Kwon.nyc

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Fri, 05 Dec 2025 20:19:28 -0500

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Craft beer cans

Fri, 03 Oct 2025 08:18:03 -0400

Ever notice how cute craft beer cans are these days? Me too.

Now

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 00:00:00 -0400

Since my last update to this page in February 2025, I

was in a car accident and sustained an acute nondisplaced fracture of the transverse process of my L2 vertebra, which means both that I broke my back and also that I am fine
have had multiple health challenges (not including the above) for myself and in my family with attendant mixed feelings
am hanging in there

This page is my contribution to the /now page movement by Derek Sivers.

About

Wed, 21 May 2025 00:00:00 -0400

Hi and welcome to my website. I'm Rachel, a queer Korean American woman of average height in New York City. Like you, I am a denizen of the internet.

There are lots of things you can say about yourself on an About page but I’ll tell you briefly that in 2016, I quit my job as a doctor (specifically, training to be a surgeon), which was the most important decision I have made about anything (so far) and has shaped much of my adult life.

These days, I work for Google, doing my best to make Search results for health information more useful for you and other people.

Outside of work, I enjoy nonstrenuous nature walks, spending time with people who are important to me, spending time on the internet, tinkering with almost anything, riding my bicycle, being indoors, being outdoors, and many other things and activities.

What I’m doing / feeling / thinking in my life now-ish
Things I use to get the job done (usesthis interview — a bit out of date by now but still useful!)
An interview I gave for Manu’s People & Blogs series

A disclaimer that makes this feel more important than it actually is, but is true nonetheless: anything I say here represents my personal opinion and perspective only, not those of any of current, past, or future employers.

Dad Hats

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 00:00:00 -0400

My dad has a pretty extensive collection of hats. A couple years ago he had an acute health event where he had to be hospitalized for weeks, so I went to visit home and help my mom. It was scary and sad. One afternoon at the house I was alone between hospital visits and looking for something to occupy time and brainspace and found many of his hats scattered in various places around the house, mostly closets.

I had a meditative moment with each hat, thinking about the significance of each. Some date back up to 30 years. Most are from places my dad visited — lots of national parks, some institutions that people in our family have been affiliated with like schools my sister and I attended, et cetera. Some are seemingly random, but all of the ones whose meaning I could discern seem to be associated with the things I know my dad loves: nature, travel, golf, education, Jesus, his daughters. Basically he’s just a Midwestern dad out there trying his best.

My dad recovered fully from that event and is okay now, thankfully, but obviously we didn’t know what the outcome was going to be at the time, so going through the hats was kind of a poignant and emotional exercise. It made me think about what it would be like when my parents are no longer on this earth and I will only have what they’ve left behind, which is their stuff, and me.

My adventure on the California Zephyr

Sat, 23 Mar 2024 12:37:40 -0400

Notes

Fri, 24 Sep 2021 08:46:45 -0400

Colophon

Sat, 27 Mar 2021 18:07:40 -0400

I use Hugo and DeployHQ to generate and deploy the site, respectively, and Github to host the source code. Locally, I use Sublime Text to write and edit code, as well as Markdown files which constitute the content. (More gear and tech here.)

This cool illustration of my visage was done by my friend Leigh Peterson, who also taught me how to bathe a cat. (Those were two separate favors.)

I don’t really use design software to design websites, but I probably should. It’s just that every time I try, I find myself gravitating back towards designing in the browser.

Typefaces I’m using are New Spirit for headlines and the Apple system font (currently San Francisco, I guess) for everything else.

Hint: if you’re on the command line, try curl -L kwon.nyc

December Adventure

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

26

Decided to break up the Alaska photos (from my 12/23 update) into smaller galleries since I couldn’t make enough decisions about which ones to cut. Here’s one from Mendenhall glacier.

25

Took a long-ish Christmas walk around the lake. I made lions head meatballs for dinner.

24

I made a decaf coffee in the afternoon with a spoonful of hot cocoa mix and whipped cream. Decadent!

23

I’ve been culling a set of 566 photos from an Alaska trip to make into a gallery. I got it down to around 200, which is still too big for a gallery.

22

I made chicken and vegetable soup with the stock from yesterday. The plumber came by to fix a leak in the bathroom and kept saying how good the soup smelled so I gave him some to take home in a pint container.

21

Found a local grocery that sold handmade spaghetti in nests and guanciale, which is hard to find in stores, so I called my friend Steve who is in Bologna and asked for his carbonara recipe. We caught up for an hour and he shared the recipe.

20

Had a houseguest so spent most of the day entertaining. After dropping them off at the train station, I came back, broke down a chicken into parts, and used the bones to make a 4-hour stock.

19

Took my daily winter walk, at least. It rained so most of the snow on the trail melted. No creative brain.

18

Busy work day. No creative brain. Watched the first episode of the new season of Fallout.

17

Made hot pot at home. Finished jigsaw puzzle.

16

Made an open face kimchi tuna melt for lunch. This rental home also has a slow cooker and a jar of dried lentils, so I made a slow cooker lentil soup. Verdict: lentil soup doesn’t need to be made in a slow cooker. Lol.

15

Busy work day. Took a winter walk on the rail trail. Shoveled snow. Felt good to see all the snow cleared when I was done.

14

Snow. Winter walk. Saw a porcupine. Made an Irish hot chocolate. Started a jigsaw puzzle.

13

Drove upstate. Quick winter walk in mid-afternoon before it got dark.

12

Work from home, quick trip to office, packing for a month upstate. No creative brain today.

11

Travel day, inbound flight home. SFO Terminal 1 has a Vietnamese spot so I had a sidecar of pho broth for breakfast, and now I want a sidecar of pho broth for breakfast every day.

10

Work trip day 2. Made a bakery with modeling clay baked goods with my niece, called the Feed Me Bakery. “Expensive stuff” in the back (niece’s idea).

09

Work trip day 1. Took a morning walk at the coastal wetlands on the way to the office and pondered this interesting bush-looking plant.

08

Travel day, sat on a plane for 6 hours on an outbound flight for a work trip. No creative brain today.

07

I made the calendar on this page interactive. Also, I changed it from using flexbox, which was somewhat convoluted, to using <table>. I remember that <table> started getting a lot of hate for a time because people (me, I was people too) were using and abusing it for grid layouts. But calendars actually ARE tables, so this feels right.

I’ll be traveling for work this week, so won’t plan to update this page, but I’ll see what I can do to continue this daily practice and document manually, then share the updates when I’m back.

06

Wasn’t feeling like doing too much today so I just did some more cleanup and deleted some old files.

05

I made a blank page.

04

Today I figured out how to automate the process I use to pull movie data from my Letterboxd into a JSON file that I can then use to display recent movies I’ve watched on my homepage (kwon.nyc). I

added a line to my Netlify configuration to run a script at build time that fetches the data and dumps it into a JSON, which I’d previously been running manually, then
created a Github Action to automatically trigger a Hugo build every morning at 8 am New York time.

I also realized from days 1-3 that waiting until the end of the workday to do decadv stuff meant I was using my tired brain (my evening brain), so this morning I spent some of my good brain (my morning brain) on it, which was a really nice start to the day. I’ll try it again tomorrow morning.

03

I had a long workday and then went to a late (for me) dinner, so I didn’t have as much time as I hoped for to work on Dec Adventure. Today, I fixed the mobile view for this page. Also, randomly, while waiting for my seat at the restaurant, I saw the actor Wallace Shawn come in, talk to the host (checking wait time?), and then leave. Inconceivable.

02

I have this micro-site, kwon.nyc/cans, that I put together somewhat shoddily several weeks ago. It’s a series of photos of craft beer cans with neat designs in reverse chronological order. Today I did some unglamorous code cleanup, including fixing a weird datetime issue where the “Last updated” date was referring to the date of the last site build – now it refers to the date of the last can photo added, as desired. (Cue applause.)

01

Goal for day 1 is to build this log. I stumbled upon this December Adventure thing on Mastodon, and it feels like a nice way to make some progress on things with minimal pressure, which is the level I’m on these days.

I built it as a custom micro-site within my existing Hugo site, which is somewhat against the spirit of Hugo sites (I think) but is super easy and fast to spin up by just creating a new content folder with hugo new, a baseof.html and list.html in a custom layout, and custom css.

This is also an interesting exercise in GOOD ENOUGH because it is not conducive to navel-gazing pixel pushing (unless said navel-gazing pixel pushing ends up as something tangible).

Links

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Movies

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

These are the last 50 movies I logged at Letterboxd.