I do my best thinking while watching TV, or so I think.  I was watching Desperate Housewives last night–don’t laugh at me–when I was hit with the concept of the “parking space society” as I call it.  I was also receiving some mental stimulation from The Long Winters, which are a band.  I was struggling with the fact that I am supposed to get a job so I can earn money and pay for things.  However, I am not qualified for most jobs–having not completed much of college, I have very little in the line of marketable skills.  This means that any job I will get, will probably be boring, monotonous, and not too my liking.  Back to the parking space society thougth.

Eva Longoria on Desperate Housewives has been burdened with her newly blind husband.  With out getting into too much back story, she is used to being rich and getting her way all the time.  However, now she is poor and has to tend to her husbands most basic needs because he can no longer see.  One day she decides to take him on her errands.  She visits this place and that place leaving him in the car on the premise that she will be right back and can do things faster than he can because he is blind.  After this situation reoccurs about three times, he gets bored just sitting in the car and wanders off; asking some kid to take him to get some food.  When Eva Longoria comes out to find her husband gone, she freaks.  Then as soon as she finds him, someone starts harassing her about parking in a handicapped spot.  She clearly isn’t, but she says it is for her husband.  At this point her husband starts to reprimand her.  In return she says she is poor, incredably busy, and has a blind husband to take care of.  If she can get a handicapped parking spot because of that, she is going to take it.

My point is not to go get yourself a handicapped parking voucher, but to look into this situation.  Do you see the parking space society?  Everyone is supposed to fit into a standard square.  People who are different get the better spaces, whether it be that they are handicapped, rich, famous, or have just been at a company for a long time and now have a space near the door.  Whatever it may be, I don’t like it.  I don’t like the concept that we as a society should all fit into the same space.  We are channeled and driven towards a common goal–to make money for a company.  Why?  Why would I want to spend my time working for something that is not going to recognize me?  Why should I conform to a society where I park in a rectangle, buy my food at a grocery store, listen to the popular music and wear the fashionable clothes?

On a personal note, I don’t want a job that requires me to do the same things over and over again.  A job that is constraining is not beneficial to either myself or whatever company I will inevitably have to work for.  I will not do my best work in a forced, focused, path.  For me a job needs to do for things:

1. A job should teach you something new; constantly.
2. A job should let you earn money.
3. A job should constantly change environments; this promotes the first thought.
4. A job should be fun; if you don’t enjoy it, it’s not worth having.

Therefore, I urge you not to give into this parking space society.  Challenge the norm and do not conform completely to the ways of the system or you will be lost in it.  If you find yourself already lost in the system, make a plan to get out, or at least partially remove yourself.  Back out, pull out, push the cars, out of the way, do whatever you have to, so you don’t become trapped in the parking space society.  Park where you want.

Many thoughts ran through my head today as different things occurred.  Perhaps one of the most humbling series of thoughts I had came while I was watching Boston Legal.

Anyone who watches the show regularly knows that one of the main characters, Shirley Schmidt, had another main character, Alan Shore, fight in court to allow her father to be put on a morphine drip in order to die without pain.  During that process a third main character Denny Crane, Alan’s best friend and also a lawyer, witnessed Alan’s closing remarks.  The remarks were made about Shirley’s father having Alzheimer’s and not having the conscious will to live, or even realizing the fact that he was living.  He then stated that his best friend, Denny, was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s and wanted Alan to take care of him in the best way possible when the time came.

However, that is just back story to where my thoughts were taken.  At the end of the show Alan and Denny regularly sit on a balcony where they smoke, drink, and sum up the shows precedences.  At the very end, Denny says, “Sleep over?” and Alan responds, “Sure,” before clasping Denny’s outstretched hand.  It occurred to me during this moment, while one man was holding a cigar and the other a scotch and both were holding each other’s hands, that our needs in life go from less to more to less sophisticated.  As children we look to bond with our peers; one of the ways we do this is through sleep overs.  We bond with our friends who have similar interests–Pokemon, video games, playing shoot-em-up and running around the house, etc.  As we grow older we abandon the sleep over, thinking it too childish and not a valuable use of our time.  We worry about problems like the mortgage and the electric bill, or we create problems.

Side thought****

And as we come out of the age where we are trying to be totally responsible, we relax a little bit and once again seek just to bond with others.  When Denny and Alan clasped hands, it wasn’t intended to be sexual, it was to show camaraderie.  To show the relationship that is there, the friendship, what really matters.

What really matters is how you treat others and how you are remembered.  At the end of the show, Shirley Schmidt sits next to her dying father, saying he was a great man.  What made him great was never explained, but I imagine that it had to do with how he managed work and what problems he overcame.  To me, this should be cast aside for the more Denny and Alan greatness.  What you do on paper, what problems you solve, numbers you crunch, deals you made, will all be forgotten.  How you treated others and the relationships you form, will be how you are remembered.  So forget about taking out the trash or the leaky sink for a few minutes and set up some bonding time with your best friend, your wife, your kids, your parents, whomever you haven’t talked to for awhile.  To steal a line from Gary Vaynerchuk and twist it a bit, “Legacy is greater than Currency.”

****Sorry this side thought would have interrupted the flow of the post.  I had to laugh because I could have taken the sophistication of needs in a whole other direction while still staying with the sleep over concept.  As children we bond with members of the same sex; primarily because of similar interest.  At the end of Boston Legal, Denny and Alan were also bonding over shared interests.  What I had to laugh about was that sophistication could be taken as emotional and physical.  Think about it.  Do we really abandon sleep overs as we get older?  No, we don’t.  We just call it something different and bond differently–usually with members of the opposite sex through sexual means.  

Feel free to comment. Thanks!

A week before I left school, I was sitting in class when the teacher said we would have homework for next week.  I wasn’t happy because the class was only worth half a credit and I really wasn’t getting anything useful out of it.  However, the homework that was assigned made me stop and think.

The teacher said we had to answer the questions:  What career/job would you do for free?  And how does it fit in with the path you are taking right now?

This question prooved to be beneficial, because I found myself uninterested with my current choice of major–computer science.  So I sat down and thought about it for awhile before we met again as a class.  When we did meet agian, I had to present, to the class, my answer to the question.  Here is my answer:

Originally, I entered computer science not knowing much about it.  Leaving high school, I knew that I was good at math and sciences, as well as the fact that I liked working with computers.  However, I was totally blind to what aspects I liked about computers.  I liked the internet: websites and graphics–how they flowed and worked together to present the information at hand.  I do not like the heavy programming that is involved with computer science.

Besides computers, I like photography and design.  So for free, I would probably be a web designer/developer or photographer. 

I then said, I guess this has really nothing to do with the path I am taking right now, and that is why I have decided to change it.

The teacher asked me to talk to him after class because he could help me contact people with similar interests.

The point of this is, if you are not happy with the direction you are going then change it.  If you would not do what you are doing now, everyday of your life for free, then is it really worth doing?  So ask yourself the questions:  What career/job would you do for free?  And how does it fit in with the path you are taking right now?  And if your answer doesn’t fit, then change it.

I just had a really strong urge to play Pokemon.  Not these new crappy versions but one of the original versions, like Blue or Red.  Personally, I would choose to play Blue only because I had it originally and can no longer find it.  I would even go as far as to play Silver because not only did it have the Blue world it also had the new areas and they combined it.  They were really thinking with their brains, minds, and heads, when they put the two worlds together?  I mean have we seen another Pokemon game that lets you get 16 badges?  When ever they open up a new area, I don’t even know what they are called like Jhoto? or something, they should make the games bigger.  Expand it to 24 gym badges in the entire game.

Anyway, I just want to be able to send out my Vaporeon and ice beam some Dragonaires.  Or use surf to find Missing No. and get 100 rare candies or something.  I mean common, it was a really good game for the time and revolutionized how we thought about RPG’s.  I think a lot can be learned from Pokemon.  How to manage money, how to be responsible, how to work with other people by doing quests, how to follow directions, and how to go online and read about that part you could never beat.

Anyway, I wasted hundreds of hours of my life on Pokemon and don’t regret it.  I just wish they were real, and that I could make money traveling around and having battles.  Who wouldn’t want Pokemon to be real?  And don’t say ‘me, because I’m a girl,’  girls like Pokemon too.  Get over yourself.

I must admit when I arrived at school, the girl situation looked dim.  Engineering schools are not exactly known for their ability to attract girls, well at least not good looking girls.  That is why everyone, including myself, was grateful when Samantha Lacy showed up.

Damn, all the guys that I knew lobbied for position to talk to her.  In the first week when everyone was getting to know everyone, she had to have realized that she was being flocked to.  I admit, I did want to talk to her–if my girlfriend is reading this, uh, you should probably stop…just playing, you can read it–so I did talk to her.  Turns out we had a lot of things in common.  We liked to cook, snowboard, watch movies, and–whoa, did I mention that we had this super cool friend named Bethany who was also her roommate?–yeah that’s how I met her.

So anyway, I had a girlfriend and she had a boyfriend–her boyfriend is a super cool, really nice guy, a shout out to Shaun–and all the rum was gone (Pirates reference), so it wouldn’t have worked out.  But I would just like to say sorry for not getting a chance to say goodbye, and that I miss having class with you and watching LOST and talking about crazy foriegn films and vaccuuming your floor and you yelling at me to hold a bottle or pick something up or whatever.  I promise I will visit soon.

I have suddenly become obsessed with statistics, and I don’t mean baseball.  I want to know more about the statistics of my life.  For instance that number of cheeseburgers I eat in a year, the number of soda I drink this month, the miles I put on my car today or last Tuesday, whatever.  I just want to be able to track it and then see it later.  Why?  Because it is cool.  Who doesn’t want to know how many miles they flew this year, how many grams of caffeine they ingested today, etc?

These thoughts were spurned by two things that I found today:  gtFtr fitness stat tracking via Twitter that may or may not be sub par right now.  I haven’t actually tried it, but it is in beta and the graffic on the main page makes me question how good of a program it is if the graffic doesn’t look good.   And the other site I found is Feltron Eight, he publishes anual reports about himself.

What I think the program should look like:

I think the program for computers should look like the launcher program you can get for Mac and the ripped off launcher program you can get for Windows. It should collect information and make pretty looking bar graphs, line graphs, pie charts, etc.

How it should act:

To access it via computer one could simply start it by typing ’stats’ on their desktop.  The program will then launch like the launcher program. At this point the user should be able to start typing a tag or category name.  For instance ‘crunches’ or ’sodas.’  The program will recognize this category or provide several selections until the user either types the full word or clicks on the selection.  Say the user chose ‘crunches.’  The user should then have the ability to put a number such as 50 directly after crunches.  It would look like ‘crunches 50.’  This will then be added to the daily total of crunches.  This way the user will be able to do 30 crunches now, 50 this afternoon, and 20 this evening, but the collective total will be 100 crunches.

Hundreds of different categories could exists such as ‘push-ups’, ‘miles driven’, ‘miles flown’, ’sodas (drinken)’, ‘pizza(slices eaten)’, etc.  Once collections are made, graphs of daily, weekly, monthly and yearly statistics can be generated.  But why stop there?  Not only should it tell you how many slices of pizza you ate, but it should know that there are eight slices per pizza, and tell you how many pies you actually ate.  It could take in infromation about the type of soda you drank and out put how much caffine you ingested over the course of the day, week, etc.

There should also be an online component that functions much like Twitter, that one can set up their own stat trackers and then text/instant message/web their stats in via phone, PDA, whatever.  Generic statistic categories should be provided.

How to make it:

I really don’t have enough experience with coding to get this thing off the ground.  Please contact me if you do have enough experience and would like to work with me to make this program.

Good People Day 2008 is an idea from Gary Vaynerchuk–whom most of you know, I have been following–that recognizes good people and what they have done.  There have been a lot of good people in my life, so here is a shout out to them:

My girlfriend:  Awesome girl.  Smart, fun, intelligent, outgoing, huge brained, kind, clever, patient, witty, good looking, everything you want in a girlfriend.  Thanks for putting up with me.

Alex Hillman:  Thanks for being a mentor to me and continuing to be in the future.  Thank you for helping me delve further into the web and inspiring me to do what I am passionate about.  You are dangerously awesome.

Bart Mroz: Thanks for your input the day Alex and I were talking about where I was going.

Gary Vaynerchuk:  Awesome person for all the ideas you throw at me via your videos.  After all it is you that has me doing this, and you probably haven’t even looked at my blog.

Felipe Tofani, Thiago Santana, Fabio Sasso, Johnny Bilotta, and anyone else who has inspired me or taken a few minutes out of their day to get back to me on design questions.

My parents: For being supportive and patient with me.  For helping me follow my dreams.

Mario Leone:  For being super cool by coming and knocking on my door the first day of college.  Man we had some good times that first week haning out meeting all the peeps.  Thanks for all the help you gave me with the filming and what not.  Thanks for all the cool events you got us into at the Franklin Institute.  Man good times.  Hey do you have a sauce recipie that I can get?

Bethany Shumaker:  Thanks for putting up with my complaining at school when I really had nothing to complain about.  Thanks for missing me and stuff.  Leave the cup on the fridge, I might come back and have to use it.

Courtney D’Entremont: Thanks for those fun times we had staying up late and talking about religion.  That one night we were up until 6 am and then Hershey Park four hours later.

Karin Tsai: For all those cool times we had in high school and should still be having if you weren’t too busy with your new friends.  I HATE YOU! Just kidding.  Please call me, I miss seeing you and yeah.  We definately need to have some good conversations again.  Thanks for being there for me.

Kevin Brodbeck: Yeah, you’re becoming a bit more evil and mellow, but that’s how everyone likes you.  It’s a good thing.  Thanks for all the math help you gave me in Calculus 2 and all the cool times we had wandering around Penn.

Cory Blasdell: We definitely need that camping trip this summer to hang out some more.  Listen to some good music, drink some, uh water, because I don’t drink and neither do you.  Maybe some Sobe’s if were feeling risky.  Thanks for all the good times with the movies and just chilling with everybody.

Dan Zimmerman: Everybody do the! Do the Barracuda!  Need I say more?  I miss you man.

Gunnar Benediktsson: My one professor who I had Honors 200 with.  Thanks for the interesting readings on Transcendentalism, I really enjoyed learning from you.  Here’s hoping that this comes up someday when you Google your name.

Pavel Grinfeld: Linear Algebra professor. Thanks for being patient and helping me out when I was really confused.

Everyone else such as: Brian Stacy, Sarah Strickler, Cameron Spurlock, Abbie Heller, Becky Atland, George Stolakis, Jared Stiffler, Ian Hoffman, Dylan Rutter, my sister, Colette Smyser, Michelle Renn, my old roommates, Poonam Sharma, everyone at Drexel.

So heres to all the good people out there that I havent met.  Keep on making the world go round and you will be recognized too.

I have had the idea of this post for awhile now, however, what Gary Vaynerchuk talked about today has prompted me to write it.  In his video, Gary talks about the kids of today and how they are embracing technology.  Everyone wants to be a part of Twitter, Flickr, whatever to get their name out there and then they wait for the world to recognize them.  He then goes on to speak about them seven to fifteen years down the road, that they will be the people buying things, people that will be choosing the advertisements, what comes and what goes.  Here is the problem.

While we as kids of today may embrace new technology–email, text, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, whatever social network is hot; we can do it all from our cell phones–the real facts are society has not.  The people who matter now, right at this instant are in their late 30’s, 40’s, 50’s and above.  These are all the people who have equity, these are the people that–for lack of a better word–yuppies will be come.  Those who are in their late teens and early 20’s challenging the brands will eventually mature and move their business plans in a more conservative direction.  Playing as if you have nothing to lose is fun when your young, you can bounce back.  Playing with everything at 50 is a scarier concept.

My point is, society has not accepted the Twitters and the Facebook.  The phone is still in, have you heard of it?  That is, or was, the primary function of the device you hold in your hand.  Not to surf the web, not to send text, not to check out what your girlfriend is doing on Facebook; it is to call people.  When some one who is influential wants answers, and wants them now, they call.  Kids today have a problem interacting with people over the phone; I know I do or did.  I am slowly coming to terms that the way to get things done in this society is to call.  Pick up the phone, make the call, you will have an answer in seconds, not minutes, not hours, not days.  You just need to learn to talk to people, interact, adjust to the new social skill that has been around for 100 years.  Kids can’t be so scared to do anything that doesn’t involve the typed word.

To jump back to what Gary said about being patient, waiting and developing your brand takes time.  I feel that it only takes this time because we have become complacent.  Complacent with the time it takes.  We have adapted to a society that comes to us.  To develop ourselves, we need to put ourselves out there in the real world.  Not just through social networks.  We need to live them, make the contacts, establish the connection in real life.  That’s how they did it before SMS.  That’s how companies were started and brands were made.  They did it then, and I bet it took a lot less time via word of mouth.

This blog is as much about thoughts, ideas, and sharing, as it is about personal outlet for myself.  Today I woke up with a vengeance to do extraordinary things with my life; then I watched TV for a good 4 hours today–wow.  I did, however, learn several new things today.  I began to conquer my qualms about calling people on the phone and even wrote a blog post about that.  After that didn’t work, I sent an email to the person–I couldn’t get him on the phone, just voice mail.  Common!

I also sent an email out about a job that doesn’t actually exist but I would like it to.  I can dream.  I don’t want to be stuck doing crap labor at some retailer that will only pay me 15 cents more than minimum wage.  Besides that, I cooked dinner for four–well most of it.  I didn’t put the spaghetti in to boil and I didn’t chop up the carrots for the salad, but I did make the garlic bread.  I learned how to 180 ollie and am pretty pysced about that, even though it really isn’t a big deal.  I gained some interesting information from Gary Vaynerchuk, see above post.  I was almost fooled by Google’s April fools joke, and was fooled by Alex Hillman’s.  Plus I got some transcripts sent.

I also found a video, thanks to Viddler, of Rick Astley–Never Gonna Give You Up.  I must say that I am really atracted to the way the girls dress in the video.  It could be my 1980’s blood, the girls themselves, Rick Astley, or just the amazing music that it is.  Perhaps it is a combination.  Hope they girlfriend isn’t mad about that.

I am also upset that Google took away the sweet drop down menu when you started typing something.  What was that?  Ajax?  Anyway, it was really cool and now it’s gone from the main search.  Now, enjoy Rick Astley–I command it.

I will figure out how to post the video code in a minute.

I couldn’t get the Viddler plugin to work at the moment so click here.  Rick Roll’d!