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Hi, I’m Hsu Ken Ooi

just trying to do good, be foolish, chase dreams

Kobe Bryant

"If you're afraid to fail, then you're probably going to fail," he says, laughing. "You know what I mean? Fuck it."

via gq.com

I just watched "Kobe Doin' Work: A Spike Lee Joint", they put a mic on him for a entire game and then had him give commentary after the game on almost every single play. It might not sound that interesting but I was blown away by how much conscious strategy went into almost every play. Adapting to the defense, taking advantage of weaknesses, exploiting mismatches. He's constantly giving directions to the guys on his team.

I don't think it's typical of all players. You can tell by how he talks about it, he treats it like a craft. He studies it, gets genuinely excited about the smallest detail. I don't know how many times he said execution, "it's all about execution".

The thing that I've always loved about Kobe and the thing that I think sets him apart from everyone else in the league is, he doesn't just want to win, he wants bury you. Unequivocally, without mercy, just because he can bury you.

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Posted 2 days ago

My Favorite Superbowl Commercial

I have to give it to Google. I found it incredibly original to tell a complete love story through a search box. I especially liked the part where the user started to type 'long distance relationship advice' and instead erased it and typed 'jobs in paris'.

Amid all of the ads about beer, cars and hot women, it was simple, inventive and sweet. Things that everyone can relate with and just the kind of personality that Google wants to be associated with. Google really stood out from the rest of the noise with this ad.

It had the girls at my superbowl party googly-eyed, pun unanticipated but appreciated.

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Posted 1 month ago

iPad Thoughts

Apple Missed Their Target Price

6 versions of the same product isn't like Apple. The device is also superior when it is 3G capable. I can understand if people don't want to sign-up for the contract but I think offering a non-3G capable version is Apple really trying to drive the price down as low as possible. They wanted it to be cheaper and they're stretching themselves to get there.

Apple's Control of the Rumor Mill is Masterful
Everyone had reported rumors of prices in the range of $800 to $1,000. I'm willing to bet that Apple put those prices out there knowing full well that they were going to come in at $499. $499 is a good price point even without the rumors but setting the expectations at $1,000 makes it a great price point. Lower the expectations and then kill it.

Apple Stock Price Down
There was a crazy amount of hype over this product, similar to when they announced the iPhone. For as obviously amazing of a product the iPhone was, the stock price right after the announcement went down about 5%-8% and sat there for about two weeks before hitting all-time highs. You're seeing similar behavior right now, stock price is down 5% today and probably will stay there (or lower) for a few weeks. Just a guess.

Full disclosure - I bought Apple stock right before the iPhone announcement and again a week before the iPad.

Why Not Full OSX?
OSX wasn't built with touch being the primary method of input. It needed to be on the iPhone OS, it was built for touch. Yes, they put Windows on touch mobile devices.. How great was that user experience?

It's a Giant iPod Touch!
Yeah.. that's true.

iPad Took A Lot Of Work
I don't think most people will notice but Apple had to re-write a lot of their software to make it work with the iPad. They knew that you couldn't just load up the same iWorks that people used on desktops because you don't have a keyboard and a mouse. They actually had to design and re-write how people interacted with those programs, that is not a trivial amount of work. Other companies, one in particular comes to mind, would have made sure existing software worked on the new device and been satisfied with that. That's what sets Apple apart. They realize that if you're asking people to change the way they fundamentally interact with the device, you need to write the software to reflect that.

Am I Buying One?
It's the perfect, sit on the couch on a Sunday, watch TV and surf the web device. Unfortunately I don't really do that. One of my night time rituals is I watch a episode of something (anime, tv shows, etc.) before I go to bed and this would be great for that.. then I saw it didn't have flash which meant no Hulu. Seriously what is the deal with the no flash?!

So I don't know. I want to see it and I'm tempted despite having no real use for it. I'm not the target market though, they're really going after the netbook market. We just bought my mom a netbook for Christmas and this probably would have been a great alternative.

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Posted 1 month ago

Nerds + Weigh Scales

My favorite television ever is Futurama. It's a pretty nerdy show about aliens, the future and created by the same guy that created the Simpsons, Matt Groening (who is from Portland!). A few weeks ago my cousin received a few Futurama toys from his girlfriend, officially making her the most awesome girl friend ever! Apparently KidRobot had made a line of Futurama toys a few months back and she had seen them selling at Urban Outfitters. Like any self-respecting fan we had to get all of them!

It's not so easy though. There are a total of 14 different characters sold blind-boxed (you aren't sure what character is in any given box) for $9 a box. Furthermore the appearance of characters isn't uniformly distributed, some are more rare than others. If you just start buying boxes you're going to end up with a bunch of duplicates and wasted money. Hmm.. what to do?

I don't know who originally came up with the idea (it wasn't me) but we found out that the weight of each box was unique depending on the character in the box. Foolish KidRobot people! That meant if we bought the right weigh scale and kept a mapping of weight to character we could avoid duplicates! 

So I over-nighted a weigh scale and set off the next day to the nearest Urban Outfitters. I weighed every single box in the store, probably over 60 boxes, and got a few weird glances from people. I was kind of surprised that no one that worked at the store came over to actually ask me what I was doing. I pretty much took down the display pyramid they had made out of the boxes. Don't worry I built it back for them!

I'm still short 4 of the characters. They're the rare ones which means I need to visit a few more Urban Outfitters to weigh their boxes. Robot Devil, the rarest one (1/96) is fetching $176 on ebay! Check out the full collection (via my cousin) in the 3rd picture of the gallery.

Aren't they awesome!

     
Click here to download:
Nerds_Weigh_Scales.zip (511 KB)

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Posted 1 month ago

Apple Campaign: Think Different

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

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Posted 1 month ago

More Personal Photos

Really just for people that know me, or random people interesting in looking at mundane pictures (mostly food) of my life, I started using photos.hsukenooi.com to post pictures from my iphone. It's like a personalized tweetphoto.com essentially.

I spent a little bit of time designing the look of it. The idea was to make it look like an actual scrap book of polaroid pictures. I used a little bit of shadow on the text to make it look like it was imprinted into the paper and put a small shadow behind each picture to give it some depth. Unfortunately I was a little lazy so I used some webkit effects rather than techniques that would work across browsers. 

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Posted 1 month ago

All I want is to be is..

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Posted 2 months ago

Get Excited and Make Things

I love this poster! It's a riff on a propaganda poster made by the British Government in 1939 when war with Germany was imminent. Meant to reassure the people, it read "Keep Calm and Carry On".

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Posted 2 months ago

Evan Williams on the Early Days of Blogger

Everybody left, and the next day, I was the only one who came in the office

Blogger, a project that he had worked on for 2 years was out of money, his cofounder left, he had to lay everyone off and he broke up with his girlfriend.. jesus what a night.

He still came to the office the next day and kept working. For the next year he worked by himself keeping the service alive. A year after that Google acquired the company.

It's crazy how quickly things can change. Startups are like looking for the light switch in a dark room, you could be standing right next to it or be on the other side of the room, you just don't know.

Evan Williams is the CEO of Twitter and one of it's founders.

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Posted 2 months ago

Christmas Present - Kindle

My brother (@hsuhanooi) got me a Kindle for Christmas! I've been thinking about getting one for a while since I love to read. It was just too expensive in my opinion and I thought the design could use some improvement. This latest generation was definitely an improvement, I thought it could still be better especially for the price point.

What is awesome about it is that my dad's Kindle and mine are both tied to the same Amazon account which means if one of us buys a book we both get it on our Kindle! I'm not sure how the publishing companies are okay with this but it's great for us! It turns out you can actually have 6 Kindles tied to one Amazon account!

I also have to say I love the packaging of the Kindle. The swirling letters on the instruction manual and the material they used are really nice! I didn't know Amazon had it in them!

If you're curious what I got my brother, I gave him a Herman Miller Setu Chair.

Happy Holidays! 

     
Click here to download:
christmas-present-kindle-JjuuptdCCvIcouqdEtyc.zip (2315 KB)

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Posted 2 months ago