My answer to "life, the universe and everything"
In one of the first postings of this blog, I advanced my two rules of life. One: All process arguments are insincere, including this one. Two: Never eat in a Chinese restaurant next door to an animal shelter.–Michael Barone
The blogosphere seems to loving the new Barone blog at US News. Of course, Brad Delong, the Berkeley blogger, found that comment utterly stupid.
 |
You scored as Existentialist. Existentialism emphasizes human capability. There is no greater power interfering with life and thus it is up to us to make things happen. Sometimes considered a negative and depressing world view, your optimism towards human accomplishment is immense. Mankind is condemned to be free and must accept the responsibility.
What is Your World View? (updated) |
(stolen from rwiggum)
How To Ruin TV Animation In Seven Easy Lessons-Simply ignore the artists, over milk a hot property, and not respect the work of the people who came before. That’s how to ruin an industry.
Tomato TomA[h]to– “In his latest Changethis manifesto, Tom Peters shares many conventional business wisdoms and tells you why they are all wrong.”
Quiz: Are you the annoying co-worker?– “Every office has at least one jerk, pest or loudmouth who drives the rest of the workers crazy”.
The [Music] Industry’s Perfect Storm-“Musicians, record industry insiders and journalists examine the forces that have emerged over the last 20 years that have helped push the music industry to the verge of collapse.”
So currently I’m working on two projects for U.S. News:
1. A end of the summer trivia quiz. Basically, we’re putting together a bunch of puzzles and other questions about summer events. Kind of neat. I’ll probably have to build the online portion of it. Unfortunately my coding skills when it comes to that kind of web site is pretty limited, so I’ll have to get better at that soon. I will get to write a few of those questions as well. The editor has seen that people have been getting into Sudoku (which I posted on a while ago), I’m now in charge of coming up with the math questions. Sudoku, though while a numbers game, isn’t necessarily a math game. We’ll see how well I can do this; my math skills have been slowly decaying over the years. I’m confident I can recover, but I was never that good at math puzzles in general though. It maybe tough for me to find and make up good ones. We’ll see.
2. Getting a hold of celebrities to do a weekly feature on people and their college lives. Basically I call their publicist or agents, get their emails, and then email them the basic pitch of the feature. Some get back to be rather quickly and yes, but most of them don’t get back to you. And of course there are the few who get back to you and decline and sometimes do it in a mean way (a la Kathy Bates publicist). Even fewer are the people who email you back themselves (Mark Cuban for example). It’s kind of a cool assignment, but can be a bit frustrating at times. Some of the people I’ve called are incredibly helpful, but unfortunately they tend to be for the lower level celebrities.
BTW, here are some interesting facts about some of the people I had to contact:
A. Conan O’ Brien went to Harvard (unfortunately, he turned us down).
B. Danica McKellar (Winnie from the Wonder Years) apparently co-authored a math theorem with a professor and another undergrad. So she has a math theorem named after her.
So yeah, I can say I’ve been helping out the company a lot now.
It’s possible you may have heard this already, but I just have to say it: Mark Cuban has to be one of the coolest, if not the coolest billionaire on the planet. Why? Because he doesn’t act like every other stereotypical billionaire. Even though he owns a movie studio, his studio wasn’t one of the ones suing the file sharing program Grokster. Instead, he was funding Grokster’s defense, and in essence defending the rights of people to file-share (which by the way, even though Grokster lost, doesn’t mean that it is illegal to use). He’s also fighting the music industries lawsuits against people who are using file-sharing programs. Cuban shows up to every Dallas Mavericks game (as the owner), dressed in jeans and a Mavericks shirt. And during home games, he has his email address displayed on the score board. Not to some pr address, his specific Mavericks address, which then sends the messages directly to him and his Sidekick. Unlike most people, he takes the time to read your emails and reply back (not everyone, but a good amount of them). And as if he weren’t accessible enough, he even blogs at Blog Maverick.
So what makes Mark Cuban so cool? Basically, he’s a special guy who doesn’t act special.
Now, you may wonder why I just wrote an entire post on Mark Cuban. Well I wrote him an email requesting an interview with U.S. News. Sure enough, in ten minutes, he got back to me with a very real yes. It was two lines of text and he signed his name “m” on it. Very cool.
-I just realized that the Google Hitchhiker’s guide to the Galaxy answer to life, the universe, and everything trick (where you type in I posted about before) has got to be one of the nerdiest things ever. I mean it combines the geeky-ness of Google’s calculator with a favorite geek book.
–Yahoo 360, finally, added feeds support (which means I now can display Livejournal on it, among other things) and Flickr integration. I had said earlier that feeds would make it really awesome. If I had more friends on it, it might become my primary social networking tool.
-I’ve never seen a subway so crowded that I couldn’t even step on to because so many people got on it before me. One of the plights of urbanization I guess…
-There’s a piece of comment spam that went around the blogs and left this message
“[last person who commented], I totally agree with what you said.
[SPAM URL]”
Very clever way leaving a spam message, as it totally just blends in with other comments.
–Life according to livejournal. Tracking the popularity the moods on Livejournal reveals how people responded to major events. Apparently, sad and angry went way up after the London Bombings. Sure wish there was a Tag Cloud for all the Livejournal tags.
An unfortunate reality of our times is that advertising is every where. TV, movies, Internet, and now even video games now have more and more ads to try and catch your dwindling attention. Unfortunately, with all of these people trying to sell you things you obviously don’t need, I’ve tended to stop paying attention to any of them. However, I do remember a time when I used to be enthralled by Super Bowl commercials and other slick ad pitches that got my attention. Budweiser was always a good advertiser, and today their “Real American” ads featuring the way too much cologne wearer and Geico’s slick advertising of “Tiny House” are some of the best out there. Of course, as Tivo and other commercial skipping devices and programs that mask advertising come out, it’ll be harder to find these gems that are sometimes better than the program they air with. There maybe one place to see these commercials though, Ifilm, which is ironically selling advertising space to show you the commercials.
I used to think I could turn my Livejournal entries into a television series one day (not that I actually would, but I had thought I’d have a decent amount of material for a base). While I still think it’s true, I don’t think I could put enough good material onto print (electronic of course) from my head to do this. Plus there’s the little matter of my life not being that interesting to want to do a TV show, but hey that hasn’t stopped some people (oh do I really have to name them?).
Anyways, it turns out that the blogger who writes “Greek Tragedy” (which I had never heard of before today) has not only got a book deal like a number of other bloggers, but is also getting a show based on her life, at least according to this NY Times article (found via Buzzworthy). Sounds like the same attractive girl’s romantic life in New York City formula that has been fairly successful in the last few years (again, do I really need to name names?). What’s interesting about this to me though is the fact that she became so famous from her blog that it was able to get her all of this. Once again, it proves that people are able to put themselves out into the public eye (for better or for worse) with nothing more than a PC and an Internet connection, as been the case for some time. With a good search engine and a simple blogging tool, the barriers to fame are growing smaller and smaller.
BTW, if you wondering what kind of show I would have liked to write about, I would have loved to have made a college life show in a Scrubs (the best show I never seem to watch-which I hope they put on syndication soon) sitcom type format with a narrator (maybe more than one) and the cut scenes that clip to their thoughts. It’s still a decent concept, though, I’d probably only take elements of my life to make the show and not actual real life events or people.
Wow these are some scary people to work for, some of which surprise me (though they probably shouldn’t) since they are so notable in history.
From Fast Company:
Henry Ford
Ford used shadowy henchmen to run “secret police” who spied on employees. He had machine guns, tear gas, and a private army at the ready to deter union organizers. He cheated on his wife with his teenage personal assistant and then had the younger woman marry his chauffeur as a cover.
Walt Disney
The man behind the Mouse was a suspicious control freak — a dictatorial boss who underpaid his workers, clashed with labor organizing efforts, made anti-Semitic smears about the other Hollywood studio heads, and wouldn’t give due recognition to Mickey’s real creator, animator Ub Iwerks, who was supposedly his oldest friend.
He also spied prodigiously for J. Edgar Hoover and cooperated with Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1960s.
Armand Hammer
Bribed his way through the oil business. Laundered money for Soviet spies. Forced his mistress to alter the way she looked to throw off his wife. Reneged on promises to support his illegitimate daughter. Forced his board members to give him signed resignation letters that he could accept if they ever dared to oppose him. Then promoted himself for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Harold Geneen
Perhaps history’s most dictatorial accountant, Geneen ran the huge ITT in the 1960s and 1970s. His method: publicly humiliating his top 120 executives every month at grueling, four-day, 14-hour-long meetings that made some of them physically ill. Geneen liked to see the pained expressions on their faces as he tore into them.
Martin Davis
People thought Gulf & Western was predatory and acquisitive under Charles Bluhdorn, who earned it the nickname “Engulf & Devour.” But when his tough-as-nails protege Davis ascended to the top position, a visitor asked why half of the offices were empty on the top floor of the company’s Manhattan skyscraper. “Those were my enemies,” Davis said. “I got rid of them.”
So apparently while I was working on my internship in DC, I missed a Bay Area bloggers convention hosted by KRON-4 news in San Francisco. About a month afterwards, KRON put together The Bay Area is Talking, a blog about the Bay Area that helps put together their news content and the Bay Area blogs. Calstuff is one of the blogs who they link to so, it’s nice to be put up with a bunch of other Bay Area residents. Interestingly enough, they linked to a comment stream on one of my Calstuff posts.
The folks at Cal Stuff are smarter than your average Bear…
So they turned us on to this new research center Yahoo is setting up in cooperation with Professor Mark Davis and the School of Information Systems.
But the real fun comes in the comments where people try to figure out if they should root for Google or Yahoo because of each’s connection with Bear and Cardinal
[…]
You guys do bring up something interesting about the nature of the Berkeley v. Stanfurd rivalry when it comes to the Internet. Berkeley made some of the technologies that went into making the Internet, but Stanford can proudly boast about its hand in helping to produce two of the crown business of the web, which is of much higher profile. A lot of the labs are doing great work, but there is no high profile story of a Larry and Sergei coming out of Berkeley.
Comment by Allen L.
Nice to know they’re reading more than just my posts.