Microsoft Access is for masochists.  It’s expensive, a pain to learn, and—frankly—quite overkill for nearly any home application.

So, for too long, folks like myself have kept lists in Excel.  This works… sort of.  But it’s a pain to share, and it lacks a lot of the usefully-database’y features that make working with data multidimensionally both useful and fun.

For instance, I’m trying to keep track of where I’ve traveled around the world, what sets of pictures I’ve taken, where those pictures reside (online, in photo albums, etc.), who I have yet to share them with, and so on.  I *could* do lots of messy filtering and sorting on Excel as I try to handle related action items, but a database (featuring multiple persistent views) would be so much easier!

Well… dabbledb and Zoho Creator to the rescue!  Below I’ll talk about my initial experiences using both services, some advantages I perceive in each, and I’ll also demo my first “app”—a filterable/sortable list of movies I’ve seen and want to see (all 217 of them so far!)

I have an envelope on my desk from the American Cancer Society.  A very, very worthy organization, and one that I do indeed plan to support financially.  But—being the strange bird that I am—I’d like to do so creatively, selfishly, and, well, with your help

No, I’m not going to ask you to send me money… at least not until I’m masochistically running some 42K fundraiser race or whatever where I have to raise [$x] and [x] is some relatively high number.  Instead, I’m going to ask you to do work for me.  Let me explain…

On a recent business trip, I ended up staying at the Hilton London Islington Hotel, since it was next to the business centre hosting the conference I was attending.

Though by this point I shouldn’t have been shocked, I was nonetheless outraged that a colleague and I paid $57USD for one night of Internet access in our room and also we were expected to pay about $5.50 per minute to call another colleague on his London cellphone from our room phone.  Oh, and adding insult to injury:  we discovered that we had to pay separately for wireless Internet access downstairs; it wasn’t included in the $57 we had just paid.

So this got me to thinking:  Why do hotels charge so much for such ridiculously minimal (and actually low-cost) incidentals and—more critically—how do they get away with it in a free marketplace? And what other industries feature such utterly obnoxious gouging?

I’ve been at Google about four months, and it’s been a hell of a great ride so far.  I really need to write more about this later, but in a nutshell… my colleagues rock, the flexible and trusting environment is awesome, and I’m very excited about what I’m working on. 

However, I do have to admit to sometimes being a bit freaked out :o.

I’ve recently written some things a bit critical about America and American culture (particularly pop culture), and—seeing as how it’s nearing our Independence Day—I figure I ought to share a more positive vibe.  Therefore, I’m offering a few things below (in no particular order) that make me happy to be an American and living in America .  I know that not all of these things are unique to my country or nationality, but I think—in combination—they highlight a positive uniqueness.

1. The freedom to fail and make a comeback (or comebacks!)
   I know of no other countries where folks can fail—go bankrupt, make their companies go bankrupt, do something really stupid or dastardly in public—and still have such high chances of redeeming themselves with later, more favorable actions.  Sure, there’s still often some stigma to failing, but it’s not fatal or absolute.

2. The encouragement to be creative and innovative
   I’ve lived in Europe, I’ve traveled to at least two dozen countries around the world, and I’ve never seen a culture with such an openness to wacky, outlandish, and yes, impossible dreams.  This, among admittedly many other factors, is why America has been and remains the center of dot.com bold insanity and brilliance.
   
    
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   - Blathered by Adam on Monday, July 3, 2006 at 16:52 Permalink
   - Filed under Personal • Society
   - Commented on by 20 folks so far. Visit the full entry page and join in!

I wrote this quite a while ago, both to vent my frustrations and also to sincerely urge HR folks and interviewers to improve their practices.  I’ve had pleasurable experiences with most of the companies I’ve interviewed with in the past, but there has still often been quite a bit of room for improvement.  Also, I figured my rant below might make for a useful counterpoint to the plethora of interviewee-advice pages out there .

* * *

Dear HR folks and interviewers:

Write or call back when you say you will.  If you don’t, apologize.

Don’t ask us about our salary history.  That’s rude and completely irrelevant.  Perhaps we were working for the Peace Corp.  Maybe we were wildly underpaid at our last job.  Or crazily overpaid.  Instead, tell us (at least a range of) how much your position is paying and we’ll let you know if that’s aligned with our expectations.

Make job descriptions descriptive… complete with some day-to-day details.  Cut the jargon and market’y crap.  When your Craigslist ad contains verbiage about “best of breed solutions” and “every customer is #1” and “we offer GENAROUS [sic] benefits! [ahem, such as?]” we don’t know whether to laugh hysterically or run screaming.

$29 for nosebleed seats at a recent baseball game.  You’ve got to be kidding me.

Okay, first let me admit a few things.  Baseball itself bores the hell out of me; I attended only for the social atmosphere and the opportunity to hang with some friends.  And yes, I do pay (less grudgingly) $40-$70 for an evening of live theatre.

But I got to thinking… $29 for this activity is just ridiculous, and not because it’s not worth $29 of fun for some people.  No, it’s because I’m being inundated with bazillions of blaring, garish ads all around me, I can barely see what’s going on on the field without binoculars, and these overpaid oft-steroid’ed babies down there are raking in millions of bucks per year.  Frankly, if all was right with the world, I thought, these folks (and their managers and everyone associated with such a non-critical function of society) would make, say, $150,000 a year, tops.

I love RottenTomatoes.com.  It’s one of the most useful and addictive movie sites I’ve found, right along with IMDB.com.  Now I can look up movies on either database in a snap by using a surprisingly little-known Firefox feature that lets you assign a keyword of your choice to any search on any site.

We all know that water drains in the opposite direction down under in Australia, but their lindy hop (swing dancing) is anything but backwards.

Check out the clip below—including teens and senior citizens—for some crazy fast footwork and awesome on-the-fly (no pun intended) fun moves.

Incidentally, Google Video now lets you rate, tag, and comment on videos.  Nice!

And hey, interested in seeing some other fun clips and learning a bit more about this lindy hop thing?