Blahgorrhea

The toilet paper at worked is branded “Marathon,” which I can only assume was meant to warn the user that wiping one’s rear with it would result in chafing as if having run a marathon without proper protection.

The old adage goes, “if you want something done right, you’ve got to do it yourself.” Being the maniacally demanding perfectionist that I am, that is not an unusual sentiment for me. This time, my attention turned to feed readers. For some reason I decided I actually needed to start keeping up with what is happening in the world — or at least what is happening in the world that I might be interested in knowing about. As it happens, that doesn’t mean “news” at all, in the traditional sense; it is more like technology, music, food, random things. Since I have a lot of friends who blog, I decided that I could use them as a filter so that I wouldn’t have to read everything myself. And I picked a few other news sources that I felt would have interesting articles but not totally overwhelm me. [Continue reading…]

I found out two nights ago that the smallest size at Starbucks is in fact not the tall, but that it is still the short. In an effort to pump more caffeine into Americans, they took the short off the menu, made the tall the smallest available menu size and added an enormous 20 ounce venti as the large. Considering how annoying the whole changing of sizes from small/medium/large (Domino’s is another terrible perpetrator of this pattern), I was very pleased to learn that I could still get a normal size cup of coffee. All this has happened since having become a huge Peet’s fan when there was a Peet’s store across from work. Now there is no Peet’s, and the local coffee shop has bad coffee, so I go to Starbucks. I had become used to the 10 ounce small that Peet’s has and was thrown off by the extra two ounces I receive in a Starbucks tall. Ordering a short gets me back into normal coffee drink size range, but it is only eight ounces. Now that is a 10-cent (and two ounce) dilemma.

Sitting humbling amongst the many philosophical platitudes in the 400+ pages of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” is the key to universal peace. On a page in one of the final chapters it is stated:

There never really can be [a contradiction] between the core terms of monistic philosophies. The One in India has got to be the same as the One in Greece. If it’s not, you’ve got two.

How brilliant of an observation is that? Now all we need to do is get everyone in the world who believes in a “monistic philosophy” (just so happens that it is the monotheists waging war right now) to agree that even though the attributes of their individual “Ones” seem different, they really derive from the same “One” source. Once that happens, we’ve got world peace. Piece of cake.

This whole “Web 2.0″ thing has got a bunch of people throwing up a bunch of sites really fast. Some of the sites are really good and useful and cool; while others are bad and useless and ugly. What strikes me about most of these sites is that in their haste to pop up on the web-o-sphere, they have forgotten some basic principles of web applications, of which the most notable to me is password security. Upon registration, almost all of these sites send you a confirmation email that includes your password in plain text. Yes, I am a bit paranoid, but think about it: most people use the same password for every site on the web. So even though your site might just be storing a list of RSS feeds that a person reads, you may have just emailed out the person’s password to their online bank account. I can only imagine that these sites are not storing the passwords encrypted in their databases. Makes you wonder what else they aren’t storing encrypted, or what they are doing with your email address.

Let’s get back to the basics, before we jump off the deep end again, ok?

Happy New Year to my three or four loyal readers. I hope all your resolutions hold up. I’ve recently been enlightened to the idea of a “new day resolution,” making a resolution each day that holds for that day only, thus not suffering the feeling of utter failure in case of not holding true to it. I like it. Resolution for today: post something on my blog. Looks like I’m not a failure yet.

Too bad I don’t have neighbors like this

It is quite possible these days for a company to fire its IT staff and move all internal applications to web apps offered by other companies. It is especially easy to do this at start-ups that don’t even have IT staffs to fire. My boss at my new job decided to go this route as well, claiming we’d be “eating our own dog food” as well as saving on IT costs. Our list of web apps includes Gmail, Kiko, JotSpot and Backpack. I was more than willing to give this approach a shot, but then I realized its drawbacks. [Continue reading…]

I cleaned up my bookcase and decided to get rid of some books. I left them sitting in a box for a week, planning to just take them to Goodwill, but then it hit me that I could sell them, and since I had recently inadvertently signed up for a seller’s account on Amazon.com, I figured “what the hell.” So I posted about 20 books for sale. Within 5 hours, two of them had sold. I was very excited. I packaged them up and sent them off, having pocketed about $8.00 those sales. Then when I got back from the post office, another book had sold. The next day, two more sold. I was in seven heaven, making money with practically no effort, ridding myself of books taking of space in my apartment, and sending books to people who wanted them. I was so happy with Amazon. But then… nothing. After that first 24 hour period of spectacular sales, not one book has been purchased in the subsequent weeks. Do you want some? Here’s what I am selling.

In “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” Robert Pirsig talks about the effect of grades on student behavior, attitude and performance. He tells a story of a college rhetoric professor who experimented with withholding grades for a semester. The experiment ended with great results, with all students eventually “scoring” where they normally would have but actually learning in the process. He gives a hypothetical example of a student in a normal system who works only for grades and becomes distracted by the “carrot” so that he does not learn at all, and a student in a gradeless system who drops out with a lack of motivation but then ends up returning to school later in life with an intense desire to learn, eventually “performing” better than he would have in the graded system. [Continue reading…]