Author Archive: Paul Epps

Lack of Privacy Is Part of the Deal

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Product endorsement is “implicitly aspirational”: The grandaddy of such advertising in the modern age, of course, is three simple words: “Be Like Mike.” Once you’re asking people to be like you, you’re inviting them to wonder about the “you” they’re supposed to want to be like. End of privacy. In case your agents, lawyers, managers, and other handlers didn’t mention it, that’s the deal. — Harry Shearer Read more →

What Would Hope Do?

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A young lady named Hope Xu — from University High right here in Irvine — scored a perfect 2400 on this year’s SAT exam. I’ve advised my 16-year-old son that henceforth, when he’s faced with a tough decision in life, he should ask himself the question “What would Hope Xu do?” I know one thing she wouldn’t do and that is to run into her dad’s bedroom at 11 p.m. and start doing flying front kicks when he’s trying to sleep. “Why are you doing that?” I ask him. “I just drank a Red Bull,” he says, then dances back out the door singing a song I don’t recognize . . . Read more →

Bad is Good

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I saw a guy I used to work with on LinkedIn today . . . The thing I remember most about him is that he believed it was bad luck to wish good fortune on someone. For example, if you said to him “Have a good day,” he believed that would in fact cause him to have a bad day. When I worked with him, if I saw him as I was leaving the office, I’d say “Have a crummy evening.” And he’d say, “Thank you.” Read more →

That Clears the Air!

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Sarah Henderson, daughter of Fritz Henderson, the just-resigned-minutes-ago GM CEO, posted some choice words about Ed Whitacre, the random white guy taking her dad’s place at the top of the just-emerged-from-bankruptcy automaker, on the automaker’s public Facebook page! — Daughter Of Resigned GM CEO Attacks New GM CEO On Facebook – Ed Whitacre – Jalopnik. Read more →

We’re Going to Let You Die

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I will actually give you a speech made up entirely–almost at the spur of the moment, of what a candidate for president would say if that candidate did not care about becoming president. . . . “Thank you so much for coming this afternoon. I’m so glad to see you, and I would like to be president. Let me tell you a few things on health care. Look, we have the only health-care system in the world that is designed to avoid sick people. [laughter] That’s true, and what I’m going to do is I am going to try to reorganize it to be more amenable to treating sick people. But that means you–particularly you young people, particularly you young, healthy people–you’re going to have to pay more. [applause] Thank you. “And by the way, we are going to have to–if you’re very old, we’re not going to give you… Read more →

Infomaki: An Open Source, Lightweight Usability Testing Tool

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Infomaki is an open source “lightweight” usability testing tool developed by the New York Public Library to evaluate new designs for the NYPL.org web site and uncover insights about our patrons. Designed from the ground up to be as respectful of the respondents’ time as possible, it presents respondents with a single question at a time from a pool of active questions. In just over seven months of use, it has fielded over 100,000 responses from over 10,000 respondents. — The Code4Lib Journal – Infomaki: An Open Source, Lightweight Usability Testing Tool Read more →

Shamans: Another Reason I Prefer to Just Stay Home

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My dad was telling me about a recent trip he took to the wilds of Ecuador. From the airport, it was a three-hour truck ride, followed by two hours in a motorized canoe to get to the lodge he was staying at. “That doesn’t sound good,” I said. “What if you have a medical emergency?” “There’s a shaman at the village,” he said. “And what the shamans do is they take peyote or whatever the local hallucinogen is, they hallucinate about a drug, then they go into the forest, come back with the drug and give it to you.” “Are they board certified?” “No. And the other thing they do is they blow smoke on you.” “I hate that. What kind of smoke is it?” “I think the guy has a pack of Marlboros. But if you have a heart attack or something, that’s all you’re gonna get.” Read more →

Dogs Are Smarter Than Cats

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My dad is of the opinion that cats are “smarter” than dogs. Not coincidentally, he and my mom own a couple of cats, one of which was sitting next to his chair at Thanksgiving dinner. Dad decided to share some turkey with the cat. He stood up with a piece of turkey, showed it to the cat, than walked out to the kitchen and dropped it in the cat’s food dish. When he returned to his chair, the cat was still sitting there. Never moved. “That is one stupid cat,” I said. “Well, he’s three-quarters blind,” my dad said, although he didn’t say how he could possibly know that. “If my dog was here, he would have jumped up and eaten your whole dinner the second you left the room.” Read more →

Thanksgiving Memories

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My dad’s holding a bottle of wine as he says, “Who wants straws?” “Are you asking me,” I say, “if I want to drink wine through a straw?” As it turns out, what he actually said was “Who wants Shiraz?” Read more →

Vanity Fair

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Reading a few pages of Vanity Fair — the book, not the magazine — before retiring for the evening . . . I say to my wife, “Man, this Thackeray guy is really funny.” “Funnier than you?” she asks. “He must be.” “Why?” “Well, this book is almost 200 years old and people are still reading it.” “Imagine at the time he wrote it,” she says. “People probably laughed till they choked.” “Exactly.” Read more →

Are Nash Equilibriums Killing Agile Initiatives?

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If each player has chosen a strategy and no player can benefit by changing his or her strategy while the other players keep theirs unchanged, then the current set of strategy choices and the corresponding payoffs constitute a Nash equilibrium. A system may have many possible Nash equilibriums. There is no guarantee that a Nash equilibrium is optimal for the system as a whole. Most are not. However, it is often very difficult to move from one Nash equilibrium to another. To do it successfully, all players must be made aware that a better state is attainable and they must trust each other to change. — Kallokain: Are Nash Equilibriums Killing Agile Initiatives? Nash equilibriums are named after John F. Nash Jr., whose life was depicted in the movie A Beautiful Mind. Read more →

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