General Disarray

Good Hodgkins » New ears are listening. » Blog Archive » ESSAY: The Garden State effect:

Here’s what I mean: nobody thinks long and hard about music and what it means to them and then ultimately decides to listen to Toby Keith.

Via this video on famous atheists.

This is what you see when you send someone an Odeo:

I wish I got to be so glib at work.

What the hell is this:

I see this commercial at least twice a day on CNN.

The WEA conference was (and is) a total disaster. Departure time was 7am, meaning that I needed to leave the house at 5am, meaning that I had to wake up at 4am. Unfortunately, I didn’t finish my presentation until 1am. I tried to sleep but couldn’t, and eventually gave up out of fear of missing the flight.

I decided to take the express to the airport, so I needed cash for the toll. It took me 35 minutes to find an ATM that wasn’t out of order, putting me on a very tight schedule. The airport was crowded due to the holiday, and I was sure I’d miss the flight. I called my boss and told her that it was a lost cause. She had called to tell me that she was going to miss the flight, but another was available at 8:30. That would have worked, but I’d only have 30 minutes to get to the hotel from the airport (and I had no idea how long that would take). But I found the express check in and managed to get cleared, even though the limit is 45 minutes before departure time, and it was 6:30.

I almost got through security unscathed, but something (my zipper, maybe) set off the metal detector. I was sent to the “chute” — the plain glass staging room where you wait for an “analyst” to wand you and pat you down. But not before I left my glasses, wallet and laptop unattended on the conveyor belt. Blind, I awaited my wanding. There was a man with a t-shirt that said “Civil Liberties Alert: Orange.” Oh so true. I got through security at 6:52 and got on the train.

I made it to the terminal at 6:57 and asked if I could still board. The gate attendants had to call the captain to see if I could get on, they were literally getting ready to leave the gate. I was allowed on. I made it on the plane by such a narrow margin that they had to update the flight manifest, which I hand-delivered to one of the flight attendants.

I landed and called my boss, not knowing where the conference was being held, and thinking that she was in the air on the 8:30 flight. Not so. She decided to stay home because she was sick, which I hadn’t understood previously because her phone was breaking up. Not good. She was the chair of a session, meaning that I had to take over her duties.

I took a cab to the hotel (it took about 10 minutes) and registered myself. My boss had called ahead and explained her situation. I was very nervous. Not only did I have to chair the session — which I had absolutely no idea how to do — I had to give her 15 minute presentation, which I had not even completely read (nor had I read the paper upon which it was based). Exhausted, I struggled for an hour to find the materials, read them over, figure out what a session chair was supposed to do, and mentally prepare myself (my drinking lots of coffee and smoking lots of cigarettes). It was show time.

But wait. My boss wasn’t there, and neither was her laptop. I had her presentation, but I’m on my iBook. Would the projector work? I asked the registration people, but they didn’t know. So I went upstairs to check. It didn’t. But the other presenter had a laptop. Could I email him the files? No, there was no internet connection. Could I use my iPod as a USB device? No, Windows wouldn’t recognize it. So what did I do? Ran down stairs and bought a CD. FOR SIX DOLLARS. But it worked. I burned the presentations onto the CD while he began his presentation. It was an interesting presentation about interesting research, so I paid fairly close attention, asking the odd question.

Then it was my turn. And oh, how I bombed. The first presentation — the unfamiliar one — was a disaster. I was so tired, I could barely read the slides, and I stumbled and muttered my way through, losing track of the slide that I was on, skipping forward and back, trying to answer questions that I didn’t know how to handle. My sleep deprivation had severely reduced my verbal acumen, and I was really embarrassed.

The second presentation went a bit more smoothly, at least I knew what I was talking about. But my impromptu style — which normally sounds polished, though casual — instead sounded like more mumbling and muttering. I reached for words that just weren’t there. The audience was small, and they paid attention and asked questions, for which I was grateful. I knew the topic was kind of boring, and I knew that there were glaring deficiencies in our methodologies. Of course, they pointed all of these out. In fact, they anticipated most of my slides with questions. But they were really nice and obviously very intelligent. I only wish I’d been more lucid — it would have been fun.

Still, the entire thing left a bad taste in my mouth. I never want to come across as being that unprepared ever again. I feel like I did those people a disservice.

I’ll be in San Diego on Saturday to present a paper at the Western Economics Association conference. So if you’re in the area and you’ve been stricken with a case of seemingly-incurable insomnia, come on down, I’ll see what I can do to help.

I’m like a decapitated chicken at the moment. I knew that we were presenting a paper, but I did not know that doing so entailed my giving an oral presentation, which I haven’t done in, let’s see, three years. Naturally, I just found out about this requirement today, leaving me one day to put the whole presentation together and rehearse it in front of my bathroom mirror, which will be necessary since I’ve taken to swearing like a stevedore in the course of day-to-day conversation ever since I started working from home.

Maybe I’ll put the slides online. Not sure if I can do that without violating my self-imposed veil of anonymity.

Listening to: Free to Run from the album “Bring It On” by Gomez

I’ve been reminiscing about soft drinks, particularly OK Soda. I used to have a pool by my house and my brother and I would hang out there on hot summer days. OK Soda was sold at the vending machines (along with sour candy that I would eat until my tongue hurt). I really liked OK Soda, although I’m pretty sure I’m still paying for my childhood affinity for cola in physique. But then it just disappeared. Turns out Denver was an area where it was test-marketed in 1994, but it did very poorly so was abandoned. What a shame. I still remember the 1-800-I-FEEL-OK campaign.

OK Soda - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

OK Soda had a more “citric” taste than traditional colas, almost like a Fruit Punch version of Coke’s Fresca. Some reviewers described it as “slightly spicy”. Others likened it to a combination of orange soda and flat Coca-Cola. In contrast to earlier beverages from the 1980s also noted for their marketing campaigns, such as Jolt and Red Bull, OK Soda’s caffeine content was not emphasized. A 12-ounce serving of OK Soda had only 40.5 milligrams of caffeine, slightly less than Coca-Cola itself (45.6 mg).

Many OK Soda fans have attempted to recreate the taste of OK Soda from memory. Though the actual formula is unknown, a generally accepted recipe for the approximate taste is:

* ¼ orange soda
* ¾ semi-flat Coca-Cola
* a splash of Dr. Pepper

I want a Firefox extension with the following specs:

• When Firefox is opened, I am asked whether I want a timed session
• If I say yes, then I enter the time limit for my session
• When the limit expires, a window pops up asking me if I want X more minutes, where X is a value that I set (like a snooze alarm)

We can call this FocusFox and I completely give my idea to you if you implement it.

Seems like everyone’s keeping themselves afloat by offering support for otherwise free products these days. At first, this struck me as odd and not viable in the long term — make a product, give it away for free, but make money offering technical support. But then I realized that this isn’t really that much different than selling computers. From what I understand, it isn’t the computer or the bundled software that makes money at big box stores, it’s the $30 cables.

Of course, as someone who’s much more likely to give than need support, I’m a total free-rider with a mile-wide smile.

I don’t think about business very much, but support has to be fairly profitable. It’s ongoing — even well-built products need tweaking now and again, even if they’re working fine. And the race-to-the-bottom effect probably isn’t as substantial. For example, you can replace Microsoft Office with OpenOffice.org at your company and say “it’s good enough.” There’s no “good enough” support in a lot of cases (pure speculation here) because when you have reached the point of willingness to pay for support, you are already signaling that good enough is not good enough for you/your company — you want it done right by experts [*].

I like the idea of free software developers making money by offering support. First, it means that they will keep developing their software, since their financial base depends on loyal users. Second, it means that their lives get easier as the software gets better, so they have an incentive to code smarter. Third, it keeps the software itself open-source and free, with all of the attendant benefits (integration with other products, standardization, volunteer testing and patching, etc.).

[*] I just finished reading The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford, so I’m still thinking about all the ways that firms are sneaking price discrimination under my door. The people that pay for support for software would have been the big corporate customers anyway. Nothing lost by giving it away for free to people that would have (a) done without or (b) pirated it. In fact, a lot is gained in terms of network effects (more people use it so more people are comfortable with it, the file format is widely accepted, name-recognition, and so on).