Pek Pongpaet

At some point you will face a seemingly insurmountable obstacle. Whether this is a technical problem, a challenge at work, or a plateau in your training, everyone will come across this at some point in their life. I have been working on something for quite some time. I keep slowly plugging away at it, but lately, I’ve seem to hit a brick wall, and I feel like I’ve been equipped with only sticks and stones to take down this mountain of bricks despite my best efforts. At times like these, I tell myself to keep pushing but when there’s no hope in sight, it can be daunting. It’s so easy to throw up your hands and give up. The seduction of just letting it all go can be tempting.

Sometimes you just have to step back and take a look at how much you have accomplished. At times like these it’s good to have someone tell you that the end might just be around the corner. If you stop now, you’d never know how close you got. There is a Chinese saying, “Failure is the mother of success.” You can rarely succeed without first failing. Through failure we learn our lessons just as long as we are willing to pick ourselves up and keep moving.

I hit plateaus in my martial arts training all the time. When that happens, I try to surround myself with people who will push me and motivate me. I also try to change it up a bit and work on not only getting over the hump but also training on other stuff that may help me get over the plateau. Sometimes, you just need a break or get a fresh perspective.

I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.
- Steve Jobs 1995

Popularity: 14% [?]

Had a shoot today at Alter where I looked progressively bloodier and bloodier. It was the first time I had fake blood on me. I guess I was never really into scary Halloween costumes. I looked at the ingredients of the fake blood and it’s corn syrup and food coloring. There’s also several types of fake blood: viscous, chunky etc. Here’s some photos from behind the scenes and the people that made the shoot possible: Producer Melanie Francis, Photographer Eric Sahrmann and Hair and Makeup Artist Karen Brody.

Popularity: 5% [?]

If you’ve never heard of Animoto, you should check this out. They let you easily create video slideshows from your photos and videos in minutes. I’ve known about Animoto since way back, but I never really got around to playing with them. For Valentine’s Day, I figured I would use them to put together an awesome video for Kim. Here’s the result:

As you can see, the result is pretty slick. It was really easy to create. You just select photos from you computer to upload, select a song from their selection and animoto creates a unique video based on the music you chose and the photos you uploaded. Their algorithm is dynamic guaranteeing a unique slideshow for everyone. I was pretty pleased with the results. Kim certainly was. You can create a 30 second slideshow for free. A 3-minute slideshow costs $3 – that’s what I used. You embed Animoto videos as is or you can also choose to upload it to Youtube.

My only gripes were that the output was a bit low res and the music selection was weak. For an extra $5, I can get a hi-res version with an ISO file that I can burn to DVD. I don’t know if I’ll go for that. I think they should partner with more music distributors to offer you a larger library of music. The other thing you have to watch out for is that they will try real hard to steer you into getting the “All Access” pass for $30/year. If you only want to get 1 video, click on the small “info” link and scroll down to the “$3 single video” link. They made that really hard to find. However if you plan to use these videos for commercial use, you’ll have to shell out $249/year for their pro license.

Popularity: 3% [?]

About two months ago I was contacted by Jasmine Grimm, Editor-in-Chief of Connections magazine. She wanted to do a story on me because I’m a weird guy with an interesting story. She found me on Twitter and did some research on me before contacting me. We did a phone interview which she used for her story. Here’s the article

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On Thursday evening, my pals Sachin and Brad alerted me to a new section on Reddit. It’s called IamA as in “I am a…”. Basically you submit a post telling your special story and people just ask you anything. They strongly recommended that I go on there and post. They were sure I was going to be a big hit there.

I tried to come up with a pretty eye catching sensational title that was true. I posted “I am Raiden from the Mortal Kombat video games. – AMAA”. AMAA stands for Ask me almost anything.

Since creating that post a bit over 24 hours ago, it was front paged on the IamA section, upvoted over 280 times, downvoted over 120 times, and received over 390 comments. People have even blogged about it. It’s been pretty amazing.

It’s been very interesting to see the kinds of questions that come up. People were excited to find out that Raiden is a web developer. The Reddit crowd I’m sure probably skews towards that. The reception’s been great. People ask really funny questions. There were some really hardcore MK fans. Or maybe I just really don’t know much about MK.

I’ve actually had an account on Reddit and have submitted articles and upvoted posts. However I’ve long since forgotten my login and password so I created a new account and named it more appropriately for this one post.

I think my takeaway from this is that there really is no overnight success. My instant hit on Reddit was a confluence of many variables. Most importantly it was due to the fact that I did martial arts for 10 freaking years and did the moves for a very popular video game franchise. That is all.

Another reason is that it was the right social network. I’ve been on Twitter for over a year and I can’t say that I’ve found the engagement on there that I’ve found in 15 minutes on Reddit. I think on Twitter there’s more marketers and other types of people – not as many video game geeks.

If you’re interested in reading the full transcript, here it is:
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9x5dh/i_am_raiden_from_the_mortal_kombat_video_games/

Popularity: 3% [?]