Archive for the ‘My Life’ Category
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What being a nice guy means.
A couple of my friends were discussing nice guys recently. Katie, who opened the conversation by writing a note on Facebook, posted a link to this Ode to Nice Guys and flattered me and some other male friends of hers by tagging us with it. My other friend Kendra politely contrasted the opinion of the piece by posting a link to this half-serious rant about why nice guys are “bleah!”
I’ve thought about this stuff by myself before, and I think that both Katie’s and Kendra’s papers have elements of truth as well as inaccuracy in them. And two goods rants deserve another. -
The shopper that bit back.
It was a long, hard fight that started in October. I was alone, up against the formidable powers of both Apple and Adobe, but today, at long last, I prevailed.
After hours of arguing and explaining my situation (in short, I paid for CS4 and they never sent it to me), Apple apologized and will be sending me a copy with two-day shipping. And I don’t have to pay for any of this since the whole point is that they owed it to me from October.
I told my story to The Consumerist, and they liked it enough that they put it on their front page. You can read it here. Maybe I’ll inspire some other people!
So it’s over. It’s finally over. Apple relented and did the right thing. Adobe, however, is still a bunch of jerks as far as I’m concerned. Shame on them.
Oh, and special thanks to my roommate Ben for keeping me pepped and focused when I was starting to feel too exasperated to go on.
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Effort management, part 1.
I’m not a Getting Things Done goon or a Zen Habits zealot. Last semester though, I used my Google Calendar and iCal (they’re very easy to sync with Calaboration) to help keep track of my assignments. Before that, I’d gotten by just fine by making mental notes, except for some cheap agendas my middle school forcefed us. So, it was my first real baby step into the world of using tools and strategies to manage time and work, and it surprised me that I liked it.
That’s not exactly what calendars were designed for though, and I don’t think I’d ever want to live according to a productivity dogma like some people choose to.
That said, there are programs that are designed specifically to make time management easier. They’re like self-organizing to-do lists, and the most important thing about them is that they have to save you more effort than you would spend without them, or else there’s no point. They must be mindlessly simple, trivially fast to use, and they have to actually be helpful even for the most casual users.
In short, they should enable people to be lazier without anybody else noticing. It’s as much about effort management as it is about time management if you ask me.
Since I enjoy experimenting with new programs, I’ve decided to demo several such programs. Here’s what I’ll be looking at:
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College!
I’ve been living up here in San Francisco for a little over a week now, but yesterday was my first day in the classroom. It went pretty well, in spite of my roommate foiling Operation Sleep In Every Day by picking early classes and waking me with his alarm. I might very well ask to switch to earlier classes (but not too early) since that was pretty much the whole reason why I opted for the later classes.
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My looming San Francisco invasion.
As the footage below demonstrates, everything is going according to plan. My fully operational battle station is in position, and the reconnaissance fleet has begun deployment operations. All too easy.
My dorm’s check-in is on August 27th, but we’re heading up a day early. So that’s actually just ten days away.
I’m going to miss my family, friends, and my amazing dog Sparky, but I’ve been waiting to go to college for my whole life and already had to delay it a year because of my health.
It’s almost time. I can hardly wait.
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