adamyntium

Category: personal

  • I, Robot

    Hello.  Good day.  A little quiet?
    I’m feeling a little blue myself.
    You know, A little anxious for no particular reason
    A little sad that I should feel anxious at this age.
    You know, a little self-conscious anxiety resulting in non-specific sadness.
    The state that I call blue.

    – spoken by the narrator (“Man In Chair”) in the awesome musical “The Drowsy Chaperone”

    Today I am a little sad because of a small heartbreak.
    And a little anxious because, well, I should not be admitting this in public.

    Real men don’t do cry.  But real businessmen… the type who are strong, who manage or mentor, who think of respect and solidness and promotions… they are not bloviatingly blathering on a blog, blissfully or blamefully or otherwise.

    Think.  Think of someone you look up to at work.  Do you want to know his private foibles, hear of his personal struggles?  Really?  No. You want someone to look up to.  Someone at least a little bit larger than life.  A rock, or minimally a damn large stone.

    You have your own problems, and when you want to schadenfreudically delight in someone else’s problems, you have your TV or paper or favorite internet gossip sites within an arm or eyeball’s reach.

    When your current or future dear leaders are feeling blue, they ideally do not show you, much less tell you.

    Then again, maybe it’s different today.  Maybe the Live Journalers of the modern era will grow up to be respected leaders… warty angst, noserings and all.  Perhaps someday we’ll view an executive’s late night facebookings with indifference rather than annoyance or scorn.

    Or maybe not.  Maybe he or she will methodically scrub, hoping the last trace of emotion is gone.  Here, look, a résumé.  A fine, level-headed portfolio indeed!

    And only a strong, competitive, safe, and secure heart.

  • Of little sleep, many chances, big dreams

    Tuesday I will be in Mountain View.  Tomorrow I will be in Frankfurt with good friends and many drunk loud Germans screaming at a big TV. Tonight beyond the witching hour I declined an adventure in Koeln, being the wise or stupid one.  Today I was rocking out with people from 10 to 79 and also teaching a tango dancer to waltz to a band playing surprisingly damn good cover songs.  Also today I unexpectedly toured Bonn for two hours with a charming new also-unexpected friend, played piano for an entire wedding in Sankt Augustin, and ate a breakfast of bread, sausage and cheese for the many-hundredth time.

    Now I am not clubbing. I am not answering any work e-mail.  I am recharging my phone, my camera, and I am thinking.  And yes, writing.

    Writing and thinking about how every new experience, every new friendship brings discovery, along with often joy, wistfulness, confusion… reminders of what was, what will not be, and choices.  Always choices.

    Sometimes I envy those with simple lives.  They grow up and die in the same small land.  They marry their high school sweetheart.  They are neither worldly nor stupid.  They don’t have huge dreams to dream or to shatter or to just miss by a teeny tiny what if or an almost or a one-courage-short.  With small dreams come exponentially smaller risks, fewer disappointments, less uncertainty.  And certainly less angst.

    I travel a lot.  I see a lot.  I have friends in more countries than I can count on my two hands doubled, and close distant friends in at least one hands-worth.  They’re so far away.  They’re having kids, they’re changing, they’re focusing.

    And I… I am still exploring.  Sometimes regretting.  But—in those moments when I let my mind wander in the way that is not wandering to procrastinate or to forget—I am more wondering.  I cannot change what I’ve done and what I’ve become, but will I make better choices tomorrow?  Or, rather, will they be more important choosings of the things that matter, not which coupon site mint gum new web too oh site cool phone app sock alignment?

    So here I sit, much loved and alone in yet another hotel room.  And I wonder if they are fast asleep or wondering, too.

  • What I’ve been up to

    As many friends have reminded me, I haven’t blogged for a while.

    Here’s a refresher on what I wrote a while back about why I blog.

    And here are a few reasons why I haven’t been blogging for a while:

    • Scrubbing
      I had to prepare my apartment for a parental visit. ‘nuff said.
    • Traveling
      I visited Seattle, Ottawa, and Toronto… which involved preparing presentations, doing my first-ever TV interview, filing expense reports, escalating/acting upon tons of awesome webmaster feedback, recovering from staying in a tiny room above a Mexican restaurant (which cost nearly $150 a night!), helping a friend break up, and beforehand personally booking plane rides, train rides, hotel rooms, and more.  Trips are a lot of work, especially those that combine business and pleasure.
    • Recovering
      I spent time recovering from having many bits of glass fly into my head.  This was associated with an accident involving me, my parents, my new car, and a very, very stupid and/or suicidal skateboarder who ignored a stop sign at a busy intersection and collided at high velocity with my slowly-moving vehicle.  While my parents and I are thankfully all healed up, I’m still dealing with financial and legal ramifications… and my car is still in the shop.  Upside:  I’ve been getting lots more exercise from walking and jogging and have lost two pounds of fat :-D.
    • Practicing and performing
      I recently performed on stage at the huge Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California.  What a scary and exhilarating experience!!!  I hope to have a recording that I can post here in the near future.
    • And yet more travel-planning
      I’m planning trips in the remainder of this year to Dublin, Seville, Louisville, Los Angeles, Chicago or Las Vegas, Viernheim, Mannheim, and Caracas.  I’m excited but stressed about this, as you can imagine.
    • Working
      I’m heading up two major events at Google, taking on new responsibilities, attending Search Engine Strategies San Jose in August, and much more.
    • Apartment searching
      Though this has been temporarily put on hold while I’m carless, I have been scouting out a new place to call my own closer to the Googleplex to eliminate the generally-comfy-but-time-consuming daily commute from San Francisco to Mountain View.
    • Facebooking
      Facebook has both taken time away from my blogging and has dried up much of my drive to blog.  With Facebook, I’ve been able to share what’s going on in my life with friends, highlight interesting articles, ask questions and get answers, show off music and photos, and learn what’s going on in my communities, in my friends’ lives, and so on.  Still, though, Facebook isn’t (yet) a complete replacement for self-hosted blogging as I see it, so don’t count on me shuttering BLADAM just yet :-D.

      *  *  *

      I always have tons of stuff I want to share… continually have blog drafts bouncing around in my noggin.  But now you understand why those have remained mental drafts for the last months.

      So… no promises that I’ll blog more often—sorry.  But be assured that I’m not just belching in front of the T.V. 😀

  • Where is Adam (online)? My participation in and thoughts about various presence/sharing services

    In case you’re interested in stalking me and/or knowing what my thoughts are on various online presence / networking / bookmarking sites I have tried, here’s a (completely unscientific, wholly biased, unabashedly uncomprehensive, and generally of questionable use) list 😀

    FYI, I’m findable via my full name on the services below unless noted otherwise.  And sites owned/operated by Google are indicated by [g], as a brief disclaimer/reminder since I work for Google (but not on any of the
    products or product-types below).

    Social networking

    • Facebook
      – a social networking site which used to be used primarily by college students (perhaps still is) and is gaining fame and respect in new quarters

      It’s my favorite social networking service by far. I belong to the Google, San Francisco, Indiana University, and Northwestern University groups, and generally only add friends, co-workers, professional acquaintances I know decently well from meeting in person, and so on. I’ve actually found this to be useful not for making new friends, but rather for catching interesting info and fun tidbits and insights into my current friends’ lives. I am impressed with nearly all aspects of this site: the strong configurability of privacy options, the reasonably-clean and standardized views*, decent navigability, and overall utility. I haven’t really gotten into the groups, though, which mostly seem like exercises in humor and/or vanity.

      *This just in: According to Eliot on Wired, Facebook may be opening up its profile pages to widgets. Given the smart people I know that have recently been hired to work at Facebook, I can only hope that the service won’t be horrifically MySpaced (uglified to hell and made practically unusable). But hey, if things turn south, I’ll at least have people I can poke about it!

    • Friendster
      – one of the first social networking sites, now apparently a haven for lonely Filipinos.

      I have an account here, but almost never log in. Some nice integration, I suppose, but nothing that really interests me. The brash obnoxious ads are a turnoff. And regarding the demographic reference… it’s more a puzzled commentary on how various services (Orkut, Friendster, probably others) end up becoming so particularly popular in a handful of countries. I suppose much of this could be explained by the network effect (e.g., some popular Filipinos became active on Friendster, invited their friends…), but I can’t help but wonder if UI / User Experience interlaces in interesting way with cultural preferences and expectations. Put more pedestrianly… I wonder what it is about, say, Friendster that causes it to appeal so much to Filipinos? (and Orkut to Brazillians, etc.) I bet someone has studied this. Paging danah…? 😀

    • Orkut
      – a quirky social networking experiment by a Google engineer, now noted for its loyal userbase outside of the USA.

      Ah, not much to say about the service at this point. I no longer use it, but hey, many many millions of people around the world love it.

    • Multiply
      – What’s a total of seventeen users times practically zero awareness? Join this service to find
      out!

      Seemed interesting initially, but it was hobbled by a confusing interface and an anemic adoption rate. I think maybe two of my friends at most use this service nowadays.

    • MySpace
      – Just like what you’d get if you had a spastic monkey doing design, an evil genius devising navigation (how many ad views per simple action?), and a bunch of lemmings for fans.

      Aaaaagh! Make it stop. Make it stop! At least make it stop blinking-spazzing-playing-seven-clips-simultaneously and generally serving as an affront to aesthetics, art, common sense, and humanity. To
      preserve what’s left of my sanity, I prefer to view the success of this monstrosity as due purely to the network effect (it was an early entrant, everyones’ friends were on MySpace, yadda yadda). Anything else is just too depressing. And yes, I have an account here only so my surprisingly-less-enlightened friends will quit bugging me to establish one, so I suppose that makes me mildly hypocritical.

    • Tribe
      – Want to meet artsy, hippie, burning-man types? This is your scene 😀

      I like the threadedness of the message forums, but the site feels a bit cluttered and unfocused. Plus… again, sorry to bring up the network effect, but… most of my friends outside of the Bay Area are elsewhere online.

    Professional networking

    • Ecademy
      – The professional networking site that’s the non-American version of LinkedIn. But more
      expensive.

      Tried it once. Was annoyed at the apparent lack of any free level of service, so that was the end of that. I didn’t see anything about this service worth paying for that I couldn’t find via other online or  offline means.

    • Ryze
      – “Hi, I’m a stay-at-home marketer. Would you like to join the most amazing wealth creation
      scheme that combines hot dogs, Buddhist monks, and…”

      Used to use this professional networking service quite a bit, but now it feels relatively empty and multi-level-marketing focused.

    • LinkedIn
      – Like any other powerful tool online or offline; great if you use it wisely, potentially painful if you don’t.

      I like this service overall. I’ve not used it much for my own networking, but I have definitely been pleased to help others… pass along legitimate requests, and so on. The key is not treating it like MySpace (adding everyone who requests you to add them), but rather judiciously linking to people you trust and who trust you… ideally, folks you have professional ties with or can similarly vouch for.

    Resource sharing / reviewing / bookmarking

    • CitySearch
      – Big, colorful, commercial, and overstuffed site that features user-submitted reviews on restaurants, hairdressers, etc.

      Used to use this, but have moved over to Yelp, which seems — if not more accurate — at least more interesting, more entertaining, and slightly-less cluttered and commercial.

    • Del.icio.us
      – Lamely named social bookmarking site that’s been (sort of) superceded by more robust and feature-rich offerings and is now owned by Yahoo

      The geek “Web 2.0” (ack, I feel dirty already) crowd latched onto this early on, and I never quite got the appeal. Other services have offered considerably more features… of particular note, the ability to take a searchable “snapshot” of the page when it’s bookmarked for easier retrieval later. On the flip side, this site had (and still has) an admirably spartan feel to it. No ads (that I can see), and no clutter. For those who crave APIs, minimalist feature sets, and simple bookmark sharing, del.icio.us could still be a reasonably good pick.

    • Digg
      – Watch out, here comes the highly-opinionated and non-buying mobs! (is so! is not! yeah, well, your mamma was an SEO! LOLZ!!!!!!!1)Okay, so perhaps that’s a bit unfair. Digg was an interesting idea and still continues to surface some noteworthy or at least entertaining sites. But, as with many fine ideas, it’s been creaking at the seams
      due to its mass adoption and resultant oft-moblike/groupthink feel. Anyway, I no longer check this site with any regularity… not enough time, too poor signal/noise ratio.
    • Google Reader –
      An outstanding feed-reader that’s easy and fun to useSure, I’m biased, but after an unsuccessful first version, the Reader team’s got their groove goin’ on. Nifty keyboard shortcuts (hit ? to see ’em!), a pleasant UI, and the capability (which I sadly haven’t used yet) to make any of your tags/folders publicly-viewable. Now if they’d just combine this with a
      public-version of Google Bookmarks… 😀 [g]

    • StumbleUpon
      – A serendipitous and often wondrous way to surf the Web and discover cool stuffI shied away from this service for ages; I don’t have time to aimlessly “stumble” around the Web! But I’ve been slowly using it more, and finding it has useful features and unearths cool sites for me :-D.
      [My Stumbleupon page]
    • Yelp
      – Irreverent, sometimes painfully hip, but typically entertaining and often useful

      Want consistently unbiased and deeply thoughtful reviews of restaurants and other local places? Then Yelp may or may not be your cup of tea. But if you’re patient and have a good sense of humor, you can often glean quite a bit of helpful info about various places around town. The conversations in the Talk section can be surprisingly cathartic, friendly, and even useful. [My reviews]

    Photo sharing

    • Flickr
      – The most active and diverse photo sharing site I’ve ever seen, with a doggedly committed community-oriented management

      Sure, they’ve gotten a lot of flack after getting absorbed by Yahoo. Yes, like on any user-generated-content-site, there’s bound to be crap, controversy, jerk-offs, and so on. But that aside, Flickr undeniably has an astounding number of gorgeous, hilarious, and downright captivating photos taken by talented photographers as active members. And speaking of active members… the Flickr crowd is hugely loyal, passionate, and not shy :-D. [My photos]

    • Fotki
      – The skinnable and surprisingly easy-to-use popular photo site you’ve never heard of

      Sets within sets! While Flickrites are still begging for this, Fotki’s had it for ages. It also has journals and a bunch of other doodads that are done better elsewhere, but thankfully that stuff doesn’t clutter up the simple-yet-powerful photo interface. $30/year gets you unlimited storage and very cheap (and good!) prints. [My photos]

    • PicasaWeb
      – Jarringly basic and spartan for geeks, surprisingly easy-to-use for normal people (who just want to easily share their photos with their family)

      Want to join a feature-rich photo site with great sense of community? This ain’t it. But it’s reliable and — as a very nice bonus — you can upload your videos to be displayed within your galleries (Google Video style). Best hidden feature: use the right and left arrow keys to zoom through galleries and enjoy the pre-caching and the perfect-fit-to-your-display views. [My Photos] [g]

    • Honorary mention: Smugmug
      – I’ve never used it, but really like the attitude of its CEO and the intense, friendly customer-focus he has pushed throughout his company.

    Instant messaging

    • Trillian
      (my choice at home) – Offered in both a free and more-powerful $25/year version, Trillian is mostly reliable and amazingly handy

      No matter how much I try to convince all my friends to use Google Talk (“GTalk”), a ton of ’em still insist on sticking with Yahoo! Messenger, AIM, or — dog forbid — MSN Messenger! A few of them even still use their AOL accounts for e-mail; I’ve disowned those folks… but hey, I digress
      those other apps at the same time and having my computer grind to a halt, I use Trillian at home, which automatically logs me into all the networks and displays my buddies in a totally customizable and wonderfully compact single-column view. Downside? Sometimes connectivity to different networks is flakey. And though they promise a Web-based version Real Soon Now ™, it’s seemingly impossible at present to easily sync one’s Trillian account across computers, so your chat history gets split between your desktop and laptop and so on. But hey, one app to rule them all? Pretty damn useful!

    • Google Talk (my choice away from home) –
      Simple, great voice quality, usefully integrated into Gmail (and elsewhere).

      It’s lightweight, fast, and just works. I really like how chats are (optionally) archived in my Gmail account, so I don’t have to remember whether I e-mailed a friend or chatted with her about an upcoming party… I can do one search and know for sure that I forgot to invite her! [g]

    Other

    • Plaxo
      – “I’m updating my addressbook…” aaaaagh! Thankfully, Plaxo is much, much more than this.

      This is one of those sites despised by many geeks and, in fairness, journalists and other popular peeps who at least previously got deluged by the perfect storm created by clueless n00bs and a suboptimal viral approach pushed by Plaxo in the early days. With an improved emphasis on improving the existing network rather than wildly expanding it, Plaxo is now increasingly loved by millions of folks (like me!) who appreciate the service’s (mostly free) offerings. The core feature which I use and find invaluable is the sync’ing of my friends’ contact info into my various addressbooks. Plaxo has recently announced that their upcoming 3.0 version (ah, gotta love engineers’ creative naming skills) will also support
      Gmail addressbooks. w00t!!! Disclaimer: I was a contractor with Plaxo a couple of years ago.

    • Twitter
      – Look, I’m having a cheese sandwich! I just burped. I tat i taw a putty kat! i’m a twit therefore i am. Just got my cell phone bill, lemme open it up and… AAAAAAAGH!Twitter — the oft-stultifyingly boring but oh-so-Web-2.0-utility that lets you, uh, share “what are you doing now?” (“I’m picking my nose, but it’s really hard to do while typing…”) Maybe it’d be more
      interesting if I had more friends on it. Feel free to twit (?) me at http://www.twitter.com/thatadamguy.

  • How I blew off Google… and more pre-Google career tidbits

    Happy Googleversary!
    As I was getting ready to board the Google Shuttle home recently, a colleague (who started at Google on the same day I did) poked me and jokingly wished me a “Happy Googleversary!”  Right then it hit me that, yeah, I had been at Google for a full year.  Wow!

    Also in the last few weeks, coincidentally I presume, many folks — particularly fellow alums — have been e-mailing me to ask about what it’s like at Google, how they can get a job there, etc.  I will be e-mailing all of
    them back (sorry for the delay!), but in the meantime it’s prompted me to do something I’ve been planning to do for a while:  write a few (okay, maybe more than a few) words on how I ended up at Google and what my thoughts are about working there.

    How I blew Google off
    As many of you likely know, I was fascinated with Google for years before I started working there.  In fact, in 2000, I featured Google in a department newsletter I wrote for the then-high-flying high-tech PR firm — Niehaus Ryan Wong (“NRW”) — which I worked for as an Interactive Strategist.  In 2001, my entire department was laid off and so I got to Google for “how can I save my pride and find a cool new job?”  I ended up using my online communication skills to keep me sane and mostly in the black doing consultant / contractor stuff.

    I think it was in early 2002 that I made a pretty big mistake, however. The conversation went something like this:

    Friend:  Hey… I got a job at Google… you know, the search engine… it’s really great!  I think it has some huge potential, you should work here!  Want me to submit your resume?

    Me:  Congrats!  But… it’s in, what, Mountain View or something?  And — no offense — how interesting could working on search really be?  And I’m doing just fine on my own, but thanks!

    Yes, I now rank that as one of my most severe and painful bouts with cluelessness.  I wised up not too long after that and applied for a couple of jobs at Google; got some interviews and the recruiters ultimately told me
    politely and firmly that I had a good attitude, fine credentials blah blah blah, but wasn’t a good fit for the positions.  And looking back, it’s clear they were right.

    The good life… and how I grew weary of it
    Over the next few years, I enjoyed working as a consultant / contractor with some super companies, a bunch of great people, and some understandably demanding but usually interesting clients.  But despite the cool projects and decent money and improving professional reputation, I grew weary.  I missed having a set of regular colleagues I could banter with and learn from face-to-face.  I missed having a mentor.  I wanted, also, to mentor others… and not just online.  I got tired of flying back and forth to Los Angeles for a client; ’twas a nice client, but I hated the city and the traffic that plagued it.

    Most of all, I felt wistful about never having worked for a medium/big company, never getting to really have a feeling of ownership in a company that provided products/services internationally.  I wanted to be even a small part of something big but not faceless, have an impact, have significant room for growth careerwise and otherwise.

    As you’ll see below, I am thankful to have found this in Google.  It’s not a utopia; there are things about the company that greatly frustrate me, there are days in which I feel overwhelmed and stressed.  But these days are few in number and gratifyingly dwarfed by the days in which I am very, very happy to be surrounded by people I respect, doing things I see as valuable, for a company that excites me and treats me ridiculously well.

    A few words about companies I worked with or even just interviewed with pre-Google
    Before I talk more about Google, I thought I’d share with you a few quick personal thoughts about some companies.

    Some companies I worked with before Google:

    • Plaxo: Very smart people. Collegial office conveniently served by a shuttle from Caltrain. Fascinating problems to solve. And their core product is hugely useful, increasingly well-designed, and truly has no equals. No need to send out “update my info please” notes; just enjoy the network effect of having lots of addressbook info updated. My interviews here were friendly, hands-on (“Okay, show me how you’d do this…”), and challenging.
    • Intrapromote:
      Friendly, hard-working, supportive folks who’ve been doing SEO for quite some time… and who happen to have one of the more concise, unpretentious, and underrated SEO blogs around. Through Intrapromote, I got to work on some pretty huge online campaigns with major Fortune 500 companies and the experience opened my eyes to a lot of tough issues that large sites face every day. The
      interview process with Intrapromote was refreshing: very open, informal, and sensible (no lame questions, no useless under-pressure crap).
    • Virgin Digital:
      I’m saddened by how this service flamed out in the U.S. The execs I worked with here were admiringly passionate about music and about enabling people to share their love of and insights about music with each other. They were motivated by the right ideas but — given that the service didn’t survive — unfortunately hobbled by either a lack of resources, bad luck, poor execution or all of the above. My
      interviews were… well, not really interviews. This was a case of, hey, Adam, we know your work, we’ve had some good chats, when can you start on this project? That’s not to say that Virgin’s consultant/contractor hiring was haphazard or careless, but rather that the President (who hired
      me directly) was pragmatic, efficient, and no-nonsense… operating on an intuitive (and, I humbly think, accurate :-P) sense that I was a decent and appropriate fellow to work with.

    And companies I interviewed with and received offers from immediately prior to
    working for Google:

    • Art.com: Classy and friendly people, very nice office overlooking the bay, and a damn neat product. The recruiter I dealt with was helpful and instantly likeable. All of my interviews were comfortable, reasonable, and — most importantly — truly two-way… conversation, not interrogations.
    • Microsoft’s MSN AdCenter: The MSN AdCenter campus is in beautiful Redmond (nice!) near one of my favorite cities (Seattle… yay!) but… located adjacent to a shopping mall away from the main MS campus (yuck!). Interview questions tended to focus on what I’ve done, and how I might handle client situations. Not terribly surprising. Suggestion to the AdCenter team and all other companies, for that matter: If you’re having a final-stage candidate do a full day of interviews, invite him to lunch with some of his potential-future colleagues. Giving him a box lunch to eat alone in an office is not only a bummer for the candidate, but robs you of the opportunity to see how he or she relates to others… and that sort of interaction, IMHO, can be quite revealing ;-). On a more positive note, I was relieved and pleased at how thoughtful my MS recruiter was throughout the process. When I told the guy I had an offer from Google, the fellow didn’t throw any chairs, but rather was extremely kind and supportive and urged me to take the time to make a decision that was best for me.

  • Five things you (probably) didn’t know about me

    I don’t usually participate in bloggy memes, but two folks I like and respect (Aaron Shear and Aaron Pratt) have invited me to take part in a viral “Tell five things about yourself that few people likely know about” thingy.  So I will 😀

    1) I’m more introverted than folks suspect.
    Though most folks see me as oft-smiling and reasonably social, I actually quite dislike large crowds, and am especially unfond of very large, loud parties.  I’ve gotten better at meeting people and making conversation, but I still much prefer small social gatherings (birthday parties, movie nights with 5-20 people I am comfortable with, long dinners with a handful of friends, and so on).  I also quite value my alone time… to read, think, rest, etc.

    2) I have perfect pitch.
    This is probably more entertaining or jealousy-inducing in you fellow musicians, but… yes, I can tell you what key a piece is in or what a particular chord is just by listening.  This isn’t useful in most circumstances, and in fact, it somewhat hampered my classical piano sightreading since I’d always try to play popular classical pieces by ear.  My evil-but-brilliant piano teacher thus forced me to study more obscure classical pieces that I wasn’t likely to have heard before :-P.  My perfect pitch, however, did come in handy when…

    3) I ran my own singing telegram business in high school.
    Due to a mixture of good behavior and amazingly trusting administrators, I was able to form and lead a group of about 12 fellow high school students in daily practices and quasi-guerilla singing-birthday-telegramming… during class time :-).  If I remember correctly, we charged something like $2 or $3 per song (including delightfully PrintShop’d personalized card), and also were regularly asked to sing the national anthem at many high school games.  I think we raised a couple thousand bucks (yes, that was a lot of songs over two years!), which we donated in its entirety to the school in the form of a music CD library for checkout :-).  And in case you’re curious, I personally arranged all the Mozart-quality pieces, including “A Muppets Birthday,” “Mexican Hat Dance Birthday,” “And Why Not?” and several other astoundingly brilliant (but brief!) compositions.

    4) I joined the Northwestern Novice Crew (rowing) team out of peer pressure.
    I lived in a super-awesome dorm at NU (“Willard WOO!”) even as an upperclassman, and a bunch of adorably cute freshmen girls persuaded their favorite Big Bro to join the crew team with them.  I lasted a month or two before sanity caught up with me (5am practices in the freezing cold on the river?  Willingly?!), and bowed out only after I fainted during practice.  Turns out I had been weakened by the flu, but I figured it was a “sign” anyway.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, all the froshies who egged me into joining the team quit well before I did :-P.

    5) I can put each foot behind my head (but not at the same time).
    This is even before I tried yoga.  Imagine how flexible I’ll get after a few more pilates and yoga classes! 😀

    *  *  *

    And now, to tag five other lucky winners, in no particular order…
    – Erica Joy Baker
    – Graham Waldon
    – Bountiful (and increasingly Big!) Bee
    – Ryan Schultz
    – Doctor Awesome

  • Self improvement — how do you measure your progress?

    A few years back, I had some free sessions with a personal trainer at my gym, and one of the most useful takeaways was this:

    Unless you write stuff down, it’s too easy to “fudge the facts” in your mind.  How much pushups are you doing with good form?  What are you eating each day?  We tend to maximize the former, minimize the latter, and that’s not good.

    For starters, he made me write down each day *everything* I ate and drank, along with estimated calories associated with each thing I put in my mouth.  Boy, that was a depressing but enlightening shocker!

    Well, I decided to go one better and start my own personal health chart (in Excel), daily noting my progress on several fronts (weight, body fat percentage, pushups, etc.).  Alas, after a few months, that kinda fell by the wayside, so I picked it up again a year later.  And, once again, that only lasted a few months. 

    I’m trying yet again, and—now that I have the regular routine of a full-time job—I’m hoping it’ll somehow be easier to keep up the list.  For the very curious, I’ve included below exactly what I’m measuring:

    – E-mails still in my inbox
    – Body weight
    – Body fat percentage
    – Pushups (#)
    – Various medicines (e.g., remembering to use Nasalcrom, an allergy medicine)
    – Meditation (in minutes)
    – Stretching (yes/no)
    – Aerobic exercise (minutes)
    – Strength training (minutes)
    – Mood (1-10, 1 being suicidal, 10 being euphoric)
    – Mood jot (my mood in a few words… e.g. “Overwhelmed and frustrated” or “Optimistic and excited”)
    – Sleep (time I went to bed, time I got up, total hours of estimated actual sleep)
    – Notes (what I accomplished that day, major challenges facing me, etc.)

    *  *  *

    In looking over my previous efforts, I’ve noticed the following:
    – My weight seems to increase the day or two after working out.
    – Eating massive huge fatty meals seems to reduce my weight in the short term (!?)
    – I tend to be overwhelmed/stressed more than I thought I was.
    – My sleep patterns are more erratic and less healthy than I assumed.
    – Surprisingly, there doesn’t seem to be a strong correlation between getting lots of sleep and feeling less tired the next day. 
    – After gaining nearly 10 pounds at Google and then losing those same 10 pounds, I’m now about where I was weightwise a year or two ago (still about 15 pounds to go!)

    *  *  *

    Have you kept your own “metrics journal”?  What are some of the things you have measured?  Observations?  And did such a journal help you reach goals?

  • More photos: From Gregarious Greeks to a Korean Combo and beyond…

    I’ve had the good fortune to travel a lot over the last years (mostly for fun, not business, though that’s shifting) and also am blessed with many fun and photogenic friends.

    With no further ado, here’s a sample of photos I’ve recently uploaded:

    Talented Tjapukais
    Presentation at the Tjapukai Aboriginal Culture Park in Australia

    Watery wires
    An interesting light thingy up close

    Korean combo
    Wow, I love Korean food! Here's a very tasty combo meal...

    Gregarious Greeks
    It's greek to me

    A fab flower
    From the Gardens of the World

    Here’s the entire list of my photo sets on Flickr.

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/thatadamguy/sets/

    Enjoy, and comment away! 😀

  • [Humor] Once again, attending a camp for swingers

    Tomorrow night I’m heading off on a plane to once again attend a camp for swingers.  As you can imagine, posting on my blog and sorting through my t-shirt drawers will be far from my mind. 😉

    Take THAT, Lisa Barrone 😛

    Anyway… if you’re interested in all the details (including lots of photos!), visit Swing Out New Hampshire’s Web site.

    See y’all in a week or two 😀

    [Added to reduce chances of some folks having a heart attack:  It’s a swing DANCE camp, people.  Lindy Hop.  Jazz music.  Sheesh… such dirty minds ;-)]

  • T-shirt stats

    So, what do you do when you’re home alone on a Saturday night, you don’t feel like going out, and you also aren’t in the mood to be very productive?

    No, not THAT ;-).

    Why, you optimize your t-shirt drawers, of course.  Exactly!  And so far, I’ve determined that I have:

    • 13 Google t-shirts (fewer than half gotten since I became a Googler, interestingly enough)
    • 13 dance-related shirts
    • 13 other somewhat-decent shirts that I may actually wear (okay, this is weird… I had no idea my t-shirt collection was so bad-luckedly symmetrical!)
    • 5 [whew!] remaining t-shirts that I don’t want to be caught wearing, so I’ll donate these to Goodwill (:cough: unoriginal and oft-oversized swag)

    A sampling of some of the stranger ones:

    • “Got Blood?” with a full-sized mosquito featured.  This was a birthday gift.  I think it’s a rather neat shirt, and I love my parents, but sometimes I wonder about them :D.
    • “Sleep with me” with a domain name that unintentionally (in English) sounds somewhat similar to a sexually transmitted disease (but yes, S, I still like and wear this… I just have to deal with a few puzzled looks!)
    • “Dance Your Pants Off!” featuring SpongeBob SquarePants (I admit it, I bought this off the clearance rack at Target.  And a rather concerned bakery proprietor once seemingly-seriously urged me… “I ask that you keep your pants on in here, please!”)
    • “Single Red Alien Seeking Portly Humans”—a rather humorous 24Hour Fitness (gym chain) shirt.  The corresponding billboards added, “They’ll eat the fat ones first.”

    …plus a mock fraternity shirt, a BIIIIIIG cartoon frog, a fake Mastercard commercial (”…priceless”), and more.  Sadly, this doesn’t take into account the 20+ t-shirts I had that were stolen from me about 6 years ago.  So many college-memories-in-fabrics, lost 🙁

    Hmm… now that I think of it, the first four could be strangely (albeit sickly) tied together.  Odd.

    *  *  *

    So now the questions for YOU!
    1) What do YOU do when you’re feeling down / unproductive / anti-social?
    2) What kind of t-shirts do you have, and what are some of the stranger ones?
    3) Is this as bad as a cat-eating-a-cheese-sandwich post?

    *  *  *

    And now… a little something for those of you still bravely (or boredly) reading:
    A friendly Googler fellow gave me some cool (“Up and to the right!”) Google Analytics t-shirts (size: large).  I’m offering one of them to a humble (and limerickly talented) BLADAM reader, and yes, I’ll pay to ship it anywhere in the world for you :-D. 

    Just two key stipulations*: 
    1) You have to write an entertaining geek limerick below (doesn’t need to be Google-related!)
    2) You must do so when signed into your BLADAM account.

    Please *do not* post your address publicly.
    I’ll mail the winner in a week or so and get the info then. 
    (By the way… I *was* going to throw in Google Analytics and Writely invites, but the meanies that run those services went ahead and opened ‘em up to the unwashed masses before I could use those perks as additional prizes.  Curses… foiled again!)

    Good luck, and have fun!

    *  *  *

    * Obligatory disclaimer and contest rules:
    I work for Google, but I have nothing to do with Analytics or Writely, nor is this high-stakes contest in any way endorsed by Google, other Googlers, any specific Google fans, or any of my sane or insane friends.  Contest not open to Googlers or their immediate families.  Void where prohibited.  Do not give t-shirt to infants or children under three, as suffocation may result.  Bearer does not inherit the ability to fly or garner unusually high values of PageRank.  Do not taunt happy funshirt.  Wash, rinse, repeat.  Shirt is not meant to discriminate against liberals or those who are left-handed.  Not waterproof, fireproof, or catproof.  Do not ingest.  Remember, in an emergency, your nearest shirt may be behind you.  The answer is 42.