Ordinarymantrying

The backup almost killed the migration. I thought moving a WordPress site to a new host would take an hour. Instead, I spent an entire evening fighting a 460MB backup file, a full disk quota, three failed FTP attempts, a PHP upload limit, broken JavaScrip

I am not naturally good at romantic gestures. I'm much better at spreadsheets, stock analysis, and asking AI questions at midnight. After 18 years of marriage, my wife knows this about me, and she has made peace with it in the way that long-married couple

A few weeks ago, I stumbled onto the GitHub profiles of some other Chinese indie developers building tool websites. I immediately regretted it. One of them had a site pulling 1.73 million monthly visitors. A simple spin-the-wheel tool - nothing technicall

It was past midnight when my phone rang. "Bro. The website is down. Completely. We're getting hammered - the whole system is offline. I think we have malware too. I haven't slept. I don't know what to do." 2am. 14 servers. One person. No sleep. My friend

I have used margin in my brokerage account, on and off, for about three years. My reasoning was the sentence every retail investor has heard: moderate leverage increases returns. I never checked it. Not once. I checked the companies I bought - cash flow,

I was wrong about what the argument was really about. After work on a Saturday, I stopped at the supermarket to restock the fridge. It was around 7pm. I'd figured out that the store marks down fresh food at 8pm - anything unsold gets cut 30-40%. So I wait

China's college entrance exam - the Gaokao - is taken by 12 million students every year. One exam. One day. Every major life decision that follows. My son is one of those 12 million. Last month I found him at his desk at 11pm, notebook open, writing the l

A few months ago, I wrote about how AI taught me to use GitHub when Reddit banned me and Twitter ignored me. That post ended with me having three repositories and six backlinks. It felt like a win. Then AI told me there was another layer. What Are Awesome

For most of my life, I believed only big media companies could tell China's stories to the world. Then AI changed something unexpected. Last night I was scrolling through my phone and I stopped. A woman in a wheelchair. A street corner somewhere in China.

I made a mistake this morning. Or did I? At market open, I bought 100 shares of Zhongji Innolight (300308) at ¥920. Within two hours, it had dropped to ¥847. I was down ¥7,300 - roughly 8% - before lunch. This is Part 2 of an ongoing series. Part 1: Befor