BluePojo

Amazon Prime makes the decision easy sometimes.

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:15:08 -0500

FREE Two-Day Shipping —get it Thursday, March 11!
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What is your 生き甲斐?

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:42:01 -0500

Your ikigai. Which is yours? Surely you have one. Why do you bother to roll out of bed in the morning?

Is it your job, and the fact that you’ll lose your house if you don’t keep going? Is it your kids, who need someone to feed them?

Now think: what is it you choose to do every day? What do you spend most hours of your life doing?

Do these two things match up? Are you sure you’re pursuing the right things?

My ikigai

Here’s an example of something that gets me excited:

Sure, this isn’t software, but this is the thought process I love. How do we make simple things in life more effective? I love that.

That’s my ikigai. What’s yours?

"One day, only the rich will be able to afford candles."

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:06:30 -0500

“One day, only the rich will be able to afford candles.”

- Thomas Edison, in reply to a reporter who asked if some day everyone will be able to afford his electric lights.

thingssheloves: Seattle, Washington This is the view I had...

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 14:42:59 -0500

thingssheloves:

Seattle, Washington

This is the view I had from my window while working at Amazon.com. The Pacific Medical Center building has such a great location.

Philadelphians: Want to make sure you're not buying a stolen car?

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 09:39:00 -0500

Good luck.

I just got off the phone with the police department who essentially said “we really don’t care.”

The story:

Sunday, I see a listing on Craigslist for a 2000 Plymouth Neon with 60,000 miles on it. ”Fantastic,” I think, “this is a great deal.”

I take the subway then ride my bike out to meet this guy. He’s friendly, lets me drive the car around a bit, and I agree to buy the car if it checks out at the mechanic. He waffles a bit about going to the mechanic, but agrees to do so the next day. I call back two days later, as I didn’t get a call about how it went at the mechanic, and he says he’s been busy and hasn’t gotten the chance. He’ll take it that day.

Now this morning, he calls me. He’s sold the car to someone else for 150% of what I was going to pay. ”You can’t blame me.” he said. “But! I’ve got this other car, a 1998 Ford with 50,000 miles on it. You can’t beat that, it’s a nicer car than the Neon!”

I mention I’m disappointed about the fact that we had a verbal agreement that he backed out of, since I had stopped looking for other cars. I say I’ll think about the other car, and hang up.

My phone rings again 2 minutes later. It’s him again, but he doesn’t say hello. He must have sat on his phone, since he was having a conversation with his wife. He talked about a kid who they used to make fun by calling him Ratface behind his back, and then talked about how he picked up this cool Ford last night, and how he needs to fix the windshield, but it should sell soon.

I’m willing to admit that he might like to go to late night car auctions and pick up extremely low mileage ~10 year old cars, but my intuition suggests otherwise.

Due to my suspicions, I called district 2 of the Philadelphia police department, the district where I looked at this car.

I told the above story, and then asked if they could check if either of the above models had been reported stolen recently. They said they don’t run checks on cars unless they have them in their possession, and, when I asked if there’s any way I can make sure I’m not about to buy a stolen car, she responded “not that I know of.” She continued: “You listened to a conversation. How credible is that?”

Ah well. Is there anything else I should do, or just hope he gets caught by other means?

The Internet? Bah!

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 11:29:56 -0500

Hype alert: Why cyberspace isn’t, and will never be, nirvana

By Clifford Stoll | NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Feb 27, 1995

After two decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

Consider today’s online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen. How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it’s an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can’t tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

What the Internet hucksters won’t tell you is tht the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don’t know what to ignore and what’s worth reading. Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them–one’s a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn’t work and the third is an image of a London monument. None answers my question, and my search is periodically interrupted by messages like, “Too many connectios, try again later.”

Won’t the Internet be useful in governing? Internet addicts clamor for government reports. But when Andy Spano ran for county executive in Westchester County, N.Y., he put every press release and position paper onto a bulletin board. In that affluent county, with plenty of computer companies, how many voters logged in? Fewer than 30. Not a good omen.

Point and click:

Then there are those pushing computers into schools. We’re told that multimedia will make schoolwork easy and fun. Students will happily learn from animated characters while taught by expertly tailored software.Who needs teachers when you’ve got computer-aided education? Bah. These expensive toys are difficult to use in classrooms and require extensive teacher training. Sure, kids love videogames–but think of your own experience: can you recall even one educational filmstrip of decades past? I’ll bet you remember the two or three great teachers who made a difference in your life.

Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t–the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

What’s missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who’d prefer cybersex to the real thing? While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where–in the holy names of Education and Progress–important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.

STOLL is the author of “Silicon Snake Oil–Second Thoughts on the Information Highway” to be published by Doubleday in April.

(via @Jovialist and Three Word Chant)

"A poet once said, “The whole universe is in a glass of wine.” We will probably never..."

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 00:39:41 -0500

“

A poet once said, “The whole universe is in a glass of wine.” We will probably never know in what sense he said that, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look in glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe.

There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflections in the glass, and our imagination adds the atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth’s rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe’s age, and the evolution of the stars. What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it!

If in our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts - physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on - remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let us give one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!

”

- Richard Feynman (audio)

This is what my wife will be working on this coming summer....

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 18:17:00 -0500

This is what my wife will be working on this coming summer. Very very exciting research. We software engineers live in a different world than real engineers like her.

http://fel.web.psi.ch/

"…and you can build a three-ringed security zone complete with layers of Cylons, Stormtroopers,..."

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 17:21:53 -0500

“…and you can build a three-ringed security zone complete with layers of Cylons, Stormtroopers, and adorable labradoodles (or whatever your IT department requires).”

- hginit.com

:3

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 17:13:23 -0500

Someone at Comcast cares... :D

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 23:20:52 -0500

@bluepojo: @comcastcares Service is going in and out tonight. It's dropped for minutes at a time 5 or 6 times now. South Street in Philadelphia.

@comcastcares: @BluePojo What is going in and out? TV, Internet or both?

@bluepojo: @comcastcares I don't have a TV. :P The Internet has been.

@comcastcares: @BluePojo First step I would like to take it down for a moment. Let me know if that is ok. In looking at the historical in, this can be...

@comcastcares: @BluePojo a few things. I would like to try something, but after we do that I would recommend disconnecting the cable and reconnecting...

@comcastcares: @BluePojo at the modem, wall then the splitter. This trouble is usually modem, bad connection somewhere, or a splitter gone bad

@bluepojo: @comcastcares Thanks for taking a look. Let me know when to power cycle my modem.

@comcastcares: @BluePojo Not the modem, but the router. You will see the modem go down, then back up again, then down & back up. They you can reboot router

@bluepojo: @comcastcares Ok, I saw the connection disappear then come back. Was that you or another hiccup?

@comcastcares: @BluePojo That was me. At this point you can reboot your router. If you want to see if that helps, that would be fine. Step 2 would be wire

@bluepojo: @comcastcares It's working so far... I'll ping you if it goes down again, thanks! (wow, this was better than waiting 2hrs on the phone...)

How to deal with a shedding dog in a carpeted house

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 09:20:00 -0500

Oh, you thought I only post deep thoughtful material on here? Hah!

This is Sumio. He sheds a lot. A hell of a lot. I’ve recently discovered how to deal with this, so I wanted to share.

Get a brush appropriate to your dog’s fur type. For a short haired, no undercoat style fur coat like Sumio’s, we use a ZoomGroom rubber brush:
Use the above brush daily.
Select the place for your daily brushing session wisely. I very specifically do not brush in the same place twice, and I always choose high traffic areas, or Sumio’s favorite places to sleep, to brush him in.

The reason this is so beneficial is that a different part of the apartment gets vacuumed every day, and, over the course of a week, all high traffic areas get vacuumed at least once. This not only means Sumio doesn’t shed as much, since I’m pulling off all the loose fur once a day, but I get a free maintenance vacuuming along with it, which I should be doing anyway, so the total extra time spent on this is about 5 minutes for the brushing itself. This also means I only have to do a whole-apartment vacuum when I have an event at my house, as the carpet is generally kept up by the daily minivacuumings, and generally there isn’t that random layer of fur on the carpet I’d gotten used to having over the last 8 months.

#shedding @bluepojo

"The purchase price is just the beginning. You’re going to have to think about that thing for..."

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 13:48:06 -0500

“The purchase price is just the beginning. You’re going to have to think about that thing for years—perhaps for the rest of your life. Every thing you own takes energy away from you. Some give more than they take. Those are the only things worth having.”

- Paul Graham in “Stuff”

"People showing up at some website, they don’t care about it as much as you — the founders — care..."

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 18:30:00 -0500

“

People showing up at some website, they don’t care about it as much as you — the founders — care about it.

What you [should] care about is the person who shows up randomly […] and has their finger poised over the Back button. Because think how many websites you visit everyday. Most of them are no good. You click on Back and go on with your life.

So you’re designing your website for the guy who’s just about to leave. Who’s just on the cusp of even caring [about] what you do. You know what your website does. But he doesn’t. He doesn’t even care that much. So you have to tell him.

”

- Paul Graham in an interview on Mixergy

(via blood)

Is that so?

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 13:59:55 -0500

Is that so?

Stewart Butterfield’s resignation letter. A work of...

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 00:32:02 -0500

Stewart Butterfield’s resignation letter. A work of genius. (via 37signals)

"Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure..."

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 21:55:37 -0500

“Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”

- C.S. Lewis

gamefreaksnz: mapenvelop : beste miray The MapEnvelop...

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 15:52:57 -0500

gamefreaksnz:

mapenvelop : beste miray

The MapEnvelop project prints your current location inside of your letter’s envelope.

Twitter is different

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 14:35:00 -0500

Today, I received a personal message from Ramit Sethi. A few weeks ago, I received a personal (direct) message from Penelope Trunk. Additionally, Robert Scoble has sent me personal messages as well. Even further, several times I have had my messages relayed to hundreds of thousands of people by Scoble and others.

This hasn’t been possible in the past. Think back to before the internet… or hell, think back to just before Twitter. How could you get in touch with anyone who is considered “famous”? Emailing them was/is a waste. Trying to get their autograph at a show was/is all you could hope for. The only pseudo-successful means available to the random individual was when bands or other famous figures would have special offers if you join their VIP fan club at the cost of however much money, so you could get invited to a “Meet and Greet” which mostly consisted of a single handshake and a “hello.”

With Twitter, however… I ask a question, and it gets answered. I post a message, and my followers see it, among which are people such as Robert Scoble and Hiten Shah. It’s a minimal time investment due to the limitation on characters in a tweet, so my messages are not regarded as time-wasting fan-service. Their responses are also limited to the classic 140 characters, so replying is not a grand investment for them, either.

Twitter is a direct connection to people who could not possibly have time to notice me otherwise. That’s a lot better than nothing.

#differenttwitter @bluepojo

Why your accent makes me think you're stupid

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 12:26:15 -0500

If you have an accent from Chester, PA, I’m going to notice. The first time you say any word with an “ow” sound, I’ll know where you grew up. Additionally, I’m going to judge you for it, and will assume you’re less intelligent than someone with a West Chester accent, for instance. The same goes for if you’re overweight, or drive by in a Cadillac Escalade with the windows down blasting bass-heavy music. You’re immediately starting out on a lower tier in my evaluation cycle than others without those features.

This is because I am superficial. That’s easy for me to admit to, because you are superficial, too.

Study marketing for a term, and you’ll realize that we’re remarkably superficial. Your job as a marketer is to take advantage of the superficial channels we leave open to the world. Does Michael Jordan know more about underwear than you do? Hell no. Does his advertisements about Hanes brand underwear work? Hell yes.

To take this a step further, why is wearing a suit important?

“Well,” says your SVP of Finance at Supercorp A, “a suit shows that you are a professional. It shows you know how to take care of yourself.”

Does that make sense? Does wearing a suit show that you know how to maintain the human body? I’d argue the opposite. For a simple example, the shoes a person wears with a suit are precisely the opposite of what the human body needs. Take a look at these pictures, comparing someone who’s lived their life barefoot with one who wears proper shoes daily.

The second image is simply unnatural, but is the state of most humans’ feet with these modern ideas of what shoes should be. Clearly this is not a means of “taking care of yourself.”

What is it, then? Why do we need suits to be “professional”? It’s a means of intercepting superficial evaluations. So prevalent are these superficial evaluations that wearing a suit has become the standard means of proving you are a “professional.”

Why is being superficial a bad thing? It’s obviously an irrational means of evaluating a person. ”Don’t judge a book by it’s cover” has become a mantra of moms trying to teach their kids not to be superficial. Is being irrational a poor way to live your life? The answer seems obvious, but lets take a second look:

What is lost by being superficial?

Opportunities to encounter superficially boring, yet actually interesting people or situations will be missed almost 100% of the time.
Being superficial, while natural, is still regarded as a bad thing by general society, so social status will slip.

What is gained by being superficial?

Time. One can make superficial judgements very quickly, as no real data is needed.

So if we lose the first two only to gain some time, why are we naturally superficial? Reverse the situation and see what the result is: imagine humans are naturally deep about everything.

Every day decisions will begin taking much more time. Choosing which cereal you wish to eat every morning will be a bit of an ordeal of comparing nutrients available from both, examining gathered data from previous experience in eating that particular meal, with relation to what you plan to eat during the rest of the day, as well as time of year and current health. Selecting which shoes you wish to wear will require you to examine what surfaces you intend to walk on, as well as your normal gait with relation to how well the tread on the shoes will adjust to each of the varying surfaces you will walk on in the coming hours at work. Choosing which email to read first will require you to examine the subject title as well as the sender, compared with the timestamp to evaluate which email will be best to read first.

Deciding whether to go out on a date with someone will be an arduous process. Information about the person you are evaluating will not be readily available, so you, after applying some risk analysis, will likely never date anyone until you know them very very well, due to the high probability that the date will go poorly.

Now compare this situation with someone who evaluates things superficially.

The cereal you eat is decided based on the color of the box, and how good the picture is on the front of the box. You select your shoes based on what color they are, and whether you usually wear them on a normal day, regardless of where you are going, generally. You read your emails top to bottom, or perhaps you read ones that have friendly sounding titles first. You pick dates based on how cute the chick is, something that takes less than a few seconds to decide.

Now, who is accomplishing more? The superficial person is accomplishing more, because every day decisions don’t need such deep evaluation. By the time the “always deep” person picks their cereal, the second is out the door, doing more important things… the things they intend to spend their deep thoughts on.

Being superficial is a defense against wasted time.

When to be deep.

We’re obviously not always superficial. When and why do we switch gears then? Being superficial does not prove beneficial when, for instance, we’re trying to win a game of Warhammer. Warhammer requires much evaluation of both the opposing army and opposing player, predicting how they’ll move and how you’ll counter them. Why am I compelled to switch gears and evaluate in more detail when playing Warhammer or doing Linear Algebra homework, but I am not compelled to when picking my shoes?

The easy answer is that it interests me, but there’s got to be more to it than that.

The reason Warhammer interests me is because I can see the end result of what I am pursuing: victory. I have won games before, so I know what feelings are evoked when I run the opponent’s general off the board, and I am drawn to them. I know there’s only one way to achieve said feelings, and so I play through the game against competent opponents to get there.

The real distinction is the clearness of the results of being superficial or deep in a given situation. Some people do deep evaluations of what cereal they eat in the morning, but this is because it interests them. It interests them, because they can see the result of eating well, and they are drawn to it. They are willing to trade the time saved by being superficial for the benefit gained by achieving the goals they can visualize of eating well. Additionally, after some practice and habit forming, making deep decisions about things that interest you will slowly take less and less time, another goal which some people are able to visualize and others are not.

Ultimately: being superficial is not a bad thing, always. It allows you to make respectable and predictable decisions without taking time away from the things you are interested in. When you are interested, also known as being able to clearly visualize the end result of investing the time required to do a deep evaluation, then being deep is a natural state of mind.

Because I am not a very social person, I have no need to relate to a remarkable number of people. It does not benefit me to be more than superficial when I first meet people, as it will take time away from things I am interested in.

The same goes for you, too, just for other situations. Further, it goes to prove that companies that require you to wear a suit are also ones that cater to the superficiality of their employees. I’m a software engineer. I don’t own a suit. If you’re in sales or marketing, however, you’d better wear a suit. Your job description is the same as the suit’s.

#imnotsodeep @bluepojo