This article/speech is AWESOME

Jul 27

Posted by jeff in Everything, Geekery | 4 Comments

No, not this one.

This one.

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she's going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn't what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, "What you doing?" And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, "Looking for the mouse."

Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan's Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

It's also become my motto, when people ask me what we're doing--and when I say "we" I mean the larger society trying to figure out how to deploy this cognitive surplus, but I also mean we, especially, the people in this room, the people who are working hammer and tongs at figuring out the next good idea. From now on, that's what I'm going to tell them: We're looking for the mouse. We're going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, "If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?" And I'm betting the answer is yes.

Restaurautism

Jul 27

Posted by jeff in Everything, Food, Travel | 9 Comments

Today has been an interesting day for me. In virtually every respect it was fairly boring, but nevertheless for some reason it made an impression on me. I did some work, went to the gym but didn't work out (forgot my ID card), did some more work, talked on the phone, and came home for dinner.

I guess dinner was a little non-standard.

After a trip to a Carrefour yesterday, I've been armed with a few things that I can't normally find in China. In fact, I had to seriously control my urges in order to leave there with even enough money for the subway ride home.

At any rate, that haul put me a handful of shrimp and some mushrooms short of a bowl of Tom Yum, or a few vegetables away from a pot of green curry.

So I hit the street market today after work for some curry fixins. Got back to my apartment and my fake kitchen, whipped out my handy pocketknife, and started peeling and slicing. Nothing says "temporary living arrangements" like having a 3-inch folding blade as your primary kitchen knife.

Midway through food prep, Christine came barging in (she has very few other modes of locomotion) and said I absolutely had to come and see the view from her balcony. Sean chose that moment to join us, and we all agreed the view was good enough to warrant a minor photographic frenzy.

Twenty minutes later I had a pot of green curry happily bubbling away on my induction stove, and a couple of roommates wafting through my door on wings of curried steam.

Shanghai_quickHDRs

Yeah, that's her view. If nothing else, I got to reacquaint myself a bit with HDR photography.

So we made a party of it. Pulled our chairs out to Christine's balcony, pooled our starches together, and had dinner lit by the Shanghai skyline.

By the way, it turns out that Thai curries go with baguettes just as well as Vietnamese curries do… i.e., very.

Afterwards, we sat around picking our teeth and each others' brains, which was unsurprisingly a fairly food-centric affair.

We're all foodies to varying degrees. Christine, while resting more on the consumption side of the equation, has nevertheless perfected an astonishing array of cooking techniques centered around the microwave, and Sean's a world traveler who's picked up more than his fair share of cooking smarts. He described his version of a paneer which had us all salivating, even having just stuffed ourselves with ungodly amounts of curry, french bread, and fried rice.

The interesting part of the conversation came when we started discussing Wuhan's variety of restaurants, or lack thereof. This led to a cursory examination of how successful, for example, a Chinese-American owned and operated gastropub might be, with a healthy selection of fairly authentic Asian and Western dishes.

This is a conversation I've had many times, both in- and externally, with a fairly wide assortment of people here, from friends and fellow foodies to former restaurateurs.

The thing is, I know just enough about cooking to know that I know nothing about cooking, especially professionally. Sure, I can whip up an array of passable curries (from two cans and a fistful of fresh veg) or fried rice, or even invent a half-decent dish once in a while ( try jicama stir-fried with five-spice beef… it's actually pretty awesome ). But to cook quickly and above all consistently, day after day, in a high pressure environment, is not a skill I've ever developed. Nor do I know anything about running a restaurant, which is a rather larger and more putrid kettle of fish.

But, you know, I keep going back to that thought, that it might be… fun.

Top X

Jul 16

Posted by jeff in Everything, Geekery | No Comments

I've discovered that there seems to be a "Top" show for almost everything. A "Top" show is what I call all these new semi or wholly scripted shows coming out that feature, say, 16 contestants competing in some kind of loosely defined skill discipline, and getting voted or judged off until some finalist wins a prize, usually money and a title nobody really cares about.

Let me be clear:

I LOVE this.

That's actually not easy to admit; it's kind of on par with admitting that I spent at least a couple weeks' worth of hours just watching MTV reality show marathons. It's like putting a bag of salt & vinegar kettle chips in front of me; I can't help myself. I'm not proud of it, it's just one of those aspects of my personality I need to deal with.

My helplessness is at least partly due to the fact that these producers seem to be churning out these shows almost in tune with my current or past hobbies/passions. The only difference is, there's a bunch of drama in these shows, which in all fairness makes them really trashy, but you know… fun.

So here's a list of shows I've seen and enjoyed, even though I'm kind of ashamed about it (kind of a weblog confessional of televised guilty pleasures):

- Top Chef (and Masters, etc)
- Top Shot (thanks Vicki)
- Top Sniper (haven't actually seen it yet, but I can tell it's going to be good)
- The Shot (a photography show that was only on for one season)

I feel like there should be more in this list, but maybe I just watched too many episodes of Top Chef. I can at least say that I haven't been watching Top Design, etc… thankfully that crap isn't even on my radar.

I like to think that I'm watching these shows ironically, like a good little hipster, but when all's said and done I'm fairly certain that these shows are really just an excuse for me to watch what are, essentially, soap operas.

I guess at some point I just have to admit to myself that I just plain like trash TV. The drama queen contestants, the goofy judges/hosts, the awkward attempts at injecting tension, and the sometimes laughably inept demonstrations of skill… it's as if somehow this all feeds some kind of deep-seated decadent urge.

And tonight, instead of going out and getting hammered with my roommate Christine, I'm sitting here at home waiting for a client to get me some info in order to hit their deadline.

So, cut me some slack. I need some of my urges fed.

World Expo 2010

Jul 10

Posted by jeff in Everything, Travel | 3 Comments

Okay, I guess I'll probably go eventually, especially since I met an American who is some kind of uppity up at the U.S. pavilion, so now that I have his card I get to jump the line.

But… looking at some of the photos, the U.S. pavilion is frankly the last pavilion I'd want to visit. It is, quite honestly, an embarrassment.

And even worse, here's a look at the politics of why it's so pathetic.

Paypal sucks too.

Jul 10

Posted by jeff in Everything | No Comments

This is a pretty old story by this point, but I'd just like to reiterate that Paypal is terrible.

Really, just terrible.

Back in the day, I had a Paypal account just like everyone else. I wanted to buy some item on eBay that only accepted Paypal as an option, so I tried to register. Lots of timeouts, server errors, and so on. Not exactly raising my confidence in your service.

Finally get my account validated, head over to eBay, click the 'Paypal' button to send funds, and bam… yet another server error. I'm pretty sure it was a 404.

At that point, I was pissed. How did they expect to run a business moving my money around when they can't even generated a working URL? So I close my account, which was a whole other ordeal.

Fast forward a few years, and now I need Paypal again. For a client's project I'm working on, I need to buy a membership to Greensock (great site for anyone with more than a passing professional interest in Flash), so I'm faced with the inevitability of re-registering.

So I go through the registration process -- credit card required -- and start the credit card validation process, which they say takes four days.

That's odd right off the bat. So I can make an instantaneous purchase with my credit card pretty much anywhere else, but once I use Paypal's "facilitating" service, I need to wait four days for them to prove my credit card is real, despite allowing me to open an account with it.

Okay, well… my client's waiting on me, but I can probably push the project a few days.

Tap tap. Click.

Four days pass, and their secret $1.95 charge shows up on my credit card account, with a four-digit numerical code that I am to enter into their website.

I wonder what the odds are I could have written a macro to continuously try four-digit numerical codes at random, and probably have validated by credit card before their four days were up. Judging from the rest of their service, probably pretty good.

After a couple more server errors that are almost criminally stupid -- on the level of: clicking through to their credit card validation page from 'my account' leads to an error page, but going to the credit card validation page from a transaction goes to a working page -- I get my credit card validated. Hallelujah.

I click 'purchase' one more time, and log back in to Paypal, expecting everything to be just hunky dory. I can finally get some more work done on this project, and maybe I'll actually get paid this month.

Oh, that red text doesn't look good.

Paypal says I can't use my credit card for this transaction. No further explanation. End game. Fuck you. Was there no thought process over there that went, hey, maybe this would have been nice to know FOUR DAYS AGO, when you made me validate my credit card?

But no. The only response Paypal has is to forward me to the bank account linking page, which makes my personal checking account Paypal's bitch.

Right, like I want to give your service, which has thoroughly demonstrated its level of professionalism up until now, a direct line into my checking account.

There's no mention about how long that would take, but it's moot anyway. I don't have my checkbook with me, so I can't pull the routing and account numbers off of the checks for the confirmation.

This is supposed to be easy?

This is supposed to be good service?

Paypal takes 3-5 percent of every transaction, plus additional fees that are pretty much in line with other major financial institutions.

The difference is, they can't even get the basics right. They are a purported e-commerce facilitation service, with a nonfunctioning website, that utterly fails to facilitate transactions.

Why do we need another mentally and ethically regressed troll squatting under the bridge between every financial transaction? Don't we have enough of them, reaching up with their twisted claws to scrape off real value and shovel it into their wet gaping maws, while providing no value themselves?

This is, sadly, the way in which people make their money now, I guess. It's both easier and more profitable to be a middleman who does nothing (hello insurance companies, banks, most news outlets, and financial brokers) than to actually do something useful.

So my question is… why do we let them?