Pek Pongpaet

On August 6th when we had TECH cocktail, Ron May interviewed Olya and I about Hot Tweeters. I think the only reason he wanted to interview me was so that he could get close to Olya. Hey, whatever works. To skip directly to the Hot Tweeters part of the interview, go to 9:30.

Here’s another video of me pimping Hot Tweeters at TECH cocktail by Ramon Deleon. This Domino’s Pizza multiple franchise owner is a marketing genius. I met him at a social media conference at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange earlier. He’s got a great story about how one of his orders got screwed up and the customer happened to be a big time social media person who tweeted about it. He handled it very well by doing a videopology to said person and making it up to her with a new order on the house. That video has been viewed almost 80,000 times at the point of this blog post. He’s one of the best things to happen to Domino’s Pizza hands down. Now he’s hobnobbing with social media heavy weights like Gary V and giving talks all over because of his insane social media marketing.

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Almost two weeks ago we picked up our newest member of the family. His name is Snuggles and he’s an 8-week old havanese puppy. He’s so tiny that I actually think he’s smaller than a subway sandwich. When Kim first found him she absolutely adored him and told me we had to have him. I don’t think words do him justice.

Here he is in the sink. In the beginning he was very needy. If he didn’t see us for any period of time he would start whimpering and crying. After not even 2 weeks, he’s shown a lot of improvement. Now he’s able to hang out by himself for a little bit. He figured out the puppy pad pretty quick but he’s also pooped and peed wherever he pleases. We got him these steps to help him up the couch and he figured those out right away although he didn’t like going down headfirst. He’s recently figured out how to go down sort of sideways.

I’ve never had a puppy or a dog before and I have to say they are a lot more work than I ever imagine. Stay tuned for more posts on Snuggles.

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I’ve submitted 2 talks to SXSW Interactive 2010 and they both have been approved. One of them is an exciting panel titled Rich Internet Interfaces Beyond Mice And Keyboards. This is a talk that I’ve given many times including at RIApalooza, Flex Users Group, Chicago Interactive Designers and Developers Group. This time however, the format will be a panel with my colleague Adam Flater of Merapi fame, Ryan Stewart Adobe evangelist extraordinaire, and Josh Holmes from Microsoft User Experience. The other one is titled How to Stay Fit Despite a Sedentary Job which is a culmination of all struggles of staying in shape trying to maintain a high level of wushu despite a day job and various startups. I would really appreciate your votes. Here’s some info about them:

Rich Internet Interfaces Beyond Mice And Keyboards
We’ll assess our current computer human interaction and explore where the new frontier of interfacing with the digital realm will take us. In the future our intuitive human gestures will seamlessly control our digital space including: head tracking, motion sensors and yet to be discovered techniques.

How to Stay Fit Despite a Sedentary Job
Are you a code monkey? Do you sit at your desk for 12 hours a day? How is one supposed to live a healthy lifestyle sitting in front of the computer all day long? Pek Pongpaet will share his tips on exercising on limited time and how to get the most out of your exercises.

Once again, please take the time to vote. I know it’s a pain because they make you register but I think I have a lot to share and especially the RIA panel has many industry thought leaders that would really rock the panel. Also years of experience doing martial arts at a level to win medals and do motion capture while having a full time job and midnight startups has given me tons of good tips that I can share. Thank you.

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Today I went to Wizard World, a comic book convention, and got to meet and hang out with Ray Park. In case you’ve been living under a rock for the last 10 years, Ray Park is a Hollywood actor famous for playing the role of Darth Maul in Star Wars Episode I back in 1999. He was at Wizard World to promote his new movie GI Joe where he plays another childhood hero of mine – Snake Eyes, a good ninja.

Ray Park was one of my original inspirations for getting into wushu. Jet Li gets the credit for being THE first when I saw the movie Fist of Legend. However, Ray Park sealed the deal 10 years ago when he, as Darth Maul, took on two Jedi simultaneously and gave them a run for their money. I said to myself, wow – I want to be just like him. That was 10 years ago, and I have been doing wushu ever since.

My friends Don, Mel and I went to his Q&A panel. It was great to hear him plug wushu so many times. So many of his fans are only vaguely aware of the martial arts behind the stuff he does.

Afterwards we followed him out the conference room and got a chance to hang out with him a bit. I’m pretty sure he spent a lot of time with us 3 instead of his other fans because we all had wushu in common. Don even went as far as offering to perform for him and busted out his award winning ropedart routine COLD! Ray also gave fans a little something by busting out a butterfly twist cold. I was too gunshy to bust out anything myself, as I’ve torn my jeans doing stuff before in the past.

Today was an awesome day. I got to meet one of my original wushu inspirations. Ray was very cool and humble. I felt deeply honored he took the time to hang out with us wushu fanboys & fangirl.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Ok, before you go on reading thinking someone paid me $200 to WRITE a blog post, let me be clear. That wasn’t the case. I wrote a blog post for an online contest and won 1st prize which was $200 worth of UX (User Experience) books. However, I had to get your attention somehow so this sensational title was worth a shot. Anyways, it’s a great story so I thought I would tell it.

I blog on both my personal blog (here) and the Roundarch (my employer) blog. One of the usability blogs I follow was running a contest. I’m a student of usability and have read a couple books on the subject but I was hungry for more. This was a great opportunity for me to get in on some books without having to pay for them provided I won. All you had to do was write a blog post on “why you love usability and want to jump-start your usability training”. I thought to myself, that’s pretty easy. I can write a blog post. I write blog posts anyways.

For the last month, I’ve been pretty slammed at work, so you probably noticed tumbleweeds and cobwebs on my blog. The blog at work was also suffering a similar fate and needed remedying. So I thought, why don’t I kill 2 birds with one stone and blog about usability on the Roundarch blog. It would give others an idea of the importance we as a company place on usability (because we do), and I would have a blog post to submit for the contest. (And if by chance I won, I’d have a great blog post for my own blog in the form of this story I’m telling you right now). Mind you, I wasn’t expecting to win.

You can read the blog post and judge for yourself. I don’t personally think it’s award winning material by any means but if you looked at the competition, a lot of it was pretty half-assed. Like Woody Allen says:

80% of success is just showing up

I guess what I’m trying to tell you is that I was being lazy. I killed 2 birds with one stone by writing a blog post on usability on the Roundarch blog so that I could have a blog post there AND have an entry to the competition. As luck would have it I won.

Here are the books I won:

• Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed
• Don’t Make Me Think
• Always Be Testing
• A Project Guide to UX Design
• Selling Usability: User Experience Infiltration Tactics
• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
• The Tipping Point
• Web Analytics: An Hour A Day
• Information Architecture for the World Wide Web

I’ve read Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Don’t Make Me Think, and Tipping Point. The person running the contest, a guy by the name of Peter Meyers, was gracious enough to let me swap out the books I already had for other usability books. I’ll give him a shameless plug. You should read his blog if you are interested in usability and UX.

So the point of this entire blog post is this: There are tons of small little contests and competitions like these all over the internet with prizes waiting to be claimed. You just have to seek them out and give it a shot. This one particular contest had 20 entries. That means you had 1 in 20 chances of winning. Why not? Anyways, if anyone did decide to listen to this tidbit of advice and actually wins something on the web down the line, please give me a shout out on this blog post and tell me your story.

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