Dial-a-gender

Twice this month I found that I’ve found that I’m a better conversationalist when I’m waiting in line to use the bathroom in those bars, places, or homes that don’t have separate bathrooms by gender.

I guess it’s the combination of boredom, a captive audience, and the need to distract myself from my bladder causes me to strike up a conversation.

It gets me wondering if this is one reason women, who have to endure “the pee line” on an almost daily basis, go to the bathroom in groups.

But mostly it gets me thinking about an obscure piece of Caltech arcana.

In the North Houses, the bathrooms have urinals, stalls, showers and a sink. This makes them impossible to have a locked door/pee line combination. They were designed at a time when the campus was single-gendered (male). When they became multi-gendered, before that balance was anything remotely like a geek event, this represented a big logistical problem.

The solution, I felt, was quite clever. Basically all you needed was an old LP, a nail, and a white-out pen and created the dial-a-gender bathroom:

Dial-A-Gender

Just turn the wheel…like magic!

(I thought the bottom quadrant was quite clever.)

[The death of dial-a-gender after the jump]Continue reading

My supermodel moment

Just heard something about me that was completely ridiculous and, at the same time, very funny. (I only wish it were true.)

To set the record straight:
> Due to the ergodic hypothesis, social entropy, and a weird lensing effect, it may have appeared at that particular moment that the male-female ratio in my vicinity suffered a slight and short-lived population inversion.

Dave says that everyone eventually has their “supermodel moment” and I guess whatever caused that person to say that comment about me was mine.

We’ll give you something hot to photograph

We’ll give you something hot to photograph
Slide, Union Square, San Francisco, California

Nikon D70, Nikkor 12-24mm f/4G, SB-800, Ultimate Light Box
1/20 sec @ f/4, iso 1250, 12mm (18mm)

I was photographing an event and asked these pretty girls if they wouldn’t mind me taking their picture. After I did, two of them said they’d give me something really worth photographing, which they did multiple times.

This photo appeared on my Facebook feed and Plaxo Pulse, and incidents like this is how rumors about me get started.

Not that I’m complaining!

It isn’t Thanksgiving without the kimchee

22 November 2007.

The dishes are being passed around the table: turkey, white and dark meat, cranberry sauce, gravy, mashed potatoes, sweet potato, stuffing, kimchee…

Maybe at your Thanksgiving there is that dish that is not like the others—the one that reminds you that no matter how twinkie you’ve become, there is still a hint of your ethnic heritage you just can’t get rid of.

At the Korean-American Thanksgiving table, that dish is kimchee.

The sight of kimchee reminds me that in the last two decades, this is only my second Thanksgiving spent with the family. I recall the other one…

[Two (first) thanksgivings with the family after the jump]Continue reading

Why I love Lunch 2.0

I love Lunch 2.0. It’s ironic that something that started as a prank on Web 2.0 could become representative of the very thing it teases: free and open communication and “the lunch as a conversation.”

Even though I missed Lunch 2.0 at Oodle, you have to love this mobile post via Utterz by Chris Heuer catching the first words of this utter by Randy Corke of Utterz, talking at Lunch 2.0 to Devon Holmes about social media.

Now that’s so meta. 🙂

I wish I could have jumped in on the social media circle jerk. Of course, I’m not as hip as them so I went “old skool” and twittered it. You see these sort of random circular connections in my blog posts, so I obviously love it.

Lunch 2.0. It’s been a great year.

OMG we made the front page!

OMG we made the frontpage!
North Beach, San Francisco, California

Nikon D200, Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G VR, SB-800, Gitzo G1228LVL, RRS BH-55 ballhead
1/100 sec @ f/16, iso 100, 26mm (39mm)

Lunch 2.0 makes the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle. Believe it or not, this is how we got a Facebook Lunch 2.0.

I thought I’d finish with how this last Silicon Lunch 2.0 of 2007 incident is a great way to close out the year, which began with the linked blog post above about how we created Lunch 2.0.

[Epicycles and thanks after the jump]Continue reading

My short career in modeling

There are a couple guys in the tech world who are models, have been models, or could be models. A friend said that the combination of tall, dark, handsome and geeky was “totally unfair” to us. (I assume she meant to us guys, but I suppose it could go for girls also—maybe for them it’s like some five year old kid pushing down on all the attraction buttons at once.)

It happened at a party that one of these model-geeks was saying, “The first thing they taught us in modeling class…”

At that moment, I almost said, “The first thing they taught me in modeling class is…” *raises hand high above head* “…you have to be this tall to get in.”

Luckily, I managed to hold back that thought—I wouldn’t want to mess with model-geek’s game.

And thus ended my short career in modeling.

Emphasis on short.

I’m popular, attractive, and self-confident!

Great news today! Halle blogs another gem about some social “research” results:

“One involved the creation of mock Facebook profiles. Researchers learned that while people perceive someone who has a high number of friends as popular, attractive and self-confident, people who accumulate “too many” friends (about 800 or more) are seen as insecure.”

High number of friends == attractive? Score! And what happens at 800? Does the Facebook CS team come and beat you with an ugly stick? I thought you’re supposed to troll their tagged pictures to decide about this one. And now that they’ve ajaxified the photos page, it’s oh so easy to do!

Unlike Halle, I’m under 800 friends, but I think it’s getting close. I better stop accepting friend requests…

Okay, one more friend.

Okay, maybe one more friend. 🙂

FOX needs a senior PHP front-end developer

Hmm, it’s been a while since I posted some PHP jobs. (You know this is getting inconvenient. I think I need to just write a job tool for php.net.) Received this rec from a friend filling a position for FOX Interactive Media to work on the American Idol site. They can work in San Francisco, Los Angeles or even Seattle.

(Also, if you are the one flash/actionscript developer out there, contact Diana for positions at FOX sports, etc.)

Contact Diana Schwartz 310.590.4570 or dschwartz at this site.

[Senior Front End Web Developer job description after the jump]Continue reading

Quantifying beauty

“You called me earlier?”

D— replies, “Oh yeah, I was at the hardware store. Something there reminded me of a blog entry of yours.”

“Which one?”

“I forgot. So hey, speaking of that. Chris was annoyed about your lame post.”

“Yeah, it was so lame that it was actually a rehash of an earlier blog entry.”

“Oh really? The article didn’t make any sense to me. What’s a Y Combinator?”

“It’s a Paul Graham idea, where they give you a chunk of mon…”

D— cuts me off: “Oh yeah! I remember now. It’s the ‘microloans for geeks’ thing. That sounds pretty stupid to me. I don’t know…you probably think it’s a good idea since they’ve had a single success.”

“It’s a good idea for Paul maybe. But it’s like no money. It seems a lot when you are a student. But… you know $5000 would have been 1/4 of our yearly income when we were grad students and we were the king of the hill back then so that seems like a lot. But, shit, their parents are paying $100k for their education here—you’re telling me they can’t hit them up for 5% of that? As for the rest. One trip to Lunch 2.0 or any other geek event in the city and you’d have a better network than… it’s still an echo chamber, but at least it’s a bigger chamber you know?”

“Yeah, it’s like no money now.”

“The problem is we can’t determine the null hypothesis: how would those startups do without that ‘assistance.’ My suspicion is that those that succeeded would have succeeded anyway and might have even done better without some half-assed business guidance. And those that failed would have failed faster. Anyway. So I was thinking that you could talk about how you could look at anything in terms of how many ‘Combinators’ it is worth. You bought that new car recently: 8 combinators. So you can go, ‘Shit, I could have funded eight startups with this car.’ I thought it was a hilarious.”

“Heh. Terry, you should set up a micro-Combinator. Since a micro is 10-6…”

“That’s like half a cent. If they have two founders, it works out to a penny. At least that’ll force them to have multiple founders if they want my money. What a great idea!”

“Haha. Remember T— in grad school and his Helens?”

“Uhh. I forgot.”

“You know. he said that Helen had a thousand ships. But nobody is that beautiful so they’re like one ship…”

My turn to cut D— off. “Millihelen! I forgot that one! Hehe. Thank you for reminding me about that. Now I have something to blog.”

How to quantify beauty

helen
A unit of measurement. The amount of beauty necessary to launch a thousand ships.
milihelen
Since nobody rates a full helen anymore. Beauty should be expressed in terms of one-one thousandth of a helen. This is the amount of beauty necessary to launch a single ship.
dinghy
Fractional milihelen. See above.
Fractional Millihelens

Have you hugged your engineer?

I was browsing through Facebook and I ran across Andrew Mager’s profile photo again. This time it was taken at the CNET holiday party.

I’ve been saying for a while now that I’m just going to compile all of his Facebook profile photos into a book and make bank. But I had to blog this one, which gives you an idea of what I’m talking about:

Besides, Andrew Mager, the people in the photo are Jessica Dolcourt, Caroline McCarthy, and Erica Ogg—all writers at CNET Networks in SF.

I took one look at this and wanted to tell Libby and Linda that they should use this photo for CNET’s recruiting material, this way they’ll have no trouble hiring engineers. 😀 This reminds me that a little birdy told me that they’re looking for a PHP architect.

[more random thoughts after the jump]Continue reading