- "I thought the more money I had the happier I would become, but it was not the case." http://bit.ly/d8yDMt #
Twitter: 2010-02-10
Bon Voyage, Captain!
‘Deadliest Catch’ captain Phil Harris dies at age 53
Never saw his TV show but he was great as the voice of Baloo in The Jungle Book!
♫ Look for the (clap) Bare Ne-cess-ities . . . ♫
Say hi to Bing Crosby in hell!
The Eternal Footman Held My Coat and Snickered
Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, a longtime fixture on the House subcommittee that oversees Pentagon spending, died after complications from gallbladder surgery, according to his office. He was 77.
The Democratic congressman recently underwent scheduled laparoscopic surgery at National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, to remove his gallbladder. The procedure was “routine minimally invasive surgery,” but doctors “hit his intestines,” a source close to the late congressman told CNN.
OMG I HAD THAT SAME OPERATION I COULD HAVE DIED!!!
On a lighter note, how ironic is it that the president loses a pro-ObamaCare vote due to medical error in a government-run hospital?
Berman Leaving Bristol?
[Chris] Berman could go all the way to DirectTV or the NFL Network when his ESPN contract expires? Its probably just a negotiating ploy, but it sure would be neat to see him exclusively on channels my TV doesn’t have.
There is No Such Thing as Information Overload
Looking over my notes from an Edward Tufte course . . .
There is no such thing as information overload, just bad design.
- Example: Google News presents hundreds of links on a single page and no one complains about information overload.
- Example: The financial section of the newspaper presents thousands of numbers and no one complains about information overload.
Saints 31, Colts 17
OK, but I’m more of a college football fan so here’s a picture of Reggie Bush at USC:
Books Etc.
Thanks to the annual Super Bowl Sunday Buy One Get One Free sale at Books Etc. in Laguna Hills, the works of Bellow, Borges, Bukowski, Brautigan, Cheever, Eco, Grace Paley, Dennis Potter, Pynchon, Robbe-Grillet, Philip Roth and Tom Wolfe have found their way onto my bookshelf for a capital outlay of only 32 dollars American.
If I Had a Toyota
If I had a Toyota, I’d drive it to work one morning, crash it right into the front lobby of the building, get out, say good morning to everyone, and blame the whole thing on a faulty accelerator, just to break up the monotony of daily living . . .
Twitter: 2010-02-04
- RT @sportsguy33: To honor the Mike Dunleavy era, I just botched my drive-thru order at Arby's, then blamed House and the drive thru lady. #
So Long, Thrillseeker!
Sharks kill man kite-surfing off south Florida
Some people say life is too short. I say if you’ve got time for inane activities like kite-surfing, your life has already gone on way too long . . .
Twitter: 2010-02-03
- Does this city make my butt look big? – http://goo.gl/N72i #
- Sign of the times: I noticed this morning that the newspaper racks (LA Times, OC Register) in front of LA Fitness have been removed #
Pride and Prejudice
As my son comes downstairs for dinner, he says, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune –”
I finish it with him: “– must be in want of a wife.”
“We spent 45 minutes in class today analyzing that one sentence,” he says.
“It’s a very famous sentence,” I say. “The next sentence will probably go faster.”
Deterrent Effect
A Columbus man has been charged with killing a teen who was out with friends throwing eggs at cars on the Hilltop three years ago.
In other news, Columbus police report a significant decrease in the number of people throwing eggs at cars.
Did Mozart Play Kickball?
Do we hear about Mozart playing kickball? I know, there wasn’t kickball. But if there had been, he wouldn’t have played it. Because you give up stuff.
So I guess what I’m saying is that being an expert in something requires frugality. It’s not just a spending frugality. It’s a focus frugality.
Evolving a System
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works . . . A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work.
How to Get an A in Hell
At Northwood High School, Honors Euro Lit is known by its acronym — HEL (pronounced hell) — and widely regarded as the hardest class at the school.
In order to get an A in the class for the first semester, my son needed a very high score — around a 98 — on the final exam, didn’t get it, and finished with a semester grade of 89.27 — a high B.
If he’d had at least an 89.5, the teacher would have rounded it up to an A. So out of 1,000+ possible points over the course of the semester, an 89.27 means you missed an A by only three or four points.
I’ve always encouraged the boy to be proactive with his teachers. Some people call this “sucking up” but I’ve been a teacher myself and I can tell you that teachers like students who are engaged and make an extra effort. When there’s a close call on a grade, those students may get the benefit of the doubt.
Being a public school teacher is unrewarding in many ways. You’re not going to get rich, for one thing. And you’re not going to be held in high esteem because the conventional wisdom is that public education in America is a disaster.
The only real attraction of the job is that every day you have an opportunity to make a difference in people’s lives. And even there, in most cases you will fail.
“Make sure the teachers know that you want to do well in their class,” I tell my kid. “Ask them what you need to do and they’ll tell you. They want to help you.”
After his final score was posted in HEL, he went in after school to talk to the teacher about his grade. They went over some previous assignments and exams, including a Macbeth exam where the teacher found a question that he felt he “didn’t teach very well.” He gave the boy four points back on the question, which gave him an 89.55 for the semester. That’s an A.
Father knows best, suckas! Academic success is not (just) about academics.
Empathize
As design thinkers, the problems we are trying to solve are rarely our own—they are those of a particular user; in order to design for the user, we must build empathy for who they are and what is important to them. . . .
The best solutions come out of the best insights into human behavior. . . .
We engage to…
- Uncover needs that people have which they may or may not be aware of
- Guide innovation efforts
- Identify someone to design for
- Discover the emotions that guide behavior
Overheard
Hearing Voices
I’m getting some coffee in the lunch room . . . no one else is present.
One of my colleagues walks in and says, “Are you talking to yourself, Paul?”
“No, actually I wasn’t saying anything.” Which I wasn’t. “Maybe you’re hearing voices,” I suggest. “And ironically, you were just insinuating that I was nuts.”
Conversation with a Dog
ME: In the future it is neither necessary nor desirable for you to greet me every single time I walk in the door. Unless a minimum of two hours has passed, the previous greeting is still in effect. In other words, if I come IN the door, and you greet me, and then several minutes later I go OUT the door, only to return in a matter of seconds, you do NOT have to greet me again.
LEWIS: Ha-ha. Good one.