« Archives in February, 2005

The Comedy Store: A Veritable Storehouse of Comedy

February 27, 2005 / posted in Otherwise Uncategorized / No Comments

I generally prefer not to go out on the weekend, as such activity takes me away from the important things in life, like sitting at home in front of TiVo, eating snack foods, and spoiling the bird. Oh, and doing work. But, somehow, I ended up going out to dinner with friends and, then, to an absolutely hilarious (except for the 15 minutes of methamphetamine-addled anti-Semitism from a large white man) show at the “Comedy Store”:http://www.thecomedystore.com/2000/main.htm, featuring Chris Rock.

Shortly after being fleeced for $20 for parking at a place slightly up the street, we went to the “Best Of” show, in the Original Room. One two-drink minimum later, we were yukking it up to a diverse set of comedians including:
* A fat former stripper in leopard-print
* A crackeresque Ohioan
* A Palestinian who deserves props for making me laugh with his suicide-bomber jokes
* A metrosexual and his trials when shopping at Ross
* A hot Italian babe with jokes about slutty women
* A hot Jew with jokes about what a slut she was
* A man spouting one-liners that he must have gotten from a 1936 Henny Youngman knock-off book
* A short, Asian, Mad TV alum who was hilarous but who blew his set when he talked about “creaming”, rather than “screaming”, in the context of being butt-raped
* Said buff, presumably high, anti-Semite
* A Latino who was trying to make Ray Romano jokes to a Comedy Central audience
Oh, and the highlight, Chris Rock:

Yes, I promise that’s really Chris Rock. Apparently, he’s about 4′ 5″ and 120lbs — or at least that’s what he looked like on stage. And he was hilarious, everything he was cracked up to be. He tried out all of his Oscar material on us, and it worked! Even though he followed up a couple of awful sets, he really got everyone back into things.
I laughed until my face hurt, and still got home in time to get McDonald’s drive-through. Veritably, the perfect evening.















The Hiking Theory of Dating

February 24, 2005 / posted in Otherwise Uncategorized / 2 Comments

I’m someone who’s undoubtedly, and throughout my life, been uncannily successful in dating. Better at it than you, for sure. Wouldn’t you like to be as fabulous and desirable as me? I knew you would. Try the Hiking Theory of Dating.
Oh, and, if we ever dated, this entry’s not about you. It really isn’t, I promise.
So here’s the idea. Everybody goes out and tries to meet The One. It would be great if you met The One, everyone should have that, but isn’t that kind of setting your standards incredibly high? Let’s face it, you’re likely to meet pretty much exactly one of those out there, and, unless you plan to date just one person, The One is going to form some pretty small percentage of your total dating experience. So let’s concentrate on the other people you’ll date and figure out how to get past them and get to The One, all while having as much fun as possible.
Now, some of the time, when you’re not with The One, you’ll be hot, desirable, on top of your game. But, let’s face it, most likely you’ll be heartbroken or frustrated by one of those many non-Ones you’ve been dating. You’re down in the dumps and you’re, frankly, a little desperate.
But guess what? The people you’d like to date can tell that you’re feeling that way, and they’d never date someone with your attitude, they’re all out there looking for their One, and, I assure you, their One is not depressed and a little desperate. Sorry.
The trick is not to make yourself more depressed and desperate by vainly pursuing the high-quality people who could be The One. Instead, you need to think long and hard about exactly what you enjoy in the people you date, and start making compromises. If you’re looking for someone who’s attractive, and tall, and successful, and likes to bar-hop, and enjoys the humor of Monty Python, and can make puns in three languagess, then maybe, after some thought, you’d be fine with someone who prefers to drink at home while watching Benny Hill and dancing to old records on the Victrola. That’d be fine for a few months.
So date that person! I’m not saying lower your standards outright, but recognize what’s important in your long-term partners and what’s, therefore, unimportant in your short-term partners. Then go for what remains as important.
The great part of this is that these non-One people, they’ll be excited to date you, even though you’re depressed and a little desperate. You’re outside of the set of people they usually date (not necessarially better, but outside), and they’ll often be happy for the fun change.
The trick is to remember that these people are just a fun experience for now. Don’t get distracted by having a good time, this person is not a suitable One, unless you’re prepared to change all of your priorities.
So where does this whole Hiking Theory come in? Well, if you think about dating as hiking, then you have an easy way to keep track of where you are in this whole process.
The first step is to ask yourself: am I ready for a big 20-mile hike to the top of the mountain today, or do I need to start with a shorter hike?
If you need that shorter hike, then figure out where you’re going to compromise. Will you take a long, flat hike? A short one, uphill? A sunny one or one in the woods?
Then, when you’re on that hike, remember that you’re on a short hike, don’t delude yourself that you’re at the top of the hill just because you’ve finished your 5-mile flat hike.
And, when you’ve finished that 5-mile flat hike, ask yourself if you’re in shape for a more challenging hike, a steeper or longer one. If you are, then take it; if not, be honest and work to get in shape with another short hike.
Every time you move up, move up by a little bit, so you don’t get exhausted and miserable on a hike that’s too long for you, or fail to make it through the hike and end up more miserable and depressed. But move up bit by bit — and you’ll know when you’re ready to hike to the top of the hill. The best thing about this method is that you will be ready to hike to the top of the hill at the same time as, or before, you find yourself at the trailhead there.
So go for it. Take that short hike today. Hike to the top of the hill soon.















I Am In Charge Here!

February 21, 2005 / posted in B-School / No Comments

I love “my group”:http://juniorbird.com/archives/001043.html this semester, but they’re very different from “last semester’s group”:http://juniorbird.com/archives/000675.html. In The Ocho, leadership was a sort of rotating affair — everybody was inclined to take leadership, at least some of the time, and if I didn’t want to be in charge I’d just wait and someone else would take the reins. But Group A-6 is different. There’s some evidence that I might actually be “in charge here”:http://www.rinfret.com/ah.html.
Which is definitely not to say that there aren’t five other potential leaders in my group. I’ve seen several other group members take leadership roles in the past, and everyone’s aggressive and on top of things. But, for some reason, people look to me. They run ideas past me, they ask me what to do — the financial guys even bother to explain things to me rather than just working around the gaps in my knowledge and understanding. Camraderie? Sure.
But it also has something to do with my leadership habits. One of my specific traits is to “keep things going” — I keep track of time, of goals, make sure we keep on target. I’m aggressive about this, I speak up about it. And now it’s like I’m speaking up about everything. And everyone’s listening to me!
And that’s bad for me. Not because I don’t like being in charge, because oh boy I do (and I’d hope that I wouldn’t be in b-school if I didn’t); it’s bad because I like to lead by consensus. I like to have buy-in from those I lead for any decision. This is a situation with a lot of buy-in, and that just encourages this trait in me.
Buy-in is good, but it’s not always possible. There will always be hold-outs, and, as a leader, sometimes you need to tell those people what to do. I’m not good at telling people what to do. Just my luck, I’d get a leadership opportunity in a positive situation that doesn’t tax me.















Superstar Workout

February 18, 2005 / posted in Sports / No Comments

Yesterday, while doing 45° overhead presses with my trainer, “NFL Hall-of-Famer Bubba Smith”:http://juniorbird.com/archives/000184.html started barking advice my way. Keep my head down! Step forward with your right foot! Back straight as a board! It was intimidating.
Bubba, who could pass for 45, thought that I had a bad leg. So then he showed me all of his surgery scars around his knee, and I had to admit that my problem with my mechanics (yay high school cross-country injuries) was not as serious as that.
Bubba also thought I had bad form. He thought I ought to shape up and earn my last name. He’s probably right. I’ll redouble my efforts; after all, I don’t want any big, tough, former linebackers coming after me.
Oh, and Gabe: he’s a Colt, not a Raider. See that blue shirt? Bubba’s a Baltimore Colt.















Sur La Valentine

February 14, 2005 / posted in Food / 2 Comments

If you knew me, you’d know the way to my heart is through my stomach; and, if you knew me, you’d know I’d never date a woman about whom you couldn’t say the same thing. And what’s better than a shared love? So, no prix fixe menu at a packed 21-Food-score-on-Zagat restaurant for me and my Wonderful Girlfriend; instead, our big Valentine’s Day event was a “cooking class for couples”:http://www.cmiregistration.com/user/org/program.jxp?org=287&id=22015 at Sur La Table.
OK, a little more background. Since both me and the little woman are in school, we don’t eat out as much as before, and we don’t get to spend as much quality time together as before. Cooking together has been a natural outgrowth of these limitations, so this class seemed natural.
The menu was pretty snazzy — an appetizer of tomato jelly on toast with goat cheese, followed by a roast pork loin, green beans, root vegetable puree, and, for dessert, an individual chocolate souffle. The program promised that we’d cook all of this in 3 hours, which we did, with time left over for a little shopping!
We worked at a table with three other couples, and we all shared wines and cooked together on a meal for the table. I was amused to see that each of the three tables of couples was determined to finish each task first and “win”. I was also impressed that, food or not, this was a thin, good-looking group. Wine tastes were also pretty good, with one couple bringing a bottle of Pinotage they’d smuggled back from a vacation to South Africa.
OK, back to the food. The first course was, as I said earlier, toast with goat cheese and tomato jelly. This was an incredible dish, both in taste and in ease of making. The trick: rub a clove of garlic across the toast before putting the cheese and jelly on it!


The pork loins were wonderful just to look at, and, because they were so small, cooked up in no time. The first step was to trim off the silver skin:

Next step was to sear the meat and make a sauce of the _fond_:

The final result was impressive:

The side dishes were incredible, especially the green beans, which we cooked with lardons. It’s amazing how much flavor these little bacon-like strips add.

OK, we’re a little short on the pics here, but, hey, I was busy cooking, drinking wine, eating, and actually interacting with others! Give a brother a break, man!
We were both sold on the class, and we’ll be signing up for others. The chef also did a good job of selling us on a couple of tools that we used to cook (a zester and a chocolate breaker). Too bad that they didn’t do the same with knives; we used some beautiful-looking asian hammered-steel knives that, sadly, were as blunt as my first-grade scissors. Another great merchandising opportunity lost!
But we couldn’t have had a more fun, more romantic night. Book now for next year! We’ll see you there!















Site #2, Version #2

February 12, 2005 / posted in Elsewhere / No Comments

My other site over at “cleverbird.com”:http://cleverbird.com has been reasonably busy since the beginning my b-school days. I’d been adding info about various things — especially “finding a job”:http://cleverbird.com/wiki/pmwiki.php/JobSearchTips/JobSearchTips every so often, and, frankly, I’d outgrown “what was there”:http://cleverbird.com/pwyky. So today, in an exceptionally aggressive effort to avoid doing work, I made some changes.
I changed two things in particular:
* I switched to a new “wiki”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki engine, “PmWiki”:http://www.pmwiki.org/
* I “refactored”:http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyRefactorWikiPages all of my content
h3. Moving to PmWiki
I had started out using “pwyky”:http://infomesh.net/pwyky/ as my engine, principally because it was:
* Easy to install without command-line access
* Written in “Python”:http://python.org, which I can at least pretend to know
* Because it was written in Python, and missing some key features, I thought I’d add the features to learn more about Python
Six months later, those reasons don’t make as much sense. The features that weren’t there by and large still arent, because I haven’t had time to add them. And I’m recognizing further that, in the future, I’ll be programming the Web less, and using clever tools like MT and wikis more. Instead, I needed a wiki that was:
* Still easy to install without command-line access
* Offered some kind of security so everyone couldn’t just change my pages
* Offered robust text formatting
* Accepted at least some HTML in pages
* Had a reasonable templating system so that I could make it non-hideous
Apart from being easy-to-install and non-hideous by defaulty, pwyky sadly was none of these.
After a search, I found PmWiki. It’s hideous by default, but it has a clever templating system and every other feature I could want. Initial experience suggests it will be a very satisfactory solution.
h3. Refactoring
Pwyky offers no export function; PmWiki offers no import. Someday — probably around the time I get my next wiki engine — both of these will be must-have features. For the moment, I had few enough pages that I could just cut-and-paste from one wiki to the other. As I was doing so, I realized that cleverbird.com’s initial organization didn’t make that much sense. For example, the home page linked to different pages based on the format, not the content, of those pages — there was actually a top-level link for “lists.”
In the name of being reasonable, I organized the new cleverbird.com around the kinds of information I offered. And I split the pages up to facilitate that kind of organization. Yeah, there was a fair amount of rewriting, but that was fun. Now I’ve just got to make those pages look non-hideous.















I Figueroaed It Out!

February 10, 2005 / posted in B-School / No Comments

I park in this brand-new parking lot this semester. And I’ve been having some serious trouble finding my car there. I’ve been blaming my easily-confused memory; after all, it’s not easy to remember, at 5:30pm, where you parked at 7:45am. Was it the third floor? The fourth? The sixth? Some days it was easy. Some days I searched for my car for minutes on end. But today I figured it out.
First, a little background. Last semester, for the low low price of half of what I’d spend parking anywhere else within walking distance of campus, at least legally, I had a permit for the Parking Center. Or, as we called it, The Ghetto. The Parking Center was cheap, sure, but it was far. A converted warehouse relatively near USC, to get there required me to take one of three routes:
# The long way, up one whole side of the campus, across two six-lane streets, past a construction site, beneath a freeway overpass, and across a freeway exit ramp.
# The short way, across a three-way intersection with no crosswalk, beside a six-lane street with no sidewalk, beneath the freeway overpass, past the homeless man getting a blowjob from a crack whore, across another three-way intersection with no crosswal, and past an abandoned warehouse.
# The only safe route after dark, a 20-minute bus ride around campus (5 minutes if you got the right bus, or 60 minutes if you got the wrong one and got to take a ride all around campus, up past fraternity row, past all the student housing, past the convenience stores, and back to where you started, leaving you just about 20 minutes to get the right bus and make it to the Parking Center in an even hour).
So when the new Parking Structure 1 opened, at the corner of Figueroa and Exposition, directly across from the business school, I happily paid double to park there. Now, the building’s not done yet, so you can’t park on the roof or against some walls, if they’re working nearby, and sometimes the stairs are closed and often the elevators are, and the one time I took the elevator it forgot what buttons you pushed every time the door closed, which I took as a solid vote for the stairs. But it’s a parking lot that I’m allowed to park in and it’s nearby.
And now I can find my car in it! I made a discovery today that explains why I’m never parked on the floor I think I’m parked on, and why it always seems like I get to the exit in no time. Now, this place looks like a “staggered floors, two-way center ramp”:http://www.polarinertia.com/nov04/parking01.htm model, but there’s a twist: the floor on the west side is flat, so if you turn west off of the ramp and go around you just go around the level, but the floor on the east side is sloped uphill, so if you turn east off the ramp you actually go up another level. I know it sounds crazy but that’s the way it is. And that’s why I’m always parked on level 5 when I only went up two center ramps.















Getting Things Done

February 9, 2005 / posted in Otherwise Uncategorized / No Comments

So I’ve been light on the updates lately. I’ve been a busy bee, getting things done at school. Case competitions, midterms, clubs, fundraisers, networking, interviewing, and planning a start-up that I should think about for the future — these all fill up my schedule. This is a lot to do, even in business school, and I can handle all of this only because I’m pretty ruthlessly organized. From time to time, other people have commented on my organization. So I thought I’d write down a few ways in which I keep my life (sometimes too much) under control.
In his book “Getting Things Done”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0142000280/qid=1108009226/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-6052189-3439365?v=glance&s=books&n=507846 David Allen asserts — quite correctly — that the whole point of being organized is to relieve one’s brain of the daily drudgery of keeping track of a million little things, a veritable “Backup Brain”:http://backupbrain.com. This “frees one’s brain up”:http://43folders.com to work on more important things.
One of my core philosophies — ever since I became organized (that’s a blog entry in itself) — has been that, if my organization system doesn’t enable me to sit down at my computer in the morning and know 100% of the things that I need to do that day (modulo, of course, any new incoming tasks), without having to think in any way at all. Better, even, the organizing system should help me to prioritize the tasks. The GTD philosophy reinforces that and includes a bunch of tools to manage various kinds of tasks.
I’m a big believer in technology solutions to problems, so I use Outlook and my Series 60 phone to track all this stuff. Since reading GTD, I realized what was holding me back from being successful in Outlook — putting all of my to-dos in one place, assigning each to-do to a date. Part of having a system that doesn’t need minding is not having to figure out whether or not something needs to get done today. So I split my to-dos in two: half I keep on the Outlook TaskPad, next to the Calendar, categorized into the day on which they must get done. The other half, which should be done but are not attached to a specific day, sit on a seperate task list and are organized by the context in which they must be done. Errands are categorized as @Home, if I have to write someone it’s @E-Mail, and so forth. When I have a few minutes, or find myself screwing around on my computer, I look for what I can do @ my current context.
It’s really important to manage information as it moves in and out of this system. Managing my inbox is key, and I’ve found that two things in particular make this easy:
* I act on every e-mail the minute I read it. I have dozens of folders that hold information in very fine-grained ways, so there’s always a place to put things. Anything that hits my inbox that takes about two minutes, I do straight away. I create a task for anything that has a next step that takes longer than that time period, so nothing ever disappears, and nothing needs to sit in my inbox.
* My inbox is a “queue, not a stack”:http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/002892.html — the oldest mail is at the top and the newest at the bottom. This creates a powerful incentive to keep up-to-date on my incoming mail, because the latest stuff gets pushed down off the bottom of the screen. And who doesn’t want to see the newest mail?
I also make it easy to see what’s going on, just by looking at Outlook: I “color-code everything”:http://juniorbird.com/archives/000669.html. This makes it easy to glance at my calendar or inbox and see what’s important without having to spend the mental energy of switching away from whatever I’m doing now to poke through my inbox or to-do list.
This is a great, self-reinforcing system. By doing any one part of this system, it makes it easier to do the other parts of this system. And systems like that usually work. To some people, all of this time being organized seems like a waste, but, to me, it lets my mind be free to think about things other than when that one appointment is, or what’s due next class for Management Accounting.















You’ve Got Bad Bad Luck

February 1, 2005 / posted in B-School / 4 Comments

Mike Ness notwithstanding, today started out great. I got up rested, motored right though a bunch of homework, and had a great workout. But then it started.
First, I went to Baja Fresh for lunch. I do this all the time. I ordered a Baja Burrito with no cheese. I get a Baja Burrito with no Pico de Gallo. I send it back for a Baja Burrito with Pico but no cheese. I get home and discover I have a Baja Burrito with Pico and with cheese. But I’m starving from my workout so I eat it. And the effect on my stomach is predictable.
I sit down to eat my burrito and what’s in my inbox but an e-mail from Mattel! I interviewed with Mattel last week and had a great time doing it, and really felt like I had a shot at at least a second-round interview for the summer internship. But the e-mail didn’t say that; very nicely, it told me that I wouldn’t advance to the next round. Not entirely unexpected, because I think I was really great and also really bad in that interview, but I thought I’d advance to the next round. In the end, I’m not sure the job was right for me — of course, I wanted the chance to find out — and I am sure that I can learn a lot about interviewing better in the future.
Now pardon me while I go and poop.