Modern household washing machines, at least in America, tend to be infuriating. They are bogged down in horribly confusing interfaces; take a look at the control panel of the one that came with our house, which we just happily got rid of: At first glance it looks like it might not be the worst, but if you actually try to do laundry you quickly discover how annoying it is. The four axes on the…
Instead of a simple blog post, I occasionally create travelogues with more customized formats when I feel like it. I've done this for my recent trip to Hawaii. You can view it here .
Rob and I spent a week in Taiwan at the start of this month. Alishan High Mountain Oolong tea fields in Shizhuo. At the beginning of the year, we got invited to my cousin's wedding in China, and we wanted to attend. It didn't necessarily make sense from a pure logistical perspective to attach Taiwan to this trip - it's somewhat far from Northeastern China - but it's somewhere that I've wanted to…
Preface Rob and I were just traveling in China for a little bit. It was Rob's first time there, and it was a really fantastic time. He's been posting a ton about the more "interesting" stuff: things we saw, places we went, food we ate, and so on. But a whole lot of work went into making the trip run smoothly under the hood, so I wanted to write about all of that specifically, in the hopes that it…
This is the sixth winter that I've experienced upstate, and it has taken the cake for the most wintery winter that I've ever lived through. It's been an absolute joy to take advantage of all of the unique opportunities that arise when water freezes in large amounts. I thought I'd like to write about many of the ways that we enjoyed the cold. Ice Fishing I have wanted to try ice fishing for…
Or: How to Put Way Too Much Effort into Something Frivolous A lobster that tells you when the bathtub is full. ( 2026-01-11 Update : I'm very happy to report that the lobster bath alarm has now been used for real several times, and it has worked perfectly. I know it's a success because several times now, I've heard a song start playing unexpectedly, asked myself "What the hell is that?", realized…
Sometimes I accidentally stain my clothing with something, and the stain doesn't come out with a straightforward laundry cycle. It's a shame to not be able to wear the article of clothing anymore, so I like to experiment and try to figure out how to get the stain out, with the risk of ruining it somehow, if the alternative is not wearing it anyway. I am starting a definitive list here for myself…
Ben, I still think about that little road trip we took last March. I scheduled some time to come visit you in P-Town; you were moving back to NYC, so I was more than happy to load my car up with your stuff and drive us both back down. On the drive back, you showed me your favorite spots on the Cape, and then we laughed at how weird the vibe was going through Rhode Island during the off-season,…
I went to 姥爷's old apartment yesterday. It was surreal pulling up to to the alley. I instantly recognized the tall building at the end where my second cousin used to live on the eighteenth floor, and I recognized the building itself. I think it had probably been nearly two decades since I'd been back last. Entering the hallway and climbing up the stairs, the smell was immediately familiar. The…
I'm walking across the Provincetown Causeway, heading towards the Long Point Lighthouse. It's a rather hypnotic journey across the rocks on this beautiful sunny yet chilly spring morning. I'm the only person on the whole thing. As I stop in the middle and look around, I'm struck by the beauty of it all. The sea shimmers as the tide lowers, the seagulls walk and swim in the shallow water flanking…
When the pandemic hit NYC really badly, back in March 2020, my partner read that copper tape was virucidal, particularly so for respiratory diseases. With the poor collective understanding that we all had of the disease, it was unclear how much fomites contributed to the spread of COVID-19, so he ended up buying a roll of copper tape and putting it on all the commonly-touched surfaces within our…
I was often bored in high school and spent a lot of time doodling. For a period of time, I was into figuring out how to write text with various constraints: writing reversed, writing upside-down, designing ambigrams for all my friends' names, and so on. One day, I was playing around with triangles and noticed I could write "DAVID" in a rather triangular fashion. "DING" was a lot less convincing,…
[Update on 2026-03-13: obviously, this post is no longer accurate after migrating my blog to Mataroa. I'm a huge fan of its philosophy.] My website has been languishing for a few years, and I think there are a few reasons for this. The first is that my site has not been optimized for content creation. Call me a Luddite, but I created this website with a simple tech stack in mind. What this meant…
