“tips”
83 posts under this tag.
 ...there’s a whole subculture of youngsters who have been ALL OVER the world.
Israeli chicks are straight talkers and have beautiful hair and are very hot.
The main purpose of giving you clean sheets is NOT having to clean the mattress cover or the blanket, so use them!
A segregation naturally occurs between staff and guests, owing to the latter’s transiency.
Tourism isn’t transformative or enlightening by itself, it’s just an opportunity.
English is, to an astonishing degree, the world’s second language.
Kids these days are, like, REALLY into Facebook.
Been playing with travel sites all day, (Kayak FTW!) and I discovered several interesting anomalies with which I plan to tour the world for some $2k in air travel. Flight arbitrage, if you will.
Guadalajara ↔ Toronto ↔ London ↔ Tokyo (at least!)
You see:
- Travel within Europe is really, really cheap. As in
€30 £5 London – Madrid round trip. So Europe can be thought of as one point: London, by far the cheapest hub.
- Round trips are a considerably better deal than one-ways. I understand they are the industry’s version of wholesaling but a 40% difference seems too much (a one-way can be 140% the price of either round trip leg)%.
- Travel order is everything. Mexico-Tokyo, one way is some $900. Tokyo-Mexico, one-way too, no less than $2,000! That’s right, the exact same distance can cost you over twice as much depending on where you start!
Putting it all together, my plan is to buy the following round trips: Guadalajara-Toronto, Toronto-London, London-Tokyo. I travel from Guadalajara to Toronto, then to London, then to Tokyo, where I stay 3 months. Then I return to London, where I stay some 6 months (to travel cheaply around Europe), then I return to Toronto and stay some 3 months, and only then do I return to Guadalajara.
All this for some $2k!
It’s a tad complicated and wasteful, and I need to plan far ahead, but the price’s pretty good, right?
Can you think of something else?
Know any other anomalies? Youth discounts? Passes?
Got any tips?
I haven’t bought yet but I think I will soon!
There are many useful tips for improving your conversation, from the “take advantage of freely offered details” to the “ask open-ended questions”, but the true secret of it, I think, was offered by Scott Adams in his wonderful little book, God’s Debris:
“What topic interests you more than any other?”
“Myself, I guess,” I confessed.
“Yes, that is the essence of being human. Any person you meet at a party will be interested in his own life above all other topics. Your awkward silences can be solved by asking simple questions about the person’s life.”
“That would be totally phony,” I said. “First of all, it would be like interrogating him. Secondly, I couldn’t possibly pretend to be interested in the answers. If he turns out to be some shoe salesman living with his mother in Albany, my eyes will glaze over.”
“ It would seem phony to you while you asked the questions, but it would not seem that way to the stranger. To him it is an unexpected gift, an opportunity to enjoy one of life’s greatest pleasures: talking about oneself. He would become more animated and he would instantly begin to like you. You would seem to be a brilliant and talented conversationalist, even if your only contribution was asking questions and listening. And you would have solved the stranger’s fear of an awkward silence. For that he will be grateful.”
“That solves the stranger’s problem, but I have to listen to this guy drone on about himself. The cure is worse than the disease.”
“Your questions to the stranger are only the starting points. From there you can steer him toward the thing you care about most—yourself.”
“Wouldn’t he want to talk about himself instead of me?”
“When you find out how others deal with their situations it is automatically relevant to you,” he said. “There will always be parallels in your life. Find out what you and he have in common, then ask how he likes it, how he deals with it, and if he has any clever solutions for it. Perhaps you both have long commutes, or you both have mothers who call too often or you both ski. Find that point of common interest and you will both be talking about yourself to the delight of the other.”
Also valuable is this sideline:
“You think casual conversation is a waste of time.”
“Sure, unless I have something to say. I don’t know how people can blab about nothing.”
“Your problem is that you view conversation as a way to exchange information,” he said.
“That’s what it is,” I said, thinking I was pointing out the obvious.
“Conversation is more than the sum of the words. It is also a way of signaling the importance of another person by showing your willingness to give that person your rarest resource: time. It is a way of conveying respect.
Surprisingly deep insights can be had ruminating about, you know, stuff.
...life is not about stuff; it’s about possibilities, which the right tools can enable.
Imagine the life you want to live. I cannot think of a sentence that has had more impact on the lives of people I have worked with. ... When clutter fills your home, not only does it block your space, but it also blocks your vision.
Get rid of the trash to make room for the treasures. Let the things that are important take center stage.
The biggest change in attitude this book made in my life was to teach me not to generate false relevance by “organizing” stuff I don’t want or will never need. Organization is what you do to stuff that you need, want, or love – it’s not what you do to get useless stuff out of sight or to manufacture makebelieve meaning.
Game: 2 players take turns to say a number between 1 and 9. Numbers may not be repeated. The goal is to be the first to say 3 numbers which add up to 15.
Sounds like fun? Try it with a friend!
Fun it ain’t.
It’s hard to remember the said numbers and “playing” is a chore involving many additions in your head. Maybe it’s fun for the better short-term memory endowed or those who enjoy arithmetic but that ain’t me.
Turns out that game above is none other than the beloved tic-tac-toe. You see:
This is what I love about information design (and what I tried to do in my calendars) this is its art, its magic: it can turn a chore into a game! It recasts our weaknesses —linear, verbal processing— into a form suitable for our talents —gestalt visual processing.
In math words: it finds useful language-graph same-shapes (isomorphisms)!
Where, but the web, would you find someone like Oliver Steele? This ain’t no metaphor. That name was a link. I’m not talking about Oliver Steele the person, I haven’t met him (though I apparently am 1-degree of separation from him; weird, that). I’m not talking about the sweating, walking, pinchable, space-and-time-and-flesh-bound avatar, I’m talking about his online persona. And either I’ve gotten crazy enough or technology has advanced enough that I’m ready to treat Oliver Steele —the link, his blog, words, diagrams, code, and further media— as a person by its own merits.
And, boy, is he an interesting guy:
In the spirit of Little Brother I’ll post about a password stealing idea I’ve worried about for a while now: using email addresses as login names. It’s now a very widespread practice among webapps and the reason is they’re a convenient way to eliminate having to come up with and remember a unique identifier and in the process they make you give your email address away, which is a boon for marketing and for easily authenticating you. In itself there’s of course nothing insecure about the practice but the problem is that they make registrations so simple and straightforward that suddenly they’re everywhere and you don’t think twice about them.
And the true problem is that a lot of people use one password everywhere and the chances are high many will choose the same password for the webapp du jour as for their lifelong email account.
So imagine an unscrupulous webapp maker who creates a popular webapp requiring registration and doesn’t hide from himself user passwords (there’s absolutely nothing but his own conscience preventing him). It is now a simple matter of running a script to test each email address password pair for him to coolly break a good bunch of email accounts.
PicLens is the breathtaking image-viewing browser extension (now compatible with Safari, Firefox, and IE!) that has caused some deserved news furore lately. It frees photos from browser-bound Google Images or Flickr pages in favor of a fly-able, zoom-able 3D wall. It’s like nothing you’ve seen, a masterful technical accomplishment and an eye-opener of the rich, delightful interactions that are just now becoming web possible. Go play with it and gape and gawk! (It works particularly well with Mac two-finger trackpads.) Interesting times for interaction design!
I’ve been meaning to learn me some physics since forever and I think I’ve finally found the right textbook in Motion Mountain: a beautiful, massive (1498 pages!), free book on physics.
The brainchild of one Christoph Schiller, after some 17 years it’s in its 21st edition (though still unfinished!) and has been enriched by the suggestions and contributions of the web community. Elegantly type-set, full of multimedia (graphs, photos, animations, tables, videos), problems, experiments, and excellent quotations (in the original Latin, Greek, German or French), the book covers pretty much the whole of physics with a passionate, philosophical approach (there’s a whole subchapter on language and many a Wittgenstein quotation!). Forget condescending, dull textbooks, this is one man who thinks (and argues! see subchapter 39) that “exploring physics is more fun than making love” (“Sex is the physics urge sublimated.”).
Truly breathtaking. One of the best web finds in quite some time. Download the book and flip through it just to marvel at one’s man labor of love.
There are now almost a quarter of a thousand tags densely covering every single post I’ve written since February 8, 2006. Hopefully, these will mean a better related posts, better serendipity. The categories themselves should also be a nice way to navigate around the archives. Among the many new categories, there were many surprises, like questions, arguments, rain, touching, or three, and there were many, many long overdue ones, like interesting people, inspiration, introductions, sex, symbols, ethics, venting, transhumanism, or experiments.
After commenting, you can now choose to be notified by email of new comments to the post. This is long overdue and the hope is it will keep conversations alive. You don’t need to comment to subscribe by email to a post’s comments, you can subscribe right through the new form at the beginning of the comment section. Finally, you can now subscribe by email to the posts themselves, to all of them or only the favorites, and even just to a weekly digest (sent on Sundays). The subscription form is right below the ELZR logo. These should be an easier way to keep track of this blog than RSS (which a surprising amount of people still don’t have the foggiest idea about).
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