“Drop everything you’re doing and read this article now!”
“This should be the one thing you do today!”
“You really, really must see this video.”
“Get this book right away.”
Really?
Bloggers telling me what I should do *right now*
May 11th, 2012A Sense of Entitlement
May 10th, 2012The other thing that bothers me more about being inconsiderate is people’s sense of entitlement. It is particularly apparent on the streets of New York City. Most people never get out of your way, believing they have the right of way no matter which direction they go (the same holds true for taxicabs).
I find myself getting angry very quickly when I walk or run or bike outside. I started literally walking with my elbows out and looking ahead (never make eye contact – if you do, people will certainly not get out of your way, as if establishing eye contact was equivalent to submitting to the other person) with determination. I find myself becoming a less kind human being. It’s terrible.
The problem with a sense of entitlement is that most people who feel it aren’t reflective or intelligent enough to understand the phenomenon and perhaps learn to lose it. This makes it self-reinforcing: those who have a sense of entitlement don’t confront it, and as a result just deepen it over time.
It certainly doesn’t happen that we all told how special we are from pretty much the day we are born.
The Ability to Solve
May 9th, 2012One of the things I value the most in people is an ability to solve problems. It’s actually a combination of a value and a number of abilities.
The value is the desire to eliminate problems; many – if not most – people don’t feel the discomfort of walking by a problem without addressing it. If problems don’t bother you, you will not be motivated to find solutions.
The abilities include:
- Being able to see the problems in the first place
- The conceptual ability and the creativity to see connections between the problem and everything that you know, so that you can discover a solution
- The ability to push through to solve the problem. Frequently this means trying various alternatives, getting to the right answer with trial and error
Despite people increasingly tagging themselves as “problem-solvers”, I think the ability to solve is actually pretty rare. It takes someone who is just a little obsessed, just a little bit of a perfectionist, has just the right amount of patience (enough to try various solutions, but not too much so they don’t get bothered by the problem in the first place), and a lot of determination.
People who choose irrelevant profile photos
May 8th, 2012No, you are not a zebra. You are a human being. I get it, it’s funny. Or perhaps a zebra means something to you (though more likely, you just want to be different).
Why do I care? Because in the age of information integration, your profile picture finds its way into my (and everyone else’s) phone contacts list, close to real time. (Or, if you are not that up to date on technology, in a couple of years it will.) I really don’t like the aesthetic of my phone showing me a picture of a zebra when you call. And, hopefully, you do not appreciate it either.
A zebra calling me? Ridiculous.
My Favorite Chord
January 21st, 2012I have a favorite chord. It’s Fsus4. It is more fascinating than a bland major chord (yes, major chords are harmonious, but they are too aesthetic, they don’t give the music the ability to engage our emotions. It’s difficult to compose an interesting piece of music using only major chords), and more mysterious than a pervasive minor chord. It conveys anticipation, hope, elevation. It used to be frequently used in video game music back when music was more abstract (and minimalist, likely due to space and processing constraints) just after you beat the baddest boss, ascending to the final screen.
Check it out here, followed by a regular F major chord: F Sus 4.
What is your favorite chord?
Recurring Payments
December 11th, 2011One of the common online services that I find very frustrating is the functionality of many utility providers to set up recurring payments. I would understand it if the functionality was complex, difficult to get right, but recurring payments are pretty straightforward. It’s pretty clear what the right thing to do here is.
When I set up a recurring payment, I want to pay the bill — the bill that until now I used to pay manually (unless this is the first time I’m paying the bill) — automatically. So that I don’t have to worry about it. I don’t want to start paying two months from now, and I don’t want to pay the next month’s bill twice. I just want it to work. Unfortunately, it doesn’t.
I never trust the service when I’m doing setting up recurring payments. Many providers don’t make it clear which payments I set up, starting when, and how they may interact with manual payments. The user interface is always complicated, which doesn’t make sense to me because the expected user experience is very simple. And I don’t buy that setting up a recurring payment should take two cycles (seems like an artifact of how things used to be done — when changes made by mail might take a week to reach the processing center, which could cause a race condition; but even then, again, it’s clear that I simply want to ensure I continue paying the bill and never have to pay twice for the same bill).
Thank you to my friend S.C. for inspiration for this.
I’m on Twitter.
December 9th, 2011Yes, as of recently, I’m on Twitter. I decided to join not out of need or curiosity or the desire to fit in or seem like I know social media or seem like I’m up to speed on technology, but because I decided to open up to the idea that Twitter may actually be useful in allowing me to communicate effectively — let me share my ideas better, let them reach people better.
Twitter (just as any tool, really, and especially just as any platform) is used improperly all the time. By “improperly” I mean used in ways that it wasn’t meant to be used, or in ways that obscure its truly revolutionary, game-changing, unique purpose. I believe that Twitter is unique in that it allows individuals (and groups) to broadcast their thoughts, opinions, reflections (broadly speaking, information) in a lightweight way, and with support for consuming that information.
In other words, As a subscriber, I don’t want articles. I want headlines. And I want them delivered to my doorstep.
The constraint to keep the broadcast lightweight is crucial precisely because we’re letting people broadcast — if the information is too verbose, its sheer volume will make the platform useless. And support for consuming the information lowers the bar for subscriptions. If the information is hard to get, people won’t bother managing their subscriptions.
So yes, I could just have a blog, but by its virtue it will likely contain longer bits of information; and there is no easy way for people to follow my blog unless they subscribe in some way, which will likely be too heavyweight for the number of subscriptions they will likely be maintaining (many of their friends, figures of authority that they trust, companies that they think of, etc.).
Now, a headline might pique your curiosity and then you may want to read more. Twitter supports URLs, which is great. I can have my cake — allow lots of people to go through my content really quickly (so they can go through others’ content too) — and eat it too — still be able to express myself fully.
This blog has a natural connection to Twitter. Many of my posts are snippets of opinion with added context. I should be able to synthesize most of them into something bite-sized. Twitter will create a contract between me and people who may be interested in what I have to say that gives me a scalable forum, and gives them the peace of mind that the content won’t be too time-consuming to get to. I had better be good at synthesizing my content, but it is a great skill to have anyway. In a way, Twitter makes information delivery more democratic.
Of course, that’s not how Twitter is used to a large extent. I think that’s fine — many platforms are abused in some form or another, and different platforms may tolerate different volume of abuse. Since Twitter has such a clear contract, I am okay tolerating abuse because if I do a good job, people who I care about will easily be able to separate me from noise and so I will be able to maximize who I reach out to.
Bumper guards
December 3rd, 2011Bumper guards — those rubber sheets people stick out of the trunks of their cars to protect their bumpers from dents — are the surest way to:
- Make your car look ugly. I understand their appeal — though I haven’t verified it myself, I am sure they protect somehow from small scratches and dents, but at what aesthetic price! It’s like a bib for your car.
- Make other drivers bump into you more. Presumably the existence of a rubber surface will protect both cars so the driver who might otherwise be careful will take a few more liberties getting out of that ridiculously cramped parking spot.
I wonder how many people get them having done the research to figure out how effective they are. In other words, is it just a fad, or is there some merit to the idea? (While I should have checked, the disgust I feel for what they make cars look prevents me from spending much time on them. Maybe except for this post.)
Carry-on Luggage? Think again.
November 28th, 2011It’s saddening that flying has become something akin to colonoscopy – a necessary agony. I don’t know enough to have an opinion on whether I blame the airplane companies for this (who, due to the high barrier of entry, have become near-monopolies and thus don’t innovate and worry only about cost-cutting) or the government (which imposes all these rules and fees on the airline companies) or the industry itself (it’s just bound to suck).
The newest annoyance (or maybe the newest for me as previously I haven’t felt the pain) is the airlines’ decision to charge for checked luggage which incentivizes everyone on the flight to carry large carry-ons. Combined with densely packed seats, this means that there is no room for all the carry-ons on the plane so some passengers are forced to check their carry-on in. Which sucks if you have things in your carry-on that can get damaged, if you don’t want to incur additional delay at arrival, hate how the baggage is handled, worry about it being lost or stolen, and so on — I’m sure the list goes on.
The most annoying thing? Somehow airlines didn’t think it fair to randomize the selection of carry-ons so those in later groups always get penalized while those in group 2 almost never do.
Turn Off All Electronic Devices
November 27th, 2011Flying gives me all this new material to file under Daily Badness… this Thanksgiving, I was infuriated by a flight attendant who insisted that I “turn off” my Kindle reader while being totally fine with the person next to me listening to music. There are so many things wrong with this, where should I begin.
For one, e-ink screens only consume power when I turn the pages so for the overwhelming majority of time the device is as good as turned off (with the added twist of irony where “turning off” the device would have to be me simply putting it away). The interference such a device might cause is also likely an order of magnitude greater than any interference that a music player may cause. Finally, it’s very likely that the person listening to music wasn’t listening to it on his casette tape player, and the hidden device he used is likely significantly more complex than the Kindle.
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