Sam Soffes

Recently, I replaced the headphones I've had for a long time with some new ones. I've used Beyerdynamic DT 770 for years (now discontinued). On a flight last year, someone leaned the chair back in front of me suddenly, the cable got caught, and the jack bent really bad. They cut in out a lot. I realize I could just replace the jack, but I thought it was a good excuse to go nuts.

My whole setup with new headphones, case, DAC, preamp, and cables was a little under $400 (half for the headphones and half for all of the toys). You could definitely just get the headphones for $200.

If you're looking for something on the cheap, I recommend a pair of Sony MDR7506. Standard issue studio headphones. Can't go wrong for only $70.

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I spent awhile today trying to convert a regular expression from Ruby to NSRegularExpression. It was being dumb and took me awhile to figure it out.

The main this is NSRegularExpression's options. By default Ruby, has AnchorsMatchLines on and NSRegularExpression doesn't. I simply turned that on and had good luck.

Here's my specific case (Jekyll front-matter):

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After watching Particle Fever, I got inspired to do a daily video journal thing. Particle Fever is a documentary about the Large Hadron Collider (which is super interesting). They had video from some of the scientists’ daily video journals over the years of working on it. It was really cool to watch.

I got inspired and thought it would be fun to do my own. Not that any of my work is anywhere near as meaningful as theirs, it’s still fun to just do it. I’ve found it’s really enjoyable to summarize what I’m doing each day. I was surprised how much it effect my focus day to day.

Personal Sam is named after a Twitter account I used to have. My friend Aaron Marshall, Over’s founder, used to have @personalaaron. It was just him complaining about his boss and whatnot. I thought it was awesome and started @personalsam. It was mainly me winning about girls and how emo my life was back in 2008. Anyway, it seemed like a fitting name for my podcast thing and I already had the domain.

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I was recently trading a few emails with someone asking about working on projects you’re passionate about full-time. Thought it would be good to answer them publicly. Here we go:

#1 Have you found that you really can make a living just by working on projects that you’re interested in?

Sadly, no. I still do contract work to pay the bills. When I’m working on my stuff full-time, it’s on money I’ve saved up from clients. I someday hope to live solely off of income from my projects.

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I thought I had decided against doing betas of software to more than just close friends. A few friends assured me that most feedback would be useless. Their point as most just wanted to get it early to feel cool but didn’t actually use it or send feedback. I can definitely say for iOS betas in the past, this has been my experience as well.

The Whiskey beta has been great. I have a huge amount of things to build still. My list was a little overwhelming. Among things that still need to be built, there were lots of little bugs that needed some attention I’ve been putting off. No one likes to fix bugs.

Getting lots of email and tweets from people saying they love it and can see its potential is huge. People actually seeing it is good motivation. It also helps get me excited to fix little bugs. For example, several people reported this one thing that took me a minute to fix. I had just been forgetting about it because it wasn’t something I used a lot personally.

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