School vs. the Real World

Top Ten Things to Learn This School Year

Like many Guy Kawasaki lists, there are more than ten things. Funny how most of his advice is about being concise, but hey, it’s his blog. Think of it as a bonus!

GetHuman.com

I hate calling my credit card company, the local IRS branch, customer support, etc. because it’s so hard to find a way to actually talk to a person. That’s where the gethuman database comes in, listing all the numbers to shortcut the interface.

For instance, if you want to talk to an actual customer representative at Apple, just press “0″ at every prompt. For the Washington Post, just don’t press or say anything! What’s also nice is that the gethuman DB lists the appropriate phone numbers, which is very useful when companies don’t list their customer service #s (cough cough Amazon).

An Inconsistent Truth?

The sky is falling, the world is over-heating. Al Gore says it’s imperative we follow his lead and embrace a “carbon-neutral lifestyle”, else we’ll “send the world into a tailspin.” However, Gore has two houses that could both be on MTV’s Cribs, and isn’t willing to spare a few extra cents to ensure his home is carbon-neutral. Furthermore, Gore’s family invests in an oil company that drills in ecologically-sensitive areas. All courtesy of Peter Schweizer (who to be fair, is a member of Stanford’s Hoover Institute, a conservative think tank).

TechCrunch 7

Nerds from all over the Valley flocked to tonight’s TechCrunch party, including this one. Main takeaways: the chance to reconnect with some good friends (or acquiantances), and to branch out a little bit. There are already plenty of pictures on Flickr, and I’ll add mine when I get the chance. And no, I didn’t collect my $200 dollars, but apparently someone paid $501 to attend.

Being at tonight’s party reminded me how disconnected from the Valley I’d been while in China. Nobody else in my travel group had ever heard of Flickr, Digg, del.icio.us, etc.

beating jet lag

For those not in the know, I’ve been in China the last two months, studying Mandarin at Peking University for 6 weeks, followed by 10 days of travel in Yunan Province and Shanghai. The trip was a blast, and if you check my Facebook profile, you can see tons of pictures.

What’s amazing is that I haven’t really suffered from jet lag. I remember coming back from Germany once and needing 4-5 days to readjust. This time, however, it was as if I didn’t skip a beat — I fell asleep at midnight, and then easily woke up to my alarm at 9:00AM. According to Wikipedia (which I’m allowed to look at now), I should have suffered from 24 – 15 = 9 hours of jet lag. My mother kept telling me to drink plenty of water on the plane, so I did. Apparently dehydration is a symptom of jet lag, and I wonder if that makes you more tired once you get back. I was definitely tempted to take long naps, but I managed to fight it off.

In other news, I took care of some errands, and even managed to play tennis today. I also had time to go to the Coliseum to see the A’s beat the Mariners 4-0. Still have to pack my stuff for my move tomorrow to Mountain View, however. Then shortly after, the next phase of my life will begin: work.

Update: The next night, I woke up at 4 am, due to my father’s being an early riser.  The light woke me up, and I couldn’t go back to sleep afterwards.  I still woke up at 11, which isn’t too bad.  Last night, I fell asleep at 2 and woke up at noon.  It’s almost as if I’m reverting to my college sleep schedule, which isn’t exactly what I want.

cia around pissing off the mac community

John Dvorak explains how he pisses off Mac fans to get more hits to his columns.

CIA + Hip Hop

Let's play a word association game with the CIA Hip Hop project:

• group think. I think the entire class came to this conclusion early on that filling up the CoHo would be easy. It turned out tonight that it wouldn't. k.flay's draw was underwhelming. Perhaps we overestimated how many people she would bring in, but I think the timing of her performance was bad — she had already performed twice last week, so her own fan base may have been spent. Also, no mention of tonight's concert is on her website.
• free riders. The class as a whole made a decision to unify to try to send a consistent message out. However, this came with the cost of having to manage everyone and reducing each person's accountability. I wonder what would've happened if each team had tried to do things themselves. I still think we would've had to collaborate to some degree, but maybe we joined up on too many action items.
• apathy. "Of course there's no one here, this is midterms week" — random undergrad at the CoHo. It's definitely hard to get Stanford students to go to a concert of an artist they've never heard of.
• saturation. "Way too much chalk, I heard people say that the chalking was lame. I just want to see the pavement!" — acquaintance of mine, 12:30am. Could've told me sooner…
• fun. Of course, all of my comments are made in hindsight. I still enjoyed trying different ways to spread hip hop, and we were still able to get people to come to the concert. I have fun working with my team and the coaches. In retrospect, I think one thing we can take into the next project is to be more critical of ideas during the evaluation stage. Also, I think we should try to pay more attention to potential signals, e.g. the low attendance at the flash concert should've indicated to us that maybe current marketing campaign wasn't working.

No more soda…

Soda's out, juice in at public schools

I remember my high school days. Pretty much every day for lunch, I would have a slice of Bruno's pizza and a can of Pepsi. I knew how to diversify, too — some days I'd opt instead for Domino's cheesebread or a McDonald's sausage biscuit as the entree. It's amazing to think of the crap kids put in their bodies, and it's encouraging that schools and soft drink manufacturers are finally making a change. It seems like conventional wisdom these days that soda-pop is unhealthy, so I wonder what it took to actually create change?

SaveGranny launches

We’ve been working hard on SaveGranny.org the last two weeks, and I’m proud to announce that we’ve officially launched. The site has been mentioned on reddit, and we’re even getting leads from fark and stumbleupon…

Saturday and Sunday definitely marked an upward trend for the # of visits to the site. We got around 1100 uniques on Saturday and then 2900 on Sunday, after averaging around 200 uniques/day from Wednesday-Friday.

If you like the site, please digg it…

Spreading Firefox

Tasks I’ve done so far:

• Created an account on SpreadFirefox.com
• Created spreadfirefox.pbwiki.com, which is for all the class to use.
• Skimmed the Intro, FAQ
• Started reading the forums
• Joined the IRC channel (after installing ChatZilla)
• Made SpreadFirefox.com my home page.