Phil’s blog

The 3 of you who occasionally look at this blog may have noticed that I’ve changed to a rather minimalist layout. I was inspired by tumblr and set out to find a way to give my blog a similar look, and this is what I came up with. I figured the old layout with all its functionality made me feel obligated to write more substantial posts, while the minimalist tumblr style encourages brevity, so the result would be that I’d do shorter but more frequent posts. We’ll see what happens.

The company is doing well and we took our first trip together which you can see photos of in my last post. Our funding situation is good and the development is speeding up. Our public launch isn’t too far away now.

I’ve been lifting at the gym regularly for the past month or so, about 3 times a week. I’m definitely stronger than I’ve ever been, but have neglected cardio. My natural state is to be rather skinny so when workouts are limited I always opt for lifting because I want to gain weight, not lose it. Ideally I’d alternate between cardio and lifting but it would cut too much into my limited social life.

Actually socially things are pretty good; I go out about 3 nights a week and spend at least one day doing something fun or relaxing on the weekend. Lately I’ve spent a fair amount of time at Houhai, a lake surrounded by bars and restaurants. It’s rather touristy but there are a few good places to eat/drink/chat, and it’s really nice to walk by the water at night.

My Mandarin these days is not so good. The money we paid a few months ago for classes finally ran out and I didn’t buy more because all we did was go through the book or talk freely, both of which I can do with friends for free and on my own time. Actually my character recognition is holding steady or even improving because I chat with people on IM in Chinese every day. Yesterday I even tried chatting with a few of my coworkers in a QQ chat room they set up, but they were typing way too quickly for me to translate so I only picked out the lines that had “phil” in them. My speaking and listening are definitely worse because people usually don’t understand me the first time and vice versa. The real value of this Chinese class is that it forced me to practice speaking regularly, just a discipline thing. I hate getting up early for class so I’ll try to come up with another way to practice…