Apr 23 I’m not sure how many people text a whole lot. I’m assuming that there are many of them out there. Now personally I am not a big fan of it. Not because it’s inconvenient or useless but rather because I don’t appreciate getting “nickeled and dimed” (in this case literally). You might say that’s cheap, but that’s just the truth. I don’t appreciate paying for the cell phone plan and on top of that getting charged the lousy 10 cents to both send and receive a text message (of course this is more specific to Verizon than it is to all cellular phone carriers in the United States. Anyways, enough about my personal feelings about texting. The real reason that I thought about texting today was because I read about Miss Morga Pozgar who is now the reigning texting champion!
I read about this last night in an Engadget article, and I could hardly believe that they even have this competition! I think that the world is ridiculous because they sponsor such things. They give money to the person who is the quickest to type out long words. How can there be many people who would try for such a thing (okay granted I think that if I had known about it then I would try for it and see if I could win $25,000 for doing essentially nothing). But it’s amazing to see the kinds of things that go on in the world out of my eyes. Utterly amazing.
Apr 20 People don’t care what you have to do, just get it done.
Have you ever noticed someone’s eyes drift or glaze over when you would be explaining something to them? Well it could be that you’re just boring them to death. But I was thinking about when I would occasionally be explaining why or how I got from point A to point B.
Say for instance someone were to be interested in how you happened to come from the point you were at 5 years ago to this point right now. You would think about all of the different things that have happened, good and bad, small and little. You would want to talk about every little incident to truly show how or why or when you did what you did. But more often than not, it seems as if that person wants to basically just know a summary of the journey. They don’t want to hear how you felt 10 days after you experience unrequited love or how you felt during that all-nighter that would seemingly determine your future.
It’s like that in the real world, too. It’s very accurate, in my opinion, to say that people just want you to get something done. They don’t want to hear about all of the problems that you had while getting there. At work, they will be much more interested in a final project (whether that’s a report or a program or a piece of art) than they will be in how you arrived at said destination. They don’t want to know how there was this tiny bug in your program that you couldn’t find for the longest time. They don’t want to know how you messed up the formatting of something and had to start over. I remember at a previous job that I had, we would have weekly lunch meetings where the new people would introduce themselves. A new guy on my team joined and there was the requisite introduction made along with the invitation to talk about what he did/was going to do at the company. This guy (who admittedly might have been slightly out of touch with American social norms because he seemed like he had not been born there) promptly got into talking about what he had done in the past week to get a particular function to work. He went on about how hard it was to figure it out but ended with saying that it looked promising and he was making headway. Want to know what I said when I introduced myself? I said, “I’m a student at UCSD studying Computer Science.” So you can imagine how I cringed at seeing him talk endlessly, which sent everyone in the room (temporarily) to Timbuktu.
Another example is my morning routine. I have five alarms set each day. Now you must be wondering why I would have such a thing. Everyone is different, and here is what works for me:
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I have my first alarm go off at a pleasant level of noise to the news on the radio on a clock radio.
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My second and third are tunes that are progressively louder on my cell phone.
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The fourth is a shrill and loud alarm on my cell phone.
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The fifth is a very loud and annoying alarm on the clock radio.
Wow this seems like a lot to me when I read it. However, I figure that this covers me for cases of when I am very tired (can’t get up at the first one or two alarms), and it also covers me for disasters (either my cell phone runs out of a battery or the electricity goes out). Do people care about this? Not really at all. In fact some people often question why I do the things that I do. But what’s really important and what do people really care about? Whether I got up in time or not!
So basically, people don’t want to hear the details of the journey most of the time. This does not mean that the journey is not important. In fact, the journey is immensely important. However in many cases, people want to know the destination and end. They want the synopsis.
That makes it all the more important to take note of this: if you find someone who is interested in the entire journey, you just found a “keeper.”
Apr 18 Because of computers, life has changed over the years. They hold the promise of many things. Quicker processing, automated functions, extensive memory are just a few of the available positives of them. While they have changed and are continuing to change, people do not change quite as much. Sure we change because now we know how to find things online whilst 20 years ago the common person did not. However, the very essence of people will not change. Take today for example.
In an article that I read, we see just how people do not change.
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Hundreds of years ago, the roads must have been clogged with people traveling by foot/horse to get to the local magistrate to pay their taxes.
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Years ago, the post office was jam packed with lines out the door as people stood in line to mail their taxes.
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Today (figuratively, yesterday literally) countless people try to file their taxes in the hours before the tax deadline and clog up the servers.
It is amusing to see that people will truly not change. If they can do things faster then do they finish them faster? No, they wait to start it later. People never learn. We truly are running around in circles and simply staying in the same place. Boy, we must be dizzy by now.
Apr 17 There are a lot of things that people do well. Well, at least it seems like they do a lot of things well. Maybe in hundreds of years people will think back upon our times and scoff at how poorly we existed. That’s kind of how we look back on other time periods isn’t it? Using a port-a-potty is bad enough, but a bedpan or an outhouse? No way! Using candles instead of having electricity? Completely necessary! But I digress (as usual). Something that makes me angry is that people are too good at things. They are good at wanting as much money as possible. They are good at looking out for #1. They are good at being sneaky. They are good at marketing.
What brings on this rant? Well the gas stations! You might think, “how in the world do gas stations market?” Well I have some beef with gas stations. Okay so maybe I also just have a problem with how gas is very expensive (and going up). Nevertheless have you ever noticed the prices for gas? Sure sure, we all know that they are currently low to mid $3 per gallon. But have you ever noticed that it’s always something like $3.199? Do you realize that’s essentially $3.20?! If you think that I’m being stupid, then that’s your prerogative, but I think that’s slightly outrageous. Do they really need to get that last 0.9 ¢?? And we are silly and oblige because we have to. How unfortunate to be bound to something (gasoline) so tightly!
Too bad ranting and raving will do nothing to stop this practice. It’s absolutely worthless. I wonder who is getting rich from the 0.9 ¢ extra from every single gallon pumped. They sure must be rich.
Apr 16 [kas-ti-geyt]
Definition:
To strongly criticize or reprimand.
Example of usage:
After running into the street, some people think that the parents should just send them to the corner, but others are of the mind that the child should be castigated in order to more strongly deter future injurious behavior.
Using a new word instead of criticize seems like an attractive possibility. Seemingly of the old English variety of words, it flavors your language, and I’d warrant to say that it might make you sound more sophisticated.