Read this

Read this. 

http://paulgraham.com/love.html

It is kind of long, but I found it both amusing and introspective, at the same time. Anything that can do that is worthy of a few minutes of my time.

Subprime in Stick Figures

This blog is 99.99% surf-related, but occasionally something land-based does catch my interest and warrant a Horace post. This would be an example.

The Subprime Primer: How Subprime really works

Definitely worth a watch (And not just because it's on Google Docs -- although that certainly doesn't hurt!). As this is a family blog, I'll give advance warning of foul language.

Luckily I'm not directly caught up in this whole mess, but in a way we really all are. I really don't know much about any of it at all, but as someone who is in the market (however passively it may be) for a new home, I find myself paying more attention to these things of late. This slideshow does as good a job of anything I've yet to see of explaining the entire fiasco (humorously -- if you want real academia analysis and explanation you've come to the wrong blog).

Thanks to Bill Middleton's GChat status message for bringing this to my attention.

Learning is good

Things I just learned in my few minute Gmail conversation with sister Madeleine.

• Harvard students are hardly ever actually in class. She just finished a 2 week christmas vacation, and now she has another full week off before 2nd semester classes start. Live it up, sis.
• "layed" is not a word. I had to correct Maddy on this one. Like me, she too spent the entire day in bed...in her words: Madeleine: well i layed in bed all day tooo cuz i'm done with school. This one is tricky, but the correct usage would actually be " well I lay in bed all day too cuz I'm done with school and I'm a lazy bum." Sure sounds funny though. Nobody would actually say that. But there ya go. This website breaks it down pretty well for more explanation.
  
• The plural of 'cul de sac' is 'culs de sac.' Interesting. Crazy French words.
• Mom knows everything. Everything. Of course I know everything too, so I already knew this. But Maddy had to be reminded.

bottle cap quotes 2

Another one from my Honest Tea bottlecap:

If we don't change the direction we are headed, we will end up where we are going.

-Chinese proverb

What direction am I headed?

bottle cap quotes

This quote was on the cap of my Honest Tea drink this morning. Which I drank because I'm exhausted and caffeine really does a number on my system, I'm wide awake now.

When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail.
-Abraham Maslow

I liked that quote.

Workday 1 post vegas -- strugglin'!!

Free Rice

Going back to prior word-of-the-day posts -- this is definitely worth a look. FreeRice.com -- online site where you do multiple choice meaning of words, for each one you get correct they'll donate 20 grains of rice through the UN towards world hunger. It's fast, easy, and fun, and there are a lot of good words there. Multiple choice is kind of entertaining, good for the brain. Plus it's doing something good for the world! What's not to like.

I donated 1,000 grains of rice (with vocab level of 32, best level 36) before losing interest, deciding to post it here, and doing a little more actual work.

Word(s)of the day 3

Here's a history lesson. Was talking to my mom who was talking about my grandpa, and the vocabulary he uses, from the 50's. My gramma and grampa (henceforth referred to by their common names, bun (gramma) and papa) this past weekend with the help of the family moved from their 2 level condo in Lake Oswego to my other grandparents old single level house in Beaverton. It's better for Bun so she can get up and down the stairs, she was struggling with that at their old place. So now she can move around much easier. I hope they like it there. This is the house brother Joel has been working on fixing and remodeling and putting a ton of work into, so I'm glad it's going to good use. It's strange to think of visiting Bun and Papa and not having them in their old Red Fox Hills condo, that's where they've been for so long.

Anyways to the point -- vocabulary/history lesson.

Mom was talking to Papa and he uses the old 50's words to describe things. Here is (loosely interpreted) quote:

"I don't get up off this davenport, I like it so much. Can you get me the hassock?"

Now for you and me that above sentence may have you scratching your head. But to Papa, it's just what things are.

dav·en·port: 1.a large sofa, often one convertible into a bed.

has·sock: 1.a thick, firm cushion used as a footstool or for kneeling. (What you or I would call an Ottoman)

And just for good measure, here is one more:

drain·board: a working surface beside or on a kitchen sink, formed and inclined to drain into the sink. (Now this one is obvious, but in Papa-speak, it is basically any counter, not just the drainboard by the sink)

Hope you enjoyed, I'm off to watch the Andy Griffith Show!

Word of the day 2

So in follow up to my earlier word of the day post, I looked online at some of those gadgets you can add to the Google homepage that automatically give you a word of the day. And while they're all well and good and all, problem is I knew all those words. So I'm not going to bother with that nonsense. My word of the day will probably be more like a word of the week. Or word of the month. I'll keep it real -- will try to have my ear to the ground and when I come across a new word will try to remember it and look it up and put it on here. Kind of like I did with Pariah. I should have known that word, I know it now that I type it, what was I thinking a few days ago? stupid.

obamania

Obama was at Google yesterday. As just another of the things Google does, all the presidential candidates are coming in for open talks. Googlers can attend as well as a lot of press invites too. It's a bit of a madhouse, in my observation. I actually wasn't able to attend Obama's talk...I was stuck in a advertiser client forum in the room just next door to the main cafe where he was talking...just my luck. But I did sneak out of the forum for about 10 minutes to try and catch a glimpse of him....not happening. That place was packed. I could get close enough to hear but nowhere I could actually view the man himself.

Anyways all the sessions are filmed and posted on to YouTube. I haven't watched this yet myself but here it is if you want to check it out.



Update: I just watched the first part...the introducton. Which is done by David Drummond, a VP here. Funny to watch these things w/ the perspective I have. I used to play pickup basketball with David Drummond on this old portable single hoop in the parking lot outside of the old Google building. Now David Drummond is introducing Barrack Obama. He's always been a bigshot here though...so it's not like that's changed. Just interesting to think about sometimes, where these guys were and where they are now. I've witnessed and been a part of a pretty amazing company growth experience. Where/what do I have to show for it all? Sometimes I get introspective and wonder these things. But those moments don't last for long. Is the corporate world something I'll ever be fully made for? Sometimes I'm sad I'm still here doing the same stuff I've been doing for the last 5 years, there's not many of me left. This is one of those times. But what am I talking about here...enjoy Obama!

(wow he's on a single name only basis. Like Madonna. Hillary Clinton can't pull that off.)

update: it is equally as funny to think back that Google's only bball hoop was once one of those plastic based, water-filled rollable deals set up in the uneven, sloping parking lot out back. And people were happy OK with it. No chance of that happening now.

Wednesday

Work: In all day training today, learning all about effective sales. Our training guy is actually pretty good, he's entertaining. Quite a personality, and the content is good. But its interesting to compare all this sales emphasis to what we used to do.

Play: I'm rarin' to go and share some Kauai pictures with you, but I can't find the cable needed to transfer photos from my camera to my computer. It's really annoying me...tonight I'll be buying a card reader device to get around this problem. And then I'll have some pictures up.

Word of the Day

Yesterday Selin and I watched the movie American Gangster, Great movie! Really enjoyed every last 160 minutes of it -- yeah it's long but it is a great story, great entertainment, very well acted. Even the rapper-actors are solid! Denzel has really got the role of badass down... nailed it as Alonzo in Training Day, might have nailed it even more as Frank Lucas this time around. And Russell Crowe was pretty good too but it is all Denzel's show, he's really good. Better than George Clooney, who is also good, but Denzel blows him out of the water, no doubt.

Anyways I digress...real point of this post: I think I'll occasionally post a word-of-the-day. To help improve my vocabulary. So, in the movie, one of the characters who (spoiler alert!) winds up becoming a heroin junkie, says that if he and his cop partner (Crowe) turn in the million dollars of drug money they find in a car trunk, they'll be treated as pariahs. This word of course I've heard before and read and seen many many times -- I actually have read quite a lot and consider myself better than the average Joe when it comes to verbiage -- but then later in the night on the drive home we were talking about the movie and I used the word pariah and I used it wrong. Right meaning (outcast) but wrong definition. Selin was quick to correct me and we confirmed the correct definition of the word on her blackberry. But, it prompted me to continue to keep my mind sharp and learning (and remembering!) words. So, there you have it: word of the day.

pariah: pa - ri - ah

1.	an outcast.

2.	any person or animal that is generally despised or avoided.

3.	(initial capital letter) a member of a low caste in southern India and Burma.

My words may or may not get progressively harder as time goes on.

Thanks.

Oh and here is a really long but from the first page which is all I've read so far seems pretty good article about the real Frank Lucas, the character Denzel plays in the movie.

Ipod wins again

Nearly 10 months ago, I suffered my first defeat at the hands of the Apple Ipod/Itunes juggernaut. Last night, I settled in for round 2...and was defeated yet again. Last time I was trying to upload all my mp3 files into Itunes and it became an organizational nightmare, which took me a long long time to fix. Last night it was a different issue that prompted me to a new discovery, ITunes default file format is AAC format, something I had never heard of before last night (but apparently it's newer and better...), and also something the MP3 disc compatible stereo in my new car had never heard of either and doesn't recognize or play. So...in order to burn an MP3 CD compatible on my car stereo, I have to convert the ITunes files to MP3 format, which 1) takes a long time, and 2) creates duplicates of all the songs I try to convert!!! (one in AAC format, one in MP3 format). OYE! What a mess. I've learned now that when I upload I think I'll set it to upload music discs in MP3 format instead of AAC and I won't have to deal with this mess...but for the 15 GB of music already uploaded it's going to get a little messy. Boooooo.