adamyntium

Category: people and relationships

  • A Frustrated Hottie, a Temporary Satan Worshipper, and an Apparent Nympho

    Just a little bit of lightness for this morning 🙂

    I’ve taken dance lessons from this one very talented instructor, and I was a bit taken aback upon noting that her nickname in dance forums is “Hottie.” Though she’s certainly quite blessed in the looks department, I found this to be a rather odd choice of nicknames… possibly even bordering on conceited.

    Then one day she explained it all to me.

    After moving from Oklahoma to St. Louis she found that some very important people — namely the folks who take pizza orders over the phone — were having a bit of trouble understanding her.

    PIZZA GUY: And your name, ma’am?
    HOTTIE: Haaaawdy.
    PIZZA GUY: Hottie?!
    HOTTIE: No! Haaaaahhhhhdy! H-E…
    PIZZA GUY: Um, yeah, okay, whatever. Be there in 30 minutes.

    It never failed. She’d get a pizza delivered to “Hottie,” not “Heidi” despite her valiant but misunderstood efforts to communicate her name with her endearing southern accent. And so, after much teasing from her pizza-sharing friends, the nickname stuck.

    * * *

    This one fellow — let’s call him Paul — is a rather tolerant and friendly guy as well as an outstanding scientist. But he was finally reaching the end of his patience after fending off a practically non-stop barrage of prosletyzing Jehovah Witnesses and similar folks knocking at his door. Apparently, “Thank you, but I’m not interested. Kindly don’t disturb me again” was simply not very efficacious.

    So Paul decided to follow the “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” mantra… or at least join them over coffee. Therefore, in an attempt to finally talk some sense into the evolution-deniers, he invited the next pair of suit-clad bible-bringers into his living room and offered them some coffee. They chatted together amiably… and Paul felt he was making some headway. Then he got to the existence of fossils.

    “So how do you explain fossils?” he asked, with a twinkle in his eye. Ah, he had them now!

    “That’s easy” one of the guys responded quickly and with utter seriousness, “The Devil put them there to confuse us!”

    That’s when Paul realized it was all a moderately entertaining but ultimately hopeless waste of his time. But it wasn’t all for naught: he also got a brilliant idea!

    A week or two later, when yet another pair of Jehovah Witnesses came a knockin’, Paul was prepared. He answered the door, cackling the best evil and menacing laugh he could manage, and hissed: “Come on in! I’m a Saaaaatan Worshipper!”

    His girlfriend, just a few feet behind him, was initially shocked but upon seeing the petrified faces of the missionaries could barely keep from busting out laughing. The speed with which those two guys mounted their bikes and zoomed away can only be compared to something out of a Roadrunner cartoon. And lo and behold, it was nearly a year until a pair of their comrades dared to come knocking again.

    * * *

    I was telling this story to my friend Lana… a sweet, generally quiet woman. But, as her story bears out, sometimes it’s the meek ones you most have to watch out for!

    She, too, was having a similar problem with prosletyzers bugging her regularly, despite her polite requests to go away and not come back. The last time (and so far, indeed it HAS been the last time) a pair of them stopped by her place, she opened the door and invited them to come in and shower with her. Apparently, a fear of hot nekkid chicks is about as deeply ingrained as a fear of satan worshippers… and so those fellas high-tailed it out of there pretty lickety-split after turning ashen and stammering an “um… thank you… gotta go!!!”

    Of course, after telling me this story, Lana attempted to demurely backpedal a bit. She was, she insists, in a rush to head out to meet a friend and was just about to head into the shower when she heard a knock at the door. So apparently her FULL protestation was something along the lines of: “Aaaah! I’m really in a rush and… um… well, I’m about to take a shower.” The guys didn’t move. They’re trained, clearly, not to take excuses. Exasperated, Lana said the next thing that popped into her harried mind: “Fine, um, I guess you could come in and join me.” As noted above, THAT got them to move. Quickly.

    I asked her, of course, what she would have done had they accepted. That’s when she gave me this look that basically translates into “ADAM!!!!!!!!!!!” and so I grabbed my Bible, got on my bike, and pedaled away as fast as I could…

  • Intuition confirmed: Homophobia, SUV purchases linked to wee willies

    In research that shouldn’t be a great surprise to anyone, a recent Cornell University study has shown that men who felt more insecure about their masculinity were “more likely to support the war in Iraq, more likely to oppose gay marriage and denounce gays, and more likely to express a desire to buy an SUV.” [Source: The Week magazine, August 26, 2005, page 21; see related articles]

    Clearly, the converse must be true, too: we men who are gay-friendly, against the war, and unlikely to buy SUVs must have really big… uh… IQs 🙂

    Interestingly, no theories were offered as to why so many women buy SUVs, but I’m guessing it’s the typically “I feel big and safe!” crap playing a role in those purchases.

    With that said, sincere apologies to my friend E and others reading this who actually have purchased SUVs due to the car’s functional qualifications (e.g., people who are actually avid campers and other folks who genuinely use the carrying capacity of SUVs).

    And, though it should go without saying, I hope everyone realizes that Anti-War does not (or, at least IMNSHO, SHOULD not) ever imply animosity towards the brave military men and women who serve and have served our country. They’re not the ones who got us into this mess in Iraq; the blame for that squarely rests on selfish, deluded old white men who never served and whose kids will never serve.

    No apologies to anyone who is anti-gay or opposed to gay marriage, however. While we’re all entitled to our opinions, I don’t have to respect yours in this context :-).

  • Overheard

    Overheard while shopping at Costco:

    Elderly man: “How many times did I tell you to bring the cart?”
    His wife: “I didn’t hear you. Sometimes you get turned off, Bob.”

  • Strange pants!


    I don’t know quite what to say about this! Your idea for captions?

  • Online social networks — encouraging sharing in the face of greed

    [Below is a note I posted on orkut in response to a fellow who noted that he was erasing his entire friends list, which he viewed as a commodity not appropriate to share with others freely.]

    One thing we might agree on as a concern is the issue of freeloading.

    Basically, what to do against those who scrape data, use and/or abuse data in the aggregate or individually on orkut, or — less sinisterly — simply take much more than they give (e.g., someone who lists only 1 friend, but networks with or even asks something of countless others in a social network).

    It’s a social networking tragedy of the commons… a few voracious grazers who don’t “replant” ruin the network for everyone else.

    Then again, isn’t this simply like real life?

    In any given city, 1% of the people do the volunteering / civic planning / cultural/infrastructure/political contributions, often for little or no extrinsic compensations. Being on the school board, contributing to citizens’ input meetings, etc. And the other 99% get a free ride (theoretically better-planned schools, more robust local economies, and so on).

    The challenge, however, becomes one of preventing “leeching” (of others talent, good will, connections, etc.) while not punishing those who — for one reason or another — don’t have much to offer initially but are intent on working their way up and contributing later, or in different ways.

    You may have fabulous connections, but someone may also have something you want. That someone may find your friends list valuable, and may (optimally) in return offer you something of value.

    But if you don’t present the initial offering… if you don’t show up on the radar screen, then you become shut out of the social networking currency exchange. You’re not even ‘listed’ so to speak.

    On a related note, take the example of your earlier offer to do paid consulting for orkut/Google. From this alone, the folks there may have little reason to understand or trust your knowledge, and thus little reason to hire you. But if you give too much feedback or assistance early, your help may be taken for granted.

    The key, then, is in the balancing of threats and opportunities.

  • Flickr — Yet another (but a cool!) social networking service

    I’ve had the pleasure of playing with a relatively new online networking service called Flickr, and — especially after reading Melanie’s thoughtful review — I thought I ought to chime in with a few thoughts of my own.

    What is flickr?
    It’s a service, based largely on the flexible-and-powerful Flash, that lets people interact, meet, link, chat in real time, post on message forums, and share pictures with one another. It’s free, it’s fun, and it’s pretty darn easy to get the hang of after just a few minutes. I recommend that you give it a try.

    So what’s to like about it?
    – The use of Flash brings familiar drag-and-drop, a fine live chat interface, and real-time built-in instant messaging / presence features. Entertaining and functional!
    – The staff members of Flickr frequently interact with everyone in chats, and they’re both friendly and funny.
    – The members of the service are also a delight to interact with… the complete opposite of cliquish.
    – Unlike most other social networking services, Flickr lets you designate links as ‘acquaintances,’ ‘friends,’ and ‘best friends’… which is both smart and helpful!

    But it’s not perfect.
    – Frankly, I don’t get the emphasis on photo-sharing. The interface in this area isn’t robust and feature-rich enough to make it particularly worthwhile (you can’t upload more than one photo at a time!), and you can’t even upload a photo directly into a chat conversation; you must upload it to your “Shoebox,” find it in your Shoebox, then drag and drop it into a chat room and hope it’s still relevant and interesting by that time.
    – The boards aren’t very active yet, unlike with orkut, which — hugely popular even after just a week or two — had some pretty active boards even early on.
    – Some of the language on the site and in the default invite text could use some major tidying up.

    If I were in charge…
    I would have ditched the whole photo idea (at least to start), and instead extended many more features into the message forums and chats. Real time alerts when someone mentions a ‘watched’ keyword on the boards or in a chat. Rich-text editing in the forums. Better search and categorization of forums. And so on.

    —

    With all that said, I think Flickr is pretty cool, and I have no doubt it will continue to be a welcoming, friendly, and fun place for a long time.

  • Social Networking Services — Excellent recommendations

    Christopher Allen gets it right. Rather than simply noting what orkut and other social networking services are doing wrong (which has been hammered by so many others), Christopher details what social networking services should do to succeed.

    And rather than blather on about how much I agree with his points, I think I’ll just invite you to read his entry yourself 🙂

  • Privacy, paranoia, and Plaxo

    For those of you reading my blogs and primarily interested in the TIPS category, I’ll get the useful / utilitarian part of this post out of the way first:

    The Plaxo service is pretty darn cool. Despite some annoying quirks, it’s useful, it’s fun, and it’s free. I definitely recommend giving Plaxo a try.

    What is it? Well, in a nutshell, Plaxo is a service (with optional software) that allows you to:
    – Keep your addressbook up-to-date pretty effortlessly.
    – Send out contact-info changes to your friends easily.
    – Access your entire addressbook securely on the Web from anywhere.

    Read on for my detailed thoughts about Plaxo.

    The Plaxo Controversy

    First, the boring ‘legalese’:

    DISCLAIMER:
    I’m not affiliated with Plaxo in any way except as a generally happy user of the service and software.

    Okay, now with that out of the way… 😀

    Since Plaxo’s inception, there’s been a bit of a firestorm on the Internet about privacy, trust, and the evils the service could and might do with your personal info.

    After all, they have your e-mail address, full name, and possibly company name, job title, phone numbers, and more. What a treasure trove for telemarketers and other sleazoids, right?

    Well, sort of. Plaxo vehemently insists, via their privacy policy, that they’re not going to do any of that nasty stuff with your info. And you know what? I believe them. I also like and respect how they prominently feature both a plain English summary of their privacy policy and also a longer, more detailed version for those interested.

    Personally, I think lots of people on the Web are far too paranoid for their own good. Of course, everyone is and should be free to make their own judgement calls about what services and people they trust, but what bothers me is the foaming-at-the-mouth invective and often outright nastiness that’s been flung at Plaxo and other companies like it. “They could sell all our data!” some scream, and “If they get bought out, they’ll betray us!” Many of these people have loudly lumped Plaxo into the category of spammers and virus-makers and worse… IMHO unfairly tarnishing Plaxo’s reputation and unfortunately dissuading many from making an informed opinion about the service.

    Do those folks who are angrily ranting about the ‘threats’ of Plaxo realize what data is ALREADY widely (and sometimes freely or cheaply) available about them via their banks, their health insurance company, the department of motor vehicles, the Direct Marketing Association databases, and so on (all of whom are, without a doubt, FAR more palpably evil than companies like Plaxo)? And unlike Plaxo, most of these companies have actively resisted disclosing, much less openly inviting people to check out their privacy policies.

    Plus other online entities already have demonstrated the concept of trust. Amazon.com not only has my personal contact info, they also have several of my credit card numbers and my purchase history. What if Amazon.com got bought out, huh, bub? ;-). Strangely, I don’t see too many people flinging epithets at Amazon in their blog entries, speculating about how all their data’ll be sold to the highest bidder if Amazon gets bought out.

    * * *

    Personally, I’m much more worried about my credit card companies’ policies (especially since they STILL persist on trying to sell me crap over the phone!) than I am about Plaxo. For that matter, I also think there’s a zillion-times greater chance of my personal data being stolen and sold by a waiter who has my credit card number in a back room for a few minutes.

    Comparative risks, people. Intelligent weighing of risks and benefits. Plaxo offers what I think most would agree is a useful and interesting service. The tradeoff, in my mind, is a no-brainer. Or, in a more direct / less-eloquent way of putting it: get a grip.

    * * *

    LEGITIMATE PROBLEMS WITH PLAXO

    Despite my defense above, I should, in fairness, point out that there are quite a few problems and annoyances with Plaxo.

    1) Privacy issues
    There actually is one argument I’ve read from privacy advocates that I can respect. Unlike with services such as Amazon.com, for instance, where each person has the choice of whether or not to submit his or her personal data, with Plaxo, it’s not really up to each individual. In other words, because I have Jim Smith in my addressbook and I send a query to him via Plaxo’s servers (AND I store his data on Plaxo’s site so I can access my addressbook on the Web), Jim has effectively had his data shared without his consent… and possibly even without his knowledge. Of greater concern, if Jim is particularly concerned about Plaxo ‘n’ Privacy, he really has no recourse for getting his name OFF of Plaxo’s servers, short of demanding all of his friends to remove him from their personal addressbooks.

    2) UI issues
    Plaxo is pretty darn user-friendly, but there are quite a few UI niceties that its engineers have overlooked, and cumulatively, these issues are rather frustrating. For instance, when I’m looking through any large Plaxo list of my contacts, I can’t simply jump to a name by hitting the first few letters. I have to first sort, then scroll. With 600 names in my addressbook, that’s damn annoying, especially if I want to select more than a couple names.

    3) Not very customizable
    While I can change and add to some of the language in the “please update your contact queries that get sent to friends, far too much of it is fixed — and overly formal. The cringe-worthy closing is “Thanks, Adam Lasnik.” What friend signs off with a closing like that?! And while one can save the (partially) customized mails sent out for future use, they’re neither named nor editable nor deletable. It’s issues like this that suggest that Plaxo has been “dumbed down” er, simplified at the expense of customizability, and frankly, I don’t believe that having a highly customizable (power-user) and user-friendly UI should be mutually exclusive.

    * * *

    Okay, with all that out of the way, let me explain why I think Plaxo kicks ass and why I’m pretty excited about it.

    WHY PLAXO ROCKS

    1) One-button sync with secure Web version of my addressbook
    This option, included as part of the free service, is wonderfully handy! Had I been using Plaxo when my Palm Pilot was stolen during a trip throughout Europe a while back, I would have had a much easier time (pop into an Internet cafe, log into Plaxo, access the handy PRINT version of my contact list, print it… voila!). Plus, it’s impressive and useful how the Web version offers nearly the identical (and in some cases, actually superior) functionality to the desktop/Outlook/Outlook Express front-end.

    2) Support for FoaF (Friend of a Friend) standard
    Granted, I’ll admit that I don’t quite yet grasp how this works, nor know if it will end up being widely adopted over time. But the fact that Plaxo has listened to and worked with pioneers in this realm suggests to me that the Plaxo folks are committed to a reasonable amount of interoperability and openness.

    3) Good documentation, admirable interactions with customers
    Though in the past Plaxo has been criticized for some slowness with customer service responses, I’ve actually been pleased with my experience so far, and also impressed that Plaxo representatives have intelligently and actively participated in multiple forums and even posted on blogs. Plus the Plaxo Web site is pretty informative, with a searchable knowledgebase and multiple ways to contact customer service (even an “emergency” form).

    4) Plain English promises and reassurances
    As mentioned earlier, Plaxo has admirably taken steps to be a responsible and ethical player in the Internet contact-sync space, and has also clearly articulated their stances and promises on their site.

    5) Robust feature set and ease of use.
    While Plaxo occupies a pretty busy space (with, among others, GoodContacts and AddresSender), it seems to have the edge in features and makes them nicely accessible via a number of different ways — both via client software and the Web.

    and most importantly…
    6) Strong usefulness!
    When you start having many hundreds of contacts like I do from all over the world, something like Plaxo is a Godsend! I haven’t yet used it to do a full scan, but when I used the similar GoodContacts software a couple of years ago, I found myself instantly provided with literally dozens of critical contact info updates from friends, and also some friendly catch-up notes from people who hadn’t written me for a long time. I also got quite a few bounces, which saved me from writing long letters to people whose contact info was long since out of date.

    * * *

    THE RESULTS SO FAR IN MY TESTING…
    I have tested out Plaxo on a handful of friends and personal test accounts so far, and the responses and results have been generally positive.
    – All said the process of responding was straightforward and easy.
    – In every case, the info they input was added flawlessly to my Outlook addressbook.
    – In my own tests, Plaxo requests weren’t viewed as spam either on my Yahoo or Hotmail accounts. Unfortunately, one friend at Cornell found my Plaxo request in his spam folder. 🙁
    – One friend was reluctant to supply his address, due to privacy concerns; he sent that to me separately via my Web forum, whereupon I mercilessly teased him about being a hypocrite :D.
    – And one other friend was angry that I had disclosed his “personal” e-mail address to a third party, but that doesn’t say anything about Plaxo in particular.
    – I’ve noticed a couple of minor bugs, such as an improper date stamp in one area of my Plaxo reports, but the engineer I corresponded with has noted that this should be fixed promptly.

    After I square away a few things, I plan on doing a much larger test with Plaxo (over several hundred contacts), and — if there’s interest — I’ll report my findings back here in my blog.

    In the meantime, I encourage you to post your Plaxo concerns, kudos, and questions below if you’d like, and I’ll do my best to address what I can and – within reason — test specific stuff out for you. Of course, if you’re as geeky and curious as I am, you’ll want to download and play with Plaxo yourself :-). I say go for it!

  • The New (much) Improved Friendster

    Well, if you’re as much of a geek as I am — or even if you just are a geek wannabe and voraciously read the tech rags — you’ve likely already heard about Orkut.com.

    Well, I’ve had a chance to play with it for a day or so, and it’s rather fascinating. Though clearly not-yet-perfect, it’s still fun and quite a bit ahead of Friendster in many ways.

    Let me get some criticisms and concerns out of the way first:

    – There aren’t enough checks and balances
    It’s too easy to add (and then be unable to un-add) a friend, delete a message, and so on. There are no “Are you sure?” screens. Aside from preventing ‘oops’ moments, I think it would at least be helpful to gently remind folks to carefully choose their friend links, as in “By adding this person as a friend, you’re making a statement that you know and like this person. Are you sure you want to do this?” Otherwise, the system is more apt to end up with a zillion useless/meaningless friend linkages.

    – As of yet, the search features are anemic
    You can search only by a small handful of esoteric and broad fields, and cannot search by company name, interests, etc… though indeed orkut.com has noted that this functionality is slated for future versions.

    – Information display is far from optimal
    On the search results page, the info you get is minimal on each person, and generally not enough to give you a good idea of whether it’s worth your time to click through to their profile. Ideally, it’d be nice to be able to choose which data points are shown, but in the meantime, it’d be nice to at least see some professional info (e.g., company name) on such listings.

    – The invite process is kludgy
    You can’t invite groups of friends, you can’t (easily) individually customize the invite e-mails, and it seems you can’t access a generic invite URL to send in your own e-mails.

    – Me Too?
    Perhaps one of the most frustrating aspects of orkut.com for me is that there’s no real sense of its ‘place.’ It mingles in just enough romantic/flirty/goofy stuff to be potentially off-putting to serious business networkers, but it’s unlikely to be enough to compete with Match.com, Yafro, and other friends-oriented networking services.

    * * *

    Okay, enough whining. There’s certainly much to admire and appreciate in orkut.com!

    – It’s FAST!
    Sure, this isn’t that impressive YET given the limited member set (2464 members as of 2:40pm PST, and seemingly growing by about 50-100 every hour since this morning), but boy, that speed sure is refreshing right now! And given Google’s track record on efficiency/speed, I am confident that orkut will remain delightfully quick on its feet.

    – It’s quite the A-List party at present
    From my experience (and, biased-ly, my friendships), Google hires uber-intelligent and interesting folks. Given that at least 50% of the current orkut.com members seem to be Googlers, the service is starting with a pretty intellectual and powerful foundation.

    – It has great potentialLook at past Google projects that started out as pet projects, like Google News. There is clearly a history of refinement and success with these projects, and while orkut.com is clearly not yet version 1.0 material due to needed feature enhancements and interface tweaks, it’s certainly a fun and impressive beginning.

    * * *

    It’ll be fascinating to see if — or perhaps, more likely when — orkut overtakes the slow-and-feature-poor-but-critically-massed Friendster.

    Additionally, will Google’s entrant into this market stimulate demand enough for online social networking so that more sites (including the stellar Tribe.net) will flourish by the expanding pie? Or will orkut.com — like Google search, to a great extent — basically crowd out all competitors? What do you think?

    * * *

    Added 1/24/04 5:16pm:
    Wow, just got my first application error while browsing orkut. Bummer.

  • Reflecting upon a wonderful man — the late Paul Simon

    It was with great sadness that I read about the death of Senator Paul Simon.

    Though always a fan of his thoughtful politics and respectful demeanor, I particularly have fond memories of the time I met him in person one chance evening.

    I was on a Northwestern University dorm-sponsored scavenger hunt back in the early 90’s, and while traversing the cold streets of downtown Chicago, one fellow in our team of eight shouted out “That’s Paul Simon! Senator Simon!” It was a joyous outburst one might hear upon a sighting of celebrity, or an old friend, or a school teacher one cheerfully remembered. Especially to residents of Illinois, I learned, Paul Simon seemed to be a bit of all of that wrapped into one.

    Along with his wife, Senator Simon — yes, wearing a bowtie, as was seemingly always the case — graciously stopped for us on the sidewalk on this wintry night, signed autographs, and posed with his arms warmly around us for a picture.

    Some people simply exude an aura of kindness and integrity, and that would clearly include the late Senator Simon.

    May he rest in peace, and may his family and close friends find strength and happiness in the memories of his life.