Hi! I am Ken and it's my pleasure to be here in Hive. How are you guys doing?
I hope you are all well and safe, especially during this pandemic. After a few days of browsing Hive, I've found that this is really a great platform to share almost anything from what we do, our interests, to just about anything. So great thanks to @lalainejamila26 for letting me know about this, and most especially to @antonette for guiding us (me and Lalaine) through the necessary things for our onboarding. More power to both of you. As well as to you who are reading this now. Thank you for your time. 🙂
So what will I be writing here in the Hive?
Well, I am currently one of the writers for the best collection of online calculators out there which is called Omni Calculator. 😁 There, we create calculators to make people's lives a little bit less of a hassle in terms of trying to calculate something. You won't have to worry about the formulas for calculating the volume of a sphere or a pyramid. All you have to do is enter the things you would know like the diameter of the sphere or the outer dimensions of the pyramid and instantly, you will already know their volumes. :) You can definitely check out our calculators at omnicalculator.com to see our thousands of calculators that solve mathematical problems like obtaining your BMI, the number of toilet paper you would need, or even the length of the shoelaces you'd need for a specific shoelace pattern, and so much more.
When I am not writing an article for our website, you might see me playing chess on chess.com under the name MrUnorthodoxed. I started learning to play chess when I was in third grade but I started improving my chess skills only recently after installing the chess.com app and watching game reviews online. I never really studied chess openings, but I still follow the basic concepts in chess strategy and tactics. This makes me interested in playing Chess960, which is a chess variant that you can also play in the app (or their website). In Chess960, the pieces (except for the pawns) will always be at random places in the back rank every time you start a game, making standard chess openings rather unusable. You can see a sample game here:
In this kind of setup, you can then, right away, go straight to exploring the possible tactics even from the start of the game. It is really cool that I once had an opponent who messaged me saying, "once you start 960, there's no returning to standard chess," and I agreed with him. However, quite recently, I started getting interested in playing blitz and bullet in standard chess and so breaking what we agreed upon. 'Cause standard chess is classic, and even though 960 (and even the newer new variants available like fog-of-war) offers even more complexity to the game, they still all happen in that same checkered battlefield.
Having said that, I might throw in some chess puzzles or some of my chess games here for you to enjoy as well. Also, please feel free to send me a challenge. That would be fun. :)
Aside from being a logical and mathematical person, I also like exploring the realms of the creative world through music and visual arts. I am continuously learning to play stringed instruments like the violin and guitar, and I used to play wind instruments like the recorder and saxophone. However, it has been a while since I last played that I may be rusty now. But maybe sometimes, I might also post some covers. Maybe. 😊
On the other hand, on the visual arts side, I really enjoy creating small art pieces using mixed media like paper, metals, pieces of wood, and even scrap pieces I've salvaged from broken toys or anything broken. Here are some of the pieces I'm made before when I still had a lot of time:
Left to right: a mixed media sculpture version of a digital art made by a friend of mine, my favorite modular origami rose, and the Eye of Horus pendant from the Nickelodeon series named House of Anubis.
Now, I just admire artworks by others and even fascinate myself by the paintings made by people on Tiktok where they swing buckets of paints over enormous canvases. I plan to create a miniature version of that so stay tuned. That would be a fun project to do. :)
Of course, like everybody else, I also tried exploring and expressing my creativity through photography. But like my interests in the other fields of arts that I mentioned earlier, I might have actually temporarily stopped taking good pictures recently. Hopefully, I'd get back to taking pictures so I can share them with you here in Hive. Let's see, and I'll let you guys know.
Before the pandemic, I am usually always outside traveling and going to different places, may it be for work or for leisure. Being outside and having an interest in photography, I like taking pictures of the things around me that I think could help other people while they navigate. To do this, I upload pictures to Google Maps. If you haven't known yet, Google Maps has this group of people called "local guides."
You might actually already be a local guide without you knowing it. But yeah, uploading pictures for places, as well as posting reviews, and giving ratings to places in Google Maps makes you a local guide. You also level up when you contribute more things to the Maps. I am currently a level 6 local guide, however, I don't really know the benefits of being a local guide. 😅 So if somebody knows, please let me know in the comments so everybody else gets new knowledge. You can follow me there if you want to by checking my account.
Anyway, I guess this is becoming very long now for an introduction post. 🙂 So I would cut it here for now. Let me know what interests you most and what you write about here in Hive. I'd love to have a good chat with things to know more about the world and the things I do not know. If you're into these kinds of stuff, please do consider following me, upvoting this post, and letting me know your thoughts in the comments section. I would highly appreciate it. Thank you and see you guys around!