Shameless plug to get Google to index the website faster. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I was playing around with the idea to up the marketing and social media stuff for Shan (WFH is taking its toll -- I was bored, always doing the same, saw Shan struggle to do both creative and marketing work, and I had plenty of brainjuice left -- and in all fairness I was probably getting a bit frustrated and going "why don't you just ...". So yeah, decided to actually help out and experiment some).

Since medio April I have been running most of the social media accounts, having content scheduled using Hootsuite, increasing followers, etc.

I did some of this before, but it was mostly some random paid advertisement without a real strategy that didn't lead to anything very substantial. The ROI wasn't really there and was mostly just a gamble -- so far we've had more leads from organic growth than from paid ads on Google or Facebook/Instagram. Soooooo something must be wrong there...?!

Another thing that was missing to make her more prominent as SME (subject matter expert) was to have all the knowledge and experience she has more publicly available; ie give some away for free (and help those that wouldn't hire the services anyway), and then provide enough of a teaser to reel in customers that want more and have budget. The blog will also hold some reviews, plug some contractors and suppliers (create a bit of a win-win situation and platform), etc.

So yeah -- I suddenly had this epiphany to set up a blog (using Medium -- and I may have been late to the party, but I've been watching and wanted to get to know more about the platform -- and so far Medium actually has quite some interesting articles).

Got some interviews going with clients, show casing some projects (the portfolio is nice, but doesn't have a lot of written content) have some posts about what's going on in Shan's mind (those are the ones that take time as Shan needs to sit down and actually give me content) and even wrote about our house. :)

So let's see how that works out -- but so far it's been worth it.

This is one from last year, but as there's another coming... Posting it here for memories' sake.

They promised us all our cat pictures (they took more pictures of the cats than us)... Still waiting. :(

I am not sure what is the problem -- I've upgraded Shan's 27" 2k monitor to a 32" 4k monitor and AutoCAD LT recently updated from 2021 to 2022. Shan's been using a 2017 i5 NUC (NUC7i5BNB) with 32Gb RAM using the onboard GPU. Something that should be plenty for a bit of Windows, Chrome, Photoshop and AutoCAD LT.

For the past few weeks, several times a day her screen would black out for half a second or so and then everything should go back to normal. Sometimes it would happen several times in a row, sometimes it wouldn't for hours on end.

I tried several things, including getting a 8k 120hz HDMI cable, using a usb-c to DP cable, changing the GPU vRAM minimum from 128Mb to 2048Mb (quite the hack, as it can't be set in the bios -- requires messing around in the registry. Wow.), updating all the drivers, updating the bios, making sure the NUC was properly ventilated and keeping cool (every full moon the NUC shuts down due to overheating in Singapore if I set the fan to 'balanced' instead of 'cool'), and probably more. And because it happened so sporadically it was quite hard to debug (to the point I sometimes didn't want to believe her as I couldn't see it blacken out).

Shan was getting frustrated (which in turn means I get frustrated)... and I started looking at getting either an eGPU (I can get a free Nividia M6000, just need the enclosure, but the enclosure would be $$), an AMD Ryzen 5 or 7 NUC (no more Intel in this house, but also $$$), or some other refurb (massive) desktop some friend had lying around (HP z240 or something, zero $, but Shan would kill me for having this massive thing on her desk).

Turns out, the quick fix, was to simply disable hardware acceleration.

Run GRAPHICSCONFIG and uncheck hardware acceleration.

This is probably not ideal in the long run (hopefully it's an issue with AutoCAD 2022 that is getting fixed, as opposed to the onboard Intel GPU getting messed up with AutoCAD).

When in doubt… Turn off hardware acceleration.

Shan has launched a new website (and a new domain)!

Logo by Christa.

Shan.sg - IG

By Shan Wong.

More photos on Google Photos.

Noticed my last Shan update on this site was Shan launching a new site. Meanwhile we've moved into our own home slightly over a year ago. I should showoff some pictures.

More pictures can be found on Google Photos.