Giapo

Here’s a cool little post about my favorite ice cream place in the town.

WHAT'S YUMMY

Giapo is well-known as ‘ice-cream heaven’ and as one of Auckland’s best dessert locations.  A couple of weeks ago, we were lucky enough to get a BTS tour of the luxe new parlour and ‘laboratory’ on Gore Street, which has opened after they out-grew their previous location.

For some background, Giapo is the name of the store and also the name of the store’s founder, Giapo Grazioli.  Hailing from Italy but strongly identifying with New Zealand, Giapo and his wife, Annarosa, are two faces you’ll often find behind the counter passionately describing the menu and bringing that infamous Italian ‘love for food’ (specifically ice-cream, in this case) to our corner of the globe.

If you ever get the chance to speak to Giapo in person, you will be able to appreciate how genuinely passionate and enthusiastic he is about his trade.  For him, ice-cream making is an art, a creative process, an exciting adventure and a constant challenge…

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Be part of future of work

I will never stop learning. I won’t just work on things that are assigned to me. I know there’s no such thing as a status quo. I will build our business sustainably through passionate and loyal customers. I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague, and I’ll remember the days before I knew everything. I am more motivated by impact than money, and I know that Open Source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation. I will communicate as much as possible, because it’s the oxygen of a distributed company. I am in a marathon, not a sprint, and no matter how far away the goal is, the only way to get there is by putting one foot in front of another every day. Given time, there is no problem that’s insurmountable.

If the above lines resonate with you, come join us at Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Jetpack, and WooCommerce.

We are always in need of great people to help us with our mission of making the web a better place.

While we are always hiring for many roles, I’d like to highlight my role, Happiness Engineer.

As a Happiness Engineer, like all the other roles, you’ll work full-time from your home (with salary and benefits) to help people with their websites and blogs. It’s helpful to have some familiarity with HTML, CSS, and WordPress. Critical is a genuine desire to help people. Apply by following the directions on our Jobs page: https://automattic.com/work-with-us/happiness-engineer/

It is not a traditional job. Working from home and importantly, working without supervision is not for everyone. But if you think you have what it takes and want to be part of the future or work, there is no better time than now to apply.

The important thing we forget in the rush to achieve

I should remember the following gems in the article I found in the following tweet.

But if I could offer one piece of advice to incoming freshman, it would be to learn to take care of themselves—because they are about to be surrounded by people who often have the misconception that racking up achievements and accolades is more important than leading a happy, healthy, and fulfilling life.

the real lesson of grit is the importance of working hard at a sustainable pace, without any expectation of immediate payoff.

Should we encourage our children to work hard? Absolutely. But young people need to learn that grit is only effective when coupled with restorative activities like sufficient sleep, exercise, a well-balanced diet, meditation, walks in nature, and time off. Research shows that these basic yet essential self-care habits result in greater focus and productivity, not to mention increased creativity, better decision-making, and stronger emotional intelligence.

1000 days of Elevate

Today is my 1000 th day playing Elevate.

Elevate Session Highlights           Elevate Milestones

I broke the streak once in June 2016, not because I slacked but because I was stuck on the dated iPhone 4 running on dated iOS 7 on which the Elevate app was slow and crashed repeatedly. I was also traveling and didn’t have reliable internet. I couldn’t let all this break my 610 day streak at that point. So once I am on the reliable phone and internet, I completed a handful of games retrospectively to fix the streak. And of course, playing Elevate is a fun way to improve vocabulary and math skills little bit everyday.

Here are the earlier milestones.

Example of a nagging app

Only yesterday I blogged about apps and their tricks to grab our precious attention by making us  install them on our phones in the pretense of helping us.

This morning I wanted to check the menu of a local cafe. I googled and clicked on one of the search results. It’s a Zomato link that looked like what I wanted:

I click on it and get this:

When I click on SEE MENU link, I get this:

If I think a bit about this…

What I wanted to do: check the cafe menu.

What Zomato wanted me to: install their app.

If Zomato’s aim is to help me, it will get out of my way and provide the info I need as soon as possible without any friction. But it seems Zomato’s aim is to make me install their app and advance its interests.

These are exactly the kind of apps and services I should avoid.