Blog on thesamosborne

Pole Gdanskers

Wed, 21 Sep 2022 18:25:25 -0700

I just reached across my entire cabin and grabbed my phone to start this blog post. My cabin is like 6 feet wide and it’s one of the bigger ones. We did get upgraded to one with a balcony, so there’s that.

This is my first cruise ever. We are in the Baltics for 10 days with a few days starting in Stockholm and a few days in Amsterdam at the end. We’ll be gone a total of 14 days. I guess I’ll just write a bit about each place and slap some pictures in here for the fans.

Free VPNs in 9 Different Countries

Mon, 08 Nov 2021 17:27:35 -0800

Apparently the BBC doesn’t let you watch their TV shows if you’re not in the UK. I was trying to watch This Country but I was greeted with this prohibiting banner:

No worries, I have a subscription to Nord VPN and they have servers in the UK. I switched my location to the UK and reloaded the page. No luck:

I read their help page and they have some VPN tracking software in place that seems like it blocked most of Nord’s IP addresses already.

Startup Grind

Sun, 18 Jul 2021 22:16:31 -0700

I’ve never been this consistently stressed out for this long in my life. Six weeks ago, my business partner and I entered into a verbal agreement with a group of angel investors to fund our company.

The cofounder relationship

This is as hard as they say it is. I am very lucky to have Race, who is honest and humble and smart and motivated and confident. He compliments me well by having a lot of qualities that I don’t. He is a great talker and can go on passionately about our product for as long as you let him. I am criminally understated and often leave out details. We make a good team. But we are very different. It takes a lot of honest communication on both of our parts to get on the same page sometimes.

Goodbye Thailand

Thu, 17 Jun 2021 22:55:54 +0700

Intro to Asia

The primary reason I wanted to teach English abroad was to introduce Kaitlyn to expat living, specifically in Asia. I credit a lot of who I am today to the fact that I was able to spend five years of my childhood in China and two years of my young adult life in Cambodia. I wanted Kaitlyn to see first-hand what I have been raving about basically since the day she met me. Our time in Thailand was a perfect introduction to living abroad for her and for us as a couple.

Chiang Mai

Sun, 23 May 2021 15:51:40 +0700

A video adventure

Thailand Adventures

Sun, 02 May 2021 14:25:01 +0700

I. The Night Train

The night train is the best. For the low price of $22 you can take a six-hour train ride from our city of Phichit to Bangkok. The train leaves here at 12:40 AM and arrives in the capitol at 7:00 AM. I love it so much because it feels exactly like what I assume being on a spaceship is like. You get you’re own little compartment with a blanket and a pillow. The air is blasting cold, so you shiver like you’re in outer space. You go to sleep and you wake up on basically another planet (Phichit and Bangkok are that different). Overall a great experience, even if a flight is only $35 and takes one hour.

How I Use My Free Azure Credit 💸

Tue, 06 Apr 2021 18:43:56 +0700

Microsoft has a program for all engineer employees to get some free Azure credit to play with. Having been with Microsoft for two summer internships I have accumulated two separate accounts with $150 of credit/month each. Growing up pinching pennies, I am not one to let anything free go to waste, so for the past couple years I have been using my Azure credit for some fun stuff.

1. NextCloud Personal Cloud Storage

NextCloud is super cool if you haven’t heard of it. It’s basically open-source Dropbox with some extra features, and you can self-host it. When I got my free credit, I thought I’d try and save some money on Dropbox by self-hosting NextCloud on Azure. Here’s what I used:

My First Attempt at Building a Web App

Sun, 28 Mar 2021 19:34:46 +0700

One of my college courses required me to build an application as a semester long project. I wanted to build an application that could solve a real world problem. I had heard about a problem that doctors were having from a friend of mine. Doctors get sued. A lot. 75% of doctors in low-risk specialties have faced a malpractice claim at some point in their careers. For doctors in high-risk specialties, that number skyrockets to 99%. I decided to make a webapp to help doctors solve this problem. You can check it out here: patientpreviewapp.com

I've Created a Monster

Sat, 20 Mar 2021 15:25:56 +0700

I am actually a ten-year-old boy.

A couple weeks ago I traded teaching schedules with another teacher. I still teach some of the small kids but now I get to teach elementary school science as well. My students are seven, eight, and ten years old. I found they are much easier for me to teach because I understand them better. Basically, I am the same as them. We all like playing videogames, making stupid fart jokes, and playing soccer after school. I am ten years old at heart.

My First Dev Job

Wed, 10 Mar 2021 11:34:03 +0700

** This post didn’t really take shape like I was hoping. I might come back later and rearrange it to be more coherent, but as it currently stands it is an imperfect combination of memoir/note to former self/love letter to my workplace. ¯\(ツ)/¯

I would have never hired myself. Bless the people who threw me a bone and let me learn to be a programmer at their expense.

After sophomore year of my CS program, I was looking around for a job that would put my years (two is still plural) of programming “experience” to work. I thought that by going to school and half paying attention in my classes that counted as experience. I was wrong. The first two years of college did not at all prepare me to work on a real dev team as I would soon find out.

Teaching is hard; Thailand is easy

Sun, 28 Feb 2021 14:03:54 +0700

I. Teaching is hard

I’m not used to people. I’m used to sitting at my computer for most of the day taking one, maybe two zoom calls. I’m really good at working alone. I am not really good with people, especially when I am the center of attention all the time.

Teaching is exhausting. Four year olds are exhausting. For the past two weeks I’ve been teaching English to four, five, and six year olds for about four hours a day. I don’t know how all these full time teachers do it. By the end of the day, I can barely think straight, and all I want to do is curl up on my bed in the dark and be alone. I was not built for this.

School Tour

Sat, 20 Feb 2021 16:47:17 +0700

Welcome to Imperial Phichit Bilingual School!

Please come inside

Here we have our swimming pool and our kindergarten building

Our swimming pool is not quite as shallow as you’d expect

This is the front door of the kindergarten building

Our Christmas tree stays up year round

We have many small children walking around most of the time

The basketball court is by the pool

The Invasion

Tue, 16 Feb 2021 11:47:01 +0700

“Some things take hold of you. Invade you. Own you. You want to be free of them, but you never will be.”
– Rich Shapero, Rin, Tongue and Dorner

(I got that quote from goodreads, and I have no idea who Rich Shapero is)

There we were, minding our own business when they decided to take what was not theirs. The bugs smugly walked right through the crack in our screen glass door and declared our room theirs.

Thailand - We Made It

Sun, 07 Feb 2021 11:30:03 +0000

Welcome back to Asia!!!!!!!!!!

After not knowing whether we were going to make it to Thailand for a couple weeks we finally made it. It only took like 17 covid tests, 52 emails back and forth with the Thai consulate, and four changed plane tickets. Not bad. After all that we have been rewarded with the luxury of staying in a small quarantine hotel room for 16 days.

Thailand has this whole international traveler thing locked down tight. When we got into the international terminal at midnight last Saturday there were a swarm of young English speaking people showing us off the flight and towards a sitting area where they checked that our documents were in order. Then we had to pass through three different checkpoints in the airport for all our covid and quarantine related documents. When we got through customs, they had shuttles lined up for each quarantine approved hotel. It was all silky smooth, and I was impressed.

Inequity

Tue, 15 Dec 2020 11:30:03 +0000

I’m done with school. I graduated with a degree in computer science from a well-known university. I have a job waiting for me at a FAANG company. If things continue this way, I will never struggle for money.

What did I do to deserve this?

Nothing. But also, some things.

I won the privilege jackpot in so many ways. I was born in America where I have maximum opportunity. I was born the majority skin color and the historically dominant gender. I grew up in a two-parent household with extremely supportive parents. We never wanted for anything. Statistically, I was born with an incredibly high chance for success. And now, by the world’s standards, I have met that expectation and achieved success.

Testing 123

Sat, 12 Dec 2020 11:30:03 +0000

Hi,

I’m Sam. I get anxious about what other people in my industry are doing that I’m not doing. So, this blog is to help me reduce my anxiety.

I won’t promise anything, but I’ve got a couple write ups in my head that I’d like to get into the world.

Here is a picture of me yesterday: