James Zhan in real life.
James Zhan
Hi, I’m James, a full-time videographer and video editor at University of Toronto, a YouTuber, a former audio engineer of 10 years, and someone who majored in English and writing, loaded with opinions. This is my personal blog where I write opinion pieces, personal reflections and articles about rabbit holes I’ve gone down, and share what I’m currently up to.
August 2026
October 2026
Top Words
- coffee
- weeknotes
- august
- bear
- list
- signal
- same
- dash
- audio
- redesign
- apple
- display
All posts (39)
This September, my wife and I started viewing houses to buy for our first home. This’s been a long time coming—for the past 5 years, we’ve been saving aggressively and safely investing our savings in index funds, which have performed remarkably well. We genuinely thought it’d take us at least a few months to find a...
My wife and I switched from Facebook Messenger and RCS to Signal almost a year ago for all our messaging needs. We have no plans to stop using Signal, but to be honest, Signal kind of sucks as a messaging app: No call notification on Apple Watch, meaning if you have your phone in your pocket on silence, you’d be...
This week ended with the news that the trade talk between Canada and the US collapsed. Once I read why, I was immensely grateful that we (Canada) have someone like Mark Carney at the helm. The negotiations must have been incredibly intense, and I just cannot imagine a career politician like Pierre Poilievre...
I was just attending a virtual academic conference, where, frustratingly and annoyingly, 9 out of 10 sessions were about AI. But then, in one of the sessions that discussed human writing vs AI writing, I saw this slide: Human Writing (good) Machine Writing (or bad human writing) Idiosyncratic Cliched Circumlocutory...
What brought me joy New coffee! I’ve had this coffee resting for 4 weeks and it’s finally ready to be opened! Opening a new bag of coffee is always exciting. I’m a few brews in and I’ve found that I prefer it brewed with the TORCH Mountain Dripper over V60 because it gets me a bit more acidity. The fermentation...
What brought me joy New coffees!! Got some new medium-dark roast coffee for espresso and my first ever bag of decaf beans, both from Propeller Coffee in Toronto! Sometimes, in the evening, I crave the act of brewing coffee and so I thought, why not give decaf a try? I’ll have to learn how to brew decaf beans as...
I don’t know how I can live 31 years of my life and not have a solid task management system for anything, but I really don’t. The only “system” I’ve had is called “pick-up-a-new-app-use-it-for-3-months-and-ditch-it-for-another-app.” Some of the apps I’ve churned through were Remember the Milk, todoist, Things 3,...
What brought me joy I discovered the indie typeface, Missive Serif, last week and started using it for headings and UI elements. This week, I set it for the blog list page as I found that I much preferred it over Rosario (font for body text). I really love how the blog list looks now! It was a rather cool week in...
Writing my response to Michael Harley’s blog post arguing against the merits of weeknotes has, ironically, had me think more about weeknotes and seek out more weeknotes to read. I’d toyed with the idea of creating my own weeknotes for a while and, rather than dwelling on it endlessly, I’ve decided to just give it a...
I came across orchids’ post sharing their conflicted feelings on whether or not “No AI” statements are genuinely necessary, helpful and/or useful. In their post, orchids argues that the onus is on the viewer/reader to distinguish human-created content from AI-generated one; it can be an indication of questionable...
Heads-up: This post is a bit of a bummer so stay away if you’re looking for something positive. When I went to open the bedroom curtains this morning, I did not expect the outside to look like it was lit by a giant night lamp. This is a photo I took in the apartment at 10 a.m.: And here’s our backyard: The photos...
Early this year, a blogger, Christian Lauf, expressed dismay over my decision to remove all the comment sections in my blog. Christian explained that he wanted to link to a blog he encountered in a comment on my post and was disappointed that the information was no longer available. I got in touch with him and sent...
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