Find things that don’t need to be done and don’t do them.
Twitter: 2009-12-08
- RT @rtkrum Cool Infographics: A Visual History of the Supreme Court – New Infographic Poster! http://bit.ly/6FeJTE #
Twitter: 2009-12-07
- A toolbox of questions http://sachachua.com/wp/p/6907 #
- Either I lost 25 lbs since Friday or the scale at the gym is broken… #
It’s Not All Bad for USC Athletics
Okay, not a great season for USC football but on the bright side, the men’s water polo team won back-to-back national championships with a 7-6 win over UCLA in today’s title match.
T-shirts are available!
Twitter: 2009-12-06
- RT @OCWeekly: Tired of KOST? Here's 10 Christmas songs that don't suck: Flaming Lips, Pogues, Kinks, Low… & Eazy-E? http://bit.ly/65buaX #
Lack of Privacy Is Part of the Deal
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.
No More Stuffed Pugs for Christmas
Originally uploaded by wombatarama
What Would Hope Do?
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 . . .
Bad is Good
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.”
Twitter: 2009-12-02
- Learning how to write http://sachachua.com/wp/p/6863 #
That Clears the Air!
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!
Why Social Networks Matter
We’re Going to Let You Die
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 all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life to keep you maybe going for another couple of months. It’s too expensive, so we’re going to let you die. [applause]
“Also, I’m going to use the bargaining leverage of the federal government in terms of Medicare, Medicaid–we already have a lot of bargaining leverage–to force drug companies and insurance companies and medical suppliers to reduce their costs. But that means less innovation, and that means less new products and less new drugs on the market, which means you are probably not going to live that much longer than your parents. [applause] Thank you.”
The Vast and Endless Sea
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the workers to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.
Infomaki: An Open Source, Lightweight Usability Testing Tool
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.
Overheard
Charlie Weis: Done
I will mostly miss him because his teams were lousy and I enjoyed watching them lose.
Shamans: Another Reason I Prefer to Just Stay Home
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.”
Occupational Intensity
I saw a guy yesterday — let’s call him Jack — that I used to work with 20 years ago on my first programming job.
My most vivid memory of him is the day he offered to sock another programmer — let’s call him Sid — “right in your f^$&ing face, Sid” because Jack was unhappy with the quality of Sid’s work.
You rarely see that kind of passion and zest in the workplace anymore . . .
Thus spoke The Programmer.
USC 28, UCLA 7
It hasn’t been a great season for Pete Carroll and the Trojans — but they’re still three touchdowns better than UCLA.
FIGHT ON!