Twitter: Having a Loud Conversation

Many years ago, Dave introduced me to Twitter. Dave is amazingly astute in his ability to spot the trends in the techie world. He told me about Flickr before it was cool, and then Twitter way before it was cool.

I have to admit, I didn't get Twitter. Why on Earth would I tweet about whatever I'm doing. Twitter, honestly, didn't really take off until celebs like Shaq and Ashton Kutcher discovered it was a way to get media attention without going directly to the media.

But that doesn't explain its appeal to the average Joe. The fact of the matter is this. Today's generation of kids, that is, generation Y, the millenial generation, has a "pay attention to me" mentality. 1984 posited a world where "Big Brother" spied your every move under the presumption that you, average citizen, had something to hide and valued that thing you called privacy.

George Orwell might be shocked to see how many people would give their privacy up for a bit of attention. But then, he was a writer who needed attention to get paid, so maybe he could relate.

For non-celebs, Twitter is a conversation in a restaurant, where you're the loudest table in the building. Hi, xxx, how's it going, as you yell to the next table. It's as much name-dropping as well. Sometimes it's a matter of who you tweet to, and who will respond that matters. I've tweeted to folks who have "blocked" me because I'm not cool enough. All in a day's work. All in a day's work!

The point is: why have these public conversations? It's a bit self-indulgent and I say that even as I do it myself. I tweet in the hopes that some random minor celeb way notice and respond. I am that groupie that screams when Justin B brushes his hands through his hair (does he even do this? Not a groupie, I assure you).

People criticize tweeters as having boring lives not worth reading about, but it is a cry from the unattended, who want, so very desperately, to be celebs too.

Rewatching "The History Boys"

I just watched "The History Boys" on television. There are, I suppose, quite a few flaws in the film. The central conceit, that a portly history teacher with a fondness for giving rides on his motorcycles to his male students and then reaching for a grope during opportune moments, with the grudging acceptance of the boys might be offensive. A reviewer has noted what would happen if it had been an all-girls school. Would there not be outrage?

The eponymous "history boys" from which the film gets its names are from a British boarding school of all-male students. It appears to be 1980s England. The headmaster, balding and unimaginative, has one goal in mind, which is to get as many boys into Oxbridge as possible, and to this end, he's hired Irwin, himself an Oxford man, to coach the boys into writing clever essays that will draw the attention of the readers that admit these men into higher education.

The previous time or times I watched this, I was not teaching, so I didn't think of the film from a teacher's perspective. There is a strong streak of idealism in the film. The kids, with perhaps the exception of the jockish Rudge, all seem committed to their studies. In discussions, they challenge the teachers. When Irwin, played by Stephen Campbell Moore, shows up, he offers an alternative view of history than Hector.

Hector is the idealist. He wants students engaged in history because he has a passion for literature. He finds truth in the fiction stories of the great masters. But, he also doesn't want the reverence to literature to overwhelm the students with too great a level of respect. So, he has the students singing songs from musicals and watching classic movies, to make those stories, mass-appealing as they may be, as relevant as the classics.

Irwin, by contrast, is the pragmatist. He sees admission as a game. While his students are technically proficient--they know their history backwards and forwards, their essays are fact-filled and parrot back the books they've read. He challenges them to bring an unusual perspective, to make the essays interesting. The history boys seem keen on this, even as Hector bristles at the notion of history as game.

Mrs. Lintott provides the female voice of reason, counterbalancing the foibles of Hector who, despite his love of teaching, can't seem to abandon his infatuation for his students, with one notable exception.

If the movie uses Dakin as the ultra-hip guy who sleeps with secretaries and seems more than plenty bi-curious, it is Posner, the gay Jewish geek, who is the moral center of the film. Posner knows he has a crush on Dakin, and even Dakin knows this too. Dakin's a bit too cool to get involved, and he feels Posner is a bit too young.

There are perhaps three key scenes in the film. First, Posner has a discussion with Irwin and says that he is homosexual and that he has a crush on Dakin and he knows it can't be returned. In a way, this confession is about Posner, but it is also about Irwin. Irwin wants to sympathize, but he's afraid to reveal who he truly is to Posner, mostly out of deference to the teacher-student relationship. Posner has another discussion with Hector about a story he's read and Hector tells him that novels are compelling because sometimes you have a feeling, one you think is completely personal, and realize that such a feeling is there in written word by a man you've never met, and perhaps by someone long since dead.

Another key scene is Irwin and Hector talking in the hallway shortly after Hector has been told he's being let go because of his indiscretions. Indeed, Mrs. Lintott seems to feel that those indiscretions, as poor judgment as they may be, are perhaps not as severe as they could be, that as a teacher that cares about what he teaches, his contributions to a student's development more than offsets bad behavior. Hector understands that Irwin himself is attracted to the boys and even as the boys think of Irwin as cooler, he advises Irwin to restrain himself, in particular, in his infatuation with Dakin.

To up the ante, Dakin wants to fool around with Irwin, especially after he has found out (like many of his classmates) that he's going to a top-notch college. It's his way of saying thanks. Irwin is uncomfortable at the advances, and eventually gives in to the idea of meeting Dakin. This discomfort is well-acted even if the situation is contrived, but it does touch on potential situations a teacher might find him/herself.

I'll quickly go over the other guys. Akhtar is an Indian Muslim. His character is not fleshed out that much and his inclusion probably says as much about modern British society's diversity than anything else. James Corden plays portly Timms, but is also a character that isn't that well-developed. He's there as the token big guy. Apparently, the actor has gone on to be in a successful British sitcom.

Russell Tovey plays Rudge, the athlete. In a way, his view is the most honest. He doesn't care for book learning at all, despite being in a prep school. He plays the game somewhat, but thinks it's a waste of time. He dislikes the guile needed, and just wants to play sports.

Andrew Knott plays Lockwood, who is not given much of a personality, and is there, one imagines, to be good looking. One other character is the token African Brit, and like Akhtar, doesn't have that much of a personality.

Jamie Parker plays Scripps. He's the Catholic, and is considered a bit of a cipher by best friend, Dakin, who wonders what Scripps does with all this religion. It does seem the writing is a touch lazy for Scripps, and his Catholicism is played, if not for laughs, than not entirely seriously either. His religion is a novelty to Dakin and the film treats it as such.

The two boys that matter most are Dakin and Posner. Dakin, confident and outgoing, ambitious and willing to take chances, and Posner, scared and timid, not sure how to deal with his sexuality, and having a hopeless crush on Dakin. Interestingly enough, Hector never gives Posner a ride, the one guy who might truly be interested in Hector's advances, while the others consider his advances more a nuisance. Hector probably senses how conflicted Posner is and doesn't want the aftermath of any encounter.

The accident that ends the movie is something of a convenience. Because Hector takes Irwin for a bike ride, one that ends in Hector's death and Irwin's injury, Irwin and Dakin never get together for Dakin to "thank" Irwin.

If the movie works, it works at many levels. From a teacher's perspective, it's the total engagement of the students. So often, students are disengaged. They wonder why they are in classes, and they are unable to formulate good questions, take decisive stances. It's a level of maturity few students, even after four years, ever reach. To find such precocity as the students in this film must make teachers giddily happy, even as they recognize the fantasy aspects.

When Hector is going to be let go, he wants to make an announcement to his class, but the boys are trying to be clever and Hector is unable to get his pending firing out in words, and breaks down and cries, realizing the only thing he truly cared about--teaching, was going to be taken away from him. Mrs. Lintott is sympathetic. She sees the headmaster as a bean-counter, one who only worries about placements and test scores, and not about educating the person.

Although the film isn't strictly about Posner, his story is the link between Hector, Irwin, and the history boys. All three are gay. All three find hurt as they suppress their feelings (in a way, the film is old-fashioned, never seeming to take the viable stance that these people might find someone who is also gay to make them happy), infatuated by straight guys, and never able to find a relationship that works.

Of all the history boys, he is most like Hector, and becomes a teacher. And like Hector, he is fond of the boys he teaches, but he restrains himself, and as much as it hurts, he says he's not unhappy either. In a way, the film touches two aspects of teaching. One is the act of teaching itself, the inspiration and engagement to intellectual pursuits, and one is more the seedy underside, the idea that a teacher is in a position of respect and that students are at a challenging time in their lives and may be victims of untoward advances.

For its variety of flaws, so much of the film resonates, from its decidedly too-brainy kids, to the different views of how to teach students, to that idyllic time in life somewhere between high school and college where students are only asked to hang out and learn, and the responsibilities of a job seem so far away.

The Reality of The Social Network

When it comes to making a movie, film makers have some idea of what makes a movie work. They need drama, that is, they need tension. They need easy-to-understand motivations. They don't need things that are highly technical or highly abstruse. Such things would only put the audience to sleep with nary a sense of the deep issues that they are completely missing.

Facebook started with Mark Zuckerberg, but the reality is, like most endeavors, it's too tough to write code on your own. As prolific as Zuckerberg might be, he can only code so fast, and he eventually needs a team that he can trust to do things. The story of Dustin Moskovitz (shown in the picture) and Chris Hughes are untold because, frankly, it's more interesting to make this the story of a handful of people.

Thus, Eduardo Saverin, the business guy, is the guy that is the foil for Mark. Saverin is the conscious of the film, and yet, the film posits that he lacks the vision to make Facebook as successful as it could be, and eventually, either Zuckerberg or Parker or both chose to exclude Saverin (although apparently through lawsuits, he still owns a reasonable chunk of Facebook).

What about Moskovitz and Hughes? What about the other technical folks that were part of Facebook? How did Zuckerberg interact with them? Did they have a sense this could be big? Did they know what it would take to make Facebook big? What did they have that, say, MySpace didn't have? Why did it work? Ultimately, such questions are sidestepped because the answers are perhaps not so pat, not so simple. Was the success of Facebook due to its technical prowess, or was it due to something simpler? Perhaps having a good idea at the right time?

Facebook started a bit like GMail. It ran on exclusivity. But exclusivity isn't be enough. Zuckerberg had created other sites at Harvard and those sites would not have taken off the way Facebook did.

You need a reason to visit the site whether you are exclusive or not. It may be enough to bait the first few users, but honestly, that's far from enough. The site has to be good enough to keep folks coming back over and over. To be fair, many websites could have been great had they had enough users. They could have made great decisions, had there been enough people to start it up, and yet, there wasn't enough. Maybe HarvardConnection (or ConnectU) would have been great. But it's highly possible it would have fizzled.

The Social Network cared primarily about the relationship of Zuckerberg and Saverin and also to the Winklevoss twins (and Narendra). The technical team behind Facebook was mostly pushed aside because, as movie makers, Fincher and Sorkin would have been hard-pressed to make that side of the story compelling. And, did the folks who invented Facebook really understand what made it different and what made it work? Perhaps they did.

To me, the reason it worked was because it flipped the home page around. Instead of the home page being about you, it was about your friends. You could have 100 friends, but all you need is 3-5 really active friends to keep you coming back to Facebook. Once you could add comments or look at your friends pictures or what have you, you have motivation to keep coming back. If it was just about you, you would get bored of yourself. Other sites like MySpace failed to make it easy to notify you when your friends updated anything. It was a huge labor to find out what your friends were up to. And they took advantage of microblogging since real blogging was far too time-consuming.

So while I enjoyed the film, and enjoyed how Fincher/Sorkin told the tale, I know that it misses on a lot of the technical aspects that would have made it more interesting to me personally.

Review: The Social Network

When I first heard about The Social Network, I didn't think much of it. The commercial didn't seem that good. I knew almost nothing of Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook. What little I knew was something about how Zuckerberg "stole" Facebook from the original creators and made a fortune. I had thought he had been the savvy business type, a Steve Jobs that took over from lowly Steve Wozniak.

But then I heard David Fincher directed the film and Aaron Sorkin wrote the screenplay. David Fincher has been a notable director, even if his name is not as widely known as, say, Steven Spielberg. Until Fincher directed his first feature, he was best known as one of the directors of Madonna's video.

Fincher got his start in that incubator of talent: the Aliens films. The first had been directed by Ridley Scott, known for his visual style. The second was a hyper-kinetic space romp directed by James Cameron. Fincher helmed the third film and Jean-Pierre Jeunet did the fourth (he also did Amelie). Fincher got notoriety in that most gruesome of cop buddy movies: Se7en about a serial killer who murders based on the seven deadly sins.

Fincher went on to direct other movies like The Game, Panic Room, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and Zodiac. Fincher is a technician, a director whose cool precision sometimes draws attention to itself. There is a certain detachment, a little like watching a Kubrick film, although Fincher seems more assured in how he wants a scene to look.

I found it a bit puzzling what would draw Fincher to this story. It doesn't seem to follow his usual brand of film, whatever that may be. This is a story of geeks that develop a social networking site that takes over the world.

The story begins at Harvard where Zuckerberg is a computer science major. The opening scene, which is made up for dramatic effect, tries to set the tone for the entire film. In it, Zuckerberg is telling his girlfriend that he wants to join one of the elite houses at Harvard. It helps to know something about how Harvard works.

Harvard, Princeton, and Yale (I believe) have a house system. Typically, students enter their first year in the dorms, then they join a house where they will stay their remaining years. A house is perhaps more akin to Harry Potter's house of Griffyndor than, say, a fraternity. The house is co-ed and serves as residence, dining hall, and communal gathering place.

Beyond this basic living structure, there are also "final clubs" which are social clubs with eight all-male clubs and five all-female clubs. The all-male final clubs have been around for over a hundred years.

Zuckerberg wants to join such a club and tells his plan to his girlfriend. She seems intelligent. Both trade verbal jabs courtesy of Aaron Sorkin until it's revealed that this girlfriend goes to Boston University, and Zuckerberg has ambitions to work his way up the social hierarchy. He's dumped when she feels it's too much of a burden being his girlfriend and that he's basically an asshole.

Without this opening exchange, it's hard to read much into Jesse Eisenberg's portrayal of Zuckerberg. Looking much like Michael Cera, he lacks Cera's huggable loser quality, but has enough of his geek to make it plausible that this guy could be the programming genius that starts Facebook.

Indeed, Eisenberg's face rarely registers any emotions. He never seems ecstatic, nor sad. His emotions are expressed more through words and he seems a bit emotionally detached, perhaps a bit of Asperger's, and yet, Zuckerberg is ambitious.

Although Facebook's creation is the result of computer programming, Fincher and Sorkin only touch on that aspect. They find enough computer consultants to keep certain parts reasonably accurate. Zuckerberg is shown blogging on LiveJournal. You can see his screen is filled with HTML, although of the most rudimentary sort. LiveJournal likely has a way to edit raw HTML, but most people don't use it (because they don't understand it), and one wonders if Zuckerberg would have edited raw HTML, because there's a bit of tedium to it. Even so, there's some accuracy to this.

There is some historical research that was done to create some of the sense of the early 2000s. I bought my first Mac around 2001 or so. The earliest power cords were round and glowed at the connection, unlike the new magnetic version that allows the cord to slip off without breaking. They were able to find a Mac circa that era in the opening scene when Sean Parker is introduced (who is momentarily unrecognizable, despite being played by Justin Timberlake).

At one point, Zuckerberg says that he's going to fire up emacs and edit the Perl code, and it does indeed look like Perl code, at least, from a cursory glance. Emacs is one of two Unix text editors in wide use (the other being vi or its successor, vim). Zuckerberg talks about keeping the servers up as well.

To show some of Zuckerberg's genius, he is shown sitting in a computer hardware course as the teacher is explaining details of how paging is done though the quantities he uses (256 bytes for a page) seems small. To increase the melodrama, the class is only 15-20 students seated in an auditorium meant for 100. As Zuckerberg leaves the class early to deal with some business related issue, the teacher notes that many students have gave up on the course. As Zuckerberg leaves, he identifies bits of a status register. The teacher makes an inane comment "That's correct--do you see how he got this?", when the answer is "he memorized it". There was nothing to infer. The status register was the way it was defined by the person or people who designed it.

Since this is a plot-driven story, there is a need to prune away enough characters that might otherwise distract from the storyline. There are roughly four main characters other than Zuckerberg. Although Zuckerberg is an emotional cipher, the everyman that we're meant to relate to is his best friend, Eduardo Saverin, who provides the money to help Zuckerberg, but is put down, even as he makes inroads to join one of the "final club", Phoenix. Saverin is shown as a big supporter of Zuckerberg, and is distrustful of Sean Parker, inventor of Napster, who eventually helps Zuckerberg grow Facebook.

There is a kind of genius picking Justin Timberlake to play Sean Parker. Timberlake, a ex boy-band pop singing sensation, has shown some acting chops. He must have liked the idea of playing an uber geek, but one reason Timberlake may have been chosen is because of his star persona. He can then play Sean Parker not only as a geek, but a cool savvy coding rock star, someone that Zuckerberg becomes enamored of. Perhaps echoing Wall Street (a sequel came out recently too), Zuckerberg must pick between the guy who takes him places or his best friend, and while Zuckerberg does side with Parker, the film leaves it ambiguous about his final feelings to Saverin.

The other two main characters are the Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler, both played by Armie Hammer. They look something like Nordic gods, and yet Sorkin/Fincher do something clever. Since they are both at Harvard, they are made out to be pretty smart guys (at least business wise). They work with Divya Narendra (played by director Anthony Minghella's son who does not seem to be Indian). Furthermore, the brothers act differently. The leader (I guess Cameron) is more worried about appearances and seems the more patient of the two, and the other is more impulsive, similar to Divya.

Sorkin, in particular, has some fun about the two being twins, making them more "twin-like", i.e., about how they mention they are brothers, almost as if the twins in the second Matrix films had intelligent dialogue.

Roger Ebert, in his review, notes that nearly all the women (except the girlfriend at the beginning) are Asian. Although Zuckerberg is almost seen as being uninterested in women (and for dramatic purposes, he is shown trying to friend the girl that dumped him at the start of the film), his to-be-wife appears as two of the groupie Asian girls that make out with Eduardo and Mark. Fincher uses indirect cues to get his idea across. Zuckerberg is showing wearing the Adidas flip flops into the next stall over from Eduardo, the same one shown during the hearings that interweave through the entire film.

Rather than show Bill Gates in focus, he is shown blurred, wearing a sweater, and a voice impersonator does the talking so unless you're paying attention, you might not know that it's Bill Gates being portrayed (although it's mentioned in a subsequent scene).

Fincher knows he has some difficult material to try to dramatize, and to this effect, he falls on an interesting crutch: music. Many scenes have music over it to add drama to the situation. Fincher also adds tension by cross-cutting time frames, from a hearing, and going back historically.

Fincher employs tilt-shift in a key crew scene, one where the Winklevoss team starts to close on the winning boat, but ends up short. This is a metaphor for how close these jocks came to perhaps creating the next Facebook (though probably not really).

Ultimately, although there are a lot of geek aspects to The Social Network, it is about the desire to be a mover and a shaker in the world, and not about why Facebook ultimately worked.

There are two or three theories that are posited in the film. The Winklevosses mention the first reason: the Harvard name makes the desirability of the social network rather high. Second, there's the idea of putting the social status (single, etc) on. The one real reason isn't given. Facebook inverted what the home page was about.

In LiveJournal, each person's home page is their blog. In Facebook, the home page is basically a feed of all your friends. What keeps you coming back to Facebook isn't what you are doing, it's what your friends are doing. It seems obvious, but many social networking sites didn't get that. To be fair, Facebook looks sleek and clean and not the dirty, gaudy clutter of MySpace.

There are two aspects of Facebook that The Social Network avoids. It doesn't try to explain why Facebook is so addictive. It merely states that it is. It also doesn't get into the group that helped create Facebook. Most of the coders are only in the background. There is a competition (that most likely never existed) where coders must take shots as they try to hack in somewhere.

Even the parties that are portrayed are sexier than reality, done to jazz up the reality that was. We understand, as movie goers, that drama is amped so that viewers don't get bogged down by the day to day mundane details that reflect reality. Zuckerberg is likely a far more personable person than the Eisenberg potrayal, but that isn't seem to be a problem for me.

Though the story is about Zuckerberg, it's Saverin we come to sympathize with. Zuckerberg is more enigmatic. In the end, he seems to worry if he is an asshole. There are few women in the film with anything more than a cursory personality. One is the lawyer that is shown to be on Zuckerberg's side. She reassures him that he is not an asshole, though he seems to be trying hard to be one.

As Zuckerberg stares as the business card that Parker helped him craft "I'm the CEO, bitch", he realizes that Parker is a bad influence and being the CEO, bitch, means he is ultimately responsible for Facebook's reputation. Saverin may have been right, but Parker was, in his way, also right.

The film focuses on the drama of how one person or a small group of people took ambitious steps to work to the most successful social network, and it's in this human drama that the film works, because it's hard to mine drama out of algorithms and code and to explain why social networking was so compelling to so many people.

No Friends for Old Men

So here's the deal. Most of us work because, well, everything runs on money. You want food? I guess you could grow your own, but that takes a lot of planning. So you spend money and you get food. Need a place to stay because, well, it's hard to just go out in the woods and just live unless you know what you are doing. And the place costs, yes, money.

Then, presuming you live in a society that produces goods and advertises such goods, you begin to covet. I want this, and I want that. And all that costs, yes, money.

For many folks, this money comes in a 9-to-5 job. Of course, there's no such thing as a 9 to 5 job anymore. With jobs occasionally scarce, the idea is work harder for more hours for the same pay. At least you have a job. But the point is, you spend 8 hours a day at work.

How much time does that leave? OK, let's say you have no kids because that's going to take a chunk of time out of your life. Maybe you need to be up by 7:30, wake up, shower, eat, assuming you want breakfast, and then do the dreaded commute. You live in a place that's affordable and work in a place that's not. So you spend an hour getting to work and an hour getting back from work. So maybe 3.5 hours just dealing with the logistics of getting to and fro.

So maybe you're back by 6, and then you have to think about cooking, or perhaps you eat out, or perhaps do a microwave dinner. Maybe you have a significant other. That leaves you 4-5 hours to spend time with them, which isn't insignificant, but is less than the time you were at work.

And perhaps, if you're not a complete recluse, you make friends at work. Humans are a social people, and we are at our most social when we are with other people. The awkwardness of not talking to people when you're around people is so overwhelming that we talk.

But are these really your friends? How much would you talk to these people outside of work? If I were to point out a work colleague, would you say "Yeah, he's a nice guy, friendly". Let's say you say that. Then, I ask, "do you talk to him outside of work". And you say "no". I ask "why not". And you say "I don't know. I guess I'm not that interested. Besides, he's married. Why would he talk to me?".

I was reminded that money makes "friends" of many people. Lately, in my respite between occupations, I've been taking tennis lessons. The guy who runs the company texts me, mostly because I'm worth revenue to his company. He wants to be nice. He wants to be helpful. He's checking up on how I'm doing. Were there not money tied to this situation, he would have no reason to make this effort. Business, you see, makes people friendly.

There's one peculiar exception that plays on the desire to communicate that is separate from work. It's college. If you choose to stay in dormitories, you are now surrounded by many people of a similar socio-economic status. And many dorms encourage roommates. Living with others compels you to talk to them, and usually, people will pick friends or at least make friends with those near them.

How often do people make friends because they just happened to be assigned to the same dormitory? Quite often. That's because it's awkward to go to a random dorm, hang out, just to meet people from that dorm. People want you to be there with a reason. That's why you talk to people at work, and not to people at some other workplace (though, I have seen some people show enough cojones to do just that, mostly because they caught sight of a pretty lass that they wanted to talk up).

As much as people excel in communication when in proximity to dormmates or to co-workers, they fare poorly once distance is added.

Ask yourself who you talk to most? For most folks, it might be a spouse, or a significant other, and then, there's your parents. For as much as you may like or dislike your parents, there's some obligation to talk to them. They have experience in the world. They spent time raising you. You feel bad not talking to them.

Short of folks who hate their parents, this is a pretty normal. No complaints, right?

So now make a list of people you consider to be your friends. Some live near you, and so you could, in principle, go out and do things. Some are just far enough away that getting together is a bit of a hassle. Some are too far away, so the only way to communicate is to use technology.

You would think technology would be wonderful. Phone, texting, IM, email. And yet, there are plenty of people who hate this. And the etiquette works out that you can ignore people using any of those formats. Before answering machines came around, when the phone rang, you picked it up. After the answering machine came around, you'd have phone spammers and then you didn't want to pick up the phone.

Phone spammers ruined the innocence of the phone. But once you had an answering machine, you could let the machine record the message and you could see who it was. And, of course, now that many people have cell phones, you get caller ID and can figure out, for the most part, who is calling you.

So now you see who calls you and you can decide "I don't want to talk to them". Email is pretty much the same. IM likewise. Indeed, the only awkward refusal is face to face. If I come up to you and say "hi", it would be rude of you to ignore me. But every other technological way to communicate and you can feel free to ignore me.

The primary reason this has happened is because face-to-face interaction involves recognizing what the other person is doing. If they're busy, then maybe you don't interact. And there is a limited interaction. You can't have 10 people talk to you at once in person, but on IM, you could. On IM, you can't see what the other person is doing. Maybe they're watching a movie. Maybe they are listening to music. Maybe they are talking to another friend.

So back to your list of friends. How many do you keep in regular contact? How much time do you spend a week? Is the answer zero? Why? Why do you have co-workers you'd never spend time outside of work and spend a non-trivial amount of time with them, but spend zero time with those you consider your friends?

I suppose the answer is partly convenience and partly embarrassment. Some folks don't like to talk. That's it. They'll hang out with you at a movie, or a concert, at some location where there's not much interaction, but to them, that's doing something. But if you have to talk, just talk, well, that doesn't feel right, and so it doesn't happen.

Part of it is embarrassment. What would you talk about? Somehow these questions don't seem to come up when you bump into these folks in real life, and yet, on a phone or on IM, the words become scarce. People treat the phone as a planning device. When do you want to meet? Can I do something for you? And so forth.

So why does this happen? Do you feel bad that the only people you talk to, outside of a handful of people, are your coworkers? We say we value our friends, but do we?

Almost Famous

I'm watching bits and pieces of Almost Famous, the semi auto-biography of direction, Cameron Crowe. Crowe was a teenager who wrote for Rolling Stone. I wonder what he thought when they picked Patrick Fugit to play himself.

One realizes that acting is, well, acting. It's not real. When you act, it's an idealization of real life, the emotions are bigger. Fugit, alas, can't really act. It doesn't kill the film, but you realize he doesn't have the chops to pull it off. I read somewhere that Crowe had to improvise.

Fugit has this wide-eyed look about him, and lacks the emotional maturity and range to pull of someone that is, by all accounts, a prodigy (a writing prodigy, to be sure).

Kate Hudson pretty much acts circles around him, though her role is to be some idealized female, so it's really important that she can act and it's less of a problem that Fugit looks mostly googly-eyed throughout.

That is all.

Telugu Woman

American woman, stay away from me
American woman, mama let me be
Don’t come hangin’ around my door
I don’t wanna see your face no more


I've heard the song American Woman for a while but never really paid attention to the lyrics. I guess it's about a stalker woman and a guy who wants this woman out of her life. For some reason, this song came to mind when I wanted to title this blog.

Yesterday, I went to the bank. I have several bank accounts, but this is one of those accounts I rarely use, and yet I have enough money residing there that it's always a bit of a pain that I have to deal with this account. Each year, I forget I have this account and I get locked out. Each year, I make a trek to re-open the account at a local branch near my old workplace.

I decided I wanted to pull most of my money from this account and went down to the bank to close out several other accounts and consolidate this account into one. I had to go down to the branch office to make this happen.

As it turns out, the branch office is aimed at Asians, mostly Chinese folks. I talked to one guy, and he showed me my accounts. He told me to talk to another woman who would take care of the account consolidation and closing down of unwanted accounts. After that was done, I still had one issue. I couldn't log into my account online.

The woman that had helped me said that there was a line (well, one other person) and couldn't help me. I was told to go back to the original guy to help out. But, he was busy too. There was an Indian woman beside him that said she could help me, so I went to her office.

As she was helping me get my online account, I asked her if she knew any Hindi. Hindi is the common language of India, but many don't speak the language. She said she spoke Telugu.

Telugu!

I knew that language. Ravi, who used to work at our company, and Vijay, both spoke Telugu. This is a language spoken in Andhra Pradesh in south India. AP (as it's called in short) is known for its spicy cuisine and its Hyderabadi biryani. Hyderabad is the capital of the state and biryani is a rice dish made with meat, typically, chicken.

Like many states in India, AP has its own film industry. Everyone has heard of Bollywood, but that refers to "Bombay Hollywood". Bombay (also called Mumbai) is in the state of Maharashtra where Hindi is mostly spoken. Although it's the biggest film industry, many other states produce films too, including AP, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala.

Each state has its own superstar, an actor (sometimes actors) so famous that they are living legends. The US hasn't had stars like this since Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. The death of a superstar is cause for national mourning. In Bollywood, that star is Amitabh Bachchan, though he is now something of an elder statesman. In Tamil Nadu, it's Rajnikanth. In Andhra Pradesh, it's Chiranjeevi.

South Indian films are often filled with implausible action scene, such as this short clip from a much longer chase scene:



The star on the horse is Chiranjeevi from AP.

I talked to the woman for 20-30 minutes discussing Indian culture. She seemed unusually happy to talk with me, and it was a nice diverting way to spend the afternoon taking care of errands.

Friends and Coworkers

Wow, I haven't blogged here in quite a while, so for those still following, hi again. I have been spending my time doing tennis blogging and that has taken a bit of my time.

I want you to think about the following. Do you have an SO (significant other)? Do you have family? Do you have friends? Do you have coworkers?

Assuming you are monogamous, you have one SO. Now, pick 3 members of your family. Let's say, your parents, and a sibling. Pick 3 of your closest friends. Pick 3 coworkers.

Ask yourself how often you talk to your SO. Presumably, being your SO, this answer is a lot. You probably see or talk to your SO every day, perhaps for at least an hour.

Now, your coworkers. You might say "I have a job to do, so I have to talk to my coworkers". That might be an hour a day spread over the workday.

Now, your family. If you're reasonably close to your family, you probably talk to them once a week, and if not so close, but not completely alienated, you probably talk once a month. If your family is close to your distant relatives, even those you may not particularly care for, you may be obligated to see them and engage in small talk.

Now, your friends. How you answer depends, I suspect, very much on gender and your personality. In other words, if you are an introverted guy, this introversion, plus a sense of male pride (guys need to be independent) means as close as you may be with your friends, you might not actually keep in close contact at all.

This begs the question. How did you become close friends? One answer, which isn't surprising, is that you went to college with your friends, and you either studied with them, or you lived on campus, and arranged to live with your friends. Your living arrangements forced you to hang out with your friends, which forced your interaction level to be quite high. If your friends are even a few minutes away living in a dorm just over there, your interaction may go way down.

Now, there are those addicted to chat, and such interactions are more than likely, of the girl/guy variety. But I know quite a few people that dislike chat, dislike phone interaction, dislike email. All they like is interpersonal interactions. You can have a long engaging conversation face-to-face that lasts hours, but you'll be hard-pressed to duplicate such interactions in IM. There's just too much typing, thus too much work. And IM always seems like an interruption. You're trying to read a news article, or watch a funny cat video, or heaven forbid, get some work done.

In real life, you know you are talking to a person by themselves. They aren't engaged in something else, or at the very least, they are pausing it for your behalf. When you IM someone, they might be chatting with someone else, or doing any number of other things, and they might be a lot less willing to stop their discussion just to talk to you.

So how does that social dynamic work? You go from hanging out in the dorms where you get to do fun stuff for a period of time every day to ...? Well, once you leave that situation, you might get to everyone doing their own thing. This is one reason many people look to finding a SO to begin with. If your friends, upon going separate ways, won't even bother to talk to you once a week, then how to make up that interaction?

You take a bigger chance and find someone that is committed to being with you that time. Except this kind of relationship is almost always sexual in nature, or has that implication. It seems OK for early teens, bored with life, lacking close relationships to do stuff with their friends: watch movies, eat out, hang out someplace. Some folks are much better at this than others. They value their friendships and invite folks over all the time.

But to invite folks over requires two more skills. First, you should know how to cook. Second, you should be neat. Oh, and third, it helps to like conversation. All of these are skills that a typical geek doesn't have, especially the conversation bit. Even folks that are reasonably neat sometimes place high expectations of neatness on themselves and never feel their place is neat enough, and thus, never have guests over. I know the neatness aspect is a huge problem for me, but I've also hardly been invited to anyone's place.

What about email? I think several things put people off about email. One, the brain seems much more comfortable with the spoken word than the written word. Somehow, there are higher expectations placed on writing than reading. There is also interaction when you speak to someone that makes it feel like a social, human, bonding event.

Although email has become more ubiquitous, and this has lead to people writing short, terse mails akin to text messaging, there's still some pressure by those who fancy themselves writers to write something that is worth reading. Indeed, folks get writer's block and then decide email is a kind of writing and that their lives are a little too boring to read. In the end, no email is sent, and that's kinda sad too.

I've never had a sustained email contact with anyone, well, no more than a few months, which is pretty long in itself. You hear of husbands and wives a hundred years ago who exchanged letters for more than a decade, the experience savored over time. The convenience and speed of email should make that easier than ever, but the convenience and speed of email means there's no need to be that thoughtful. When you had snail mail, and the effort to exchange correspondence was very slow, there was a premium placed on the content put in letters.

I happen to grow up before email and remember sending and receiving the occasional snail mail. There was an expectation for letters to be 2-3 pages long at the very least. I remember my brother sending me many small pages in letters. The thought placed into such letters even over mundane topics was tremendous compared to the lack of thought placed in today's rapid emails.

Recently, a friend began using Google's video chat service. This has the convenience of not having to be installed. True, he has to be motivated to make the "call", but he has done so a few times. The advantage? You can talk! It brings back some of the immediacy of face to face conversation. When you do video chat, you find typing to be a nuisance. Things that you might not have typed, you can quickly ask. I find my brain engaged more in the act of conversation. Things I say, I wouldn't have typed. Why does the brain engage itself in such ways?

Ah, but what about real interaction? I've known some folks that seem to have pretty active social lives. Some of that comes from having roommates. While the notion of roommates is pretty uncommon in the US--everyone wants their own place, it is quite common in India where the inclination of the educated middle class just out of college is to save money. If you ask the recent graduate why they don't live by themselves, they scoff at the idea, exclaiming how expensive it is.

I'd love to see how their salary breaks down and to see whether living by oneself is truly expensive or whether Americans have left themselves to take huge chunks of their salary to living on their own. Perhaps the typical Indian graduate thinks their rent should be no more than 10% of their take-home pay, while Americans plunk down 30% to give themselves independence. I tend to believe it's the second. As an American, we spend too much money on our own housing to give ourselves independence.

I do know some folks that have roommates. Saving money, of course, is one big concern. The second is to have people around, to create a social environment that they may not have had since they were in college. Of course, for every good roommate, there is the potential for bad ones. This is why some folks have multiple roommates, to spread the potential for bad interaction out, and to have allies in case one person is a bad apple.

But such situations seems rare. Extroverts are rare almost by definition. Well, they're rare. They find more solace with doing activities with friends. They look for things to do, get together with friends, and head out. And, given the sexual innuendo that seems to seep in a typical American's life, many of these social occasions are a mix, with guys and girls, but sometimes not. The thing is, only fairly social extroverts seem to have the incentive to go out and do stuff and they seem to mostly hang out with other extroverts.

If I'm making a point, it's that although we are social creatures, there are impasses that prevent people from being social. Conservative cultures like India are culturally more social. There is a premium placed on meeting with people, and even the frowned-upon male-female interaction usually leads to guys doing stuff with guys and girls doing stuff with girls to make up for the lack of dating interaction. The pressure to save money causes guys and girls to live together and add social interaction to their lives. And of course, arranged marriages create that ultimate of connections.

On the other hand, in the US, there is some degree of shame calling people that are merely friends to do things. Many prefer skipping the uncertainty of friendship to the certainty of a relationship. They want several hours of committed time each week, as opposed to and uncertain number of hours with friends. So once that commitment occurs, that reduces the time to meet other people, and they too want to have a commitment. Pretty soon, you have many people in relationships that don't have time to hang out with one another.

Ironically, conservative societies tend to interact better. Why is that? To point to India again, although some couples are more enlightened and look to spend time with each other together sharing common activities, hundreds of years of men and women being segregated with guys doing guy stuff and women doing women stuff have lead to marriages where guys still want to do stuff with other guys and women want to do stuff with other women.

You would think a marriage would mean the guys really don't have time to spend with you, but the commitment deal has already been sealed. I play tennis with some fifty-something guys who seem eager to play tennis every day, meaning they want to spend time away from their wives to hang out with their male friends doing "male" activities. Although it's possible these wives could participate, they seem to avoid these male activities.

On the other hand, those who haven't committed to marriage, i.e., in a dating phase, even in a long-term relationship, feel the commitment of time is there, and spare time should not be willing given up to hang out with friends.

The point is, there's isn't exactly a platonic equivalent of a commitment between friends, which is too bad because I think many people would benefit from regular social interaction outside the workplace.

Early Days of Usenet

Ever since the early days of the Internet which, by the way, predates the invention of the browser by at least a decade, there has been a form of social networking. In the mid to late 1980s and on into the 1990s, that was Usenet. Usenet was a collection of so-called "newsgroups" which weren't so much news as discussion boards.

Now, many sites have discussion boards. They are now ubiquitous throughout the Web. However, Usenet brought them under one umbrella. You would get a newsreader, which was a client-side software tool (text-based, much like working with vi or emacs) and then you'd pick a few newsgroups you were into. Many of them used naming schemes that classified it. Thus "rec" would refer to recreation and might include sports as well as TV shows.

For example, when I first became aware of newsgroups, sometime in the late 1980s, Star Trek: The Next Generation had just started. Needless to say, due to the number of nerds on at Usenet, a far higher percentage then than now, there were plenty of ST:TNG fans (ST:TNG is an acronym for the show). You'd have at least half a dozen reviewers. Names like Vidiot, Michael Rawdon, Atsushi Kanamori, and, of course, Tim Lynch were the authority figures, folks that wrote about each episode, dissected what they liked and didn't like.

And much as geekdom was not simply isolated to computers and Star Trek, there was also a huge fascination with sex. Usenet groups, legitimate ones anyway, went through this approval process. I believe some guy at Purdue approved each group and there were hundreds of such groups. However, there were also groups that some wanted without approval, and they all fell in the "alt" groups, the most famous of which was, alt.sex.

For a long while, alt.sex was a pretty fascinating newsgroup. People would freely ask questions, discuss their own personal experiences. Alternate lifestyles were fascinating. I recall a guy who was married in an open relationship. Both he and his wife would sleep with other men and women, in 2-somes and 3-somes. Their view outside the normal spectrum showed a world few were familiar with.

Due to the relative anonymity of the Internet, several phenomenon that exist to this day showed up. Most common were "flame wars". A flame was an incendiary post meant to take a highly opinionated position and often to criticize someone severely. These arguments were more emotional than persuasive and people easily became incensed by contrary viewpoints.

Why did this happen? Ask yourself who read these newsgroups? Typically, bored geeky guys that were passionate about a particular subject, say, Star Trek. Once you get hundreds of such people, it's not hard to have at least one person have a view that is contrary to the views of many. Atsushi Kanamori, for example, enjoyed Star Trek a great deal, but he found most episodes of TNG to be tripe. He argued why he thought it was that way, but it seemed 2 of every 3 reviews were negative. Fans of the show argued with him about the awesome-ness of the show, but since he reasoned his argument out in a review, he was often better prepared to retort.

And that was a civil discussion.

I used to be involved in a tennis newsgroup. During the height of Steffi Graf and Monica Seles, Seles got stabbed and took nearly 2 years off from the tour. Ardent Seles fans, who were all male, demanded Steffi return all the trophies that she won saying they were tainted because Seles was not there to challenge her for them. To be fair, Seles probably would have won her share of trophies during that period, but in a way, it's no different than if Seles had been injured and returned slowly to the tour.

The point is, even a newsgroup as potentially boring as tennis, was still filled with passionate people with passionate arguments.

What was interesting about this tennis newsgroup, and honestly, a whole host of other newsgroups, some devoted to fairly erudite topics such as artificial intelligence or arcane subjects in math, was its ability to attract passionate people who loved a particular subject matter together with other people of similar interests.

I used to love following tennis, but it was really hard prior to the Internet. If you watched tennis in the day, you could only get coverage for matches between the French Open and the US Open. This typically included some of the US tournaments (then played on clay). It was rare to see even the early hardcourt season played in Miami and Indian Wells even though those matches had been played for years. The Philadelphia Indoors was a major indoor tournament that was rarely covered on TV. Forget the entire European clay court circuit which was barely reported on.

In those days, it was amazing just to get tennis results. Most local papers didn't bother with tennis scores. At the time, the best place to get tennis scores was USA Today. USA Today may have been called "McNewspaper" for its generally cheery and somewhat controversy-free news reporting, but it also had a sports section that covered sports nationwide and internationally.

Believe me, even tennis scores don't begin to adequately cover what happens in tennis, but in those days, if you were into tennis, then tennis scores were better than nothing. You could, in principle, try to track an individual player week to week and see how they did. All you would have is scores since live coverage was out of the question.

The newsgroup, in those days, was primarily devoted to the pro game. Sure, there was the occasional discussion of how to play tennis, but Usenet's medium was primarily text. In the early 1990s, there was no YouTube. The best you could hope for was to post photos, and even back then, digital cameras were rare, and there was no convenient way to produce slow motion video from which to take digital stills.

Tennis instruction wouldn't take off again til about 2007. By then, YouTube had existed a few years, and people were producing high quality tennis audio and video and able to acquire slow motion video of the pros and begin to dissect their shots. Up until then, information about how to play tennis seemed like a deeply held secret among certain tennis coaches and that information was not widely disseminated, not even in the "Dummies" books that were starting to abound.

Anonymity creates a strange social dynamic. On the one hand, people will say critical things in front of others and not fear any repercussion. I used to participate in a college newsgroup about issues affecting colleges. One person was adamant in his hatred of affirmative action claiming it was reverse discrimination. The African Americans (at the time) tended to ignore what he said so there was rarely intelligent discussion. Liberals just assumed affirmative action was right and conservatives assumed it was wrong, and there wasn't much discussion, just heated arguments.

Thus, behind the veil of anonymity, people behave in ways that are outside the norm. On the flip side, anonymity sometimes lead to people being a lot more honest. For example, suppose a person was having an affair, or they were gay, or a whole host of things that would be seen unfavorably if their friends new (they were sexaholics, etc). They could get to a newsgroup and discuss it in relative anonymity being a lot more open knowing they could leave at any time.

Of course, the flip side also held true. If people couldn't see you, then perhaps you could pretend to be someone you're not. If you were 50, you might pretend to be 20, and so forth. All sorts of social behavior that has evolved over time to let us interact mostly peacefully begin to deteriorate when bad behavior doesn't have to be reined in. That beautiful girl? Ask her to remove her clothes? That "ugly" person? Criticize them for being a lardo.

It's perhaps no surprise that many of the behaviors that spontaneously evolved during that time continue to this day. People still flame. People still pretend to be other people. People still are passionate about topics and find others that are similarly passionate. Sociologists may one day look at this period, near to the cusp of a new millennium, and wonder how the nature of the Internet and anonymity lead to the burgeoning of the earliest form of social networking, and how people began to view notions such as honesty and privacy in surprisingly different ways.

Dallas 362 Again

I saw Dallas 362 a few years ago on the positive review of Internet critic, Mike D'Angelo. It was just showing this morning on IFC and I caught the last 20 minutes or so.

If memory serves, the story is about a mother and son, originally from Texas, that move to California. The woman, played by a perhaps impossibly beautiful Kelly Lynch, has become a widower when her husband has died as a bucking horse rider, one of those guys that tries to stay on a horse as long as possible, usually merely seconds, before getting tossed aside. She's moved to be as far away from where this happened as possible.

The son, having been transplanted, doesn't fare particularly well. He gets tangled up with a guy named Dallas who is mixed up with the wrong folks. Perhaps in Dallas, the son (Rusty), sees a kind of father figure, or at least, some masculine role in his life. But perhaps, much like the Charlie Sheen figure in Wall Street, he knows that what he's doing isn't right, and the film depicts how he ends up choosing the right path for himself.

Jeff Goldblum plays, well, himself. Perhaps one reason to cast Kelly Lynch is because she's blond and a bombshell, though with the paucity of characters in the film, no one much pursues her. Goldblum's character is the awkward, geeky, nerdy character he generally plays in most films, but it serves as a contrast to Rusty and the film takes time to have Rusty warm up to this guy who is nothing like the self-destructive Dallas.

Mike D'Angelo, himself trained as a screenwriter, picks a scene, where son and mom sit on a bench outside the house having a heart-to-heart. She tells him that she's in love with Jeff Goldblum's character, and wants to marry him, and he tells her that he's genuinely happy for her, and she finally gives him permission to pursue his dream to go back to Texas and do the only thing he's ever been good at, riding horses.

And he realizes that, even if he thought he would leave California and pursue it with or without his mother's permission, he would have to cut off his life in California, one that was bad for him, but the only one he knew. And it's an interesting decision, the contrast of living the honest life that he knows he should. He tries to convince his buddy, Dallas, to leave his wicked ways and join him, and yet, we know, Rusty knows, and finally Dallas knows, that Dallas is just as suited to life in Texas as Rusty is suited to life in California.

During this scene, D'Angelo points out that Goldblum is just about to join in. He's in the background, hangs out a minute, then leaves. Rusty peers over for a second, and the Goldblum is gone. He credits director Caan (who also plays Dallas) with keeping that subtle, not drawing attention to it.

I happen to like a later scene, flashy as it may be. While Rusty and his mom and his mom's boyfriend are having a nice dinner, Dallas has paired up with a guy to rob a local kingpin. That scene is played for tension and intercuts with the life Rusty could be living (namely, being with Dallas) and the life he has now decided is right for him. The scene ends in an absurdist situation where a third character pounces in at a moment that causes Dallas and a guy he has paired with to rob the house, end up accidentally shooting each other and killing one another.

Of course, that scene is played for the tragic ending you know the film feels inexorably drawn to, and while flashy and reminiscent of the tense moments in "Boogie Nights", it's not the one I point to.

Instead, although you are never told this, it's a scene afterwards where Rusty is dazed, devasted and begins to cry. Few films about the tough male bonding ever dig deep at the emotional, homoerotic crux of such relationships. Dallas, for all his faults, was the one guy that, in his way, cared for Rusty, and bad as he was for Rusty, it meant something emotionally to him. It was, in its way, a doomed love affair, improbable because one guy was, at his core, someone bad, and one, at his core, was someone good, as trite as the idea seems.

It reminds me a bit of "Wild Reeds", a French film, which has the daughter of a Communist teacher (communists supported the Algerians during their fight for independence from France) who has fallen for a loner (whose dad died in Algeria, and believes Algerians owe the French for all they've done for them). The two have a very brief tempestuous relationship, one similarly doomed to fail because both are such different people. Lust and love can't overcome their diametrically opposed view of the way the world works.

Perhaps the reason this scene resonates is because few male relations are depicted like this, and perhaps few relationships exist like this. In the process of creating a drama like this, it seems Caan has also given thought to what it's like for someone to have that intense a friend, and the associated emotions that it brings. This hyper-masculinity means the two can never really express what they mean to each other in any but the most superficial macho preening ways.

And yet, in that moment of loss, with Rusty on the verge of leaving California, leaving his friend, he breaks down. The one man he truly cares for is gone, and it has taken his death to reveal just how much he cared. And yet, he's also now a truly free man. He has made the right decision, and he only wishes his friend, whose life was being sucked to self-destruction, had listened to him, had taken that improbable step, a step he was never going to take.

It takes keen observer to create characters that you can tell have a path they must lead, but try to escape it.

By the way, after this movie, IFC is now showing Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress, the inspiration to Star Wars. The movie opens with two bickering low-lifes who are wandering across the desert. There is a war and they were mistaken for the enemy, and like Merry and Pippin, have managed to get themselves out of a bind. The two insult each other, even come to strangle each other, when another guy, a warrior of some sort, stumbles across, trying to escape the enemies pursuing him.

Six horses with men come by, finish him off, and then leave, the two men bewildered, happy to be seen as beggars.

It reminds me of the scene of C3PO and R2D2 crossing the desert planet of Tatooine. Of course, C3PO is the fussy English butler, and R2D2 mostly squeals and beeps. They don't have the kind of insulting, bawdy, relationship that the two characters in Hidden Fortress do. And it is funny to imagine Lucas deciding to make the droids behave like these men, bawdy, bickering, rather than polite, effete.

Too bad that Lucas's pilfering of Kurosawa doesn't extend to Kurosawa's clever filmwork. Kurosawa is a formalist, often as interested in the relationship of how characters fill the screen, how they sit and situate against one another. Lucas, far less mannered, doesn't seem concerned with these trifles.

Wait Wait Followup

Of course, now that I did a full rant, I learned what had happened. Turns out the guy who was supposed to play tennis with me got caught in traffic and that had severely delayed him. He went on to play tennis with someone else that day. We ended up playing doubles and singles the following day.

I'm not sure my observations were incorrect in my previous post, but at the very least, I should apologize for the situation which I misunderstood.

Wait Wait

In India, the term is so common, it's been given its own name: IST. IST stands for Indian Standard Time. No, it's not the peculiar N + 1/2 hour difference that the entire country of India has with other countries. It's akin to what is called "Clinton Standard Time".

Bill Clinton was known as something of a schmoozer. He loved to talk and charm his guests. So much so that his meetings often ran late, which meant he was rushing to his next meeting, but the rush was superfluous because, well, he was late. And that meeting would run late, and so forth.

IST is this idea that Indians don't show up to anything on time. They can be late as short as 10 minutes to as late as, well, who knows, half an hour, an hour? If the person making you wait is, say, a relative, then you put up with it. Grandma was supposed to arrive at 2 PM, and it's nearly 6 PM and you're still waiting, wanting to get on and do the next thing? Nope, you're hanging out. The thought of taking off and leaving Grandma by herself would be deeply insulting, and so the culture never cures itself of this promptness problem because the person that's late knows they can get away with it. They prey on the kindness of others.

I've heard of Indians who promise they will show up to something and when it happens they "just don't feel like it" and so they don't show up at all. Do they call ahead to inform the folks that they don't feel like it? It doesn't seem necessary. They don't seem to feel that bad about it. Perhaps it's happened to them so much, and they've done it so much, that saying you won't show up, especially to a group event is, even in this modern day of communication, a trifle. What should someone bother?

Now, to be fair, there are enough Indians that are pretty prompt. They know how to get to places on time. But it seems like a foreign trait. Most people that run late feel they have "power". I'm not constrained by a schedule. I don't have to be out there right. This. Minute.

Part of the problem is the lack of ability to estimate time. You need to be somewhere by 7? Many think, oh, it'll only take 5 minutes. Once you convince yourself of that, then it no longer matters if you leave at 6:55 or 7:00, now does it? It's only 5 minutes, right? And much like the snooze alarm, you can always say, well, if 5 minutes late is OK, then 10 should be OK too, right? I think many would be shocked to learn that they need to be in their car at 6:45 moving, because at 6:45, 7:00 seems so far away.

And so sometimes the lies come. It's 7, and they are still at home, so you give them a call, and they don't want to displease you, so the white lie is "I'm on the road now, so I'll be there in a few minutes" and by the time they show up, you realize when you called, that they weren't even in their car. The entire trip time consists of the time between the time you called and the time they arrived.

And because it's so prevalent, a late Indian never (or rarely) apologizes for being late. Sometimes they are almost indignant or shrug it off, and try to convince you to move on, they're their now, let's get started.

What's worse than that is not the lack of ability to estimate time is the thought process that occurs. It seems, any time there is a deadline to arrive somewhere, that's when someone will decide to do something. Oh wait, we need to take care of this one thing before we go out.

I suspect this idea of getting a hundred things done had to do with the nature of slow transportation in India, that once you were out your door, you might not get back for hours, and if you hadn't taken care of something by then, it might be too late, so rather than take care of those things hours ago or the previous day, the deadline of having to leave the house suddenly reminds the person they need to take care of this or that, or they don't want to be interrupted in whatever they are doing.

The idea of completely dropping everything and getting out and to the vehicle and reaching you on time is foreign. Indeed, if everyone is in IST, why bother rushing? The other guy is going to take his or her time, and you have to wait, because the notion of abandoning the person you are waiting for would be cutting your nose off to spite your face, that is to punish someone and yourself as well.

This tardiness, as I mention, not a particularly Indian trait. I'm told it's common in Brazil, and I'm sure in many developing countries. To be held to a deadline is to feel shackled, and so people feel it's OK to slip a little late here or there, until it is an epidemic behavior in society.

So I tell this story because this happened to me. I play tennis with a guy who is routinely late. I think part of his tardiness is this embarrassment that he has to do all these things at home for his wife and kids. He never says that this is the cause of why he's late to play tennis, and then insists, after he's late, that everyone else accommodate him so he can play his 3 hours, even though everyone showed up 1.5 hours earlier. You must wait, he says. It's an incredible amount of selfishness that he merely shrugs off.

The morning group tennis was canceled because it was felt the courts were too wet. But he hadn't played the night before with me. Why not? His new job means he gets back around 8. His cheapness means he doesn't have a cell phone, so he can't call any sooner than 8. I told him I had made plans, and I wasn't going to play tennis, but he had hoped. By 10 PM, it was raining anyway, so it might not have been possible to play.

So at 10 AM, I called him, and asked if he would play at 10:30. Oh, no, that's too soon, how about 11? Fine, 11. So I went out to arrive by 11, and he calls while I'm on the road. "Maybe it's too wet to play?". Too wet to play? Too wet to play?! I told you the morning tennis had been called off because it was wet, and you insisted on playing, and only now, you think it's too wet? You better be out in a raincoat ready to play. If you break your leg and can't play for 6 months, you better be out there! Too wet to play, indeed!

Of course, I said nothing of the kind. I told him I'd check on the court conditions and get back to him. I reached there, and it was wet, but no wetter than the previous weekend, and he showed up then.

Now realize, this guy was ready to show up at 11. So I figured, he's dressed and ready to head out. I should have known.

IST.

Probably not dressed. Probably attending to hundreds of other things, and taking care of them, and not even ready to roll. So when I say it's OK, he has, I'm sure, not even made a move to leave. He's in the middle of other things, don't you know. I will wait, don't you know? It's all about him and his selfishness, and he won't even bother saying why he might be late, because it's a sign of weakness, or it's something no Indian ever thinks about. You don't apologize for your lateness because it's a trifle, a bother. You are too stressed out about people being late! Enjoy life!

So as it became close to being 30 minutes late, and I had made several calls, I left. Funny that he called 4 minutes later. Clearly, he couldn't have arrived at the court, and then gone back home. It meant he was still home and still hadn't left. So I refused to return his calls all day. I hope he was unable to play with anyone that day.

And you have to do things like this, because otherwise, the guy thinks he can do it again. And, of course, being human nature, he'll probably not learn, and continue to do it, and continue to beg to play. The man can't even convince his own son to play. His son doesn't want to be seen with his dad. So he bullies his friends because he can't bully his family. His family knows how to say no, and he's given up.

Are things likely to change? Most likely not. Lateness is a disease, and the cure too painful for most to swallow.

Netflix vs. Redbox

I've wondered whether the demographics of those who use Netflix differ from those who use Redbox.

Both address the following problem: how do I get a DVD conveniently? Stores like Blockbuster are often not that convenient. Once upon a time, you had to go to the store and rent the video for 2-3 days, and if you didn't get it back in that time, you were fined some amount for each day you had it out.

This lead to users having to make a trip to the video store late, and often making themselves watch a movie they might have ordinarily said no to if they hadn't already plunked down the money.

Netflix came up with a pretty good idea. They figured people don't want to pay late fees. They don't want to have to go to the video store to pick up videos. Since DVDs are pretty small these days and fit in typical mailboxes, why not mail it to them? You pay a monthly fee that gives you 1, 2, or 3 videos a month. When you return it, you get another one.

There is a drawback. You can only get videos as fast as you can return it and have a new one sent to you. Netflix has centers at many different locations so returning it can be speedy. Even so, you expect perhaps 1-2 days minimum turn-around.

Netflix tries to mitigate the delay by letting you create a queue. That way, you can plan ahead, sort the list of DVDs you want. This requires a browser. And, while you're at it, you can rate films so other folks can see what you like. It's a social networking experience.

Redbox, on the other hand, solves the problem differently. They try to be everywhere, in particular, grocery stores. You have to shop for food, right? So head to a grocery store, and rent a DVD for $1 a day. You can keep it as long as you want, but you continually get charged. There's still some incentive to get it back, but the idea is the location is closer to you.

Unlike Netflix, there is (I assume) no online identity. You do not plan ahead. You go, look at the selection, and rent. This is geared to the masses that may not particularly care for an online experience that requires a long-term commitment and planning.

Thus, I can see Redbox being more popular than Netflix even though Netflix appears to have been around a lot longer.

These crowds need not be exclusive, of course. You may decide that, at some period in your life, you have time to watch movies, and then you maintain a Netflix account, but at other times you don't, so you use Redbox and pick up a DVD whenever.

Clearly, the long-term solution is download on demand, although Redbox would still continue to be a viable option for those who only want to pay for what they rent, rather than pay for the privilege of downloading.

So are the kinds of people different? Are Netflix folks typically more well-educated, Internet savvy folks? Or not?

Asian Mart

I live quite close to an Asian supermarket. This is a fairly new phenomenon, at least, to me. Larger metropolitan areas have always had access to big Asian supermarkets. Smaller towns have Chinese shops that are smaller than a 7-11, perhaps half the size or one third the size.

I just discovered they built a new Asian supermarket a bit further away. Like the one I live by, this one is Korean-run. Of course, Koreans know that their customers aren't solely Korean, so the shop covers a wide variety of Asian countries including: China/Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam. And because there's often a large Spanish speaking population, these stores often have a section devoted to products like Goya.

Usually, there are two big strengths over standard supermarkets. First, is the dizzying array of produce. There are vegetables you've never heard of, and at prices that are bargains. Indeed, even products like soy sauce is often sold cheaper at Asian supermarkets.

For a while, these supermarkets looked a bit run-down, much like supermarkets used to look in the 1970s where the goal was to sell quantity and not offer a good customer experience. However, H-Mart, the Korean supermarket has adopted a bunch of ideas from places like Costco. They have their own logo and shopping bags (often Asian supermarkets used generic bags). They have music blaring. At H-Mart, that music is often 80s or 90s music, and not of the Asian variety.

They have food samples for people to try. I had a sliver of a Korean pear. The items are displayed attractively on shelves. Admittedly, the spacing is a bit tight, and it resembles nothing short of a zoo.

I went to H-Mart looking for Pearl River Bridge Superior Dark Soy Sauce. Dark soy sauce is thicker than standard soy. Some recipes call for dark soy, but I couldn't find it at the local Asian supermarket. I think I bought the last one and the only stuff they have is the mushroom flavored dark soy. I've bought that before and it's way too intense. Fortunately, this store had plenty.

Indeed, you can often buy 20 different kinds of soy sauce. Do you want Chinese soy? Or Japanese? Soy from mainland China? Or Hong Kong? Soy from Korea? Soy from Thailand? They have maybe 10 different kinds of fish sauce. You can get Vietnamese brand or Thai brand. You can get various Korean miso, spicy and otherwise.

Oh and if you like beef and like making beef lo-mein? They have pre-cut beef strips. You can get it fairly thin for sukiyaki or pho. You can get it moderately thick. See if you can find that at your local supermarket. Won't be able to find it. A little too much labor for your local supermarket.

Oh yes, fresh seafood. Usually situated in the back, you can see fresh seafood, though it's often not so fresh that isn't starting to smell some, but you can't find that easily at your local supermarket.

This is one nice trend in the US, an alternative supermarket if there ever was one.

500 Flavors of Soda

500 Flavors of Soda

It's about soda, only it isn't. Watch it.

Links to Recipes

Recipes on BBC Website

Freshman Orientation

This is going to start out as a movie review, but it isn't one, so bear with me. There was a movie that came out a few years ago called Freshman Orientation. It didn't get particularly wide release so if you haven't heard of it, no big deal. Indeed, the film was originally released titled Home of Phobia, which may indicate why it didn't get much attention. That title, which is a double entendre, sounds like a bad horror movie.

The new title, Freshman Orientation, at least hints to what the plot is actually about. It follows a freshman who goes to college and wants to, surprise, meet women. The main female interest, in a plot machination that really seems contorted, is forced to join a sorority, the one her mom went to since there's some discount of such if she joins.

The sorority holds a contest where each of the sisters need to make a guy of a certain stereotype fall for them, and then they get invited to a party hosted by the sorority, where they will be unceremoniously dumped. The main female picks the stereotype from a hat (it's "gay" in case the movie title hasn't hinted that to you). The main male pretends to be gay because he's taken a fancy to this girl and will do what it takes to be with her, and hilarity ensues.

Well, not really. It's a not-so-great sitcom.

But let me get to the subject matter at hand. What exactly is homophobia? I can't claim to have a good definition, but the term suggests a fear (or hatred) of homosexuals, which is usually more prevalent among males than females.

Here's my thought. There are plenty of folks that say they are not homophobic. Indeed, they'd give you liberal credentials. They say they're pro gay marriage and so forth. That's fine. Perhaps, in the end, that's all that matters.

But here's the deal. Many young American men grew up at a time when parents were starting to be more homophobic. This came at a time when gay rights was becoming more prevalent (during the 1970s). Many middle schools had, up to that point, required gym for boys and girls and decided, for whatever reason, to "require" showers for boys and girls. Since the facilities were not extravagant, this meant "gang" showers, the kind that some gyms still have today.

This was an awkward moment for many teens who had been raised to have shame about themselves, which makes some sense. After all, left to their own druthers, many children might run around totally unashamed bringing shame to their parents who would be criticized for not placing more restrictions on their children's behavior.

By the 1980s, parents were starting to become even more concerned about their children's welfare. This may have been due to an increased sense of fear. News was being pressured to attract viewers and make money. Sensationalist news was replacing hardcore news. Parents were increasingly called "helicopter" parents who would hover over their children's every move, making sure they got to school safely, making sure they got back home safely. Kids were no longer considered safe enough to wander for hours on their own. Parents feared their kids would be kidnapped and they'd be accused of poor parenting.

Perhaps along with that perception, parents were now concerned that gym showers were a little too much for little Johnny or little Janey to bear. They'd be under scrutiny from potentially gay teens. Or perhaps it was simpler than that. Kids complained and then parents complained. This lead to many schools throughout the nation deciding to stop requiring showering.

This seems innocuous, and perhaps it is, but what that also meant was one way of acclimating teens to not be so body-conscious was gone, and so people continued to carry shame. Ironically, athletes who can be quite homophobic are usually not particularly homophobic in this respect. Athletes were still required to shower as part of their athletics.

Whatever the reason, more teens carried this notion of shame with them. Furthermore, even kids that aren't particularly likely to spew homophobic slurs still reacted badly to the notion of the unclothed body (especially males). If you mention that so-and-so might get nude, the reaction is generally "Eww" regardless of how handsome that person might be. It's similar to how some men feel the need to comment on the beauty of women.

Many men feel insecure in their orientation or feel the need to reassure their male friends that they are heterosexual by making saying how hot they are for some female, and by contrast, how male bodies are icky to them. This seems very much a male view, at least in the US. Women don't seem to have this problem. Women are allowed to be more friendly with women, allowed to comment on the physique of other women with impunity. They aren't considered lesbians.

Much of this may have to do with the pressure women have to look good to be attractive to men. They spend a great deal of time looking at how other women present themselves to the public and can admire women who look good. Men, by contrast, often care very little about how they appear, and so they don't spend much time looking at other men. The exception seems to be those who are heavily into fitness and working out so they look good to women. It's so much effort that they grudgingly admire other men who are putting in a similar effort to look good. They can positively comment on how some guy looks ripped because they feel it's worthy of admiration.

So here's the point. I believe many guys who are otherwise pretty pro-LGBT are nonetheless homophobic. Their reaction to other men are not that different from the men who spew homophobic epithets, except rather than give in to their natures, they restrain themselves and say the "right things". Were such guys indifferent to other guys like women seem to be indifferent or even partly admiring of other women, then the idea of being pro-LGBT would be met with an attitude that backs that belief.

Photoblog: Soldiers

Denver Post Photoblog

I'm a sucker for good photo photography, especially of the photojournalism variety.

Concentration

Here's a scenario. You are busy doing something. You are asked to spend a few minutes calling up a place, no more than 5 minutes, by a friend or significant other.

Do you do it?

Or do you say "No, I won't do it. I need to get what I'm doing done first, and then I'll take care of it". There are quite a few people in that second camp. Why is that? What is the big deal being interrupted?

Joel Spolsky noted this when he posted the following problem. He imagined two tasks that needed to be done, each lasting 10 minutes. He asked which is better, for a computer to do one task to completion then the other, or to interleave the two tasks. That is, give one minute to one task, then one minute to the other, and so forth.

It may sound identical to you. Both tasks are finished in 20 minutes. Or the second might seem more appealing because each task makes more progress. But consider when both tasks complete.

Start the clock at zero. If you interleave, one task will finish at minute 19, and the other at minute 20. However, if you did one task to completion first, it would complete at minute 10, while the other would complete at minute 20. The average in the first case is a wait time of 19.5 minutes while the average wait for the second is 15 minutes.

This assumes no penalty for switching tasks. In reality, computer tasks pay a small penalty to switch from one to the other. This is called "context-switching". Apparently, for humans, context switching is a very real penalty. Thus, minor interruptions may not be so minor. I find it baffling personally, especially if the time to carry out the task is very little.

The point is this. Some people are definitely inclined not to be interrupted, not even for a few minutes so they can get their task done. I wonder if that is symptomatic of a certain mindset or personality. Is a type A person likely to dislike interruptions and want to be fully engaged, no matter how short the interruption?

What is the thinking behind this behavior?

Change I Want

OK, so we're embroiled in a health care debate (if you can call it that) because health care costs are spiraling out of control and because millions are uninsured. I was going to discuss whether the attacks on Obama racist (indirectly, they are), but instead, I'll talk about the kinds of changes, mundane as they may be, that I'd like to see changed.

First, Internet bandwidth. I don't really download or stream movies, but one can see how nice it'd be if the bandwidth was comparable to say Japan or Korea which reportedly have 10 to 100 times the bandwidth.

Up-to-the moment reporting of how much electricity and gas I'm using. Why does someone have to come and check meters once a month? I want to know how much I spent cooling my apartment today. I want to know how that money is really being spent? Who oversees this anyway?

More intelligent traffic monitoring. Why am I sitting at a red light when there's no one in the crossroad? Why are lights based on very simple information about who is on the road?

Getting groceries easily. I would like to order groceries, and I know I can, but the cost! Is there some better way to do this?

Companies that pay for auto maintenance. Would be nice if an on-site mechanic did routine maintenance so you wouldn't have to worry about taking it to the shop when something breaks down.

Or perhaps better public transportation. I look at the Metro and it makes a stop every stop. Why isn't there an express that stop every 5-10 stops the a smaller train that visits those 10 stops all the time. You'd need twice the trains, but people would get to where they were going faster.

I'm sure I could think of more things, but there are changes that would affect my day-to-day life more, and yet these changes are much slower to come.