National TV Exposure?

Today I received interest from a TV program with national exposure! Assuming all goes well, MathScore will be featured in a Back to School Segment in the late summer. When things become more concrete, I'll be sure to share details, such as when you can watch the segment on TV. This show will air at least 20 different times, appear across a number of different major networks, and it reaches lots of parents, so I'm really excited!

I also received feedback from the math teachers at one of the middle schools. Apparently, they had issues with some of the forms of input I was accepting. You see, I have to accept certain types of encoded input that aren't entirely natural. For example, x² must be typed in as x^2. I can't do much about that, but for an answer like 16 cm², I have switched the style to 16 sq cm instead of 16 cm^2. The problem was that the students at that school were using MathScore.com frequently enough that some students were using the ^ sign when writing out answers on actual homework! I suppose that is both a good and a bad problem :-)

I also recently came across websudoku.com. Talk about being an ego buster! Think you are good at Sudoku? Try the sudokus on that website and see how you rank. See, that's what is ego busting. It is often the case that when I complete a "medium", "hard", or "evil" sudoku, my time is slow compared to most people who complete the sudokus on websudoku.com. It is rather demoralizing, but I sadistically take pleasure in trying to improve my average time.

New Jpeg Compressor!

After getting fed up with having tons of digital photos but not wanting to email them to people due to their file size, I figured out how to compress a batch of files at once. I think this general purpose utility is needed by many people, so if you try it out for yourself and like it, please pass on the word! This is what I did:
1. I downloaded jpeg source code from http://www.ijg.org
2. I compiled the code and discovered two utilities (djpeg and cjpeg) that work great.
3. I created a Perl script to enable batch processing (djpeg and cjpeg only work on one file at a time)
4. I created a Windows batch file to make it less cumbersome to call the Perl script
5. I created a web page with all the information to use the utility at http://www.spyang.com/utils/jpeg/

Pearlin is also excited by this little utility. In addition, when I post photos on my website in the future, I'll use this utility to do batch conversions, enabling all of the photos to download quickly. To give you any idea, this utility will compress a 2.5MB jpeg file to about 360K without losing much quality.

Fun at Bishop Elementary
I also visited Bishop Elementary today to discuss how Project HELP and MathScore.com can help each other out in the future. I also visited a couple of teachers today. In one of the classrooms, lots of kids were eager to show me their appreciation of MathScore, and one child even exclaimed "I'm your biggest fan!". That was really cute, and it really felt good that the students were so compelled to tell me how much they liked my program :-)

At 4pm, I will be attending a CEO Networking meeting. Due to a non-disclosure agreement, I won't be able to say anything about what goes on in those meetings, but I have to tell you, those meetings are great for providing me with excellent advice for running my company!

Teacher Training / Soup

Today I trained the teachers at Cherry Chase Elementary School in Sunnyvale to use MathScore.com. I'm really excited about them because they already have a very high API score that exceeds 900 (out of 1000). The teachers themselves were noticeably more web-savvy than the teachers at most schools, and a very high percentage of their students have Internet access from home. The teachers got really excited when I got them to all sign in as students and play with the system. Just like a group of students, they were all kind of loud so I had to raise my voice to be heard a few times! I think many of the teachers really felt the game-like nature of the system, and I'm really excited about their future student usage. I'm expecting really high usage from home given their demographics, so it will be fun to monitor their school over the next few months. In addition, the principal was enthusiastic, which was just awesome.

Sesame Chicken Soup!
I also made sesame chicken soup yesterday! It's not the first time, but I had to call my mom to make sure I had the recipe right. Here it is:
1.5 - 3 pounds of chicken leg quarters, chopped up into reasonable chunks
2-3 tablespoons of sesame oil
5 slices of ginger (about half a centimeter thick)
Rice noodles (Japanese style)

Pour the oil in a pan on high heat, add the ginger and let it sizzle. Now add the chicken and brown all the sides of the chicken. This whole process should take only a few minutes. Now dump everything in a steamer, add water to cover the meet, and turn on the steamer. Cooking time varies with the steamer, but expect it to take somewhere between 1-2 hours. It is done when the chicken is obviously white. Due to chicken blood, sometimes the meat may look pink, so make sure you break open a piece of chicken to verify it is fully cooked. If you don't have a steamer, just use a large pot on high heat.

When the soup is done, boil some noodles, drain the water, and serve. Adding salt is optional - I'm fine with low sodium food, so I don't add any myself. Also, you don't have to peel the ginger. That way, it is easy to identify and you won't accidentally eat it.

The thing I love about this recipe is the few ingredients it takes and the paltry amount of preparation time. All you need is a little patience while the steamer cooks your food :-) By the way, Chinese households sometimes add really healthy herbs like ginseng to this type of chicken soup. I don't do that because I think it hurts the taste too much.

Back From New York

Pearlin and I are now home from our trip at the New York Charter Schools Conference.

We arrived on Thursday morning on a red eye Jet Blue flight. When we finally arrived at our host's home, we quickly collapsed for a few hours of quality sleeping. Pearlin's good friend Ellie has a place in Brooklyn Heights, so we very conveniently were staying only about half a mile away from the Marriott, where the conference was being held. For lunch, we went to Katz's deli and ate quite possibly the best pastrami sandwiches in the world! We went there on the recommendation of somebody who grew up in New York, and Katz's clearly did not disappoint. For fun, I made my wife and I sit at the exact spot where the orgasm scene in When Harry Met Sally was filmed. Pearlin looked at me funny when I chose to sit there, but that is where we ate :-) Oh, and their matzo ball soup was delicious! In the evening, we attended the welcome reception, and Mayor Bloomberg was there. It turns out that he is a major proponent of charter schools in New York State. One of his pledges to the charter school community is to raise the cap on the number of allowable charter schools. At any rate, he gave a good speech, so I got a positive impression of him. The welcome reception was pretty fancy, featuring an open bar and hor douvres (chicken satay was yummy!).

Friday was the first of two days of exhibiting. The Chief Program Officer of the New York Charter Schools Association dropped by. Her name is Susie Barker and she is the reason why I came out to the conference in the first place. Caleb Offley, part of the Hoover Institution (affiliated with Stanford), had introduced me to Susie in the first place, and he also dropped by our booth. The exciting thing is that both Caleb and Susie brought some prospects to our booth and they got interested :-)

On Friday evening, we had dinner with my long lost friend James Destro. We hadn't seen each other in about 8 years, and the only way I got a hold of him was through an Internet white pages search and a hopeful phone call. We ate at Metro Cafe, which was pretty decent. Afterward, we got an overdose of chocolate at Chocolate Bar, and Pearlin and I also visited Magnolia Bakery to buy cupcakes. Apparently, Magnolia Bakery was featured in Sex and the City.

On Saturday, traffic at our booth was better than on Friday, but a lot of the traffic was from parents rather than teachers. We kept our booth up until the bitter end. A lot of exhibitors were breaking down their booths well before they should have, which really looks unprofessional and hurts everybody else. The good news is that we were rewarded for staying. We got two qualified leads after every other booth in the whole exhibit hall had closed down. When I was doing a demo for somebody, the company in charge of the furniture literally asked me to swap our rented chairs with some generic hotel chairs. In addition to that, the barriers that divide booths were being removed from my booth during my demo! It was kind of funny, but at least the teacher was interested in my product!

Afteward, we ate dessert at Chikalicious, which is famous despite being only a few years old. They only have seating for about 16 people and parties of only 4 or less. Apparently, Chika (pronounced "Cheeka") changes some of the items on her menu 2 or 3 times per week. The desserts are very small, but they taste good and won't interfere with your dinner appetitie. We showed up at about 4pm, and had to wait 15 minutes to get seated. We ate with Sharon and Ishi, friends from California who happened to be in New York at the same time. By complete coincidence, Ishi sat next to us on our flight to New York!

For dinner, we ate with Ellie and Adrien (our hosts) at Patsy's, a very famous Italian restaurant in New York. This is one of those restaurants that every famous person seems to visit, as evidenced by the huge array of photos on the walls (Katz's is no different in that respect). The food was good and worth returning for another meal, although I'm not able to give it huge accolades.

Unfortunately, Pearlin caught a cold so we took it easy for the rest of the trip. I was worn out anyway, so I ended up sleeping a ton. On Sunday afternoon, I ate pizza with Gary Culliss, a good friend of mine and also the founder of Direct Hit. I joined Gary's team for the MIT $50K Competition in 1998, and that company really put me on the right foot. Monty's is a very tasty, clean pizza joint on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights. Gary's comment was that Monty's was "California clean". Apparently, Montague Street is cleaner than most streets in Manhattan, and Monty's was unusually clean. Gary also said that Montague Street reminds him of Boston, and I certainly agree.

Finally, on Monday, we slept in, had a small lunch, took a cab to JFK airport, and made the journey home.

Home from CUE

I'm home now... for now. My last day at the CUE conference was a bit slow. However, I think we got 2 good school leads that day, so it wasn't terrible. On the bright side, due to my association with John Cradler (an educational technology expert on our Board of Advisors), one of the top educational consultants in the country (and friend of John) is interested in meeting me to discuss possibilities. I can't share specifics, but there is good potential :-) On Saturday night, I also met with fellow Nu Delta alums Steve Belin and Ben Skolnik. Ben recently founded http://www.livingproofproject.org,, a non-profit organization geared toward mentorship in lower income neighborhoods, and he has influence in Los Angeles. The exciting thing is that I will be given a chance to speak at a major event that they are putting together on April 29. I will have the opportunity to speak for 15-20 minutes, talking about my career as an entrepreneur and tying things to education. This will be a motivational speech in front of a group of 100+ people, and the attendees will include young MIT alums, some Ivy league alums, and inner city high school students who are participating in Ben's program :-) Ben will be inviting school officials from Los Angeles to attend, so I hope to meet with some of them as well. There will be other speakers, of course, and then we'll do a panel for Q&A. In addition, I will be giving away free MathScore student accounts to the attendees and have my logo appear on a big screen.

I also spent the night at my cousin Jim's on Saturday. He's doing well, and I ended up eating Japanese food with him. He's a doctor, and his dream is to open up a sports medicine clinic. He knows that he has to dream big to make this happen, and I hope he succeeds.

Today, my drive back up to Palo Alto was smooth. There was some snow in the mountain pass and rain on and off, but nothing to really slow down my commute, so I think I averaged 80+ MPH for most of the drive home. I saw a cop creep up on I-5 near Coalinga (a relative speed trap), but I was driving too slow to be worth his time, so he zoomed past me (phew!) At any rate, how many times have you been passed by a Honda Civic Hybrid? Are most people surprised when I pass them? My wife only knows of 2 occasions when a Prius has zoomed past me while driving, so I imagine people find it weird when I pass them. What do you think?

The Conference is Going Well

So far, I've completed 2 out of the 3 days at CUE as an exibitor. Things are going great! Lots of stuff happened and I got a decent number of leads, but here are some highlights:

Yesterday, I got one teacher very interested, but it turned out my Percentages topic was inadequate because it was not providing solution explanations. I wrote comprehensive notes regarding what she'd like to see in that topic, so when I got back to my hotel room, I literally designed/wrote code for 5 hours. When I was done, I had created a brand new topic that showed nice visuals to build up a conceptual understanding of percentages. I also added really nice solution explanations as well as alternate explanations. I sent her an email with the update.

Today, the same teacher came back along with a friend of hers, who is another teacher in a different district. She was very impressed by my fast response time and quality of work and now everything in my product meets all of her needs. I expect her to enthusiastically try it with her classroom, and her friend also got excited, and I expect her to try it out with her classroom. I kept explaining the importance of getting the district involved, so I would not be surprised if these teachers lead me to minimally their principals, if not multiple schools within their districts. I also got some big players at a major corporation excited about my product. Hopefully we'll sign a deal in the future and I can tell you about it. I also had some other stellar leads. The average time spent by a person who sat down with me for a demo easily exceeded 20 minutes :-) The thing I did best was listen to each prospect's needs, write down those needs, and then show how I could meet them.

Calm Before the Storm

It's 10:30pm. I'll be waking up around 7am tomorrow to start my first day of the CUE conference. We got lots of traffic at our booth last year, so I expect more of the same this year. Bob, who does sales and marketing consulting for me, will also be at the booth. One thing he is very good at is leaving the booth, networking with some people, and getting them excited enough to visit our booth. I look forward to seeing what he can produce in terms of leads this conference.

Btw, back at MIT, I participated in the Shakespeare Ensemble. We once did a series of scenes and we called it the "Calm Before the Storm" (we did The Tempest the following semester). I kind of liked that name. It was kind of fitting then, and it is fitting now.

The drive to Palm Springs was calm for the most part. However, at one point, a red car zoomed past my car at a tremendous speed. I was driving about 80 mph. It passed my car so fast and with such noise that I would not be surprised if he was doing 120-130 mph. I have never seen a car drive that fast before. Ferrari? I need to get one of those...

Btw, I'm staying at Extended Stay America. For a flat fee of $4.99 for the length of stay (not per day), I get wireless Internet access. Pretty cool, huh? I also have a large refrigerator, electric stove, toaster, etc. I like Extended Stay America a lot :-)

For those of you well acquainted with MathScore, I also just started the process of paying the same person who did www.mathscore.com to enhance the look of my student accounts. I know my student accounts look pretty ugly, so I am hopeful that she'll produce a significantly enhanced look.

Today I also bought my first ever reasonably expensive dress watch. I had been talking about wanting one for more than a year, so I set a goal that once I closed a school district, I would buy one. I ended up buying a Movado "Portico" at the outlets near Palm Springs. Unlike a classic Movado, this one has markings for all 12 hours. I prefer having markings for all 12 hours, so although it is strange to buy a Movado in that style, that's what I did. This watch works well for me because it is a dual tone watch that isn't too heavy on the gold. My wedding ring is also a dual tone and has more platinum than gold, so together, they match quite well.

I hate low flow washers!
It is past midnight. I'm waiting for some clothes to dry so I can finish packing up for the CUE conference in Palm Springs. Our "low flow" washer just leaked water for the first time. It is a rather new washer, but it sucks! The next time you are in the market for a washer, absolutely do not purchase a washer that saves water. You'll end up with dirty clothes every time you do a large dark load. The person we bought our house from left this washer behind, which, by the way, is a pretty new washer. Despite that, because it leaked water tonight, I think that gives us a good reason to spend the money to replace it with a regular washer.

I'm such a computer nerd
I finally decided to create a computerized packing list for every time I travel. The list contains not only clothes to pack, but lots of other things as well, such as "turn off the heat", "take out the trash", etc. I ended up using PHP (a programming language) and I categorized my lists (clothes, electronics, toiletries, etc). Each list was stored in an array. I then wrote a function that took the contents of the array and printed the items in a nice column in a table. So now, whenever I need to travel, I'll just visit my web page, print out the list, and check things off as I pack.

I wrote a Javascript calculator
Today (actually Mar 7), I also wrote a Javascript calculator that I sometimes display when students do worksheets on MathScore.com. I don't display the calculator for basic arithmetic, but for topics like "restaurant bills", "sales commission", "batting averages", and "mean, median, and mode", I now display the calculator. The calculator is very simplistic. You just type in a phrase like 12*13 and it spits out the answer. The neat thing about it is that it also takes more complex phrases like (12+98+2)/3. I didn't have to do anything fancy to make this happen. I just call the Javascript eval() function to get the answer.

The CUE Conference
The CUE (Computer Using Educators) Conference is a major educational conference in California. Last year, I was a first time exhibitor. It will be interesting to see how some people react when they recognize my booth this year. I'll be exhibiting this upcoming Thursday - Saturday. I hope it goes well!

Educational Conference Season!

I've been busy doing educational conferences for my company, MathScore.com. Seeing that some people out there would like to know about what's happening, here's the update:

Through my connections, I was invited to the ETC conference in Modesto on February 25 to speak. My topic was "Using MathScore.com to Raise Standardized Test Scores", and I had the opportunity to present my product in a hands-on format in a mobile computer lab, called the Urban Technology Vehicle (UTV). The UTV is actually a $200,000 small bus that has Internet access and about 30 laptops. Anyway, my two 1-hour sessions were very well attended, and I got a whole bunch of very strong leads! If everything goes well, I may be able to land another school district or two. For those of you who don't know, I recently did a deal with the whole Sunnyvale School District, which encompasses 8 elementary schools and 2 middle schools :-)

I also exhibited at the National Charter Schools Conference on March 1 and 2 in Sacramento, CA. Due to the layout and schedule, traffic at exhibitor booths wasn't really good for anybody, so I ended up leaving my booth a lot to go network with people directly. I still ended up with some great leads. I'm busy following up with leads from both conferences, so I've got my fingers crossed.

I'm also going to be exhibiting at the CUE (Computer Using Educators) conference in Palm Springs March 9-11. I'm looking forward to seeing my cousin Jim in LA after the conference. I may also meet up with some Nu Delta alums as well.