Mailbucket.org appears to have disappeared entirely

I tried setting up some mailbucket.org feeds a while ago but never got it to work. The website at the time seemed very outdated, so I just stopped tinkering and hoped it might “kick in” sometime in the near future.

Instead, I’ve recently started getting all these failed delivery messages! It took me a little while to remember how these mailbucket.org emails were set up in the first place until I checked my gmail filters and voila! — updated each one to stop forwarding to those mailbucket email addresses. Hope that fixes things, but I’m sad that I’m that much farther away from getting email RSS feeds now

First job, first resignation

 

It’s unbelievable to me how the years have flown by since graduating college almost 4 years ago — and I’m also pretty amazed that I’d been holding down the same job at the same company for almost just as long. In a market where it seems like most of my working friends are already onto their second or third employer or career path since school, I wonder what percentage of professionals my age were actually in the same boat.

In any case, it’s definitely been a very fruitful 3.5 years at my first job — I’ve put my UX skills to the test on many projects/accounts, whetted my appetite for working on sales pitches, and made many new (hopefully life-long) friends! I also managed to finish a graduate certificate in Interactive Design from Northeastern and become a Certified Usability Analyst from Human Factors International!

But beyond these factual, concrete accomplishments, I think what made me the most happy was something else very important — the individual people are the ones who make the environment and the culture through bringing their passion for not just the work but also those people they work with. I’ve been very blessed to have the good fortune of connecting with good people who have brought me to good things in life and this first job experience has definitely been a critical one to my career and personal development. And now I move forward with high hopes of finding these opportunities in the new environments, challenges, and people I meet — and continuing to learn and grow.

I hope to be able to offer my best to this new world — and hope that you do, too, wherever your world happens to be

Dragon Fruit Lesson

Yum! Picked up one of these for about $8/lb just to try it out. It’s been about 5 years since I’ve had dragon fruit when I was in Taiwan. Apparently the official name of this fruit is “pitaya” according to Wikipedia (wiki pitaya) — and diabetics in Taiwan eat it as a rice substitute!

Cut and cubed dragonfruit

The Future of For-Profit and Non-Profit Organizations

Let’s pretend someone asked me what I thought the future will look like for businesses and that they also asked me what I thought the future would look like for nonprofits. This may never happen, but I wish it would, so let’s continue pretending so that I may answer it: The future will be a hybrid and spectrum of the two.

Perhaps this is already happening. There definitely are nonprofits that make millions (billions?) of revenue from donations and selling products or services, but to me, they are really just mini or scaled-back versions of for-profit businesses. And I’m going to take a guess here that the majority of nonprofits are not million-dollar business but rather that most are struggling, grant- or donor-funded organizations who live on the constant threat of having their only source of income dry up and run out. These groups need to be more creative about revenue sources but are probably small, under-staffed, and lack the organizational capacity to get there anytime soon. Meanwhile, the demand for their services are still high and growing, and those who need them will continue to suffer as well.

On the other hand, I imagine a lot more for-profit businesses have a pretty good handle on the supply end of the chain. The problem might actually be the demand for their core products or brand, which more and more consumers are realizing they don’t really need. So you might start to see some of these companies find other ways to branch out into things like having contests to sponsor charities or entrepreneurs/startups to drum up more demand from consumers. In this economy, these businesses are probably experiencing more supply and capacity than they know what to do with — and they might need to lay people off, for example.

So where does this leave us? Well, for starters, the job market is now replenished and brimming with talent that would otherwise be locked up in the same old ways of doing business. Oh, and guess what, there is an increasing demand for services typically run by nonprofits now that so many people are out of jobs and inches (or miles) closer to poverty. I guess in an ideal world, these people would figure out how to reassemble themselves and apply their talent in the most useful, meaningful ways possible, but if that groundwork didn’t already exist, and if people are still pining for a way of life that is now lost because it was clearly not sustainable, then it might be a long future away before it actually happens.

Messed Up or Not?

In response to an email about a TAF conference call for program directors tonight, this is what one fellow director, we’ll call him “DB”, replied with:

I can’t make it tonight…something personal has come up. I also have
some bad news, I can’t make it to TAF this year…sorry guys

Shocked at this news, I sent him an IM to ask what was wrong and this is how it went down:

——————————————————————————

DB:
yea…
my dad is in the hospital

i need to go home next wekeend
ti’s pretty serious

Me:
awwww!
i’m sorry!
hope he’ll be ok soon!
was this totally out of the blue?

DB:
yea i hope so too…
yes
it might be prostate cancer

Me:

DB:
i’m kidding
april fools

Me:
……

DB:
=D

Me:
THAT IS THE WORST APRIL FOOLS IDEA EVER

——————————————————————————

I still think this was pretty messed up, and to prove it, I’m running this poll. Take your vote!

Japanese Yam Sushi Rolls

 

I made an earlier post on making Japanese yam fries — which were delicious, btw — and decided to try making them again, but this time for SUSHI! Combined with asparagus, carrots, cucumber, and avocado, this veggie combination roll is highly recommended! I am adding this to my list of vegetarian-dishes-that-taste-great-possibly-better-than-meat-so-we-can-stop-eating-too-much-meat recipes

Recycled Costco Cereal Box and Magazine Paper

Before

After

I love re-using packaging and turning them into free, usable containers. I also started collecting magazines for their vibrant color spreads. So when I was trying to figure out what to do with this cereal box from Costco, I took out my pile of blue magazine paper to match the theme in this room.

Japanese Yam Fries

I tried making this because I love Japanese yam (steamed over rice) and sweet potato fries. I just cut up a Japanese yam and dipped them into a mix of cornstarch and seasoning (pepper, salt, tumeric), then sautéed in a quarter-inch of high heating oil. Then seasoned after with more salt. Yum!

A DIY public safety announcement

Just the other day, as I was getting in my car in the parking lot, I wiped out on ice that was hidden in a very shallow puddle. Needless to say, not only did I end up bruising myself but I was also left with wet marks on the bottoms of my pants.

Not fun.

It did get me wondering the rest of the day though: How did this happen? I was otherwise fine when I was standing in that puddle next to my car door and opening it. It wasn’t until the very moment that I went to get into the car that I suddenly went sliding and landed practically under the car door. After madly trying to regain ground, I looked down closely and realized there was a huge layer of black ice sitting right below the glistening surface of the puddle.

After thinking back and carefully reflecting on the sequence of events that led to my fall — how nothing indicated to me that the black ice was even there until it was too late — I saw that a number of influences factored into this accident, so I set out to make this PSA to post in the elevator to warn other residents in my building.

How I keep my kitchen towel from falling onto the floor

Binder clips! Great for keeping opened snacks closed,  making clip boards out of notepads, and keeping the kitchen towel from falling off its rack when you dry your hands

Two Easy Steps:

1. Drape kitchen towel over the holder on the oven door.
2. Clip one side of the towel to make it impossible for the towel to slip off.