Category: Blog

Before the pandemic, I met with different friends for coffee regularly.  Since these are mostly former colleagues, we often reminisce on shared memories.  Sometimes our conversations drift to other friends and how they’re doing.  We occasionally talk about our current positions.  Sometimes those conversations are celebrations; occasionally they are rants.  That said, their different takes on the same events persistently surprise me.  Everyone has different perspective and life experiences.

One such friend has an identical twin, though I’ve never seen them both together, save for the occasional picture.  I found this fascinating.  For instance, I listened intently of stories where they played on the same basketball team and was very amused by imagining how the opposing players would react to seeing the ‘same’ person twice on the court.  Similarly, I wondered how well face detection technology worked between identical twins.  There are many questions that a geek like me would ask about being an identical twin, mostly debates about ‘nature vs. nurture’.

Continue reading “A fraction of a person” →

A television commercial aired when I was young.  It portrayed who I remember to be Dick van Dyke but may be wrong about that.  First, he instructed everyone on the appropriate use of a Q-tip cotton swab.  Next, he wielded one to clean is ear lobes and very explicitly instructed, “Only on the outside.”  I laughed at the ad and thought it was absurd.  Were they simply guarding against potential litigation about the misuse of cotton swabs?  For all I know, it may have been part of a settlement from an incident.

Since that ad, like many adults, I have had my share of ear infections.  I’ve had instances where my doctor has flushed ear wax from my canals with hydrogen peroxide; the motion sickness nearly made me hurl.  Any legitimate medical professional will tell you, do not put a cotton swab in your ear.  First, there are safer and more effective ways to remove ear wax.  Second, there are many potential complications to putting a swab in your ear canal.

Continue reading “Fatal uses of cotton swabs, cars, and guns” →

Years ago, I watched the news as they mentioned a restaurant that did not have required prices.  I don’t remember if they had suggestions or minimums, but I believe that you could literally pay nothing.  The concept is called Pay-What-You-Want and it’s not limited to restaurants.  My family owned two restaurants, and I worked on many more before I graduated college.  There are real costs to running a restaurant of which most patrons are not aware.  The notion that our livelihood relied on a stranger’s good will would be unsettling.  Still, today the notion of running your business in a PWYW model is still your choice to make.

Continue reading “Deconstructing colorblindness” →

There’s this thing that we programmers do called code reviews.  This means that someone else needs to review your work before it goes ‘live’.  As experienced as we may be, engineers are humans and thus fallible.  Over the years, I’ve used many different tools to conduct these code reviews and many different teams do it to different levels of scrutiny.  Sadly, sometimes that scrutiny is none.  For at least a decade, I’ve advocated that we need to conduct code reviews for all changes.

The downside is that everyone gets busy; there have been times when I’ve been waiting for someone to sign off on my changes for over a week.  This caused me to eventually walk into a teammate’s office and insisted she pull up the code review on her screen (and refused to leave until she did).  She didn’t necessarily need to do it that moment, but when she returned from lunch, it’d be there waiting for her.

Continue reading “My pronouns are he and him” →

I spent my early years in the warm island of Puerto Rico; we left that blissful and simple life a year after my father passed away.  Subsequently, we moved to Florida where we started the next stage of our lives.  My sister and I were in the same bilingual classroom, sharing it with students from first through fifth grade.  However, recess included the entire school; we were collectively unleashed upon a field where we worked off our energy.  It was during recess where I made a new friend, David.

Continue reading “It’s not indoctrination that we fear” →

My parents immigrated three times, and twice during my lifetime.  First, they married in Hong Kong, then moved to Spain.  A couple of years past my birth, we moved to Puerto Rico.  We lived there until my father passed.  We planned to move to Florida, and the rest of us did within a year.  I won’t say that my life was full of strife; life is what you make of it.  I will say that it gave me a different perspective, and oftentimes it wasn’t voluntary nor necessarily welcomed.

I have spent my entire life as an outsider.  Among the most interesting parts of this difference is accountability.  In my high school English class, I was once called “sumo wrestler” by our class president.  My proportional response was to call him a “spook”.  Yes, he was black, and I knew it was a racial slur.  The moment that word escaped my lips, our teacher barked at me.  His uttering a slur was fine, but somehow my uttering a slur was not.  This incident repeated itself weeks later with precisely the same results.

Continue reading “Establishing paternal accountability” →

I reflect back to some of what I learned in high school.  I remember sitting in Mr. Watter’s class while he introduced us to terms like dogmatic, which at the time I thought it was a cross between dog and automatic.  He also went into some detail about some of our social struggles in our history.  Subsequently, he mentioned Senator Joseph McCarthy and his unrelenting search for Communism, even where it didn’t exist.  Why is this unusual?  He taught English, not history, but he introduced me to relevant topics about our history.

I sat in my American History class while we discussed a wealth of different elements of history.  The class ran through the entire year, not just a semester.  Mr. Barnes, whom we affectionally called ‘Coach’, taught that class.  Naturally, we talked about the Civil War and slavery, but we simply couldn’t omit it.  It is an inextricable and undeniable part of our history.  We discussed World War II, but the Japanese internment camps only got about five minutes.  Even upon this terse mention, it was filled with rationalizations about how afraid we were.  We consequently barely mention about how those Japanese, most of them United States citizens, were unjustly impacted.

Continue reading “Why teaching about the Tulsa race massacre matters” →

I got into a fight on school grounds when I attended Parkway Middle School; I think it occurred during seventh grade.  It was a stupid fight; in fact, I’m not sure that it was even a fight.  This is what transpired.  First, my friend Sean and I trash talked about something; honestly, I can’t even remember what it was.  Second, it turned into shoving, with the lame excuse that one of us was violating the other’s space.  Next, we threw punches.  Honestly, we didn’t try to hurt each other.  Other kids surrounded us; each of them fascinated by the altercation and unwilling to do anything to stop it.  We continued a bit like this.

Continue reading “Accountability versus culpability” →

It’s sometime in the mid-2000’s.  I am a bachelor and grocery shop on weekday evenings.  Today’s trip is like any other such trip.  First, I walk through the brightly lit aisles to gather my items; this includes produce, staples, and a 12-pack of Coke.  Next, I go through the checkout to pay for my items; I often use self-checkout these days.  Finally, I simply pack the items into my car and head home.  Today that last step ends up occurring a bit differently.

Continue reading “The problem with ‘reasonable’ and ‘threatened’” →

During my childhood, the sibling rivalry in our home manifested itself in complicated and nuanced ways.  I grew up with two sisters, four years my senior and one year my junior.  My father passed away when I was nine, and thus I ended up growing up as the only male in the house.  As such, in a Chinese culture that is predominantly patriarchal, it similarly colored many of my experiences.  Depending on the nature of the situation, I may possess an implicit seniority over my older sister.  It’s something that is cultural which I navigated strictly by ‘feel’.  To delicately unwrap all those interactions would take more time and space than this simple post.  Similarly, to attribute an outcome as a product of culture (whether Chinese, Spanish, or American) or as a function of our individual personalities would be even more complex.

Continue reading “Sibling rivalry at a national level” →