I tried using Google+ as a means of sharing for two weeks – I really did. But it didn’t stick. First, the sharing from within Google Reader was clunky at best – I had to hit the “+1” or the new “G+ share” button, then select the Reader circle I had made, and then do another click to share – awkward process. Secondly, Google+ just didn’t cut it with what I used Google Reader’s social functionality for. I use Google Reader to read. Google+ is great for sharing snippets and pictures and thoughts – but its not a reading platform, so treating it like a replacement for Google Reader’s sharing functionality was never going to make it. Lastly, the point I brought up from my previous post on different levels of interest on different types of content still rings true – the people who I shared with on Google Reader were opting in to my content shares – most of my friends on Google+ are opting in to my personal shares. The two aren’t always the same.

So, ultimately, I threw in the towel and decided to use Tumblr as an alternative. As you may know, Tumblr is a popular and fairly versatile mini-blogging tool – it lies somewhere between Twitter (where you are limited to 140 characters) and WordPress in terms of simplicity. But, it packs a ton of cool features to make it, from what I can tell, an okay substitute for Google Reader’s sharing functionality:

• a full-length RSS feed so that folks can subscribe to my “shares” from a reading platform like Google Reader
• packs a lot of compelling sharing features (liking, “re-blogging”)
• a browser bookmarklet pretty similar to what Google Reader had (so I can share things as I go)
• support for custom domain (so my Tumblr is now officially http://tumblr.benjamintseng.com/)
• support for Disqus (so it can do comments)
• pretty versatile HTML/CSS templating system so I can do further customizations later

Its not perfect. Its not integrated into Google Reader anymore – so all sharing/interaction will need to be done using the bookmarklet or on the site directly. But, the full-length RSS feed means we can keep reading and the sharing/Disqus functionality means we still can like, re-share, and comment.

I’m hoping my friends who once used Google Reader will join me on Tumblr, and I’m hoping my friends who were using Tumblr all along will welcome me to their world . I just started with the integration, but I am hoping to play around with the templating system to more tightly integrate the two sites in the near future.

(Image credit)

So, when I found out that my girlfriend needed some help with her glaucoma research and that writing software was the ticket, I decided to go out on a limb and help her out (link to my portfolio page).

The basic challenge is that the ophthalmology research world uses an arcane but very difficult-to-do-by-hand scoring system for taking data on a glaucoma patient’s vision (see image below for the type of measurements that might be collected in a visual field test) and turning that into a score (the AGIS visual field score) on how bad a patient’s glaucoma is (as described in a paper from 1994 that is so old I couldn’t find a digital copy of it!).

So, I started by creating a program using the C programming language (developed by the late Dennis Ritchie, and explained in the seminal programming book to the right, who was also one of the two leading brains behind the UNIX operating system) which would take this data in the form of a CSV (comma-separated values) file and spit out scores.

While I was pleasantly surprised that I still retained enough programming know-how to do this after a few weekends, the programming was an awkward text-based monstrosity which required the awkward step of converting two-dimensional visual field data into a flat CSV file. The desire to improve on that and the hope that my software might help others doing similar research (and might get others to build on it/let me know if I’ve made any errors) pushed me to turn the tool into a web application which I’ve posted on my site. I hope you’ll take a look! Instructions are pretty basic:

• Sorry, only works with modern browsers (Internet Explorer 9, Firefox 7, Chrome, Safari, etc) – this simplified my life as now I don’t need to worry about Internet Explorer 6 and 7’s horrific standards support
• Enter the visual field depression data(in decibels) from the visual field test into the appropriate boxes (the shaded entries correspond to the eye’s blind spot).
  • You can click on “Flip Orientation” to switch from left-eye to right-eye view if that is helpful in data entry.
  • You can also click on “Clear” to wipe out all the data entered and start from scratch. An error will be triggered if non-numeric data is entered or if not all of the values have been filled out.
  • Note: the software can accept depression values as negative or positive, the important thing is to stay consistent throughout each entry as the software is making a guess on depression values based on all the numbers being entered.
• Click “Calculate” when you’re done to get the score

Hope this is helpful to the ophthalmology researchers out there!

(Image credit – example visual field) (Image credit – C Programming Language)

• In the upper-right, under the subscribe header, I’ve added a Twitter Follow Button. It’s a quick and easy way to (a) see if you’re already following me (@BenjaminTseng) on Twitter and (b) if you’re not, to do so.
• Today’s web surfers apparently find email/ShareThis too cumbersome and an insufficiently public means of expressing their support for things they read. To keep up with the times, I decided to sprinkle my articles with the “like buttons” that social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook are now spreading. While the quick research I did on how to set up those buttons that you see at the top of each post revealed that these are fairly easy to put in, I wound up being too lazy to edit my WordPress templates by hand and used a WordPress plugin (called, ironically, The Really Simple Facebook Twitter Share Button) to do it.
• I contemplated swapping out my Disqus commenting system with Facebook comments, but the fact that I’d lose all my old comments and that there are enough people out there who either don’t have Facebook accounts (especially those in Asia) or don’t necessarily want to associate their Facebook accounts with their public comments held me back.
• I made a few changes to the Links page to update/remove some old links, revise the right-hand-side column to better match what I read and listen to today, and tack on my Google Plus Profile page.

Nothing too earth-shattering, but hopefully enough changes to keep me relevant with the times .

As I did with 2008 and 2007, a couple of highlights from this blog for the past year:

• I made quite a few changes to my blog, including updating my Feedburner feed, installing Disqus and ShareThis, and moving the blog over to my own hosted site and making the jump from Blogger to WordPress
• Ended an extended >1 year stint on a major client
• Reviewed a video game designed to teach students immunology [Bench Press]
• Upgraded my Blackberry’s operating system
• Read quite a few books on business strategy, including: The Innovator’s Dilemma, The Race for a New Game Machine, and The Essays of Warren Buffett
• Was blown away by the new Star Trek movie
• Attended the 2009 Hot Chips conference on advanced chip technology
• Said goodbye to one of my favorite shows, Scrubs
• Learned the hard way that I should always be chained to my Blackberry
• Wished my favorite browser a happy 5th birthday
• Attended an international, week-long training program that my company holds for third year associates and got a new song stuck in my head
• Bid a sad farewell to Sheldon Dorf, the founder of the San Diego Comic Con
• Gave a belated birthday blog shout-out to my lovely girlfriend
• Had some fun with a camera in the de Young museum observation tower and courtyard
• Learned that music videos are the best way to sell PCR machines
• Checked out the new mummy exhibit at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor
• Really enjoyed the new Sherlock Holmes movie

Happy new year, everybody!
(Image credit)

Instead of hosting my blog on Blogger, I’ve decided to move it over to a self-hosted WordPress blog which not only gives me a whole lot more control over content and styling (and has vastly more versatile plugins and themes), but allows me to start consolidating my online presence into, hopefully, a coherent presence. [This will also hopefully finally get Serena and Teresa to stop with their “Wordpress is so much better than Blogger” comments everytime they talk to me about my blog ]

The process, while complicated, was not as painful as I expected:

1. Design – With the help of my lovely girlfriend, I picked out the Berita theme from BizzArctic. It presents a very cool landing page with a slider and a sophisticated menu-ing system across the top. I then did some simple copy & paste to create a CV page (from an existing resume) and an About page (borrowed heavily from my LinkedIn profile). A quick scan of my Google Reader and some of my friend’s blogs helped me fill out the Links page, and a quick scan of my hard drive put together the various pieces of my Portfolio.

2.  LifeStream – Through WordPress’s plugin directory, I found LifeStream which makes it easy to embed a LifeStream page and sidebar widget which aggregates my activities on Google Reader, Twitter, and my blogging life in one place.

3. Import – WordPress comes with a powerful import tool which made the actual moving of posts from Blogger to WordPress painless. Handling the URL’s (steps below) proved to be a bit more challenging…

4. Maintaining permalinks – Oddly, I discovered that WordPress and Blogger use a completely different mechanism for defining their permalink URLs (the web address that lets you visit the page for an individual post). Thankfully, Justinsomnia maintains a very helpful plugin which helps convert the much more rational WordPress permalink naming system into the peculiar Blogger URL naming system (and because WordPress’s plugins are basically combinations of PHP and Javascript/CSS, it turns out that it’s just a simple regular expression!)

5. Setting up a URL re-direct on Blogger – This too, thankfully, was very simple (just follow the steps after “Update your Blogger settings” as it sets up the Blogger URL re-direct – the playing around with the DNS is needed for it to be completely seamless, but I don’t think its necessary) and step #4 above makes it so that the URL re-directs from Blogger go to the correct WordPress page.

6. Correcting internal links – While steps #4 and #5 fix most of the URL issues, I wanted to fix the internal links so that people who read my blog wouldn’t have to deal with the ugly Blogger re-directs everytime they clicked on the many internal links I have in my blog. Thankfully, because WordPress relies on a SQL database to store all of the post content, a simple SQL command in phpMyAdmin was all that was needed to fix all the internal links.

7. RSS feed – Because most of the regular traffic I get on the blog comes through RSS readers, I wanted to make the transition seamless. Thankfully, I’ve been using Feedburner for quite some time so all I needed to do was switch out the source feed, and then I used the FeedSmith plugin to re-assign my blog’s RSS feed <META> tags to point to my Feedburner feed so that new subscribers would get the right one. So, most of you RSS readers won’t see any difference unless you actually click over to the page itself.

And voila! While I’m sure there are still a few kinks to work out (i.e. alas I’ve lost all the old Disqus comments from my Blogger days and the pictures on my blog are subject to the whims of Picasa/Google hosting), the new blog has been set up. So, please, check it out, let me know what you think, and for those of you with your own blogrolls or who haven’t yet figured out how to use RSS, please update your bookmarks & links!

(Image credit)

• Threaded comments and comment ratings
• Powerful moderation and admin tools
• Filter out spam, trolls, and unwanted commenters
• Enable your visitors to become a real community
• Moderation by email or mobile
• More comments and increased engagement
• Connected with a large discussion community
• Increased exposure and readership

It comes with a cost though – all of the old comments have been erased. I too am sad to see my fellow contributors disappear, but the longer I waited, the more painful this would have been. On the surface, nothing will really change unless you start using the much more powerful commenting system. And, if you’re reading this, but just haven’t commented yet – what are you waiting for, the comments are now pretty!

The other change I made was to implement ShareThis on the site – something which many of you who troll blogs will recognize. Simply click on the cute green icon at the bottom of each post, and it will pop up a number of options you can use to share my post with Facebook, Friendfeed, Digg, by email, and through a whole host of other options. It even makes it easier to make your own blog post about my posts!

And now, pardon me, I have to mourn the old comments…

Oh, and enjoy these cute RSS symbol cartoons (HT: Teresa of MMIAF fame)

• Started blogging on Xhibiting and Bench Press
• Installed Opera Mini on my Blackberry
• Despite being on a large tech case, I found myself at Safeway comparing brands of women’s shampoo
• Rolled out my current practice of making quarterly financial and strategic updates on … my self (which reminds me, I need to wrap up 2008’s ASAP)
• Reflected on Taiwan’s prominent position in the technology space
• Discovered that Barack Obama is the Sandman or Blade the Vampire Hunter
• Bid farewell to the very charming and very intelligent Jeremy Knowles
• Made a “Vasa ship” at work
• Got my comic-movie fix on by watching Wanted and the Dark Knight
• Went to Comic-Con and took many pictures of cosplayers (the Wiki link if you have no idea what that is)
• Wondered if I went into the right career – haven’t figured it out yet, but am pretty sure it beats banking
• Made a standing offer with my homey Anthony of $100 for any troubled firm or division out there (we’re still looking at you, Circuit City)
• Presented 6 non-partisan suggestions to President-elect Barack Obama (online, of course, it’s not like I know him)
• Bid farewell to the First Lady of Star Trek

Happy new year, everybody!

(Image source)

• Started work as a management consultant
• Graduated from Harvard 
• Installed Linux Mint for dual-boot on my computer — and liked what I saw
• Bought a crackblackberry (yes, quite significant in terms of my life)
• Wrote a thesis — lost a few year’s of life in the process
• Played a Harvard-campus-wide game of Risk (was part of the winning team, I might add)
• Interviewed Jon Doris, medical consultant and inspiration for the lead character for the TV medical comedy Scrubs
• Watched Season 6 of Smallville, the best season of the show yet
• Had an “emotional” re-union with my laptop
• Played the most intense and complex game of Starcraft possible
• Guy Kawasaki commented on my blog!

Happy new year everybody!

Apparently, we:

• have to wait for British Petroleum’s upcoming Third Quarter results to find out
• have a wonderful commentary by the British financial newspaper the Financial Times about the proper etiquette in which a CEO is to lambaste his or her staff

“What’s consulting? And, why am I doing it?”

As recent as a year ago, I was positive that I would be pursuing a PhD in Systems Biology (or, as it is sometimes referred to, Computational Biology or Mathematical Biology) after college. The field was vast and exciting to me. It was (and still is) full of untapped potential. I spoke eagerly with professors Erin O’Shea and Michael Brenner about how I could prepare myself and what I could study. Having worked in the lab of professor Tom Maniatis for almost two years at that point, and being exposed constantly to the joys and tribulations of postdoctoral fellows and graduate students, I was fairly certain that being a graduate student doing research full-time was what I wanted.

With almost a sense of smugness, I looked down at the more “business-y types”. I thought what they were doing lacked rigor, and it was hence not worthy of my time. I believed it was mere mental child’s play compared to the rigor and intellectual excitement of trying to decode complex gene networks and how invisible molecules could determine whether we were healthy or sick.

I would like to say that the reason I’m doing management consulting now is because I’ve gotten over such prejudices. If I were to be perfectly honest, though, I would have to admit that I haven’t. An Ivy League education teaches you that you’re not the smartest person in the world, but, at least in my case, it doesn’t teach you to show humility about the field you’re most interested in.

So what did happen? Well, I can think of four main reasons. The first and most immediate was that I was part of the organizing committee behind the 2006 Harvard College Asian Business Forum, which was the HPAIR (Harvard Project for Asian and International Relations) business conference. The experience was very rewarding and eye-opening, but more than that, it was an impetus to follow the paths of the many excited delegates, most of whom were early professionals or about to be, who were hoping to be future business leaders.

The second factor was a growing awareness of what life in academia meant. Yes, I was well aware of the struggles that graduate students and postdocs and, to a lesser extent, assistant professors had to go through on their way towards tenured professor (which, I still think, is the coolest job ever) when I decided I wanted to be a graduate student, and those were, in my mind, fair sacrifices to pursue what I was interested in. But at the same time, towards the end of the summer, with my experiments facing multiple setbacks, the doubts in my mind over my competence and my ability to be a good grad student, making me look to other alternatives.

The third consideration stems from the fact that I have always been interested in application. My approach towards science has always been rooted in searching for possible applications, whether commercial or for public interest. Even the reason that I chose to specialize in Systems Biology stems from a belief that traditional molecular and cellular techniques will soon face sharply diminishing marginal returns with regards to elucidating the causes and cures for diseases. Having lived from almost all of my pre-college life in the Silicon Valley, it is no wonder that I am accustomed to and would like to see more of science being moved from “bench to bedside” and would love to manage a successful transition from brilliant idea to profitable one.

The final factor is of course that it’s always exciting to try something new, especially something competitive – and even though I cursed recruiting at times, it was kind of like a fun competition. Although I did not expect to receive a job offer from any firm that I would consider, I actually did reasonably well in the interview process and did indeed receive an offer which I simply could not turn down.

All roads, at least for me, led to consulting.

• Comics: anything where I talk about comic books or comic-related movies is here
• Editorial: all the posts where I preach the Ben-gospel from my digital pulpit
• Links: all the posts (frankly, most of them) where I link to something that I find profound or interesting or humorous
• Personal: all the posts where I discuss things of a more personal nature
• Reversi: of course, the fan-favorite discussion of my epic rounds with Vrushali and her crushing, crushing defeat at my hands
• Tech: the posts where I discuss current technology, particularly with regards to what people can do to make their lives easier or go more smoothly