The shopping experience is the second most important aspect aside from having great content. Instead of going to each artist’s site and navigate their own ecommerce system, Creative Market houses the payment system. Once my credit card info is saved, it’s a matter of clicking buy for future purchases. Once that’s processed, click download and the zipped file is saved to your machine. Now, all my purchases are centralized in one marketplace with a record of all my purchase history.

Finally, each week, they feature free graphics, fonts, and templates that you can download. This is a great way to get hooked and try out the system. These are straight up high quality products that I would have paid for that’s given away.

Some of my favorite graphic sets:

• Picons Ultimate+ Icons
• Modern Heraldry
• Chalkboard Vectors

These graphics come in handy when putting together a custom slide deck. Look for graphic sets that come with .jpg or .png files or you’ll have to export the vector files.

My company sponsored a glassblowing event. The molten glass is surprisingly hot.

@danielhoang You’re invited to join our #glassexplorers program. Woohoo! Make sure to follow us – we’ll DM in the coming weeks.

— Project Glass (@projectglass) March 29, 2013

Would you pay $1500 and a flight to San Francisco for the chance to be among the first 8,000 people to try out Google Glass?

This is really a project to feel a connection to the food I eat. In today’s modern economy, we go to supermarkets to pick up produce and meats. The entire supply chain before that point is out of our view.

In short, what I’m learning is that it takes an enormous amount of labor, sweat, and pain to put together a basic garden to produce just enough food to feed our family. While we’ll never have the economies of scale as production farms, we’ll know exactly what we put into the soil, trace the source of the seeds we use, and harvest the food straight to our dinner table.

The second, and more important benefit of starting this mini farm is that it’s building community within my neighborhood. This is an experiment in change. When we first moved in, there wasn’t very much interaction. When we installed our chicken coop, it became the focal point of the neighborhood. People stopped by to ask questions. Some come by daily to visit with the chickens.

We hope that as more neighbors walk by and see the food being grown, they’ll have a chance to interact more and maybe barter and start an informal market.

Not shown in the picture is my compost bin. We’ve produced nearly a cubic yard of compost, freshly steaming each time you turn the pile. We’ve reduced our garbage bin to the smaller 32 gallon bin and barely fill that at all. Nearly everything we consume is recycled or composted.

Below is a snap shot of our garden up to date. The two beds have been covered with a landscaping fabric to keep in the heat and protect the newly seeded vegetables and herbs.

We put in river rocks from our neighbor’s rock collection. It would be fun to have flowing water but too wasteful to do so.

Here’s a removable bench that sits between the beds. Lola and Amelia are enjoying their time out in the yard.

This stack of cedar slowly became the raised beds. I used 2×6 cedar boards screwed to 4×4 cedar posts. It was very tempting to try complex joinery but I opted to use timber screws for simplicity. Even with that option, it took a better part of a weekend to sand down the boards, seal the end grains, and assemble everything.

Just opened up a twitter account. I gotta join in.

— Daniel Hoang (@danielhoang) August 14, 2007

It’s been a pretty wild journey. At times, it was a complete waste of time. For a while, I went on nearly a year without really checking it much. Today, I find Twitter to be an amazing platform of information. Search has enabled us to listen into conversations, follow tags, and find interesting people to follow. Most importantly, the connections I’ve made continue to this day and many have lead to great conversations and ideas.

Happy 7th birthday Twitter.

As Fall came and Winter drew near, we were concerned of having her out there by herself all Winter. We bought a New Hampshire Red, Lola, to join the flock. As beginner flock owners, we didn’t know that the new bird bullied Jeannie all night long in the coop. This was the first night they spent together after a few days separated. Jeannie lost most of the feathers in her back and neck. She was terrified. It seems that she was destined to be a lonely chicken.

We built her the coop below from scrap wood and kept her isolated from Lola. We later introduced Amelia to the family.

Jeannie had her moment. She lived contently in the small coop. Her roosting bar was smaller and the coop was cozy.

The neighborhood kids walked by every morning on their way to school and named her Blueberry. She was everyone’s favorite.

A few weeks ago, Jeannie suddenly passed. A few days earlier, she appeared a little weak. After feeding her and making sure she had enough to drink, she regained her energy again. Two days later, we came out in the morning and did not hear her unique voice.

Our first chicken had passed.

Like when our cat Pepe passed, Jeannie was had a special place in our hearts. Our time with her was fairly limited but she was part of the family. Her voice will be missed. Her willingness to be held and hugged will be missed.

Jeannie, we’ll miss you. You’re now in a better place. No one will bully you anymore.

PS: My wife made the headstone where she was buried in the yard. Someone came by and left the blue wind wheel. I’m sure it’s the kids that come by each morning and named her Blueberry.

When I first served for the City of Davis, it was my first attempt at being engaged in local government and a chance to exercise my Masters in Public Policy. Years went by as I continued on to consulting and I became disconnected. This is a great leap back into local government in a much bigger City. It’s very exciting to be a part of a thriving City in a tech hub and having the opportunity to inform the future growth of technology in Seattle.

A few of my interest areas include bridging the digital divide. We’re starting to see a flatter world. Although the economic divide continues to get bigger and bigger, closing the technology divide will enable everyone equal opportunity to education, communications, and employment opportunities. Platforms such as Coursera is enabling education to the masses at zero cost. Khan Academy is changing the way we learn.

My other interest is pushing for Fiber-to-the-Home. We’re already observing the Google Fiber pilot in Kansas. Having lived through the transition from no Internet to dial up to broadband, I’m excited to see the next evolution of connectivity. We are starting to pave the road for future data intensive applications such as streaming 4K video. Collaboration technology will push us further and enable us to share video, datasets, etc.

I look forward to contributing to the conversation. Leave a comment or contact me if you have opinions on the subject.

The 12 megapixel image sensor doesn’t capture 12 million pixels of color and data. It records a moment in time. It freezes time and brings us back to that moment when we were happiest. It takes us back to a time where we felt something, where we were connected to something.

Find the connection. Find the emotion.

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Don’t get caught in tunnel vision. Stop, smell the roses, refresh your perspective.