Don't Quit Your Day Job
1997 to 2010 I worked in the airline industry building software applications involved with the revenue accounting side of the business.
2010 to present I have worked for a great real estate group based in Newport Beach, California as Director of Software Development. I spend my days engineering and developing from scratch all of the company's large scale web-based software systems, from their public facing web sites to their back-end business management system.
Freelance/Consulting
2006 I joined VideoSift.com as IT Director and built the custom PHP-based CMS that still powers the site today. I continue working on software and act as system administrator on the four servers on which VideoSift resides. VideoSift receives approximately 1.5 million unique visitors per month.
2009 I build TeeVirus.com which was a very interesting community-based e-commerce site, wherein members could submit their own custom t-shirt designs. Other members would vote on the quality of the design, and those with the best ratings would make it into the store available for purchase, earning the designer a commission for each sale.
2009 I built from scratch a brand new, much more powerful PHP-based MVC framework I call VosaPHP. Using the new framework, I built over the course of several months the massive custom shopping cart system referred to as NeatoCart, which powers Neatorama.com's storefront, NeatoShop.com. More than just a simple shopping cart, NeatoCart was also developed to support affiliate shops skinned and promoted by third-party websites. (Affiliate shops include Fark and Boing Boing.) In addition, I am Neatorama's system administrator, managing the 8 servers on which its collection of sites run. Neatorama receives over 3 million unique visitors per month.
2010 I used VosaPHP to build a software system for neatohub.com, another Neatorama property, which is a link-exchanging hub similar to 2leep.com. It functioned by allowing select third-party bloggers to embed a widget on their websites which would rotate links from other third-party neatohub blogs. It promised and delivered a 2:1 ratio, giving participants 200% of the traffic they sent into neatohub.
2011 I was contracted to build from scratch a very large scale blogging platform to replace WordPress for my client's high traffic blog. This is a work still in progress that is likely to take at least six months to complete.
2012 After about 8 months of development with VosaPHP, the new HOMGroup.com website was launched. It's the public-facing company website for HÔM | Sotheby's International Realty that supports instant MLS property searching among many other features. Still in development are agent websites that will all be driven by the same back-end system to provide to HÔM Group agents fully-customizable real estate websites.
2012 After about 8 months of development with VosaPHP, the new HOMGroup.com website was launched. It's the public-facing company website for HÔM | Sotheby's International Realty that supports instant MLS property searching among many other features. Still in development are agent websites that will all be driven by the same back-end system to provide to HÔM Group agents fully-customizable real estate websites.
If you're wondering, yes, this page is this plain on purpose. I like simple. Plus, the shoemaker's children and all that. : )
Other Stuff
Convert Vietnamese Character Codes - Use this tool to type normal characters (found on a US keyboard) into Vietnamese characters and also into the corresponding HTML character codes. This is useful whether you are just typing some text and you'd like to paste the raw Vietnamese characters into something like an email or if you need to paste the HTML entities into something like a web page.
From the Archives
I came across this old program I wrote a few years ago (in 2005). It's a desktop application that I was toying with as a very simplified version of an MP3 playlist editor and MP3 player. My goal was to make it simple and unobtrusive (see the image below) and in its current unfinished form, I think I achieved that. The player is tiny and can be hidden/controlled (play, pause, previous, next) in the system tray. Download, unzip, and give it a try if you're up to it: LMEdit.zip.
A simple click on that tray icon will pause/unpause. This is essential if you're at work and need to pause without delay.
Here's another neat old app I wrote back in 2003. It's a binary clock and aside from telling time, its main purpose is to illustrate how geeky cool you are to anyone who sees it on your computer screen. Download it: binclock.zip. Double-click to change the color of the virtual LEDs and hit ESC to close it.
How quickly can you tell what times are shown here?