At work and at play

I recently went on vacation in Telluride, Colorado. Vacations are one of the few times I’m surrounded by non-Googlers, and I was asked several times by my parents’ friends what my day at work is like.

Well, while not totally representative of an average day, here’s what I did on my last day of work before my vacation:

  1. Worked with Albert to figure out how to take portraits of team members, because our manager thought it would be fun.
  2. Did some work for the Webmaster Central YouTube Channel
  3. Went over to Charlie’s (a Google café) for some potstickers and David’s bacon fried rice.
  4. Sampled food from a variety of vendors hoping to get our votes to stock their products in our microkitchens.
  5. Spent the afternoon racing members of my team at Gokart Racer.

It has to be cool enough, but not too cool…

Ok, so as Nelson pointed out, shortly after my rant against WeFollow, I went ahead and sent them three replies. Why? Because enough people were doing it that I figured I should just play along and participate. Of course as I indicated in my last post, once this becomes too mainstream (tech goes below the fold), I’ll lose interest.

This reminds me of my use of smileys (or emoticons, if you prefer), and how it proves I can be susceptible to peer pressure if I respect my peers. For the first 12 years of my online life, I refused to use smileys. Well, except for when I used them ironically, but again, I’ll note that this is before I had ever heard of a “hipster.” I think this was when people were just starting to talk about emos, which I later learned were not large Australian birds.

I refused to use them because I saw them most commonly used by people who did other annoying things like using colored fonts, writing *shrug* and *sigh* and otherwise trying to bring emotion into a textual medium. One day, I was shocked to see Tony (Dude, update your blog!) use a smiley in conversation, and I called him out for it. He shot back with something like, “I’ve been using email since the ’80s!” so I decided to refrain from judging him, but still didn’t deem smileys to be good enough for my use.

Finally, in the summer of 2006, I found myself at Google, surrounded by geeks. And you know what? They use smileys all the time. I probably started using them just to fit in and not get fired, and didn’t really see a huge value in them. At some point, however, I started to realize the great thing about smileys. They let you say almost anything without risking offense. As someone whose constant attitude of “I can’t believe you took that personally/seriously, you fool” gets me into trouble more often than I’d like, I’ve found smileys to be a great safety net. Let’s take a look at an example:

Without a smiley:

You want to know what else looks like a bug? Your face.

With a smiley:

You want to know what else looks like a bug? Your face. 😉

Pretty neat, huh?

And now even Twitter confuses me

Life used to be so simple. Look at messages that were 140 characters or fewer in length sent by your friends.

It reminds me of the early days of Flickr — a place for people who liked pictures to share pictures. At one point I stepped away from it for a bit, and when I came back, I found MySpace-level antics going on. The mainstream users had found it. There were seemingly automated “join my group” requests, and comments with, I hate to say it, glitter text.

And then there’s Facebook. I used it daily for about a year in school. Now, I log in about once a month and can’t even figure out where to find my own profile, and have to reject a bunch of requests to fight zombies or some other nonsense.

So what happened to Twitter? It looks like again too many people are trying too hard to get in touch with everyone on the planet. As you may already know, I’m never thrilled about meeting new people. And you know what? I didn’t get into computers to interact with humans. I thought that was part of the deal… I mean since when were nerds social animals?

Here’s what made me finally write this: Today, my Twitter home page is full of people writing some variation of this message:

@wefollow #google #search #tech

I don’t know what this means. Yes, I know the hashtag thing, but why is it to this wefollow character? I’m sure I could easily find out with about one click, but it’s a Saturday, and Saturdays ain’t for learnin’ nothin’.

Why do people think I’m incapable of embarrassment?

A few minutes ago, I was trying to get some information out of Nelson, but he said he was too embarrassed and wouldn’t reveal the info. I respected that, but as a final attempt to get it out of him, I offered:

“I’ll tell you something embarrassing about me.”

But Matt immediately took the value out of this offer:

“Yeah, but you’d probably just blog about it if we waited long enough.”

True.

Online florist marketing

I just placed an order for some flowers online and a bunch of things bothered my about the experience:

The very first thing they asked me for was the recipient’s zip code. So why did they wait until the checkout screen to tell me the following information?

  • There’s a $15 “delivery fee,” even though I don’t even think they offered a local pickup option.
  • Sunday delivery is not available in that area.

After checkout, they had a link to some survey thing through a third party. It promised me something like $100 for my thoughts. Of course on the next page this $100 turned out to be credit toward magazine subscriptions, I’d have to pay a “processing fee,” and the survey looked like an SAT exam. Want to know what I would like for a survey? A single (large or expandable) text box on the checkout page that asks, “How was your experience?”

And then in my confirmation email, I saw this text:

*** NOTICE: This order qualifies for a
FREE SHIPPING REBATE: > Click to claim

“Free shipping rebate” was actually in red, but WordPress’s visual editor is crapping out as usual. Hey, I’m in the middle of complaining. 🙂

I knew what that link was going to be thanks to previous experiences with the merchant, but this was especially scummy. It was listed right below the order total, and made no indication that it was an ad. So what was it? Some paid membership service where you get rebates on shipping charges. And their signup was labeled with “One-Time Offer!” in huge text. Their only service is a one-time offer? How long does it last? The life of the business? The offer probably referred to the free trial, but still, that’s like a grocery store offering free shopping bags (with purchase) as a “one-time offer.”

Kung Pow on Hulu!

I just found out that Nelson has never seen Kung Pow: Enter The Fist. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the film, Steve Oedekerk, the writer, director, and main actor re-dubs scenes from a 1970s kung-fu film and even inserts himself into the action. Fortunately, I checked on Hulu and it’s there for your immediate viewing pleasure! It’s not quite as good as watching the DVD, which has awesome special features like letting you listen to the non-dubbed audio (even the English stuff has different content before dubbing), but it’s a start. Enjoy:

I suck at meeting people

The first thing I do when I meet someone is forget his or her name. This happens right away, and I have to spend the rest of the conversation doing my best to avoid structuring my sentences in a way that would reveal my forgetfulness. I think this happens because by default, I assume that I will not see this person again, and therefore do not need to learn his or her name. But all too often, I’ll be introduced to someone by a mutual friend at what I think is a fleeting moment like a coincidental meeting at a restaurant or other social setting. After the introduction, just when I’m assuming this stranger and I are about to part ways, I learn that since we’re all friends now and we all know each other’s names, we’re going to hang out together for the rest of the night, and quite possibly for the rest of our lives.

I go through life with plenty of these one-way connections, where every time I see the other person and they greet me by name, I feel like a jerk, and can never remember who they are. This happens a lot with my sisters’ and parents’ friends. Some people try to avoid this by using a trick where immediately after the introduction, they will repeat the person’s name (by saying, “Hello, [name],” which helps them to remember. For me, I’m so used to not addressing people by name that this technique would just sound too forced.

Similarly, there are those times when I and the other person are mutually aware of the other’s existence, but we’ve never introduced ourselves. Perhaps one of us wasn’t present for the initial round of introductions to a larger group, or maybe we just assumed that we were people who bump into each other from time to time, but not often enough to require any extensive knowledge about the other person. Unfortunately, it often turns out that we see each other more than either of us expected, but by the time we learn this, it’s not only awkward that we don’t know each other, it’s too awkward to introduce ourselves at this point. This happens to me all the time. In fact, just this morning, I finally learned the name of someone who sits very close to me every day, and has been doing so for over half a year. It was a little awkward, but at least I got a blog post out of it.

#bayareaquake030209

I thought of a fun experiment tonight but decided not to go through with it. It would most likely be a complete dud and a waste of 140 characters or fewer, but it also had the potential to have unintended bad consequences.

I thought it would be fun to tweet something like this:

Did you feel it? Tag your tweet with #bayareaquake030209 and include your coordinates. Some back/forth, no damage at 37.428746,-122.170672

I might have also asked a few friends to play along to get things going. Then I would sit back and see if, by the power of suggestion, others “feel” a quake. And since I would have location data, it would be interesting to see where the “epicenter” ended up.

I figured an earthquake would be good because its lack of noise. “Did you hear it?” or “Did you smell it” questions had a might higher potential for legitimate non-suggested “Yes” answers. I also thought it would be safe. An earthquake generally lasts for less than a minute and then is over, so if someone read my tweet and wasn’t injured, they would know that they did not need to worry about it.

But you just never know. I’m not a psychologist, and even officially sanctioned experiments can get out of control, as anyone who has taken Psych 101 has already learned. So, I decided to just share the idea in a blog entry.

Speaking of experiments going bad, a couple of weeks ago I turned on the TV and found that Howie Do It was on. I think it’s NBC’s way of punishing people for staying at home and watching TV on a Friday night. Anyway, in one segment of the hidden-camera show, they convince someone that he’s a contestant on a crazy Japanese game show. As part of the game’s rules, he needs to shock his teammate. The first few shocks appear temporarily painful, and the last one “kills” the teammate, who is really just acting. I really can’t believe that none of the producers, writers, or legal staff stopped this from happening, as it so closely mirrors an infamous experiment from the 1960s in which participants believed they were shocking (and possibly killing) another person. Read about the “Milgram experiment” if you want to learn more.

Also related is a show on ABC called What Would You Do? which is actually quite interesting once you get over the absence of Marc Summers. What I like about this show is that (I hope) people who watch it are more likely to take action in situations where they might have otherwise turned a blind eye, even if they are only doing something with the hope that they are being taped and will appear heroic on national television.

Ok, back to my personal study on sleep deprivation.