Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

This year, everyone corralled in Austin and we gave each other terrible (awesome) gifts and played lots of Magic.

Magic:

Franklin’s brisket on the deck:

Hats:

Crazy onesies:

Trailer:

Some other notables:

• Oriana loves Wonderful Christmastime and begged me to play nearly a dozen different covers of it in a row


• To satisfy Oriana’s love of Taytay, I gave her a Saint Taylor Swift candle, a Taylor Swift blanket, and a Taylor Swift “haters gonna hate” mug. She loved them.


• Mozilla thought the world was ending last night (NYE)


• I’m quite fond of the new Star Wars. It has its flaws, but I just had a blast the entire time watching it.

In true trollsy fashion, I have finally associated photos with my family member contacts in my phone:

For completeness, here are the large versions:

TROLL, OUT.

We had our traditional annual Dallas trip this past weekend. Usually we go OU weekend, but there were too many conflicts this year, so we ended up doing it a week earlier. I flew into Dallas directly from SF to join up with the gang, made Oriana pick me up, then we watched UT get slaughtered and hung out at the State Fair.

More photos on the flickr. Here’s also a video of Sam:

And… I’ve started to populate viraj.fail!

A whiles back when Jonney, Mark and I competed in a team Magic tournament in Portland, some of the bounty we got was a bunch of planeswalkers toys. We’ve now got them stationed above their appropriate poster!

omg such nerd

A photo posted by Oliver Wong (@owiber) on Sep 19, 2015 at 4:03pm PDT

NERD OUT.

We finally hung the Magic posters I framed at the old house but never hung up completely. Wallah!

Well, now that I’ve been a front-end developer for the brunt of my career, I’ve finally shamed myself into replacing/updating my blog which had some embarassing code to say the least. Naturally, this new incarnation has almost no JavaScript (for now). :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Anyways, I’ve made the whole blog much more simple and switched from WordPress to just using GitHub Pages.

Maybe this means I’ll blog more again, but don’t count on it. :wink:

This month, I started at Stripe! I’m currently in the middle of a three week stint in San Francisco. The scent of piss is not uncommon here, but the city is very nostalgic for me, so I guess that at least evens things out, haha. I’m enjoying my time here, but I miss my Mozilla. On the plus side, I’m really excited to work with my new teammates and Stripe has great food (breakfast, lunch, and dinner!).

Last weekend, I strolled on over to Chinatown and found that unsurprisingly Golden Gate Bakery was on vacation. My hit rate is probably around 50/50 now, or perhaps a little worse. I debated bringing my camera on this trip, and ended up doing so, but I have yet to take it out of my bag. I’m going to San Diego at the end of the month with my new Stripe team, so perhaps I’ll put it to some use there.

Before starting at Stripe, I had roughly a month off. I did a lot of bumming around, playing some Minecraft, and went to Los Angeles and New Orleans. LA featured the debut of this video:

and resulted in this one:

I’ve got a bunch of random clips of Sam from NOLA where we tried really hard to make him out to be a racist, but I’m not sure what I have gels well, so it may not end up anywhere. I did, however, rummage through a lot of old media and came out with this:

Mark and I have purchased a sweet house and we moved in last weekend. We’ve still got a number of things on order that have yet to arrive, but it’s pretty great. It has two master bedrooms, so it was convenient to co-purchase. Here’s a video of when I took Mozilla to the house shortly after closing:

This is a Facebook album of pre-closing photos.

And here are some photos of the game room:

Ok, blog, here’s my middle school story that I was recently reminded of when someone asked me what I would do if I could turn back time.

First, you’ll have to understand that I was quite a dweeby little asian boy. Surprising, I know. I was smaller than my peers, had rather dorky large glasses, and definitely had your stereotypical nerdy asian boy thing going on. In physical activities, I did alright when I was up against my own weight (running, pull ups, etc.) but not so hot when pitted against others (tackling).

So one day in my PE class, we’re playing flag football. Sometimes, devious kids would try to tie their belt around their waist so that it would be hard to pull off. I wouldn’t do that, but since I was so small, the belts were usually too large for me and one end would hang down really low, so I’d take the end and tuck it into the belt around my waist so it wouldn’t swing wildly as I ran.

My PE coach was all-time quarterback and for some reason on the last play of the game, he throws the ball to me. I somehow catch the ball! Amazing! I start running towards the end zone and weave my way around multiple defenders who were probably in a state of shock that I even caught the ball. I was fairly zippy once I get going so I actually make it to the end zone. Touchdown! I was so proud of myself! That was rather short-lived, however, as some kid quickly runs over to me and yanks pretty hard on one of my flags. I expected it to just fall off, but he apparently yanked quickly enough where the end that I had tucked in created a knot so the belt “tied itself” and he basically lifted me up a short distance by my belt. Oh no! Everyone thinks I cheated now! Shame!

So that’s how I failed to secure glory for the nerds and instead was awarded shame upon my family for cheating at flag football. If I could turn back time, I would figure out a different way to tuck in that belt. I’m pretty sure I would have been king middle school once news of my victorious run made its way through the grapevine, but alas…

So I was talking about this with a friend and decided I’d dust off ol’ blog to potentially hit a broader audience.

Is there anyone out there that also sees the Disney logo and doesn’t immediately recognize the first letter as a D?

So when I see the Disney logo, I have to very consciously shift my focus to see the letter D. I have a hypothesis that maybe this is because I knew of and recognized the Disney logo before I knew how to read and the whole thing turned into a symbol for me during a time when I primarily identified the logo/word by the bottom left part of the D (the part that kind of loops, which is not a very typical D). Honestly, I don’t think it was until late elementary school or middle school that I even realized it was supposed to be a D and not just some made up symbol.

To better visualize what I’m talking about, this is kind of what I initially see:

Versus:

So… anyone else out there have this too? =)

I also have a story about my nerdy self in middle school to blog about, but I’ll save that for another time.