Announcing 33″ by 25
While most of you may know me as a rather good looking fellow with boyish charm, I have in fact become a bit of a slob over the years. When I started at TokBox in June 2008, I was probably approaching a 40" waist line. Nothing like the 30" waistline that I came into college with. Clearly those "Freshman 15" hit me a bit harder than I would have liked.
When I first measured in February of 2009, I had a 38" waist. I did so because I gave up fast food for Lent, and I wanted to see what the difference would be. It was huge. I lost 2" over the 40 days of Lent with no fast food. I've since gotten it down to somewhere between 34.5" to 35.5" depending on the day. Now my goal is to reach a 33" waist by my 25th birthday which is on November 20th. I have just over 2 weeks to do it, and I want you to help.
You probably weren't going to get me anything for my birthday anyway, and that's okay! I didn't get you anything for your birthday either. But, I am going to be a bit selfish, and ask that you help motivate me by "sponsoring" my drive to 33". For each inch lost (today I measured, and I was 35"), I ask that you pledge an amount to donate to charity. I don't have a favorite charity, and so I'll be taking suggestions for that as well. I say make it a bit fun too. As an example, pledge $10 for a 34" waist, but $25 for a 33" waist. Give me that extra bit of push!
All said, I need 2 things from you, my friends.
- A charity to which I should donate my proceeds (most popular two or three will get the proceeds)
- A birthday gift of pledging some amount to donate for each inch lost
Worse comes to worse, we'll have fun and laugh over that time when I thought I could be good looking again! Please do post to my blog your ideas and pledges because these links tend to get lost on Facebook/Twitter/etc. after a few days.
Frankly my dear, no one gives a damn
That's how I feel right now about my need to make excuses for myself of late. No one gives a damn, and nor should they. I don't have any good ones... there rarely is a good one. I need a good reason to move forward, and I think that I've finally found it. It's over. 24 is over, and it's time to take control again, and understand how in so many ways I control the destiny of the most important thing in my life right now... me.
So here's a game plan for me:
- Get Organized
- Set Goals
- Have Fun Again
I'm working on a good calendar & to-do list for myself. I'm not quite sure what I need or what I want. I now that iCal isn't it, and I also know that Google Calendar isn't it. Would love to get suggestions from people to see what they use. I also might just build my own. I'll start with a to-do system, and work my way up. I'm really trying to figure out what I would need in it. I would need SMS access; I would want some level of control for others to see when necessary and not see when not necessary. Anyway, just thinking out loud here, but this is definitely number one for me.
It's really hard to have any idea of being successful unless you have some metric against which to measure. I didn't think this was true. I always assumed that the end goal was to just reach a new milestone, regardless of what it may be. That's a never ending road to nowhere as it were. When I went to TIP camp during the summer of 2000 (which was probably the best summer of my life, btw), we had a session on the difference between nowhere and now here and how incrementally different these two words are in the English language visually, and yet how large the chasm between the two is philosophically. Setting goals is effectively my exploration of how to jump that chasm from nowhere to understanding what now here means.
I saved the best for last. I think the thing that I've really lost is just the idea that I need to have fun. There just isn't enough life not to have fun all the time. I need to find my smile. I enjoyed my soccer match this week just for the folks that I got to play with. Yeah, they drive me crazy, but that's why I love them. I actually have a huge crush on one of the co-eds... but don't tell anyone! I laughed a lot today with the "Costume Gang". We made a big mistake leaving when we did. We lost too much of our day, and essentially lost a day at work, but for my morale it was good. It's what actually led me to force myself to re-focus, write this, and make the commitment to gain control again.
I am committing here to making this next year of my life huge. I don't know today how that's going to play out. I don't know if it's a good or bad thing. What I do know though is that looking back on the year in 365 days will be much like an architect returning to the keystone in an archway knowing that it takes all of the stones to build the archway, but this one stone to bind the rest together.
Update on Me
I've been doing a whirlwind tour of my life over the last month or so. Some physical, some mental... a lot in the here, but also a lot in the tomorrow (I'm so good at living in my past, that I've ignored that bit). It's been a very riveting personal roller coaster. I'm taking some time to get off of the roller coaster, and just write down what I've figured out. The goal isn't to offend, but to enlighten.
And so it goes.
I'm good at what I do. Sometimes I need to stop and just say that because I get too focused on all of the things that I can't do. I enjoy learning from the people who I work with, and I hope that I bring something into their lives as well. It's a really great family that I have at the Box. And I think I add to it in some small way.
I'm learning an immense amount about what I want to be, who I want to replicate, and, very surprisingly, what I don't want to be. I think that last point is the one that really strikes me as being the least obvious thing to learn. And yet, you run into personalities and individuals where you can clearly see how they make people less well off. They are the quintessential elephant in the room. It's become very clear to me that I need to understand what makes those people so unlikeable to me. Otherwise, I'm going to make those same mistakes.
I'm an imitator, a mockingbird, in that I find things in people, and then try them out in myself. Is this how all people are? I don't really know, as I've never been anyone else that I remember. But I'm finding that I'm incredibly good at taking what I like in other people and emulating it in myself; engraining it as my own. The things that I really like, I then make a concerted effort to preach downstream.
I love to dream. I dream big dreams, and don't understand those who have to be grounded in reality. Life, for me, is meant to be lived flying towards the moon. I love that about myself... If I ever lose this, then I don't think I'll recognize myself.
I need to take better care of my body. Not just in terms of exercise, which I'm much better about lately, but also in terms of what I eat, sleep, time outdoors. I'm bad at this. I need to work on it. I will improve upon this.
There's a lot more, but I made this a ten-minute exercise tonight. I'll get back to the grind of the hourly exercise tomorrow. Very excited about what the last month of 24 has to offer me. It will hopefully be a launching pad into 25 that I could never have imagined.
Modern Gladiators… or maybe cows to slaughter?
I just finished reading a really intriguing set of articles in this week's New Yorker. I wish they had a micropayment system where I could pay for articles that I enjoyed a la how Radiohead releases their albums, but that's a different topic altogether. I'm going to write some thoughts, more along the lines of immediate reactions, and then maybe follow up if I can find some time after doing some thinking and discussing. The first article is by Malcolm Gladwell, and can be found here
Ignore for a fact that the article draws links against dogfighting because of the prominence that dogfighting has gained in the last few years, and instead think about when humans pitted humans in battles to the death against each other for entertainment. I ask you to ignore it because I'd rather focus on the notion of long-term human suffering in the name of entertainment as opposed to animal cruelty. I think the major pieces that come to my mind are the Gladiators of the Roman Empire, and the jousters of the Middle Ages.
(I'll admit that I know very little about either in any form of depth, and so please let me know if I've made an assumption, and you know it to be wrong.)
I think a crucial difference between then and now lies in how we view fellow persons. There isn't a need to prepare soldiers as there was in the Middle Ages. If I'm not mistaken, which of course I can be, the tournaments of the time acted as a way for those who competed to show off their prowess in the ability to wage war. Winning wars is no longer an indicator of the success of a man. The merits of that can be debated in another forum, but to me it also makes the value of physical prowess much less.
On a similar note, the spoils of war are also no longer something which is an integral part of society. Slaves, wealth, and property were all benefits given to the winning army in the age of the Roman Empire. Slaves, and again I could be quoting popular fiction instead of historical fact here, were often in the center of the Coliseum tasked with being the kill or be killed entertainment du jour. Thankfully, in my opinion, we've found that elevating even our enemies in victory to a higher level of understanding has replaced the notion that success should be measured by spoils won and stolen.
Given that these forms of entertainment have become outdated either because they are no longer necessary in preparing for war, or because we've advanced in our moral treatment, what is it about football that keeps us engaged. It has so many of the attributes of the Coliseum and the Tournaments of the Middle Ages. The battlefield analogies, the insane athleticism, the unbelievable wealth associated with it all. And it turns out that we're still cheering for a sport that at the end of the day leaves the players in a broken state, unable to even take care of their families despite the millions they have earned.
It actually turns me off to the sport in my mind, and yet, as I sit here and watch Monday Night Football, I'm completely engaged in it all. Why can't I see that in my entertainment, that these men are killing themselves? Why is that okay? I don't really know, but I'm fascinated by it all.
What do you think?
College Football – Review Week 4
First, you're going to need to watch Saket's review of week 4, and then watch my response embedded below:
Finally, my pick'em group shows that for last week I only got 7 out of 22 picks right last week. It was just... AWFUL! I think it was a function of the games being too unpredictable, but one thing I've noticed this year, which I spoke about in the video above, is that a lot of teams are much closer on any given Saturday than we have seen in years past. Outside of the Top 5 ,or as Saket said, the top 3, it's really a crap shoot this year, and for a fan that's just awesome! I wish every year were like this where any given Saturday is one you can't miss.
I love college football.
Oh CSS… You drive me crazy
I've been working on the content pages at work for the last few weeks, and it makes me wonder how people can work with CSS everyday without going bald (good thing I had already lost all of my hair). The inability to create a consistent user experience across web applications has got to be one of the largest dead weight losses in productivity and efficiency in the web industry. Not finding a solution for this, and a solution which is accepted industry wide, is just going to create a workplace for mediocre middle men whose sole purpose is to make sure that IE looks like Safari (or maybe I should say WebKit to include all WebKit based browsers) looks like FireFox. These people should not be in the industry because this problem should not exist in the industry.
(On a side note, this was a problem for Javascript, and the solution has been to build frameworks so that one isn't working directly with the browser implementations themselves. I haven't done the work to try and understand if there are CSS frameworks which mimic this, but please let me know if there are)
My specific problem was probably a bit of an extreme case. I often wonder when doing this work if there is a best practices to all of this, and if I'm just missing it. I've often made my way over to QuirksMode to see, but I've found that it's often non-comital at best. But, back to the case at hand!
I was working on our new Platform page, and we were adding a call to action button (the Getting Started button that you see on the right hand side of the page). I have the image above it laid out in its own <div>, and I thought that I could put the call to action button underneath it, add appropriate padding, and the two columns which make up the content section of the page would be all lined up. Result...
-
- Safari -> Worked as expected
-
- IE -> Just needed to fix up the padding in the IE only stylesheet, and things were good to go
-
- FireFox -> Not playing at all
Now that's a surprise! I think the first thing that I needed to change was to set the image width and height explicitly instead of in the CSS selector. This helped things in IE, but ended up changing nothing for FireFox. Safari saw no difference. The irony of it all was that there's no such thing as a FireFox specific stylesheet in our ecosystem.
I'm sure that if we were to do browser detection and build out a full HTML+CSS site, then we could do have a FireFox specific stylesheet for these nuances.
Nothing I tried using a two column layout worked. I finally ended up taking out the two buttons from the bottom of the content section, and creating a footer <div> which aligned the two buttons as we wanted. This was the cross-browser implementation that finally worked, but either my lack of knowledge or the quirks of an imperfect system really drove me batty on this one.
Fighting Java Ant… Setting params in a foreach loop
It's really frustrating to me that doing something ever so slightly differently leads to such drastically different results when dealing with software. It's true that software engineers (if you're curious about the treatment of the word engineer, then just call me on TokBox me and I'll explain) tend to be the harshest critics of software, and that it's hard to impress someone who thinks that they know how to do it better. Every software engineer thinks that they know how to do it better.
With that disclaimer, I want to complain a bit about some behavior that I found in working with Ant.
I don't know how to do Ant better than the creators of Ant have. It's not my favorite tool, but if I had to use makefiles, then I would stop developing code. I don't think whether I use hardtabs or softtabs should determine the validity of my code. That, however, is a different rant. However, I was very surprised to find that when using the <foreach> tag in an Ant script, that it doesn't inherit the properties that have been set so far. Instead, you have to expressly define what properties to pass into the <foreach> tag. As an example:
target: buildinfo
<property name="tokbox.build.num" value="${current.time}"/>
target: getcssfiles
<foreach target="compile-css" param="the_file">
<path>
<fileset dir="${localedir}">
<include name="*.css"/>
</fileset>
</path>
</foreach>
The <foreach> loop doesn't know that the tokbox.build.num property exists. Every other target does, but the <foreach> doesn't. However, if I were to add:
<param name="tokbox.build.num" value="${tokbox.build.num}" />
into my <foreach> loop, then it not only knows the build number, but everything builds! The final code ends up looking like this:
<foreach target="compile-css" param="the_file">
<param name="tokbox.build.num" value="${tokbox.build.num}" />
<path>
<fileset dir="${localedir}">
<include name="*.css"/>
</fileset>
</path>
</foreach>
Memories… from King Tut
Today I went to the King Tut exhibit at the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. Just walking through the ten rooms that they set up really took me to another place and time. Clearly, the exhibit itself takes you back over 3000 years, and gives you that glimpse into a world that's nothing like the one we live in today.
It left me with so many questions. What was it like to be poor in a world where the pharaohs, and I'm assuming the rich, had so much wealth? Was the middle class, if there was one, just enabling the wealthy? How does an economy react to as much wealth as was in Tut's tomb being effectively destroyed when the pharaoh dies? Have we really advanced as much as we often claim in technology, art, culture?
(As an aside, having just written those questions down, it makes me realize that there are a lot of things that probably don't change at all...)
On a personal level however, it took me back to elementary school. I was fascinated with Egyptology in third grade. I would actually skip recess to have a chance to go the library, and try to find one more book to read about that world which fascinated me so much. I don't think I was as passionate about anything in my life to this day as I was about becoming an archaeologist when I was in elementary school.
Remembering that really has me questioning a lot of things all of a sudden. I know that I'm good at what I do today, and that makes me very happy.
However, should I have gone after that dream? Would I have been good at it? I'd still be in school, and I definitely would not have gone to NC State. I would not have met James or Matt who are my future co-founders in waiting. I'm not sure where I would have ended up, but I do know that it would have been doing something that I loved.
I ended up asking myself, and my brother the Philosophy major, do we need to fail many more times than we succeed to say that we've even tried.
I don't know what the answer is today, but I'm going to work through it a bit in my head, and see if I can come back and answer the question. In the meantime, please feel free to share.
Making a wish
Tuesday night was Kadir Gecesi, and I asked my co-workers to join me in fasting that day. Kadir Gecesi was the one psuedo-religious/cultural event that we celebrated as children. One prayed that night, and whatever was wished for would be granted (or so the story goes according to my mom). I thought the fun idea of earning a wish for fasting was a good premise for sharing Ramadan with the team.
There are two things that I think one day of fasting teaches a person.
The first is that the body is truly a spectacular machine, and that we haven't come even close to replicating what was created regardless of the technology we discover and innovate.
The second is that the individual is unbelievably capable of things that he always doubted about himself.
Is it tough to skip that afternoon coffee? Yes, but two of my friends did just that. What about not drinking all day?
The Big Deal himself texted me four or five times about not being able to drink, but on his first day at a new job, he pulled it off, and I bet he even looked good doing it.
And as the time ticked closer and closer to 7:18pm (sunset in San Francisco), the group collectively came together to support each other, and to fill those last minutes, which often seem to last for hours, with camaraderie and laughter.
And so, I realized that I didn't need to wait for Kadir Gecesi to make my wish. If everyone were as lucky as I feel I have been to have people around me who love me this much, then the world would truly be a better place. It's amazing what giving up on food and water for a day can teach a person about how full their life really is.
College Football – Week 3
Join the weekly picks group at:
Link: http://football.fantasysports.yahoo.com/college
Group #: 28253
Password: Call me on TokBox to find out at http://www.tokbox.com/melih