Living a calm and productive life in the Philippines since 2019. Prior to that, we spent almost a decade in New York City.
After an adventure in the digital media world in the past nine(!) years with News Deeply and Cignal TV, I’m currently doing innovation and product work for the Palawan Group of Companies, the Philippines’ leading non-bank financial services provider. Our flagship service, PalawanPay, launched in April of 2022 (now with over 15.8 million users). Fintech is a lot of fun.
As for my side projects, Slavatar remains. It will actually end up paying for all my failed (but worth it) experiments. Not bad for a thousand dollar investment I made all the way back in 2015. Still thinking of what to experiment on next. I’d love to work on information products and services. Proprietary, casual spreadsheets and databases are very, very cool and I’ll start publishing these digital gardens on this page soon.
I still maintain a nano-consulting practice with Southpaw Labs LLC, with a few clients on retainer. Side projects are great ways to augment your professional development. I highly recommend it.
I ran the 2023 TCS London Marathon back in April and I’m so happy to be back in my quest to complete the majors (Boston is just a bonus, I’ll be happy with five stars). I recently ran the Asics Rock ‘n’ Roll Series Half Marathon in November of 2023. Berlin is next on my list but might defer it just to slow things down a bit (literally).
I’m currently obsessed with the following:
- What is up with all these amazing games?! - I haven’t had an epic gaming year like 2023 in a really long time. I recently completed The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and fell in love with it. Until I started playing Baldur’s Gate 3. But life happened and I’m currently playing Palworld in my free time. A bit weird and unpolished, but my kids love it.
- Digital Gardens – I’ve been doing a considerable bit of (private) digital gardening the moment I transitioned to Notion (from Evernote) back in 2017. I do all sorts of stuff in Notion, ranging from my yearly dashboard, hobby logs(!), a system to process loose paper notes, weekly meal plans, shopping trackers and all sorts of stuff. I’ve performed way too many garden “remodelings” through the years and these continue to evolve. Even this site runs on Notion.
- Story Formats – Playing with freeform tools like Notion and Day One gave me an opportunity to experiment with story formats. Story formats can be described as structured content that have clear intent. Think “Hot Ones”, “Wordle” and “Humans of New York”. I’ve played around with monthly reviews, show recaps, media diet posts, etc in my private journal. The newsletter “Formats Unpacked” by Hugh Garry explains this much better than I do. It’s also a great way to hone my writing skills as well.
- Revenue Exploration Studios – I like the idea of institutionalized innovation. I read Prehype’s “Acorn Method” book and loved it so much. It’s so good to see my current job through these lens.
I still do the following:
Record all my exercises in Strava, log food in MyFitnessPal, scrobble music in Last.FM, track app usage in Rescuetime, checkin in via the Swarm App, play Wordle and tally finances in Moneywell.
Kept up with my Goodreads Reading Challenge target for 2023 and working on this year’s. I recently enjoyed Fuchsia Dunlop’s “Invitation to a Banquet”, “The Art of Leadership: Small Things Done Well” by Michael Lopp “Generations” by Jean Twenge, “How Big Things Get Done” by Bent Flyvberg and “Some People Need Killing” by Patricia Evangelista (great, but far from “enjoyable”). I also started a rereading project and it’s been so great for retaining and refreshing a lot of things.
Writing 1200 words a day on average with the DayOne app but it’s been going way, way over that lately. I should learn to be more concise.
I’m curious about:
Gold! Personal Holding Companies. Personal Creative Studios. The right amount of exercise. Fiber. Tinned seafood.
Last updated February 29, 2024