Even the Swiss Army is geeky

A friend once commented that the fact that Swiss Army knives included tweezers was an argument for men plucking their eyebrows (Swiss Army knives as reflecting the cultural shift to metrosexuality... though I doubt tweezers are a recent addition). Well, if Swiss Army knives do in fact augment their offerings to support all possible manly pursuits, then sitting at a computer and typing (or whatever) now fits the bill. Behold, the swissmemory 1GB (also available in 'flight' versions that don't include airport security-confiscable knives).

London

I know I haven't posted anything about it because current events have never really been my forte, but I did hear about the London bombings the morning they happened, and was completely shocked and saddened to hear about them, the more so in contrast with the happy announcements about the 2012 Olympics the day before. I know that was probably what the timing was supposed to accomplish, and it worked, and it's depressing to think that joyous occasions like that in the future will be slightly tainted by the fear of retribution from people who simply don't want us to be happy.

The interesting thing about these bombings, though, is that people throughout our country felt their effect, and yet we've lost no time in turning an analytical eye on what happened and what the reaction was etc. etc. There was no such dialogue (none that sounded rational, anyway) so soon after September 11th, and in the aftermath of two attacks, now, I've heard a few things that have given me pause.

The first is in how people reacted to this event. In London, public transit was shut down, but there were several stories on how people were attempting to simply carry on, walking to and from work or school instead, and getting up and doing it over again the next day. There were quotes from people who took comfort in the fact that their country had survived worse from WWII and IRA bombings. It was as if there was that sudden intake of breath from the shock of the event and then a slow exhalation, and then everything went on as it had.

And unlike what happened during the IRA bombings, our country reacted too with that same sharp intake of breath. And there are a few reasons for it: it's a major bombing in another Westernized country, one that we feel particularly close to. It was coordinated. It was unforeseen. And most of all, it could've been us. When I first heard the news, I felt a tinge of guilt. Not just because I was so sad that this had happened after a day of celebration, but because I felt they had drawn this attack because of their involvement with us. I don't follow the news closely enough (or at all, beyond what I read on Brendan's website--I'm exceptionally well-informed about Gulf Coast weather) to have sorted out what I do and don't know and what my position is, and so I take my rather vague cue from the occasional LA Times headline and Hollywood liberal conversation, and sort of think at the back of my mind that we almost deserve terrorist acts here because of the war in Iraq. (Which I disagree with upon further scrutiny, but such scrutiny doesn't always take place.)

I also ran across this editorial in the New York Times, which made me stop and think for a moment. Thomas Friedman writes that the Muslim world needs to take action in its own self-interest, or rather the interest of Muslims already living in Western societies (a vast minority: 23 million live in the EU, we'll assume the same for the U.S., and after rounding up to 50 million, that's still less than 4%). Either they need to do their own policing, or we'll do it for them, in the form of ostracizing them. While this is certainly a good plan from our perspective, I wonder if they will feel the same way. The Muslim world is hardly encouraging terrorism as it is, though I don't know if they could be said to be condoning it (I tend not to think so). Out of 1.3 billion people, no matter how strongly the Islamic culture discourages it, you're still going to get a few who disagree, and unfortunately, that's all it takes.

On a somewhat unrelated note: Oliver Stone is making a movie about September 11th. I know I wasn't as profoundly affected by 9/11 as some, and even I feel that this is offensive. I don't care who the director is (and there are plenty who feel Stone is a particularly bad choice), the scope of that day cannot be captured in a two-hour film starring Nicholas Cage and the attempt to do so cheapens it and that is unacceptable.

Blog + Job search = More Job Searching

I finally got back to my good ol' web surfing habits (I should really click on the links in my sidebar more often, there's a reason I put them there in the first place) and found this article on job searchers with blogs, this one written from the employer's perspective. I've written on this before because I found the idea of one's online activity affecting one's offline activity to be an interesting one: people frequently feel freed to act how they want online simply because they assume there's no connection between those two worlds unless it's specifically created, in which case they believe they have control over it. Also I thought it more than usually relevant to me. But this particular article does an excellent job of outlining why blogs are a liability for those looking for a job. It's written by a professor on a committee looking to hire a new faculty member (pay attention Tom). Since blogs are gaining in popularity, academia is probably reflecting that in disproportionate amounts, and a number of the job candidates had blogs. No one was eliminated due to the blog alone, but they got dinged for any one of the following reasons:

• They revealed an intense interest in something other than what they were being hired for, thus raising questions of loyalty and investment
• They pose the potential threat of indiscretion in a public forum that could adversely affect the department or institution
• They show evidence (or are linked to by a friend's blog that shows evidence) of previous questionable activities
• They simply provide too much information about the candidate's personal life. Favorite quote:

  "It would never occur to the committee to ask what a candidate thinks about certain people's choice of fashion or body adornment, which countries we should invade, what should be done to drivers who refuse to get out of the passing lane, what constitutes a real man, or how the recovery process from one's childhood traumas is going. But since the applicant elaborated on many topics like those, we were all ears."

I think that last bullet is the most interesting, and most indicative of the split between online and offline. In the offline interview process, there are certain rules that must be adhered to. One must put one's best foot forward and hide everything else until the relationship has reached a point where it becomes appropriate to share more: so it is with most human interactions. It's thought of as rude, or gauche, or downright weird to share more about yourself than those with whom you're sharing this information are willing to share themselves, or even listen to in the first place. And yet online, many feel at liberty to ignore this convention and give free rein to, if not all, then a fair number of the thoughts that enter their head. But perhaps this is something that needs to change, unless one is conscientious enough to make sure that the divide between online and offline is complete.

In my own case, what I write here is far from uncensored because I know who's reading: it's not the anonymous internet user (for the most part), but friends and family. And that kind of self-censorship is even less restricting than that of people who have more than three readers, like Brendan or Chris, whose blogs are well-known and regularly read in their circles. You have to decide where the line is and make sure you don't cross it, and then hope that you picked the right place. As soon as I found out that a potential employer and some fellow students had found my blog, it led to a sudden reevaluation of the kinds of things I was posting. And then another when I told my family about it when I was going abroad. And I still live in fear of people I know now who don't know that I have a blog suddenly becoming as dorky as I am and googling my name and finding it. Those recent job-related posts have certainly been borderline with regards to TMI. Somehow I tend not to think of them as such because they don't seem to resemble the middle school diary-esque minutiae that attempts to answer very limited questions, like "Why doesn't Mark like me?" (answer: he probably likes Kimberley, I saw them talking and she's so much prettier than me and it's not fair cuz he's soooo cute) and "Why was Stephanie mean to me today?" (answer: Because everybody's mean. The world is mean. Everybody hates me. No one understands me. Except you, Diary.) Then again, I also think I was an exceptionally mature middle schooler. I suppose these things are open to interpretation.

iPod Flea

I know there's other stuff going on in the world, but as a marketing geek, I just had to share this, which is the funniest thing I've seen all day.

Visualization part deux

I know I've posted on this topic before, but I still think visualization technology is hella cool, and if it happens to be useful, so much the better. So I was really excited when I actually read one of the Search Engine Watch newsletters that I get and ignore everyday (one of our clients advertises in it occasionally) and it mentioned visualization for Yahoo! search results. It's from a company called Grokker, and this thing ain't half bad. At least, I'm sure it won't be the next time I actually do a general search (I only ever search for song titles based on lyrics and yellow pages listings, and you don't need visualization to categorize by topic: I know exactly what I'm looking for). It's a handy little interface though, very fast, and very easy to navigate.

Follow-up

I realize my last post (if one were to actually get all the way through it) doesn't show me to be in the happiest of states, and that's accurate--I'm not. (Where's Tahiti when you need it? Oh yeah, an 8-hour flight away.) I've just started my first job, just begun my working life, and I know that it's going to last for the next four decades or so. It's the notion that this is what the rest of my life is going to be, and the best stuff is now behind me, that really gets me down. But things are getting better. I'm learning how to do what I need to in order to fulfil my job responsibilities, I like the people I work with, I've decided to spend those lunches I can lying in the shade in a nearby park, I've started staying up late again (I just don't understand my life without that... getting up at 5 am to go swimming most mornings just isn't me). And so I think I'm going to be ok. I still look brokenheartedly at some of the tech job listings I get (marketing analyst for Apple? Sigh.), but I think that after a couple years of working where I am now, I'll be poised to actually have a shot at those jobs. (Whether or not my master's degree will ever benefit me remains to be seen, but AccessGroup tells me I have to pay my loans back anyway.)

In short, I'm adjusting, and I think I'm doing pretty well happiness-wise (I will forever be mystified by the mechanism that makes the world look completely different from one day to the next, even though nothing's changed), but when I get pensive, that last post is about what it sounds like. I still haven't managed to think my way out of having to work at all, but give it time.

The consolations of philosophy... or not

This may be the product of an addled mind (it is, after all, way past my bedtime), but I was just lying here thinking and it occurred to me that maybe a bit of catharsis was in order.

I’ve been a bit philosophical of late… a major life change can do that to you. You ask yourself why, and try to understand it with respect to all the other steps and missteps you’ve taken thus far. Which category does this fall into? How do you know? Me, I’m not crazy about my job, but then that all depends. Isn’t this how it’s supposed to be? Was I just spoiled before, and that’s why I’m unhappy now? Are there other things at work here? What would make me happy? How do I know? I always thought that a career in marketing would make me happy because I like thinking about the challenges inherent in that line of work. But I’ve since discovered that, while I like thinking about those challenges, that’s a very tiny (and often nonexistent) part of what a job in marketing actually entails. And sadly, I’ve ruled out other roles in marketing that might be a better fit because I don’t think I’d like them or because I don’t think I’d be good at them. For an example of the former, an academic career (I hate writing, and that’s kind of what it comes down to). The latter, consumer insight/branding (I simply lack the instinct necessary to read people: I can’t think of a single instance when I’ve made an accurate assumption about what other people think and why).

And then I have to wonder, why really have I ruled those out? It’s not like I knew what I was doing when I took my current job. It’s not that I didn’t have all the facts, it’s just that I didn’t read them right (see end of last paragraph… I don’t even understand myself, how could I ever purport to understand others?). Whenever I get into questions of happiness, of my perspective on life, I always try to imagine how things would be if I were living a hundred, a thousand years earlier. I continually ruminate on the effects of living in the information age because it seems to me that one’s happiness and/or contentment at any given time is proportionate to how much their current experience compares with what they expected to be experiencing. I don’t know if my dissatisfaction, my disappointment, is a product of having glimpsed something better on tv or in books, or if it’s inherent in the human experience. The grass is always greener, right? But is it greener some times than others? How and why does that change? What if envy and discontent are inherent (as I tend to think they are… part of what makes us human is our awareness of others, and where that exists, there exists the awareness of how they are different from ourselves) but the wealth of information we have today has exacerbated the effect?

I can’t answer that last question without defining what the measurable results of such an occurrence would be and doing a fair amount of sociological research to determine if anything’s changed. And then evaluating the research upon which that was based (for example, I recently read in The Bell Curve that violent crime has been increasing since the 50’s, but have my doubts about what those numbers and that conclusion are based upon). But my instinctive answer would be that society is not going to hell because there’s too much information. In fact, all that information shuts us up. Information is the new religion. There’s so much to sort through, and it tells stories of such extremes as you never even dreamed of (I’m reading Chuck Palahniuk’s new book, Haunted, and never even imagined such a plethora of horrors between two covers). And it desensitizes you. Nothing is too horrific that you aren’t sure that it’s happened to somebody somewhere. And at the same time, no achievement is too great that aren’t sure it’ll happen. Maybe we won’t have flying cars by 2025, like we’ve all been dreaming about for years, but that doesn’t discourage us from believing that it’ll happen someday. No challenge is too great that someone won’t find a way to overcome it. Look at Lance Armstrong. Is it inspiring, or depressing that you can’t hope to ever live up to that kind of example? All this information has sucked out our own passions, because how can my love of art compare to the starving artist who gives his life to it? How can my love of travel compare to the researcher who lives among obscure tribesmen for years, learning their language and customs? It makes my pleasure in such hobbies look like a cheap thrill. I see where I stand in the grand scheme of things and feel there’s no way I can measure up, so why try? Why not just sit back, watch the newly-released first season of Scrubs, and try not to eat anything?

And the questions just keep on coming. This from a girl who never questioned anything.