Thanks to the awesome culture at FreshBooks, I was able to get a stand-up desk with relative ease! I did do a little research, and it turns out a lot of people are using Ikea’s Fredrik workstation as a stand-up desk. All you really need to do is mount the table top surface at a height that’s appropriate for standing. It’s not easily adjustable so I’d makes sure the height is correct before you screw everything in place.

I’ve been using the standing desk for almost two months now, and it’s great! I’m more energetic when I’m working away in the afternoon, and it’s much easier to think when you kind of pace beside your desk. Some folks in the office are even buying into the standing desk trend now, and from what I’ve heard, they been enjoying it too. We even bought gel mats to stand on!

I’ve also been using the Standing Clock to track how long I’ve been standing. It’s a good tool to be more scientific about your standing desk, and also a good reminder to let you know to maybe sit down a little when you’ve already been standing for two hours.

I’m definitely digging this standing desk trend, and I highly recommend you to try it if your work can allow you to have this kind of freedom. It’s certainly made me feel better at work!

Fast forward to mid-July, I realized that I had made myself that promise 6 months ago. I’ve never ran a marathon, but thanks to all that exercise physiology classes and labs, I knew that training for a marathon took time, I had better get started if I wanted to survive. First stop, research. Thank goodness to the people I knew that were hardcore runners, and so the conversations began.

First, it was buying my first pair of running shoes, then, it was all those dry-fit clothing. My first run was a total of 8 km, child’s play, or so I thought. It was the hardest 8 km I ever ran, and were my legs sore the next day.

Eventually, I got the hang of it. After a few weekends, I started going for 12 km on the weekend. Running being somewhat of a time consuming sport made it hard for me to stick to a schedule. If I came home late one night, it pretty much meant no running. It didn’t help that I had to leave for Taiwan for a wedding in late November. By the time I got back, I had a sinking feeling in my stomach that the training few weeks ago have gone down the drain. At the end of it all, the longest I’ve ran was 24 km, hardly the 32 km recommended distance.

I was also a little frightened because I decided to run the Goofy race, which means I got to run the half and the full marathon. I figured, it’s go big or go home. Besides, the pacing restrictions for the races wear fairly moderate. 16 miles / minute pace was all you needed, that’s pretty much a walking pace!

I’m also proud to say that I raised $1046.00 USD for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. A big thanks to all those who donated!

With more encouragement, I arrived in Florida, where thankfully I got to stay with Matt and Kevin. I’ll tell you why I’m thankful later.

Race day, I was pretty nervous, but I think I managed to hype myself up enough to not freak out while waiting in the corrals. The game plan was to run slow for the half, and then go all out on the full. That did not happen. The excitement pretty much took hold. They started the race with columns of fire at the starting line, then they got all sorts of fun band, characters along the way.

In the end, I managed to run a 2:30:42 for the half, which was nice, but I knew I had ran too fast, and I was in trouble for the full. I must say I thoroughly enjoyed the whole experience though.

The first thing I did when I went back to the hotel was having a nice, cold ice-bath, then I slept a few hours to recover from the exhaustion. To keep my legs feeling good and not sore like a log, I forced myself to walk around Downtown Disney whilst having a bite to eat.

Feeling surprisingly fine the next morning, I was starting to feel very confident that the race was going to go well. The race started, and I was off again.

It was all going all so well, until the half-way point, when everything pretty much fell apart. My legs, feet were starting to ache. I tried to keep running, until at one point, a grandma passed me speed walking. I chuckled to myself at how slow I was going, and then I started to walk.

The crowed was great, at points, when the crowed was large enough, they forced me to run — I can’t look like a fool walking the course! At other points, they gave me encouragement, shouting out “You can do it Tim!”. I always yelled back “Thank you”, or tried to anyways, the encouragements were nice boosts.

I was so happy when I got to the finish line. I ended up with a disappointing 5:25:53. But, as a first time runner running both the half and the full, I’ll take what I can get!

That night, my legs felt really good, thanks to the ice bath and the massage at Saratoga Springs Resort. Matt, Nick, Shanan, a bunch of other Canadian folks and I went for a celebratory dinner at Le Cellier. Amazing food.

Now here’s why I’m thankful I was with Matt and co. I ended up throwing up everything in the evening. The whole experience took me by surprise, since I was expecting my legs to act up. A good night sleep didn’t help at all either, and I was pretty much on liquid diet for the next few days until I got back to Toronto. Matt and co. took care of me for the rest of the time I was down in Florida, and for that, I’m eternally grateful.

My stomach continued to play games with me for a few weeks, at which point I went to the Doctors. Turns out, an asymptomatic bug called H. Pylori I contracted years and years before was able to finally flare up after the stress of the races. Nothing some antibiotic can’t take care of.

In the end, the race was a great experience. I’d like to take this time to thank all those who’ve helped me along the way! I’m not sure if I’ll ever love running again, perhaps I’ll just stick with my current gym routine, 3 hours a week of exercise sounds just fine. That said, I have a feeling that once warmer weather hits, I just might be back on the roads again.

Though it’s only the beginning of October, I’m already feeling the approaching end of 2010. This year has gone by fast, and it’s been such a ride.

In June, I had the privilege to attend my first Electronic Expo, ever. It was a dream come true, getting to try the latest and greatest video game that are not yet due on the market. My favourite would have to be the ‘Epic Mickey’ Booth, though I might be a little biased. It was also an eye opening experience zipping through Los Angeles on their public transit system. Man do I take the TTC for granted sometime.

I also learned that I’m not all that prone to conventions and expos as I thought I would be. I was exhausted by the end of the week, and that was suppose to be my vacation. I can’t even imagine what it’s like to be a journalist at E3 for a week trying to cover everything.

In July, I went on a trip to Las Vegas with my Support Team at FreshBooks, and well, what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.

In August, I went to Disney World (again) for some R&R. We decided to upgrade ourselves and stayed at the Kidani Village at the Animal Kingdom Lodge. It was an incredible trip, and I definitely had lots of fun strolling through the parks with friends. I also got to visit some friends I haven’t seen in a while, so it was a relaxing trip over-all.

Trip-wise, I’m heading out to Taiwan for my cousin’s wedding, which is always exciting. Then, it’s the Christmas season, which I’m greatly looking forward to. 2010, what a year already.

The past Thursday I had the opportunity to climb the CN Tower for the first time as a part of a fundraiser for the World Wildlife Fund. It was quite an interesting experience.

The whole thing started around the last week of May, when I realized that maybe I should get myself in shape once more. I’ve been kind of slacking off at the gym, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to get things started for the summer season.

And what a start it was. I trained twice a week almost every week since then. I remember dying on the Baldwin Steps behind Casa Loma on my first attempt. I never ran stairs before, not to mention running 144 flights (that’s 1728 steps!) in an all-out, do-or-die fashion. Eventually, with the encouragement of Daniel and Levi, I discovered a pace that worked for me. The key to the race was apparently: 2 steps at a time, and never stop.

My goal was to finish the climb in 15 minutes. Admittedly, this was a little unrealistic, but I thought if I gave myself an impossible time, I’d push myself harder. I was pretty nervous on the day of the run, which sounds a little silly, but I couldn’t help it — the anticipation, the pre-race nerves, what if I totally fatigued half way up?

After all the administrative chores, along with all the security check-points, a WWF volunteer registered my timer wristband, and that was it, time to run. The next 20 minutes were a blur. I couldn’t quite remember when, but I think it was around floor 47 when I told myself that I was insanely stupid for signing up for such a task. My legs were on fire. Reading the flight numbers slowly go up by one was a torture, I had to force myself to stop counting. After passing the 100th flight of stairs, my legs were done with 2 stairs at a time, I had to switch to doing 1 steps, I was also tasting blood at the back of my throat — so that’s why they tell you to breath in through the nose.

I ended up getting a time of 00:17:58, and placed 390 overall — all sorts of disappointing. I was pretty sure that I could do it in 17, but alas, I was almost a minute late. A lot of fun was had by all though, so it was all in all, a great afternoon / evening.

I want to thanks all the folks that sponsored me for the event! I ended up raising $420.00, which is pretty amazing! Congrats to the FreshBooks “old-school” team as well, they placed 3rd overall as a team with the average time of 00:12:47!

Back in second year of university, I received an email in my gmail from the University of Toronto, letting me know that they’ve received my application to the Doctor of Dental Surgery Program for the 2006-2007 session, and requires some further documentation from me. Indeed, the thought of going through with dental school myself will make my mother no doubt very happy, but I couldn’t help but think about pulling someone’s teeth out — a rather frequent procedure for a dentist I’m afraid, and to that, I say “no way!”

At the time I felt bad for this “Dentistry Tim”. People make mistake all the time, and the poor guy might miss his deadline for supplement documentation if I don’t redirect this email to the right guy. So I gave University of Toronto a call, and they said they’ll fix it, all was well.

Fast forward to last month. I received another curious email from the University of Connecticut for Dentistry Tim, this time for Oral and maxillofacial Surgery residency. My first thought was surprisingly joyous. After all, it’s nice to know that Dentistry Tim has made it through his first few years of Dental school, and now is moving on to such a prestigious international surgical specialty. I fired an email back to the University of Connecticut letting them know that they’ve got the wrong Tim, and they should notify Dentistry Tim of his missing documents at once so he can continue to be considered for the residency. Admittedly, I was a little annoyed. How can someone be so careless to put a wrong email address into such important applications? Not to mention, twice!

About a week ago, I got another email from Loma Linda University, telling me that they were thrilled to offer Dentistry Tim an interview. By this point, half of me wanted to fly myself all the way to Loma Linda University and pose as Dentistry Tim. Imagine the possibilities:

Loma Linda: So, tell me why, in terms of of your ability and experiences, we should accept you into our residency?
Me: Well, I once knocked a kid over and some teeth fell out!
Loma Linda: … Uh…. wha…. umm… I beg your pardon?

Needless to say, doing so would probably lend me some jail time for identity theft. So I laughed it off and gave Loma Linda University a call, letting them know that they’ve got the wrong Tim.

At this point, even my friends thought it was rather ridiculous, one joked that one day I’ll get a password reset email for an account of some sort:

I laughed it off, and went on my merry way… until today, when another email popped in for Dentistry Tim, except, not Dentistry related at all:

Looks like Dentistry Tim managed to buy custom car parts using the wrong email address. Not only is this guy a Dentist, he also drive nice cars. One would think he still have lots of education loans to pay off, but that’s outside of my knowledge regarding Dentistry Tim.

What I do know though, is his address, and I feel like writing him a post card, complete with a photo of the CN tower on the back, and write something along the lines of “You know that interview? Yea, you would’ve missed it if it wasn’t for me, as well as all those due dates for supplementary submissions. So on those counts, do yourself a favour and stop mistyping your email address!” A better idea — ask my cousins who lives in the same city as Dentistry Tim to order copious amounts of Pizza to that address! Okay, only kidding. Though you must admit the thought of it is awfully tempting. I mean, were you expecting me to send a care package with a “Good Luck with Oral and maxillofacial Surgery” note attached?

It’s been a while since I last posted. With twitter so popular, who actually blogs nowadays? No matter. It’s been a busy few weeks getting adjusted to my new life at FreshBooks. It’s been going well. Everyone is so very welcoming and brilliant, sometime, I feel like I’m the one with the least experience in the room compared to everyone else. It’s great though, to be feeding off the energy at work — there’s such a good vibe there, and no days are ever dull. Just take a look at the photo above for example. Who gets to sumo wrestle at work?

Adjusting to the working life has surprisingly been more difficult than expected. I’m constantly finding myself “bored” during the evenings. Not a good thing, bored means unproductive times, and unproductive at the age of 22 doesn’t sound at all appealing. I figured it’s time I started investing more time into self improvement, but I couldn’t quite think of a place to start. There are all sorts of things I could improve on, say, learn how to program again (learn a whole new language while I’m at it), but I almost fell backward on my butt from being dazed and confused when I went to the bookstore the other day trying to find a tutorial book. That’s just say there are a lot of books about programming out there.

Out of frustration, I went back to my favourite past-time — the piano, and started jamming. Half an hour into the session I tapped myself on my forehead and said “duh!”. Clearly, what I needed at the moment was not to learn a new set of skills, but to built upon what I already know, and I was already doing it for half an hour. I decided that for the next few months, my goal is to get my groove on the piano back. Learn a new challenging pieces and expand my repertoire, all the while research a bit into what I would like to work on non-musically.

So that’s the plan I stuck with. I ended up purchasing the “Kingdom Hearts Piano Collection” book (shipped all the way from Japan!). The pieces are quite challenging, yet fun, and will hopefully be enough for me to tackle for the next few months. Currently I’m working on the piece called Kairi. It seemed to be an intermediate piece out of the entire playlist, so I figure I’d start from there and see where it goes.

Until then, if anyone has any great reads in terms of business and marketing, or any interesting reads in general, feel free to suggest them to me. I could use some guidance in picking out some books out of the millions in stores.

I also made a little funny/cheesy self-promotion video when I applied for the position (available after the jump). Freshbooks wanted, as an option, a video to be sent in describing why you’re interesting and how you enjoy helping people. I thought the “call for video”-video that they made set the tone for a less serious self-promotion, and encouraged a more fun and wacky submission. So I started brainstorming ideas with some help from friends, wrote the script, shot the footages, and edited. It turned out to be a fun little project for a weekend, not to mention a chance to revisit my media roots from high school and PTS. Special thanks goes to Dan T, Dan K, Amanda, Heather, Howard, Peter, Wilfreda, Alex T, Alyssa, Shanan, my sisters, and my neighbours for either starring in, or helping me in the making of the video.

Admittedly, there were some concepts that I didn’t present too clearly. In case you were wondering. The “Assist” sequence at the end starts with me chlorinating a pool. When I appear behind the TV at 3:15 I had just fixed said TV, and the last montage of the sequence at 3:44 was me directing my friend Howard on how to do peform an Ultra Combo in Street Fighter IV. Though it should be noted that in real life, he dominates that game (I rarely win a match against him!).

The video was apparently a hit with the crew at Freshbooks, and though they never told me, I think it gave them a good first impression before the interviews. So here’s a tip on job hunting — Anything filed under “optional submission”, is really “required submission”.

I feel both very excited and very fortunate to find myself in this spot, and am looking forward to doing what I can to help Freshbooks and its customers have a rocking invoicing experience.

Let this image serve as a preview of the photo-set to come. Speaking of photo-set, I’m quite stoked to be finally gutting my dust-collecting desktop and refurbish it with some brand spankin’ new parts tomorrow. Then hopefully I won’t have such a hard time processing photos.

Things are finally looking up a bit, hopefully it will get better as this year unfolds.

Well, it looks like I’m headed for another trip to my beloved hometown of Taiwan, with a stop in Hong Kong on the way back. My grandpa is turning 90, which is quite an incredible feat if you ask me. I can only wish that when I’m 90 (if I even get there) I’ll be as fun and loving and mobile as he is.

The not-so-fun part about flying standby is that there’s no such thing as “connecting flights” if you’re flying between two airlines that are not in the same “alliance”. Therefore, I spend hours and hours usually somewhere if I fly the Vancouver to Taiwan route. Last time I did that, I spent 6 hours in the Vancouver airport waiting for a flight back to Toronto on a return flight. Thank goodness there was the 2004 summer Olympics, or else I would’ve died from boredom. Today’s journey will see me at the airport from 8:00pm Vancouver time all the way to 1am — a grand total of 5 hours; a thought that has “tired” plastered all over it.

So wish me a pleasant journey! If anything, the prospect of eating a bowl of authentic Taiwanese beef-noodles will make the long hours flying all worth it.

This year’s headliners features some of the best and brightest in Jazz. Tony Bennett is obviously one of the highlight and will be closing the festival this year. If you’re looking for some retro funk, don’t miss Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings. Grandmaster Dave Brubeck and awesome saxophonist Sadao Watanabe will be making an appearance as well. So get your tickets today!

Strangely the one performance I’m looking forward to the most (and thus, has bought a ticket to) is the British Jazz pianist / singer Jamie Cullum. I’ve bought his past three albums, and so far they haven’t disappoint. I find his style in jazz so interesting and different (to the point where sometime it offends some jazz crowds) that I even wrote a final paper on his performativity to jazz and popular music in my fourth year course Music and the Body.

I was wondering when he’ll come to Canada again, I told myself I’d go see one of his concert if he does. I estimated sometime next year on his next album tour, but the announcement that he’ll be playing the TD Toronto Jazz Festival at the end of June got me all excited. I’ll be with good company too — Heather, Dan T. and my sister Anna so far has told me they’d accompany me to this performance. If there’s anything to look forward to this summer for me, it’s the night of June 30th.

With that, I leave you with Cullum’s ‘These Are The Days’ from his earlier album titled Twentysomething. Enjoy!

These are the days that I’ve been missing,
Give me the taste, give me the joy of summer wine.
These are the days that bring new meaning,
I feel the stillness of the sun and I feel fine.

Sometimes when the nights are closing early,
I remember you and I start to smile.
Even though now you don’t want to know me,
I get on by, and I go the extra mile.

These are the times of love and meaning,
Ice of the heart melted away, and found the light.
These are the days of endless dreaming,
Troubles of life are floatin’ away like a bird in flight.

These are the days
These are the days
These are the days

I thought you said our love would last for ever
Believing that the tears would end for good.
I told you that we’d get through any weather
Maybe that didn’t work out, but we did the best we could.

These are the days that I’ve been missing
Give me the taste, give me the joy of summer wine.
These are the days that bring new meaning,
I feel the stillness of the sun…and I feel fine.