop profiling. That’s discrimination.
Me: This whole game is about discrimination!
Apparently there is a ton of strategy behind this game.