smallchou.com/blog

I’m certainly not a pro in regards to the stock market and personal investing, but as I learn more I constantly find myself thinking, “Hmm, that’s exactly like poker.” (In fact, there’s actually a ton in common between investing and gambling. And when I say that, I don’t mean investing in a stock is like putting $500 on 31 at the Roulette table, though there’s a corollary for that in investing too.) Read more

We’ve officially reached that point of the California Winter where I begin explaining to people, “Hey, it’s really F’ing cold here,” only to be rebuked by a comment like, “Yeah, [insert place that is ACTUALLY cold] is getting pretty cold too. Only 13 degrees today. Kelvin.”

Is it so wrong to claim that highs in the low 60’s (that’s less than 70, for Christ’s sake) are “freezing”?

Reading the 37Signals blog today, I was pointed to a “report” that can best be described as a 60 Minutes hate video .

Watching this video literally made me blink in disbelief. I’ll admit I haven’t watched a lot of 60 Minutes in the past, oh, 25 years, so maybe that’s why they’re so cranky about people my age (it’s probably safe to assume none of my friends watch it either).

Basically the premise of the “report” is (only slightly paraphrasing): ‘The workplace is being filled with an entire generation of kids that have tattoos, wear flip-flops to the office every day, don’t know how to work hard, can’t accept tough feedback, live with their parents, play video games at work, don’t know how to use a KNIFE & FORK (!), and are ‘narcissistic praisehounds’ (my favorite) from years of getting trophies in AYSO despite losing.’

I’m not kidding.

Some of my favorite moments:

• The ad agency manager who thinks she needs to speak like a therapist to her employees. Sorry lady, but if you think you need to talk like that to get my attention, maybe you do need some psychological help.
• The “consultant” shown teaching 20-somethings about how to use a knife and fork properly, followed by shots of her smiling audience, no doubt thinking, “Does this bitch really think we don’t know how to use basic eating utensils?”
• The two “representatives” of our age bracket who seem like total douchebags, proudly stating that, ‘for our generation, it’s perfectly normal to have four jobs on your resume in a year,’ and, ‘we love the praise and, truly, we want our parents to know.’ Sorry 60 Minutes, can you please go find some reasonable human beings who are in “our generation”?

I’d write seven pages of commentary here, but I think the absurdity of this is pretty apparent. I’m not going to lie, there are probably some folks in my generation who actually match up with the profile described in this “report”. Unfortunately, 60 Minutes: 1) paints my entire generation with a single broad brush, and 2) does not even try to display any semblance of balanced reporting.

The equivalent would be 60 Minutes also doing a 15-minute report (with a reporter under the age of 30) that talked about how everyone over the age of 40 is incapable of using technology, intensely interested in senseless meetings, and continually hiring incompetent people based solely on their experience. Would that report fly with the execs? Probably not, yet I’ve seen plenty of those types of people too.

Actually, can someone go and MAKE that video? I’d love to see it.

Oh also, if 60 Minutes could go interview some of the 12-year olds that fall into the age range they give (they slander everyone born from 1980 to 1995) just to get their perspective on the new-age office environments that they work in, I’d love to see that.

Idiots.

All I could do while reading this article was begin to open my mouth in objection and then stop, realizing that Caple’s entirely right:

Baseball is the most individual of sports, and all that really matters is what a guy does on the field. And what A-Rod has done is average 124 runs scored, 45 home runs and 128 RBIs per season the past 10 years…. It’s wonderful if every teammate is like Mike Lowell or Jason Varitek, but it’s hardly necessary as long as a player produces. For crying out loud, Curt Schilling’s ego is so monstrous it’s an official stop on the Boston duck boat tour, while Manny has repeatedly asked to be traded. Talent matters, not personality.

ESPN Page 2 – Caple: Defending A-Rod

Blogged with Flock

Honestly, probably the single best one-line plot description in the history of IMDB:

Violence and mayhem ensue after a hunter stumbles upon some dead bodies, a stash of heroin and more than $2 million in cash near the Rio Grande.

- No Country for Old Men

Don’t read Sports Guy columns related to Boston sports and PLEASE don’t read any of his stuff while thinking that he’s knowledgeable about athletics.

I’ve had a very like-hate relationship with Bill Simmons over the years. He’s clearly a pretty funny guy with the ability to make some humorous insights about sports and pop culture. But if you are any kind of an objective sports fan, reading an absurd column like his latest today (The Sports Guy: Sore winner) just irritates you. In case you don’t want to read that waste of words, he basically says:

• “Cry, cry, the Patriots had calls go against them in the game. The refs are probably out to get the Patriots. Cry some more.” He also gives a decidedly one-sided view of every call.
• “I want to bone all the Patriots because they ended up winning the game anyway.”
• “I love it when they run up the score because I’m an asshole.”
• “You can’t hate me for being an asshole because I’m just rooting for my team.”

Bill, great column – everyone outside of Boston thinks you’re a moron. I’ve also come to a few key conclusions about Simmons:

1. He’s not very smart: even the most brain-dead of writers must be able to re-read a column like that and think, “Hmm, I might be a little hypocritical here. Didn’t I spend years calling the Colts a bunch of whiners and crybabies? And now I’m complaining about the same things that I claim they did.” Then, this non-brain-dead writer would slowly go back and tone down the rhetoric.
2. He doesn’t understand football: any reasonably intelligent and informed observer last week can tell you that the Colts really should have won that game, but they were only able to pull out 6 points from what should have been 21 in the first quarter.
3. He really doesn’t understand football: I like how he feigns expertise in the sport while proudly touting a record of 59-63-8 on picks for the year. Now that might seem like it’s pretty decent, but you can literally teach a monkey to do better than that. For a sample size of 130 NFL games, that means he’s actually a statistically significant loser.

Is he still funny? Yes, when he’s not writing about any of the Boston sports teams, he can be slightly humorous. But don’t mistake him for any kind of a knowledgeable sportswriter and certainly don’t think of him as an expert.

Blogged with Flock

So I finished writing that last post about Yahoo’s browser demands and finally decided, “Just to get this thing off my screen, why don’t I hit ‘Remind Me later’ and maybe ‘later’ will mean 7 months.

So I did. And the results:

Plus the yellow monstrosity remains.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Most companies and sites have come to accept/embrace the fact that their users should use whichever browser they would like. If they, for some reason, decide to choose an archaic relic from the Stone Age, you’re just supposed to smile and thank them for coming to your site and add:

“Oh by the way, are you sure you wouldn’t like to upgrade to Netscape 1.0, much less a modern browser? No? You’re good with the flickering all-text product you’re running with now? That’s awesome.”

Obviously I’m exaggerating, but it bothers me to no end when sites still mandate the use of IE (or anything else). Over time though, that type of obtuse behavior has been relegated to just the most boring sites anyway.

What you don’t expect is a ‘cutting edge’ company like Yahoo! to get it so wrong. Here’s a screenshot of their recommended browsers page that I was practically forced to see (more on that in a bit):

Now there’s nothing really wrong with the page. Would it be good for them to show a little more flexibility in those browsers? Probably, but it’s pretty much fine as-is. Now you might be asking yourself how I got to this page. I am currently rolling around with Camino (http://caminobrowser.org/) on my Mac machines, which is a nice lightweight thing built on Gecko. I like it a lot, but apparently Yahoo! doesn’t:

Now that is what I call obnoxious. In case you can’t see the small text, it reads:

Upgrade your browser now for the best Yahoo! experience. It’s free and easy

Upgrading will allow you to use all of the Yahoo! features that make your life easier. Upgrade now and enjoy all the benefits of Yahoo!

[Upgrade Now] or [Remind Me Later]

How about some thought process into ALL of the browsers people might use? Using Camino certainly isn’t hindering my usage of Yahoo! Sports, I checked. That in and of itself isn’t a terrible mistake – Camino’s not all that mainstream.

But how about a button to get rid of this absurd enormous yellow box taking up a significant portion of my screen? Or how about an option to do something other than “Upgrade RIGHT NOW” or “Bother me again whenever you see fit”?

Or how about just some simple humility in considering the possibility that I like my browser, you may not have thought of every single possible modern browser, and there’s a possibility that I’d like you to just stop bothering me about this FOREVER.

Update: it gets even better…

This is when it gets real interesting for all of those facebook app developers… Facebook Abandoning Its Open Platform Applications?

Great news from Matt Maiocco’s Niners blog (great blog, by the way):

Good news for Bay Area professional football fans. KPIX, Channel 5, announced that the Raiders-Texans game is not a sell-out. Therefore, the game will be blacked out in the Bay Area. The station will carry the Patriots-Colts game in HDTV on Sunday at 1 p.m.

Can the networks apply some simple common sense to the television scheduling sometimes? Luckily those Raiders fans took matters into their own hands. Even the Raiders fans were actively telling each other not to buy tickets to the game on Saturday so that the Pats-Colts would be shown on the local networks.

Now if they could only do the same thing every single other week of the season…