Question for B.J. Novak

Last night, I went to a performance by B.J. Novak, a writer for The Office who is perhaps now best known as playing Ryan on the same show.

After his stand-up routine, he started taking questions from the audience, and said he’d be happy to talk about The Office. I couldn’t think of any questions at the time (I was running on no sleep), but when I got back to my apartment, I remembered something that I’ve often wondered. This is what I’ll have to ask B.J. the next time I see him:

The Office is shot as a documentary. Do you think the characters watch it?

If the documentary is a TV series, I’d guess that at least some of them do watch it, and that Michael tunes in for every episode to evaluate how entertaining he is. If it’s a single film, they’ll probably all go to the premiere, and then have an extraordinarily awkward day at work, if they ever see each other again.

Humor is in the genes

Here’s a snippet of our dinner conversation when I went home for Easter.

My grandmother was telling us about a recent exchange on a bus:

Bus Driver: [talking about his job] It keeps me out of my wife’s hair.
My grandfather: But it doesn’t keep you off the streets.

Zing! My grandmother said that the driver probably went home and told his wife about a funny old man on his bus.

“What old man?” my grandfather interjected.

We all laughed. My grandfather held up his hands and said, “No charge.”

My apology to Ai

Ai, Nelson‘s favorite pronoun, is mad at me. Why? Because she’s offended by weather. Yeah, it sounds crazy, but this is how girls think. So, Ai, allow me to say here on my blog, from the bottom of my heart, that I’m sorry.

Here’s what went down. Last night, at an event organized by Ai, we surprised Nelson with a birthday dinner at Vung Tau in San Jose. It was my first time at a Vietnamese restaurant, and while I was terrified of what I might eat, the food actually very good, including some spongy vegetable I had never seen before in an unidentified soup. That part of the evening went pretty well, and I even brought a sufficient amount of cash for when it was time to pay the bill, although I did have to ask for change. (I still I can’t believe that in 2009, cash is something I find myself using, but I could write an entire series of blog posts about how I hate carrying around paper and why restaurants should be better equipped to handle multi-card payments.)

After dinner, we headed to the Peacock Lounge in Sunnyvale. It’s a bar, the type of venue I could write countless more parenthetical complaints about, but I was happy to attend and support Nelson on his birthday. Things were going pretty well, I was doing okay with talking to Nelson’s friends in between segments of faux interest in whatever sports they were showing on the TVs, but then Ai confronted me about something.

“So I was reading your blog,” she said.

“Uh oh,” I replied, secretly thrilled that anyone had read it, regardless of whether or not it was about to lead to me getting yelled at.

She then told me that she had serious issues with what I had said about California in one post. She claimed that I said that I wouldn’t miss my friends, and called my description of weather and seasons (for the benefit of Californians) “condescending.”

She schooled me a bit on her history with, “I spent some time living in Illinois. I know what weather is.”

My post was meant to exclude Californians who had spent some time living in Illinois, but I forgot to explicitly state that so again, Ai, I’m sorry.

At the time, I was fatigued and not thinking straight, so I attempted to get out of trouble using logic and not just apologizing. After I pointed out out several flaws in her accusations with quotes from my post, like “I like California,” and “I will miss some people,” she said that it’s not her fault if she misunderstood what I wrote. At this point, I may have, if one interprets my words a certain way, subtly implied that she has poor reading comprehension skills when I told her, “You have poor reading comprehension skills,” and noted that I write at an advanced level. Eventually, when the conversation got to the point of “Oh, boy, she might not be taking this argument as a joke like I am,” (this happens to me a lot) I came to my senses and added this to my Gmail Tasks list on my iPhone: “Apologize to ai because girls are scary and I always agree with them as a life rule.”

So why did I decide to apologize? It’s a defense mechanism I’ve developed over time, and it’s part of a (previously) strategy that I think I’ve only shared with Ted until now. Two main rules of this strategy are:

  1. In an argument where you are forced to take sides, always agree with the girl.
  2. When in doubt, apologize.

Let’s go over #2, since it is the relevant rule here: When in doubt, apologize. Even if I think it’s a situation where there is no argument and nobody should feel guilty, I just play it safe and fill any awkward silences or otherwise confusing moments with an apology. Let’s see if it saves me this time around.

Understanding my query

It’s the “small” things— spelling correction, parsing geographic terms — that  make me habitually search for just about anything. (Which, by the way, is why I go absolutely nuts when a webpage tries to take over the default actions of double and/or right-clicking.)

Anyway, I thought this was cool:

Here’s the picture, which now has an updated caption. I can only show you a reverse angle of the sign in the picture, because it looks like the Street View cameras didn’t go down Canterbury Rd, but maybe they’ll visit someday.

Fewer Ws

Now that I’ve moved to wysz.com (from thewysz.com), I decided to trim my URLs even more by not using the www subdomain in my URLs. I usually prefer www on URLs because I’m used to seeing it, and I think we’ve been trained to use it to recognize URLs. However, since “wysz” starts with a W, I think the www prefix was actually hurting its readability. It looked like URLs were mistyped with four Ws.

Let me know if you see any broken redirects as a result of this change, and thanks to everyone on Twitter who convinced me to go through with it.

Moving!

I’m about to start the process of moving thewysz.com to wysz.com. I will almost certainly screw something up, and my blog will get b0rked at some point in the process. I’m turning off comments for now so nobody’s input gets lost during the transition.

Stay tuned to Twitter for any updates, and please contact me via Twitter or wysz@thewysz.com if you notice things that need to be fixed.

Update: Okay, looks like most things are working now on wysz.com. I’m having a few minor issues, but let me know if you see anything that’s broken. If you don’t notice it, I might not even bother fixing it. 😉

Adding captions to YouTube

Why would you want to add captions to your YouTube videos? I can think of a few reasons:

  1. Your videos become accessible to people who cannot hear.
  2. Your videos become more accessible to search. (Check out this search for three terms that only appear in the captions for this video. They’re not in the description text.)
  3. People watching your videos in an office/library can do so without headphones.
  4. Non-native speakers may find it easier to read the text.
  5. Captions can be translated (manually or automatically) into other languages, becoming subtitles and expanding your audience without you having to create multiple videos for multiple languages.
  6. Fun hacks.

Whoa, wait, what was #2 again? Search? Accessible? Did Wysz just give an SEO tip on his personal blog? Yep.*

So, how easy is it to caption your videos? Well, I screencasted the entire process for a video live. I did it for a pretty short video, but you get the idea of what the process is like:

In this demo, I used an application written for Google App Engine, since it’s free and easy. For more information about how to create captions and subtitles, check out this help article from YouTube.

* I work at Google on search quality. Look for me in the Google Webmaster Help forum. Oh, and anything I write on this blog is my own view and not on behalf of Google, etc, etc.

Shampoo

Here’s a public service announcement for all of my readers who have hair and wash it.

I was talking to my uncle today, and he mentioned that it saves him money if he gets his hair cut really short, since he can then go for six weeks without getting it cut again. I suggested that he probably also saves money on shampoo when it’s really short.

He then pointed out that this is only true if you think to adjust your shampoo usage when you squeeze it out of the bottle. And when I thought about it, I’m pretty sure that regardless of length, I always put the same-sized glob of shampoo on my hand before applying. The only case where my usage changes is when my hair gets really long and I add a second coat of shampoo.

So, if you haven’t thought to do this already, try using a smaller glob of shampoo when your hair has been recently cut.