conquering the world one oxymoron at a time
Archive for March, 2007
March 30, 2007 at 3:52 pm · Filed under hobbies
Last weekend, I met up with Liang for some midday bloody marys, with brunch on the side. He must have been drunk because he let me test ride his sweet sweet fixie afterwards, and I kinda got hooked. So I think I’m in the market now for a fixie. If/when I get one, I will have 4 bikes (#1, #2, #3), but I’m trying to sell #1. Maybe I’ll have better luck than the first time around. So if anyone’s in the market for a 2002 Gary Fisher Wahoo, let me know :)
I began my search for a fixie today on Craigslist. There really aren’t so many options, or maybe I just don’t know how to look. Additionally, I got really upset seeing Walmart bikes being sold for $150 with the caption “full suspension! Only $150!” Yeah right; the bike is maybe worth ~$80 completely new from Walmart. Why are people so dis-integritous? On craigslist no less! Isn’t craigslist supposed to be some kind of honor system cult?
Yes, I know dis-integritous is not a word.
Additional note: I just read this craigslist ad. WTF?? Kmart doesn’t even sell $300 bikes new. Is this person out of his mind???
March 29, 2007 at 11:41 am · Filed under daily grind
In working with student government this past year, I’ve come across several people who are students but who try to be politicians. And by that, I mean the sleazy, slippery, reason-we-hate-politicians type of politicians. I don’t particularly understand the motivation, except maybe to just appear as a politician. I guess people have made comments such as, “Yeah, he’s just being a good politician”, and maybe these are the compliments these people strive to get.
I get very frustrated working with these people, and I visibly fume. Take a recent example where one student completely and ruthlessly expressed his disgust with a particularly idea, in the company of a group of other students. However, when the audience changed to a key MIT administrator, the same student sweet-talked the administrator and told stories about how he really supported the idea and how he only wished he could have done more to convince others that it was a good idea.
My jaws dropped during that meeting. While I never had that great of an impression of this guy before, he just lost all forms of respect from me.
When I brought this up with the two other students in the meeting, they agreed, but one of them backed up the sleazy guy and said, “Well, he was just being a good politician. He did what was best for us, and he said what I wouldn’t have been able to say.” I was more shocked. So now his actions are being viewed as good? When did we lose all sense of integrity??
I really feel that there are two ways to do politics: with slippery sleaziness and with integrity. The slippery sleaziness is like the hacked temporary solution; you smile and tell people what they want to hear knowing full well that you are completely lying to them. It’s not even a white lie; you are just flat-out lying through your teeth. The people are happy with you in the moment, but 1) everyone else who witnesses this loses respect for you, and 2) eventually the people you lied to figure it out, and they too, hate you.
The integrity is trying your best to do what is right and to be able to in your heart, justify your decisions. It’s impossible to make everyone happy, and politicians have that impossible task. So the point shouldn’t be to make everyone happy, but to have a good feeling about the decisions you do make. People will disagree, but you can go to sleep at night knowing you did your best and your actions were not questionable morally.
I heard a talk recently, by a Harvard Business School graduate-turned entrepreneur. He talked about this idea of a company culture, and how important that was especially for a small start-up. He put up a list of qualities to define his current company culture (small startup with some 10 employees, I think). And in there, specifically, says “As much as possible, do everything that is right.” He even mentioned in his talk that they value personality so much when hiring. If someone is arrogant, that’s a big red flag. If someone seems dishonest, that’s a even bigger no-no.
So often, HBS graduates and politicians and entrepreneurs get lumped into the same pot of “sleazy schmoozers”, and it was nice and refreshing to see a completely humble and down to earth guy talk about the importance of integrity and company culture. It made me feel kinda justified in my whole view that politics can be conducted with integrity instead of immorality.
March 21, 2007 at 6:44 pm · Filed under grad life/MIT
- Seemingly endless supply of Poland Spring water: free (to me)
- iPod nano to keep me company at 2am when most everyone else has gone home: $250
- Bottle of beer from the guy down the hall’s lab fridge stock: priceless
I went to sleep last night at 4am, mulling over how best to loop through a set of data in Matlab so that every cell that is undefined can be replaced with something intelligently informative. I woke up this morning dreaming about matrices. Life can be really pathetic sometimes.
March 16, 2007 at 2:08 pm · Filed under daily grind
Sitting with some of my students last night, it came up that I graduated high school with the Class of 2000. One guy very noticeably said “00?? Wow, you ARE old”. I paused, and then I thought, he is absolutely right. Class of 2000 was eons ago. When I graduated high school, if someone told me they were the Class of 1994, I would have had a cow. Only old fogeys belong to classes graduating SIX years ago. So it’s all relative.
I also went to a meeting yesterday where some undergrad stated that she really enjoyed attending weekly meetings for the organization and discussing policy. When probed on what the policies were, she mentioned things such as how many mailboxes should be stacked on top of each other versus placed across, or how to phrase a particular question on a survey or really just whether or not to make the answers to that one question public. That’s all fine and dandy until she mentioned how these were all very important issues that were debated at length for 3+ weeks each. That’s when I thought, “wow, was I this brainwashed as an undergrad and thought that the longer the we discuss something, the more important it must be?” So again, it’s all relative.
It’s snowing outside right now. With the weather in the 60s earlier this week, the snow is really quite a bummer. But I’m going snowboarding this weekend on Sunday, and I groaned at the 60-degree weather this past week thinking the slopes would be incredibly undesirable on Sunday. Now I’m actually happy that it’s snowing. I don’t think I’ve been this happy to see snow since I was in elementary school in the South.
It’s all relative.
March 15, 2007 at 3:07 pm · Filed under random
Whenever spring comes around, there’s just something in the air that makes us want to be outside. I’ve wondered about how people in California feel, if they get the same itch to be outside when spring comes around because their winters don’t really prevent them from being outside.
Yesterday, walking all around, I saw people throwing frisbees. I want to throw frisbees, instead of sitting in my office holed up in front of my laptop. I also want to ride my bike. Walking to school this morning (because I missed the shuttle), I saw a biker go by, and I kicked myself that I completely forgot about my bike. It’s sitting in the basement somewhere collecting dust, and today would have been such a perfect day to bike to school.
That, and I miss my road bike.
March 9, 2007 at 4:06 pm · Filed under grad life/MIT
Riding the campus shuttle back to lab this afternoon, a couple came on and sat down right behind me. Here’s a snippet of the conversation I overheard. Everything was said in complete seriousness …
girl: I don’t even know if I can get into MIT again, or even if I want to stay here. I’m thinking Berkeley.
guy: something about working that I didn’t catch
girl: you’re stupid
(at this point, my ears perked up and I started eavesdropping. Hey, if they wanted a private conversation, they shouldn’t have been talking as loudly as they were on a shuttle)
guy: a bunch of technical details about dropping/adding classes
girl: right now, I plan to get a B in XX class
guy: so you think you’ll get an A in all your other classes?
girl: well, I have to. I need a higher GPA to get into grad school
(pause … pause)
girl: really, I just want a higher GPA than you
(a few minutes later…)
guy: so where are you getting off the shuttle?
girl: god, at XX stop. why do you need to ask me that?
guy: are you going over to XX building then?
girl: no, geez, I need to go to YY building first. Are you going to YY building first?
guy: i don’t know
girl: god, shut up
guy: no, you shut up
And then I got up to get off at XX stop, and both of them got off together after me. What a healthy relationship.
March 9, 2007 at 12:59 am · Filed under tv/movies
My fourth year in college I watched the OC religiously. At first I chalked it off to stupid primetime soap and condescendingly made fun of Ryan for watching it and for his roommates for all getting together on Wednesday nights to watch it. Then I saw one episode and got hooked. Upon coming to Boston, I kept up with the second season. It couldn’t be missed. I let down friends with whom I played IM basketball in order to watch the OC. Even when they really needed more bodies to field a team for a game, I stood my ground, said no, and stayed home in front of my TV.
Then the show really got stupid. Think about it … they only have so many characters. The stories all revolve around those same characters. They can only date each other so many times before the writers run out of combinations of couples. That’s when they start making up stupid stuff like a girl’s ex-boyfriend dating her mom. Yeah, like that actually happens. It just gets lame.
So recently, I’ve been watching Grey’s Anatomy like crazy. Granted, it is a better written show than something about a bunch of rich, privileged teenagers in Southern California… BUT, I’m halfway through the third season, and I’m getting a sense of the same problem that brought the OC down. They’re running out of stories, and in particular, juicy stories about who’s dating who. So they start making stuff up that’s totally ridiculous.
That got me thinking to another show that never seemed ridiculous: Sex and the City. How did they do it? How did they not run out of stories? Borrowing from that success, I think the key is for the show to revolve around a handful of key characters who have stable relationships with each other (like a girlfriend bond that will never break). Then you write the show about their volatile relationships with OTHER people. That way, you can always have new other people on the show, and nothing gets stale.
If I ever write a pilot, I’ll write about something like that, instead of revolving my story around a core group of 10 people getting in and out of relationships with each other.
March 5, 2007 at 6:51 pm · Filed under random
We’ve established that Dunkin Donuts signs in the distance are better than mirages in the desert, but sometimes may still be made up. So here’s something else I noticed driving on the highway: cars travel in packs.
It’s not noticeable until you blink those hazards and pull off and stop on the shoulder for a while. Cars drive by in packs of 4-5. There are still a few hundred feet between the cars in a pack, but there is a gap significantly longer than few hundred feet in between packs. Each pack takes about 10, 20 seconds to pass by, followed by some 30-60 seconds of nothing before another pack comes along.
Isn’t it strange that random stranger cars would end up packed up like that driving down the highway? Why wouldn’t they be evenly spaced out? Why are there distinct packs?
I feel like there should be some kind of theory describing this phenomenon, or maybe this is a manifestation of something else well-studied that’s already been observed elsewhere. Like maybe why cherries come in bunches of twos. Or why fish organize themselves into schools. But schools of fish has a purpose, and it doesn’t seem like schools of cars would really have a purpose on the highway. Except maybe to avoid speeding tickets. Just kidding. I don’t think ticket-avoidance is strong enough of a common goal to unite packs of cars together. Or maybe it is …
Anyways, google google google later … I didn’t really get anywhere, but it does seem like people tend to model traffic like a fluid flow (and also people write whole PhD dissertations on this stuff). Now, I’m no mechanical engineer; I know nothing about fluid flow … but maybe fluids also tend to flow in clumps. I’ll ask my MechE friends.
March 2, 2007 at 12:33 pm · Filed under the internet
Have you heard about this webpage? I only just did last night hanging out with some geeky electrical engineers. We were at a popular bar, yet we were talking about the resistors and web scripts and the Million Dollar Homepage. The basic premise is that a 21-year-old kid got a webpage, divided it up into a million pixels and started selling pixels for $1 a piece. Well, the pixels sold out, and he made a million dollars.
Another example someone gave last night of people making ridiculous money off the internet was that of someone who got the domain name “netflicks.com” (as opposed to netflix.com for the actual video rental service). NetFlix has a referral program where you get money for each person you refer to netflix.com, and all the guy did was to set up a link on netflicks.com pointing to the real page. He made thousands before NetFlix finally shut him down.
My inner gut reaction is that this is so cheap. It all seems rather sneakish and backhanded. Right? Right? Then I thought, hey, those are pretty clever ideas. If someone came up with that idea, they ought to be able to make money off of it. How is it any different from someone making money off of a patent? I wish I had an idea.
March 1, 2007 at 12:43 am · Filed under grad life/MIT
My record over the last month or so has been about an entry a week, which is probably on the lower end of my frequency of posting. Partly, I haven’t had much to tell (non-anonymously); partly, I actually don’t have anything interesting running through my head; and partly I just haven’t had time because I need a simpler life in general.
After that big presentation on Valentine’s Day, I really thought that I would have some time to myself. That, and I thought I would be able to sustain the drive/momentum coming off of the past month and a half of research, which has actually been pretty incredible. Basically, neither one of these thoughts ever materialized.
Let’s use a hypothetical example with some numbers. Let’s quantify the school/academic work I have at 100, and let’s quantify the extracurricular stuff at an equivalent 100, bringing the total amount of work I have to 200. I picked these numbers because the truth is that each portion can easily be 100% of my work, and I would still have my hands full, so the two portions combined create 200% of work I am able to actually reasonably do in a week.
In any given week, I get done 60 units of extracurriculars, and 20-50 units of school work. I don’t usually work at max capacity, and I generally do more extra stuff than school stuff. The past month and a half, the numbers have been more like 30 units of extra stuff and 80 units of school stuff. A couple of weeks before my presentation, those numbers suddenly jumped up to 80 units and 100 units, meaning that I was working at 80% over capacity. This also meant that actually, the busier I got with school, I actually did more of both school and extras, despite having less time.
I also stayed at lab until midnight almost every night, but that’s besides the point. Ever since the presentation, the numbers are around 90 units of extra, 10 of school. As in, I’ve done almost nothing school-related, but done almost all of my responsibilities in the extra stuff. I kinda had an awakening of some sort and actually decided to step up and be a good GSC Vice President, not be a half-assed GRT, follow up with friends and family (though I still try not to talk to my parents too much) … in general be a more responsible person and actually shoulder the stuff I said I would do instead of just making a big showy talk of it. In this process, I realized that I need to simplify my life.
When I can spend 100% of my time working on extracurriculars and still be working full 8-hour days, something is wrong with my life. I realized that I can make a profession out of answering emails. Besides meetings, I send emails. Most everything gets resolved over email, so that’s nice, but I basically spend 1-5 hours a day in meetings (depends on the day), and the rest of the time on email. I feel exhausted because I haven’t wasted any time, but I feel inadequate and irresponsible still because I am a student after all, and I’ve done nothing to contribute to my degree.
I’ve really thought about 1 or 2 relatively small things I can do after my term of GSC VP is over at the end of April, and I think my life will be a lot simpler after that.
