The firt dvd player my parents bought ate a dvd and I struggled for 10 minutes with my poor weak right hand trying to make it spit out. The player–the only player that ignores regions, plays illegal vcds and dvds from overseas, play images and cds–was twisting its 3 dvd tray and tossed my Stand by Me dvd on top of the Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen dvd.
The dvd player likes to ignore my pushes on the remote too.
Yes, I admit I saw the latter. It was fun.
Why ever use a cellphone for internet?
I never thought to do so until today when I was looking at San Francisco apartments on craigslist. I brought my laptop so anytime my Macstumbler found an open network, I would yell stop. And as rapidly as possible, I would try to load the craigslist page I was trying to search.
Awkward. But I have this habit of hitting refresh over and over again even when the network didn\’t work the first, second and third time.
When is the moment that you stop saying yes and start saying no?
Observations on my commute to work from the East Bay, BayCHI meeting at PARC, picking up a friend and dropping him off at Belmont and dinner in downtown Mountain View:
\”How long did you wait?\” the question that has stumped me this year. What is the appropriate response when the one who asks the question has obliviously arrived late?
Punctuality varies from culture to culture. From the West to the East. From company to company. From school to school.
But when we say \”I waited here for 30 minutes\”, we are almost begging for an apology. Are we upset when we wait? Are we supposed to give others the benefit of the doubt? And in the end, I say that I was waiting for only a few minutes.
With the proliferation of cell phones, no such urgency is demanded anymore. But. I remember waiting in Berkeley for a friend. I said 7 pm and called him. He said he was just leaving and estimated an hour. So I found something to occupy myself. I called him again at 8 pm and it turned out he hadn\’t left yet. When he finally arrived at 10 pm, there was no regret but he implied that I should understand his culture–be flexible and work with his style of arrival. Right.
At one of my jobs, I stood outside in the cold Pittsburgh winter. I arrived exactly at 9 am, but hadn\’t received my keys yet. So I waited, rubbing my hands together, my nose turned bright red. They finally arrived about 15 minutes later and asked me how long I had waited. Despite my frozen deposition, I said, \”Oh, only a few minutes.\”
Nonetheless, I learned from my experience to arrive at a party 90 minutes late. That took 3 years to learn.
Yet another social network advertisement. Add me on LinkedIn. This time, a professional social networking site. I mean after all, the executive dean did add me too.
Use my gmail account (jenn.ng) to find me!
Most of the time, I imagine myself as the extrovert. The one with easy charm and charisma that could talk anyone up. A magnetic personality. Someone that could walk into a group of unrelated people and make a connection instantly. An energetic, vibrant personality.
But that\’s really not me. To some, I am one of the most outgoing people they know. In Pittsburgh my last year, I was able to gather people together–organize events and the like. The driving force, some said, to get events going. But I can\’t constantly do it. I prefer being in the background–a wallflower. I prefer being in a group and observing what people say or do. It\’s much more peaceful. And the thing I love doing the most now…is write, read and sleep. Activities of the loner.
I am tossed in the unknown, where I know almost next to nobody. It\’s intimidating. It\’s scary. Of course, the path is set for me to succeed and connect. But it\’s a strange position to be in when I have gone from a loner to an extrovert and then back again. I love people and what makes me happy is when I can bring people together to interact. And yet, here I am, almost embracing it but treading timidly at the same time.
Aaaaaah, massive headache coming on!
Out of a slight addiction to web 2.0 activities, I attended the SF New Tech meetup today. Unfortunately, the presentations were slightly shaky and not as toned as I thought talks in the real world of the Internet would be.
I personally advocate short talks with a lot of visuals. The rule is if you have 30 minutes, give a 10-15 minute talk. Less text, lots of photos.
But some interesting things:
posticky.com – stickies web application so that it can persist over several computers, but the guy was saying that they didn\’t have a clientside application because it lacked the functionality to automatically update (wouldn\’t there be a way to build this anyway?)
peopleaggregator.com – a great idea to seamlessly blend all social networks together and have a single place to control them all. Except that the guy was a bit obnoxious. After all, he\’s a darling of valleywag.
Until next time. Or whether I can find energy within myself to partake in these activities. It was held at the cnet building and there were drinks provided by a local law firm.
My new job starts tomorrow!
I have always loved the geek life. Or maybe it was just the poseur inside me that loved it. I did work at rescomp for almost 3 years surrounded by geekiness that could not be measured. The nights I remembered were filled with video games and office chair races. And of course, the days of sleeping on the couch overnight because we didn\’t want to go home. And who could forget the late-night runs to Jack in the Box and Top Dog?
Of course, I didn\’t partake in it all. But apparently early-stage startups still would. Geek houses, they call it. At my (bone-creaking) age of 24, I wouldn\’t do it.
Well, ok, maybe just once. I find it amusing how some people get so delirious at 4 am after staring at a computer for 14 straight hours.