I am a fun and outgoing guy looking for a strategist or community management type position. I've got some dev experience (LAMP, JS, ~python, working on jquery) and a minor in CS, but coding full-time gives me cabin fever of the brain.
I'm super curious, intellectually fearless, and willing to relocate (currently in Chicago; would prefer SF.) Contact info is in my profile.
I know it's hard to believe, but there are people who legitimately enjoy finding the exact right word. This is like trashing someone for working on an open source project - they're just doing something they love the best they know how. In this case it's not strategically optimal and finding that out was a (perhaps overdue) shock.
You are operating from the perspective that the "right word" is the one that the dictionary defines as the most accurate based on the context. If the people you are communicating to will receive the message better if you choose alternative, less correct as far as dictionaries are concerned words, the message will be better received.
I see people make this mistake all the time; it's important to recognize that the ultimate goal of language is to communicate.
>I know it's hard to believe, but there are people who legitimately enjoy finding the exact right word.
Absolutely. There is an appropriate time and a place for such an exercise, however, and having the cognizance of when and where is useful.
>This is like trashing someone for working on an open source project - they're just doing something they love the best they know how.
I don't think it's anything like that. The submission is about a person who had purportedly been sending out thousands of resumes with nary a bite. Their angle is not "Clearly I'm doing it wrong", but they instead resort to the tried and true "everyone but me is stupid" angle. I don't patronize that thought process because it's the hubris of failure.
+1 for Virgin. I've never flown (I live in Chicago and they don't hit O'Hare) but I've heard almost exclusively good things. They are doing exactly what needs to be done in these giant, somewhat stagnant industries - introducing a brand with a customer-centric model, offering a "premium" service. Of course, in the world of air travel, it takes surprisingly little to distinguish yourself from the notoriously horrendous experience of dealing with other major lines.
Last year, there was a Wakefield/Wi-Fi Alliance study that found 76% of travelers would choose an airline based on wi-fi availability. (http://www.wi-fi.org/news_articles.php?f=media_news&news...) A number which, I can only imagine, has been increasing over time. And, as we've seen (re: Starbucks) there's a big difference between wi-fi and free wi-fi. As far as I can tell skimming a couple searches, there doesn't seem to be any line that offers free wifi... yet.
It seems like there's a coming sea-change, however. The going theory is that free wi-fi is going to be a standard check-box item by the middle of next year - with many assuming Virgin and SWA will likely be leading the way.
On a related note, I fly pretty much exclusively Southwest. I took my first flight at just over a week old and have flown pretty regularly ever since. About 6-7 years ago, I made the change to flying SWA whenever possible and haven't looked back. Last time I flew to SF, it took two different flights with a transfer in between - and I got a free drink on both.
Last year, there was a Wakefield/Wi-Fi Alliance study that found 76% of travelers would choose an airline based on wi-fi availability.
I'd imagine Wi-Fi Alliance might have some biases here.
Since in-flight wifi is just a satellite connection, I'm sure the overall available bandwidth is fairly limited. Charging for wifi is a good middle ground for airlines as a way to make a few extra dollars but also to keep usage to a level that the uplink can handle.
Are their any airlines that currently offer free wifi? I know that SWA did during their testing phase a while back (which only consisted of 3-4 equipped planes) but they eventually started charging for it like everyone else.
Very interesting. Even with a cellular based system, I'm sure there isn't too much bandwidth available but much more than with a satellite connection I'd imagine.
That's a good point, though about charging in order to throttle bandwidth concerns. But that comes at a potentially high cost in public perception points. All it takes is one airline to say "Everyone should have free wifi, so now we do!" and there will be a big jump in people complaining about having to pay for it.
TANSTAAFL, or free wireless. Any time something is being offered for "free" you can be sure those that aren't using it are being ripped off for the benefit of those who are.
Badges? It's become kind of cliche as of late, but it might work. I've known many a pot-smoker who were (overly) concerned with their rep as a connoisseur, as it were.
There's been a lot of hating on us poor liberal arts graduates that didn't have the foresight to know that our education was going to invariably lead to crushing, static unemployment, so I figure I'd throw in my $.02
I've been building and tinkering with computers since I was 11 and it has always been sort of a foregone conclusion that I would go into CS or compe. But when I started college, for a number of reasons, I decided I wanted to study physics. But a few years in, I realized I wasn't really getting the full-bodied education that I was hoping for. I noticed this in myself as well as my peers in comparable science/engineering programs. It turns out, many of the programs that leave you with marketable skills necessarily sacrifice breadth of understanding.
This isn't to say all cs grads know nothing of the world, but it was a noticeable problem. There is, of course, virtue in training people to think only about a single field and think about it deeply and constantly. But I didn't want to be one of those people, so I switched to Political Science.
Political Science, at my school, was an interdisciplinary program - it allowed students to design their own concentrations within the framework of the program. Because of this, I was able to take advanced level courses in philosophy, music theory, english, astrophysics, economics, and computer science. No I'm not an expert on any of these, but I have the groundwork to understand any of them that I wish to personally pursue further. And many of them, I have.
Of course, after five years of college, I finally realized that I'm most passionate about writing, advertising, and technology, but I'm stuck competing against people with more specifically tailored credentials. This is obviously a problem, and I'm not going to claim I haven't spent nights wishing I had just stuck with something that would land me a job and a life of comfort. But comfort is as dangerous as it is pleasant and a lack of it often spurs the greatest innovation. That last part, however, I'm still working on.
But what about my CS friends? Some of them are legitimately well-rounded and interesting people... and some sold their souls at 100 hr/wk at nyc firms making 100k but they'll never see the world with the appreciative eyes of the destitute - they'll always want more because that's all they've ever been taught to value. Many will live lives hopelessly seeking satisfaction through abundance.
Save your pity for those guys, thank you.
PS: I don't really think all these guys are doomed because they took high-stress, high-paying jobs, I just wanted to represent the other side of the coin. Don't assume all LAS grads are forever useless... also, if you have the means, hire one. (specifically, me)
In school, we had a group that did microgravity experiments in freefall, could be useful research applications along those lines. Although I'm not sure how much control you have over the physical satellite.
Perhaps you could do some LEO photography? I'm thinking, if this is possible, there could be some interesting mapping applications.
I use notecards - I keep a stack of blanks in my bag. If they're not particularly actionable, they go up on my blog for such things(http://mohrslaws.com/Lifein3x5), otherwise, they go in the to-do pocket. If they don't fit in either, I fold them into an origami frog, draw a funny face on it and leave it by the wayside. (http://tweetphoto.com/12387364) - This is also the format I use for my business cards.
If I ever find myself wanting for something to do or ponder, I just go to the to-do pile and browse.
I like the physical aspect of this system. To me, the important thing here is getting the ideas the hell out of my head - it gets kinda crazy in there, it's no place for a delicate thing like an idea. Plus having a big, unsorted stack makes them more interesting to browse.
Anecdotally, I was surprised, above all, by how natural it feels to start meditating. There's thousands of years of practices and traditions meant to improve/structure the act, but I never really thought of those as being aimed at someone like myself. As a result, most of my exposure, up until a few months ago, was either through articles like this one or occasionally at the end of martial arts workouts.
But I spent a part of this summer working on a farm in rural Wisconsin and I ended up with a period of downtime in the early evening - after the day's work and catching up with emails and whatnot. As it turns out, I was also struggling with a particular quandary (specifically, I was trying to define 'value') and one day, I just sat down cross-legged on the porch with my eyes closed, facing the setting sun.
What I did from there is hardly what any sort of zen master would consider 'meditation,' but I was amazed at what a difference it made to simply make a conscious decision to sit and think only of one topic. Consequently, I was reminded of a zen koan that I had encountered earlier in my investigation of the meaning of value, which was edifying enough for me to feel okay with calling what I had started doing 'meditation.'
I guess the bottom line is not to put too much stake in what everyone else says meditation is or isn't and focus on the practice of just taking time to be alone with your thoughts long enough to organize them in such a way that makes sense for you. Again, this is strictly anecdotal, but I think that's where you'll really see many of the benefits associated with meditation coming from. As someone who was diagnosed ADHD in college and has always had a problem with focus, I can say that having a disorganized mind can really be toxic to your life and work.
I guess the bottom line is not to put too much stake in what everyone else says meditation is or isn't and focus on the practice of just taking time to be alone with your thoughts long enough to organize them in such a way that makes sense for you.
This brings up the interesting and valuable question of what meditation is and isn't. Buddhist meditation is a skill that concerns itself with two activities. I've provided a link at the end of this reply that you can use to learn Mindfulness (as taught by a monk who is also a Stanford Ph.D in Buddhist Studies).
So what are the activities that comprise meditation?
The first activity is to willfully concentrate the mind in an effort to calm it. This is done by focusing strictly on the sensation of the breath in order to restrict the mind from wandering off. The name of this activity in Pali is called "samatha", which means "calm" or "tranquility".
The second activity is to see the processes by which the mind runs off into orthogonal thought and unhelpful states of mind. Once you see these processes happening, you intervene in them to stop them from happening in order to bring your mind into a strong state of calm awareness. This activity is called "vipassana" in Pali. It means "insight" in English.
Samatha and vipassana are two sides of the same coin. They are a process broken into two supporting functions to achieve the goal. When people are introduced to meditation, they are being introduced to the encompassing practice of samatha-vipassana, otherwise referred to as Mindfulness Meditation.
One of the most thorough and accessible sources of instruction on Mindfulness is Gil Fronsdal. You can find an entire course, along with everything else on this site, for free here:
I have and loved it - it is responsible for my regular use of the word 'gumption.' But, now that you mention it, I should go back and read it again. When I first read it, I was much more technically oriented and have since shifted towards a focus on writing. This is largely what caused said quandary.
When you're working on technical problems, the question of value is relatively straight-forward: you are attempting to solve a problem by creating tools or applying existing ones. As a writer, it's a bit more nuanced. Moreover there's not a quick or easy way to measure that value.
If I hack up a script to grep a dataset, when it's done, I can toss the code and nobody has to know how ugly it is - the task is done. I cut an hour of work down to 30 seconds using 15 minutes of coding: saved time = obvious value.
If I rewrite the copy on my landing page, I may see an increase in conversions, but there's a strong chance that I timed that rewrite to coincide with a marketing push. Did my new landing page with a stronger call to action and a more approachable voice convince people to sign up? Did my popular friend give me some twitter love? Or did I change the copy to fit a new, more attractive design?
Basically, 'value' is an extremely elusive concept. I've asked a lot of people about it and the resulting conversation is pretty formulaic: it starts with a simple, poorly veiled abstraction of what the respondent does and, as I challenge it, it morphs into this maddeningly abstract compromise.
This response was inappropriately long, I realize, but it's obviously a topic that's been tugging on my brainstrings.
Speaking of long responses, feel free to ignore this, I just wanted to explore your idea a bit.
If I am understanding you correctly, it sounds like in your example of re-writing your landing page the question you're facing is "Can we measure the value that re-writing the landing page generated" (or even "Can we measure value"). It sounds like the elusive nature of the answer to this question is coming from a couple of sources:
1) Incompleteness of information - you can't possibly know who's sharing links to your site or what exactly caused every new visitor to decide to visit (was it just x,y, or z? simple correlation?).
2) Complexity of information - even with perfect information of the environment your site operates in - the number of variables affecting it is so large that it would be near impossible for you to comprehend how they all interconnect and determine the root cause of the up-tick.
3) Inherent subjective nature of value - The new trend could be fleeting, or even worse -- you might have changed something that increases short term performance but may be detrimental in the long term (Reddit gold?). This makes it hard to categorize this as good/bad/neutral.
I think the root cause of all of these issues in relation to your conundrum is the basic desire or need to categorize information we receive about the world. In this example, you would be attempting to categorize the rewrite as an action that was either positively, negatively, or neutrally valuable, and at least the above 3 limiting aspects of this information are preventing you from easily doing so.
The two extremes of the options you'd have, given this, would be on one end to try and minimize the limiting aspects of the information (maybe going so far as to invent some type of analytics tool with AI that can tell you with X probability that the action will be worth it), with the other extreme being to throw your hands up and ignore any information related to it. I think the question obviously isn't "which option do you choose" but rather where do you draw the line -- where do you stop and decide that whatever else lies beyond your current state of understanding can remain unknown?
I think in the literal sense, this is relatively easy, as we have to make choices based on limited information every day. The real trick is in the follow-through: refraining from judging our decision to limit ourselves (or not) as either good or bad.
I'm super curious, intellectually fearless, and willing to relocate (currently in Chicago; would prefer SF.) Contact info is in my profile.