Carma

Wow, we've done a terrible job keeping up with this NotBlog (tm). Oh well. Here's a not-so-interesting story if you're bored.

Yesterday, while walking home from work, I passed a parked car that had its lights on. There were two men standing next to the car, which also had a slight opening in its sunroof. One of the men had a long stick of bamboo, and was trying to turn the lights off with the bamboo stick, using the opening in the sunroof for access. Needless to say, it's quite difficult to rotate the headlight control using a bamboo stick.

I was confused. The keys were locked in the ignition of the car, and it seemed to me that the easiest thing to do would be to unlock the car door with the bamboo stick, and then turn off the headlights using those amazing "opposable thumbs."

I asked the man if this was actually his car, because I couldn't understand why he didn't seem concerned about getting his keys out. I got a smart-ass response. At this point, I considered leaving him there (he had been trying this for a few minutes, apparently), and letting him be screwed. But I decided to be nice, took the bamboo stick, and unlocked the car door in approximately two seconds. (I was lucky that the locks were the type that were easy to unlock just by pushing them up from the inside of the car.)

The two men looked at me in amazement. (I should point out that unlocking the car was *not* difficult, and any of you, my loyal readers, could have done exactly the same thing.)

As I walked away, one of them called out to me, "Hey, are you an engineer?"

"Yes sir!" I replied.

Netflix ratings over time

To date, I've rented 65 DVDs (movies and TV shows) from Netflix, and I thought it might be interesting to see what it would look like to plot the ratings for those DVDs over time. So I did it. I'm still not sure whether or not it's actually interesting, but I figured I'd share anyway ... just in case.

So here are DVDs 1 through 65 (along the x-axis) with their 1 through 5 star rating (on the y-axis), along with a trend line that shows the average rating of all DVDs to that point:

Not Always Right

Something happened this week that reminded me of a fantastic website, Not Always Right. On Monday I went to Delfina Pizzeria with L, and had the following conversation with our waitress:

Waitress: "Can I get you anything to drink?"

L: "We're not sure which wine to get. What would you recommend?"

Waitress: [recommends a wine]

Me: "Okay, we're trusting your recommendation! It had better be good!"

Waitress: "Oh, don't worry. If you don't like it, I'll drink it."

Me and L: "..."

WALL-E and anti-consumerism

Saw WALL-E last night. It was another good movie from Pixar, featuring another great short beforehand called "Presto." I wouldn't put it up there with Nemo, Monsters, and Ratatoulle, and they played up the cuteness factor a bit too much with their mini Johnny 5, but still definitely worth seeing.

What struck me about the movie was the very blatant anti-consumerism message. It was like they took a page out of The Story of Stuff (mentioned in an earlier post and still very much worth watching) and fast-forwarded to a sci-fi-worthy version of the future where people are fat, lazy, and have every impulse both generated and satisfied by a Walmart-like superstore. This animated comedy highlights perceived obsolescence ("blue is the new red!"), the power of advertisements and media (the average American is exposed to 3,000 ads per day!), the inability of new technology to increase happiness (also mentioned in The Paradox of Choice, definitely worth a read), and the general downside of our current pattern of externalized costs.

I was pretty psyched to see these topics covered in this way. Kids can't hear this stuff enough, especially since they'll probably have to start cleaning up this mess.

Borderline behavior

Hola Compadres! I must say that it is was a bit intimidating to join the ranks of notbloggers and I hit a substantial writer's block going into my first post. So- I decided to do what made sense to get over my lack of creative ideas- I got drunk. After a fog of several mixed drinks, cheap beer and maybe some shots (of tequila of course) I came to a realization. Some things are not as cool for people who are 30 as they are for people in their 20s.

Now 30 is often the upper limit of the 18-30 demographic but obviously the differences between an 18-yr old and a 30-yr old are vast. What is news to me is that there is a large divide say between 25 and 30. Apparently when you are 30 you are expected to have a bit more sense than to get totally blow-torched, pass out, lose your wallet/purse, and have to recover any shred of respect that you previously had the next day. Frankly, as I have observed over the past year, it can be downright shameful to be drunk and ridiculous when you are 30 whereas had you been a little bit younger you could pull off inappropriate behavior as being a "late bloomer" or just a "good time."  Although the divide is subtle for those that look younger than their age, once a late twenty-something realizes that a 30 year-old was acting more outrageous than a 20-something a whole new level of judgement is passed.

So, I suppose when you are 30 you should really think of yourself in the 30-39 demographic rather than hold on to the good old 18-30 bucket. That will ensure a smooth border-crossing year with minimal impact to your reputation and possibly career.