What Now?
Updated:
Long time no update, eh? It's been about four months since my last update to this page. What have I been up to? Well, I just came back from Vietnam. Saw and did a lot of stuff there. The caves of Ninh Binh are incredible. Bat Trang's pottery museum was really cool (search online for pottery from there). But what I'm bursting to share is one of those "kicking it like a local" experiences. The country's been rapidly expanding its economy and one sector under rapid development is finance. Shocking, I know.
Anyway, at least four of the major banks there have a QR code payments system with what felt like a majority of the businesses participating. It's pretty common for locals to pay by scanning these codes with a banking app. I obviously wanted in, so I tried to search online for what app to install and the internet is basically useless. It's all spam, slop, or sloppy spam. It took way too long to find Moreta Pay, one of the few apps you can use as a tourist.
I hope it's obvious nothing I post on here is sponsored. There's like, what, six of you reading this? I just found it so hard to find a bloody app I could actually use. I just wanted to share it here in case somebody somehow finds this page before I update it again and it helps them (a totally real thing that will totally happen).
I had to give it way too much info for KYC compliance (passport photo, face video feed, residency details), but after getting it all set up, I was approved to load money into the app with a credit card and start paying for things using QR codes. It's not just Vietnam, it seems like a number of Southeast Asian countries are rolling this out. Anyway, the experience was great fun because it always caught the merchant off guard; I'm an obvious tourist and it's not something many tourists have figured out how to access. Totally worth it.
I was looking at job postings and noticed Stripe is hiring for a physical terminal payments team (may they have better luck than Square). I kind of wonder if they should look at being the first to invest in this system in the North American market. Hit me up. :P
What else? Lots of playing with local models. I'm avoiding cloud models as much as possible, so I've been running whatever I can on my own hardware. Putting together another of my talks on everything I've been learning. I know I still haven't put my talks up on my own site. I'm not sure what the copyright situation is around that. I technically prepared them for my employer, so I don't think I can. Might be worth getting that clarified and seeing if I'm free to share them more broadly.
One subtle thing you probably didn't notice is that I finally spent the time to debug and fix the nudger I built but never got working right on my Bouncing DVD Logo page. It adjusts the velocity vector to pocket the logo in the corner within a certain number of bounces, using algebraic billiards for that satisfying corner bounce.
It's pretty good but not perfect. One problem is that at squarish dimensions, it just goes corner to corner in a straight line. I might add a minimum number of bounces to the routine, but it'll require a bit of a redesign on the nudge trigger to figure out when it's best to fire it. Stay tuned for some point in the future where I play with it again. Until then, I hope it brings you some inner peace now that corner bounces are more common.
I'm sure there's more I could mention, but I won't bore you for now. Until next time, happy hacking.