citym.org/ue

Airline troubles in Ottawa

2008-11-18T22:55:20Z

Got into Ottawa last night for the Practical Product Management seminar - which started today - and is offered by PragmaticMarketing.com. More on that later.

Poisoning of the commons

Last week, I bitched about my flights to and from New Jersey (the flights themselves, not the trip - which was wonderful). Yesterday, for my flight from Detroit to Ottawa, more of the same. For the privelege of placing my bag into checked luggage, I had to foot another $15. The entailments of this policy:

Just by instituting it, airlines are externalizing the cost onto all of their passengers (and themselves), since it takes so damn long for people to excavate their luggage from under their seat or from the overhead bin. Getting on is the same story. Subtracted value.
The $15 buys you the right to wait for your bags to eventually circulate on the luggage track - which can take sometimes 20 minutes.
That is, if your bag even gets their. Which mine didn't last night. :(

So now I need to search around for a clothing store so I don't look like an ass wearing the same clothes to the seminar tomorrow.

Plus, I think my socks are beginning to grow mold. They're getting pretty stiff. I've been wearing all the same clothes for two days now.

Anyway, I think I'm done with checked luggage.

The seminar itself is interesting, and very useful. I thought ten minutes ago that I would have more to talk about it, but I don't. I must still be digesting it. So I guess not more on that later.

Speaking of digestion, I'm reading a book about reading books. It's called How to Read a Book (I'm not kidding), and it's very good. The title is poor in that it's a poor branding exercise, I think - nobody wants to be seen reading a book entitled How to Read a Book, I suspect - I'm one of those rare assholes who doesn't mind - but it's accurate as far as the content.

A core theme of the book echoes around that Francis Bacon quote (which is cited in the book):

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.

The book explores this theme and offers suggestions on how one can leverage this insight into something actionable. It's a very practical book, which I like.

The authors go even further in suggesting that a very select few books grow with you, and are worthy of reading over and over, providing valuable new insights on each reading. Luckily the authors do not extend their gastronomical metaphor in this direction.

On a more serious note, between the lines of the book lies a discussion on the philosophy of mind and the relationship between minds and media (mostly books, of course), and it's really worth a read for that idea alone. I won't go into it further right now because I have to buy some underwear.

Flood of email

2008-11-17T03:13:34Z

Ugh. I'm just going through my email right now, and after removing and filtering out all of the ones that really aren't that critical, and that I'm choosing not to read - I still have over 200 to read. This is getting to be a big problem.

2008-11-17T02:48:44Z

Blog entry I wrote on the plane last weekend. Just like I suspected, I'm posting it a week later than the actual creation date... :(

This weekend went too fast, visiting with A, MF and VG. ;) I'm kind of bummed out to be leaving so early. That's Priceline for you, I guess.

It's 5:26 AM. I'm in Newark airport right now as I'm writing this, though I'll actually commit it to my blog several hours later. Or days or weeks, depending on my motivation level. Or never, if it gets too stale.

There was a weird new "security" device we were subjected to today before going through the gate. It was another machine through which we had to walk through. It said "Smith" or something on it. You had to enter this mini-chamber as very high-powered jets of air were shot at you. I can't tell if it was some sort of chemical detector or what. Heather remarked that it probably doesn't hurt that it's intimidating and pretty unpleasant. It's one of those few things that's actually more unpleasant than it looks.

Gotta go now. Here comes Heather with our mozzarella sandwiches.

Airlines: externalizing pain via the luggage surcharge

2008-11-08T14:06:00Z

In Hoboken right now with our friends. Woo hoo!

There was much to be desired with our airline experience. This time, we let the fates decide our airline by placing a bid on priceline.com. The fates decided United Airlines. We did get a good deal, I have to say.

The most annoying thing was the $15 luggage check-in surcharge. It wasn't the money (although Heather was pretty irritated about it - I've taken to calling her Ebenezer). Rather, it was the effect it had on the rest of the experience. The economy is clearly having a big impact on people, as nearly everyone brought their luggage (which should have been checked) into the cabin. We actually ran out of cabin storage space. The corollary effects were pretty enormous - it seems like it took three times as long getting onto the plane, as people tried to find and put away their bags, delaying everyone else from sitting down. Similarly with the deplaning. At the luggage claim, barely anyone was there. I have to wonder whether the airlines did their due diligence in analyzing the effect of the $15 surcharge on the whole system. How much does the surcharge cost the airlines in terms of delayed flights - as well as the externalized cost on the passengers for increased boarding/deplaning delay and missed flights (BTW, this does not create passenger goodwill)? Did the $15 per (some) passengers offset this cost - especially over the long term? It's like we have all this bandwidth/infrastructure to handle the way things used to be - and I'm sure the airline experience was efficient 20 to 40 years ago. But the situation has changed, by incremental introduction of small policy changes (which introduced severe system bottlenecks) - or sometimes big policy changes, like those due to 9/11, or to record-high flights and record-low margins. It's a complex problem. I'm not saying that I don't blame the airlines for these problems in large part - I do - but I also empathize with the enormity of the problems they have to [should?] solve.

Volcanoes - Earth's pimples

2008-11-07T02:35:12Z

Cool.

Campaign addiction, and drinking a little too much of the Obama Kool-Aid

2008-11-06T04:37:47Z

There was a really interesting Wall Street Journal article about "campaign addicts." Unfortunately, I can't find it online, so I'll reproduce an interesting passage the old-fashioned way (i.e. no ctrl-c, ctrl-v):

Her affliction started with late-night news programs, then progressed to incessant Internet surfing. It culminated in door-to-door campaigning for Sen. Barack Obama near her home in Fairfax County, Va. "Addiction wouldn't be too strong a word," she says.
...
The end of the most-followed presidential campaigns in recent years will leave many Americans feelin lost, even if their candidate won. The 2008 race provided drama and suspense to a nation hooked on reality television, mystery novels and Hollywood epics.
Arin N. Reeves, a Chicago-based diversity consultant, says she lost hours of sleep to late-night cravings for new campaign developments. For her, the vice-presidential picks were among the many suspenseful episodes - with the emergence of Gov. Sarah Palin deliciously surprising. "Week after week after week the story just kept getting better," she says.

It was a good story, wasn't it?

The whole campaign addiction phenomenon made me laugh pretty hard. Heather has been glued to the web for the past few weeks, following the campaign. Although not to the extent of the lady in the article...

Heather and I watched the election last night with a friend. Our friend is a diehard Obama supporter - he even campaigned for him.

I was pretty astonished at the degree to which the Grant Park party - and that thing was an event - was executed. And the people - the fans. Really, the disciples. They worship him. Worship. I don't think it's too strong a word for what I witnessed. It scared me. Can you imagine the pressure Obama must be feeling right now?

Even my friend who joined us that night is so thoroughly smitten with Obama, the man. I wondered aloud last night about whether David Axelrod would become the next Karl Rove-type guy (I mean, in the strategizer sense), and that I admired how he had helped to brand Obama. My friend almost took it as an affront that I might suggest that Obama had any help along the way, from Axelrod and/or other members in the Obama team, in composing the Obama message and in creating the Obama brand. This is a man who I have known for over ten years - one of the smartest people I know, for sure - and yet he had swallowed so much of the Obama Kool-Aid that he believed ever message and idea to flow out of one man.

To be sure, Barack Obama is an extremely intelligent, sensitive, thoughtful man, and he is the core of that team. And I like Obama - he is an extremely compelling figure to me. But the campaign is a team. Nobody could do it alone, and nobody ever has or ever will.

Anyway, sorry for the rant. It's just been bothering me.

I'd be interested in hearing what other people thought about the election - particularly the Grant Park event.

2008-11-03T23:00:00Z

Browsing those Twilight Zone episodes on YouTube last week, I found an episode that really captured my imagination: A Little Piece and Quiet.

Also directed by Wes Craven, it's the perfect blend of prosaic existence, supernatural interference, and 1980s nuclear paranoia. It also gave me terrible nightmares.

That last scene is the kicker, isn't it?

I always thought to myself what I would do in that situation. Would I have enough time to learn how to pilot a helicopter, for example, and disarm the nuclear weapon? Would it be feasible for me to drag my family members and everyone I cared about to safety, wherever I interpreted that to be, in time? What would be the repercussions for the universe at large if I died before saying "start talking" again?

A pumpkin carving success and a less-than-success

2008-11-03T00:12:37Z

These past couple of weeks, I carved a couple of pumpkins. It had been a very long time since I had done any carving, and the results were decidedly mixed:

The pumpkin on the right - which is actually an albino pumpkin - was pretty easy, and the results were much better than I expected. Although now, he's exhibited a significant amount of tooth decay, and, well, face decay. And it smells. A pool of stinky liquid pumpkin rot has collected at the bottom of that one, and it's attracting flies - which says something when you take into account how cold this November has been. But all in all, a success. Took me about fifteen minutes to carve.

The one on the left is a different story. First of all, it's much bigger than the albino pumpkin. Secondly, it's much thicker, which makes it tougher to carve. On top of that, I made the un-brilliant decision to leave the pumpkin outside before I carved it, which made it especially cold and hard. Difficult to carve - I thought I was going to have to use a blowtorch for a second.

The design is meant to be the logo of the company where I work - Zattoo. Yes, the pumpkin vaguely resembles the Zattoo logo, but only vaguely... there were a couple of slips in the carving that forced me to have to change carving strategy and compromise my original vision. ;)

Here it is, lit up:

Lit up, it looks somewhat better, although this underexposed shot doesn't really do it justice.

The original intent was to take it into work for a laugh on Halloween day. In the end, though, I decided not to - I just was not proud enough of it.

It took me about three hours to carve, believe it or not.

Face from a Japanese print I bought at a Hachioji flea market four years ago

2008-11-02T05:36:54Z

Man in the dark

2008-10-30T01:58:53Z

Weird. Weird but cool.

I thought I had a stroke tonight

2008-10-28T03:13:20Z

Guys, I thought I had a stroke tonight. Really.

Heather and I went to our improv comedy class tonight, just like we do every Monday. We did a bunch of wacky activities, like we always do. And then, all of the sudden, the instructor just starts speaking in this weird gibberish. Like some sort of weird, proto-French/German hybrid.

I looked around. Everyone else seemed to be nodding. Heather stood up and looked at me. She nodded in clear comprehension. By this time, the instructor was really getting into it. She was wildly gesticulating, seemingly telling us, "move the chairs to the side of the classroom." But it was pure gibberish.

But Heather seemed to know what she was doing. I proceeded to move my chair - and another - to the side of the room. Seriously - seriously - I thought that I was having a stroke, and that I had entered some deep psychosis in which I could tell that people were saying things - and that it was full of emotion - but I just had no idea what was being said. Kind of like that old episode of the Twilight Zone, Wordplay. Get ready for some nightmares.

And part two, if you can stomach it.

It was all an improv exercise, of course. But it really terrified me.

I sometimes smell things in the office - like burnt toast, or lilacs. I ask others if they smell it too, but nobody ever says they do. So I've often half-joked that maybe I was having a stroke or something. So you can imagine how scary this experience was for me.

Choose two.

2008-10-27T12:02:30Z

A couple of weeks ago, a guy came in to the office to interview for a position at Zattoo. Very smart guy. Very sharp.

Anyway, he told us a story of when he was interviewing at MIT. This is what they told him:

Work. Friends. Sleep. Choose two.

Remind me never, ever to ~~work~~ interview at MIT. IHTFP indeed.

Pictures from friends M and J

2008-10-27T02:23:25Z

Heather and I went to our friends Mark and Julie's place for a halloween party. Here's a picture of Heather (prisoner with a dirty face), me (as Bob Marley), and our friends Mi (as Elvis) and B (as Neo from the Matrix).

Heather found a picture of a watermelon brain on the Internet, so we decided to get our demented Martha Stewart on, carve one of our own, and bring it to the party. Doesn't quite look like a brain... but it's a good first attempt. The next brain is going to be awesome.

Defending the movies: film and the written word, and their impacts on the imagination

2008-10-26T17:37:39Z

I'm (finally) finishing up Frank Luntz's book Words that Work. Good book, but I think the first half was much better than the second. The second is useful, but sometimes deteriorates into off-message homily.

Film, for all its wonders, is an infinitely more passive medium [than literature] for just this reason - and it undermines rather than enhances imagination. Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities is one of the most read and applauded novels about business and greed ever written because of its visionary and descriptive prose, but the movie was a bust. Even good films suffer in comparison to what we imagine from the pages of a book. The Natural is considered by many to be one of the best baseball films of all time - but those same people will assert that the book was better. Same with Lord of the Rings.

Ah, the old, oft-repeated complaint, "the book was better than the movie." The idea that movies stimulate imagination less than books across the board is ridiculous, and is only held by the unimaginative. Sure, literature can manipulate turns of phrases with unequaled facility, and can transplant the reader to any perspective at any time. Everyone would concede that literature has strengths that film could not possibly tap into. But film has its own strengths that rival literature. Facial expressions, for example, are an especially poor phenomenon to communicate via the written word. If a writer wants to convey that somebody is sad, she might just write it: "he was sad." If she's more sophisticated, and wants to show rather than tell - or, perhaps she might want to inject mystery into her character - she might write "his brow furrowed."

Whereas in firm, we can see the extent to which a character's brow furrowed - immediately. Was it quick? Did it linger? Were the character's eyes shifting? What was the character doing with his or her hands at the time? What were other characters doing in response to the original character's response? These things all can be communicated in print, but it would be such a laborious read that I would put it down soon after I started it. I'm simply not smart enough to keep all the details in my head and try to construct a real narrative out of it. Film, in this regard, has much greater emotive bandwidth. Furthermore, there's an inexorable, steady rhythm in the movies - more like real life. It really puts us in the headspace of the characters and the resulting social situation. Not so with books. The reader can pause, rewind, and even fast-forward with ease, at least compared to movies.

Anyway, I still love books. Love 'em. But I'm not going to stand by while film gets trashed.

Chicago's Emilio's Tapas Bar, and signing up for an improvisational comedy class in Ann Arbor

2008-10-04T16:00:03Z

Heather and I arrived in Chicago last night. We're here to visit some friends and my uncle. Actually, in about an hour and a half we'll be enjoying some delicious Tapas at Emilio's Tapas Bar, as suggested by my uncle. Really looking forward to it!

So, Heather and I will be starting to take an improv class at the Washtenaw Community College. You know, like that show Whose Line is it Anyway? It's a continuing education class, and it lasts about four weeks. Here's the description:

Improv 1: Your Life is a Stage
Laugh your way to thinking quicker and better on your feet.Enjoy developing your creativity through improvisational play in a fun and supportive environment. The class will help you learn a set of skills and attitudes that will let you become a better communicator, a better collaborator, and a more relaxed, spontaneous person at work and home. Writers, actors, and musicians may also find some unexpected benefits.

Neither of us have any aspirations whatsoever of doing improvisational comedy. We just wanted to find a way to stretch our minds and push our own boundaries. Also, the bit about "thinking quicker and better on your feet" really appealed to me personally. I'm hoping that I can parlay any skills that I learn in this class to something that can improve my effectiveness at work.

I guess that sounds kind of lame, now that I'm reading it. I don't care. I'm pretty excited about it.

Heather and I have no idea what kind of people to expect to be in the class with us. Will it mostly be people like us, who are just coming to see what there is to see? Will it be people interested in launching a comedy career? Will it be shy people who are interested in learning how to come out of their shell? Will it be slick MBAs interested in brushing up their routine and tailoring their elevator pitch to their audiences? A mixture thereof?

I'm excited to find out. Really excited.

OK, that's all for now. Off to Tapas!

Oh, and tonight, friends Andy and Sam are hosting an Indian-food and beer-brewing themed party. Which I'm also really excited about. :)