Entries Tagged 'Personal' ↓

My friend Paul and did some polling last night, and we uncovered some surprising results! See who the public thinks will win the election: http://www.pkgraham.com/popular_vote/.

Last weekend I travelled to Yosemite National Park here in northern California. It was stunningly beautiful — just amazing, really. My photos from the trip don’t really do it justice, because they don’t really capture the magnificent scale of the landscapes, but they’re still great photos. Enjoy!

Yesterday I made a short day trip to Pebble Beach, Carmel, Monterey, and Santa Cruz. I wanted to see some of the Pacific coast before I move to Seattle in June.

All of the cities were pretty, but 17 Mile Drive was especially beautiful. It’s a private road in Pebble Beach — it costs $9.25 to use the road — but the views are amazing. There are great views of the Pacific coast, the Pebble Beach golf courses, and some spectacular homes. Here are some photos from the trip!

I was reviewing some old outgoing email this morning, and I found a message I sent last month, regarding a book I had listed for sale on Amazon Marketplace. A few weeks ago, a man named Hiroshi Ishii attempted to place an order for one of my listings, but there was an error processing his payment. He emailed me asking if I could take PayPal, but as a diligent seller, I said we had to complete the transaction on Amazon. He never did, and I eventually sold the book to someone else.

At the time, the name “Hiroshi Ishii” meant nothing to me.

I now know Hiroshi Ishii is a professor at the MIT Media Lab and the author of a seminal paper in Human-Computer Interaction. He’s coming to speak to my Research Topics in HCI class in a couple of weeks.

I should have just sent him the book for free.

I’ve started to publish my calendar on my website so that everyone can see when I’m busy or free. It may not be terribly useful, but it was pretty easy to do, and a fun little programming exercise. Read on to learn how I did it.
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This is a great (hilarious) a cappella rendition of “The 12 Days of Christmas”…

My grandfather passed away last week after a long, drawn-out illness. Eariler today, my cousin found this blog post about him. We’re all incredibly proud to learn about the lives he touched.

I’m reading a couple of articles by Ryan Norbauer on 43 Folders, a great site for personal organization junkies. (Not that I’m one of those…)

Ryan’s most recent article is about his paperless life, and though I love the concept, I’m a little scared by the recommendation for the $400 scanner.

I also found another article about how Ryan uses outsourcing to enhance his personal and professional life. He uses GetFriday, an online service which supplies him with a personal assistant in India. Ryan outsources lots of menial, time-wasting tasks to his assistant Suresh. the thought is very interesting and very provocative.

The business uses for GetFriday made a lot of sense, but every time he suggests outsourcing personal tasks to Suresh, I shudder:

He does all sorts of one-off research, such as finding contact information on the net, and he even once called around Boston for me to find out which Starbucks was open latest. (I got the results in a meticulously-prepared spreadsheet.)

Or:

When I get an iPhone, for example, I imagine that I’ll be calling Suresh less frequently to look up little tidbits of info on the internet for me while I’m out and about. (Right now, it’s actually far less painful to call someone in India and ask them to search the internet than for me than to wrestle with my Treo’s nearly unusable browser.)

At the end of the article, Ryan does address the elephant in the room. It feels unsettling and imperialist for rich Americans to send all their boring, menial work to underpaid assistants in India or China. Ryan’s argument against this is pretty strong. He argues that it’s a situation of comparative advantage: the developing world has a surplus of labor, so there’s nothing unnatural about sending work to them. The alternative is to let them “sit around twittling their thumbs in relative poverty,” which doesn’t help either side. By sending them work — even tasks like “sit on hold with Dell for an hour” — we’re actually doing something about the income inequity, and transferring little bits of our wealth to the developing world. I’m not sure whether I’m convinced, but I encourage you to read the article and check it out yourself.

What do you think — are these indeed reasons to sending more personal tasks to India? Or is Ryan just rationalizing America’s laziness?

I felt it too — my first since moving to the Bay Area.  But it felt much less intense than other reports I’ve seen online, like this one.  Maybe it’s because I was napping on the couch at the time…

Yesterday I registered for WordCamp 2007, a conference dedicated to the software that runs this blog. It sounds pretty interesting: the first day is going to feature presentations about blogging with WordPress, and the second day focuses on WordPress development. It’s coming up next weekend here in San Francisco. If you see me there, say hi!