I am planning on talking at the next Moth meeting in San Francisco. The Moth is sort of like an open mic night at a comedy club, except it doesn’t have to be funny, it’s mostly stories. They give a theme and each person is supposed to talk for 5 minutes. The theme on Tuesday,…
So this weekend, I went to the Verizon store. I have never gone into that store and left in less than 2 hours. It’s ridiculous how long it takes to get stuff done in there. The reason I was there was to get my youngest his first phone, plus to upgrade my father-in-law. He had…
Hillary Clinton should choose for her VP, Michelle Obama. Two former first ladies! Plus, Michelle is a serious customer. I have no idea who would win, but it sounds good. Despite winning the most games of any team ever, the Golden State Warriors will not be considered even in the top ten basketball teams of…
Out of curiosity, I looked at the most viewed YouTube videos. The distribution looks like this: That first one is Gangnam Style. This is a song, I am very familiar with. Why is it so much higher than every other? Good question. I do not have a good answer. In fact, you get music videos for almost the…
Nothing I have done has ever gone viral. I am talking about Charlie Bit My Finger viral. (840 million views, 500k comments) Ok, maybe even something with a few thousand likes. This is the kind of viral that usually happens in numbers similar to winning the lottery. Very few have done it and usually it…
I hear the phrase “Fail Fast” all the time. At heart, the sentiment of this is “Get on with it.” (Which is a good thing) The problem with the word Fail is that it assumes that the effort is going to be negative. Why can’t the message be “Learn Fast“? Fail fast makes me depressed. Failure is…
These are currently my favorite comedy acts: Flight of the Conchords I love these guys. They have live acts plus an HBO series. They are brilliant. So many different styles, each funnier than the last. Here is my favorite live show from them: Garkfunkel and Oates They are like the female version of Flight of…
My world has just been rocked. At the end of the movie, The Wizard of Oz, the scarecrow receives his diploma. He then immediately rattles off what I thought was the Pythagorean theorem. Until this morning, I thought was he was saying was correct. Today, on NPR, they disabused me of that notion. Here is…
Someone once told me that you should be happy doing nice things for people, for its own sake. You should never do something nice with the expectation of getting something good in return. In other words, if you save someone’s life by pushing them out of the way of a truck, don’t expect them to…
My son and I watched the movie Whiplash last night. He is a drummer and guitarist, so he was interested in this movie. (He loves Rush, but appreciates Jazz and Buddy Rich). My definition of great art is when the piece evokes thought and/or emotion in the audience. Whether it is writing, music, paintings, sculpture,…
Im starting to get annoyed that this is taking so long. The therapist says this is normal and I’m doing well, but I just want to play tennis unencumbered. It’s not just the flexibility, it’s also the strength. My wrist, fingers and forearm are still a bit weak. Here is the updated flexibility. The backward…
I’ve seen two advertisements leveraging this Donald Trump meme. One was a billboard on 101 that stated “Make your data great again!” and today, I got this email that proclaimed, “Make your events great again!” Both times I saw the ad, Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan came to mind along with a bunch…
It’s slow and steady progress, but you can almost see the diminishing returns. Getting to that green line is going to be difficult. Whenever I see data, I want to visualize it. I hate looking at tables of data. The line shows a trend, the numbers are harder to understand. There is a UX lesson…
No matter how long I live, no matter how big they get, my kids will always look like this to me: It was taken in 2009 during our infamous Tahoo trip. It’s funny how kids get frozen in that moment. This one picture of pure boyish joy was the moment they stopped growing in my…