Hello! I'm JC Medina.

In 2011, I decided to allocate a percentage of my monthly salary to a conceptual Karma Fund - a personal movement of cosmic goodwill capital governed by three simple principles:

1. It’s an acceptable/humane percentage of your gross monthly salary (you can start with 5%)
2. There should be a layer of interactivity with your act of charity- recipients undergo a certain selection process.
3. Gains from the karma fund are primarily tangible and not just an overall good feeling about yourself. There will always be an exception for intangibles (like not going to hell. kidding).

Mind you, there’s no science to the whole thing and people have been doing this for ages. This is my definition of charity.

Think of the Karma Fund as an exercise in investing, answering the question - “Which one can give me happy returns?”. While the act of charity is designed to be selfless, I don’t see any reason why you can’t also enjoy and learn immensely from the experience of giving.

Investment Mode

The objective is to primarily invest your funds in crowdfunding projects you can find on Kickstarter (and similar websites) - not only does this website allow you to choose from a variety of projects, it clearly states the “returns” through a tiered reward system. It all starts with a pledge, and if the funding goal is met, the amount pledged is charged to your credit card (via Amazon).

Alternatively, as long as you follow the main investment theses (items 1-3) you can explore other funding opportunities offline. It could be in the form of personal contribution to causes like a friend’s schooling, your mom’s entrpreneurial initiatives or even Favors Receivable - skilled man-hours rendered to other people within your professional/personal network pro bono(more on this later). Feel free to experiment.

Should you choose to work with a charity, then the Karma Fund way is to come up with a portfolio of small donations to charities of your choice - the same practice you apply to actual financial investments. One key attribute of the Karma Fund experience is diversity, a virtual trophy case that allows you to monitor, revisit and assess based on its karmic performance. In this context - the more, the merrier.

Favors Receivable

Of course, the Karma Fund doesn’t have to involve real money, people who choose to optimize their savings can still practice and participate in the fund by rendering services with a corresponding monetary value.

To illustrate, you can use the following sample formula:

(Monthly Gross Salary / 240 work hours) * 2 (charity value hour multiplier - feel free to tweak this) = your charity hourly rate.

Say you make US$6,000.00/month then divide it by 240 = US$25.00 multiplied by your charity value hour multiplier x 2 = US$50.00/hour

Going back to the core principles above (item 1) then you have a maximum budget of US$300.00 worth of skilled favors to render based on 5% of US$6,000.00

But what exactly do you gain from here that’s tangible? This is a bit of a gray area and subject to much debate. But here’s the thing, Favors Receivable - based on experience yields better returns in the form of equivalent favors, referrals and even job offers.

Bottom line is, as long as you play nice and don’t charge people for every little thing you do (in moderation of course), the rewards are truly worth it.

Karma Fund Portfolio

My KF portfolio looks like this at the moment.

• 50% Kickstarter
• 10% Charitable Institutions
• 40% Favors Receivable*

I’ve “invested” in 12 Kickstarter projects to date, with a 80% hit-rate in delivering tangible gains. This is my haul so far:

• A really cool MORE/REAL Stylus Cap for my iPad
• Attended the Girl Walk premiere in Brooklyn (also a fun dance party!)
• A DVD of Gary Hustwit’s Urbanized + other fun freebies
• My name written on the wall of the now defunct and dry “What Happens When” restaurant
• The LetterMPress App
• and more to come…

My Favors Receivable has been a great ride so far. This month alone, I’ve designed a logo for a friend, introduced a stranger to some VCs and provided ad-hoc tech support to a friend 8000 miles away.

As for the 10%, this was actually in the form of church donations, money given to the homeless and the like. Nothing quite tangible here, so this considered as traditional charity embedded within the Karma Fund.

It’s Still “Charity”

Not all Kickstarter projects will push through and give you the gains that you want. There was one Kickstarter project I funded that had the noblest of intentions- a rooftop bee farm in Queens, NY. After buying all the supplies and other beekeeping materials, the project failed because the Queen Bee died, twice. These things are bound to happen and when they do, you just have to remind yourself that the Karma Fund is still a charity experience.

In a span of one year, I’ve transitioned from a Blackberry Bold 9700, an LG Optimus V and finally ending up with refurbished iPhone 4. 

The iPhone 4 has a great camera and has effectively replaced my Lumix LX3 as my point-and-shoot of choice. All that without taking up much real estate in my pocket. 

With the popularity of Instragram and other photo sharing apps, I’ve also replaced my original workflow up taking photos with my LX3 + doing a little bit of post-process work on Picnik (shutting down soon).

In celebration of New York City’s first snowfall in 2012, I trekked to Central Park for some cameraphone fun. While my photos aren’t really Explore/Popular material, it’s definitely “better” than what I would normally shoot. This is a walkthrough of my workflow. 

I started out with Photosynth, the great Microsoft (oh, the irony) photo stitching app available in the iOS app store. It’s free and has the amazing ability to produce really nice panoramas. I previously installed the 360 Panorama App ($0.99) but found the free Photosynth app more fun to use.

Far from perfect, there’s a handy feature within the app that allows you to Auto Crop the image above. Here’s the cleaned up version. 

Looking okay so far. I then opened the Camera+ App to do some editing via filters. Since this is snow and I wanted to establish contrast between the white fluffy ice and the trees, I applied the “Night” filter on the image. I then finished it with the “Fashion” filter since it the white was almost luminous. 

I wanted to expand the white space on both end of the photo, with the intention of making the horizon look isolated. For this purpose, I used the AntiCrop application to add more white. In the spirit of Bob Ross, I even added more happy little trees on the side. 

I finished my workflow with this image. Now ready for sharing on Instagram + Path. 

2010 

2011

clientsfromhell:

Following up an online posting for a job. The client offered $20 (I assumed an hour) to manage his tech support team. However…

Client: Okay, so that’s $400 per month and a bonus for performance.

Me: What? I couldn’t even afford my cable and electricity bills on that.

Client: Oh, so you’re…

NYCSSC Dodgeball - Ball Hogs on Flickr.

I signed up for a Dodgeball league here in the city. This is my team, The Ball Hogs.

youngmanhattanite:

Yikes.

Bona

In my quest to earn the Pizzaiolo badge from Foursquare, I somehow managed to sample over 20 NYC Pizza joints in a span of two months. 

It was gross. 

Beauty and Brains. 

Radio silence. The transformation is almost complete. 

So sexy.

You can get a pack of these peanuts mixed with anchovies in any 7-11 (I think). They’re cheap and it’s practically a holiday in your mouth, with the genius addition of keffir lime leaves.

Sprinkle on rice or eat straight from the pack. This is good stuff.

Found it here

ER: Speaking of inspirational moments, in the RW article, the author describes you running 7:30 pace on the treadmill while reading.  He indicates that this raises several eyebrows at the gym.  How on earth do you do that, and what kind of reading do you get done? (Note to readers: when you run a marathon at 5:50 pace, 7:30 pace is that easy!)

TM: It’s funny because some people actually can’t believe I run that “slow.” I love the treadmill.  I feel like I can run forever on one and a lot of times I’ll actually have to talk myself into stopping.  I think it’s great for recovery because it’s a little softer surface and I love that I can run super early in the morning and not worry about the weather. I also really enjoy reading while I run. I get a lot of weird looks. Usually I read magazines or books that I hold open with office clips. I’ll even read the paper. It took me awhile to get the page flip down but now I don’t even think about it.

Saw these curiously-dressed twins walking in downtown San Francisco. Even helped them carry their groceries.

This is their backstory.

SUBJECT: kamote from my garden

Hello clan.

Last Saturday, I harvested a bucketful of sweet potatoes (kumara or kamote).  I don’t know why they came out in weird shapes.  Attached is one.

Take care all
Lina