I’ve had it with tipping.  The more traveling I do—for business or pleasure—the more I despise the uncertainty, the uncomfortableness, the need to have petty cash on hand.  When will someone—an influential someone—say ENOUGH IS ENOUGH?!

Tip too little, and you risk imperiling the quality of service you receive in the future from that person… plus you may look like an idiot or a miser in front of friends and business acquaintances.

Tip too much, and you look like a chump… and your wallet is made thinner (sometimes much thinner).  And you feel like a moron for being taken advantage of.  Heck, in some countries, you risk really offending someone!

This is one of the many reasons why I love Europe: you typically round up to the nearest euro when you eat out, and that’s that.  Adding to the coolness… for takeout food and pretty much else, what you see on the billboard or pricetag is what you pay.  15EUR?  You pay 15EUR; taxes, fees, etc., all included.

Now, back to the insanity that we endure in the States… Here’s just a sampling of recommended tips from a recent AAA (Automobile Association of America) article:

Happy Googleversary!

As I was getting ready to board the Google Shuttle home recently, a colleague (who started at Google on the same day I did) poked me and jokingly wished me a "Happy Googleversary!"  Right then it hit me that, yeah, I had been at Google for a full year.  Wow!

Also in the last few weeks, coincidentally I presume, many folks -- particularly fellow alums -- have been e-mailing me to ask about what it's like at Google, how they can get a job there, etc.  I will be e-mailing all of them back (sorry for the delay!), but in the meantime it's prompted me to do something I've been planning to do for a while:  write a few (okay, maybe more than a few) words on how I ended up at Google and what my thoughts are about working there.

I’m usually a firm believer that charity—like praying—is best a private affair.  In particular, I have an especially high admiration for generous folks who give anonymously.

With that said, however, I’m going to share with you a business that I just helped fund… and I hope you will join in!

UPDATE: I’m thrilled to note that within 24 hours after I posted the original business profile here, that business was fully funded!  See the comments on this entry for more details.  The profile now shown below is selected randomly (on each page view) by Kiva.

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After evaluating many possible businesses / business people to invest in, I decided to support Ms. Wamaitha in Kenya in her drive to expand her current library and continue her support work fighting HIV/AIDS.  You can learn more about her and her efforts by clicking the photo above, and in the meantime, here’s a relevant snippet:

She is requesting a loan of US $ 2,000. Her budget is: US $ 1,000 to purchase assorted education books, journals and magazines, US $500 to purchase furniture for the reading space, US $ 300 to decorate the library and build shelves and US $ 200 advertise and acquire necessary license. This will increase her income to an average of US $ 100 per week. She plans to utilize the income to keep her children in school and to expand her business further. Jane is hard working and will be able to repay the loan.

You can make a loan for as little as $25… and in about 2 minutes via credit card (it’s done through PayPal, but you don’t need an account with them, just a credit card).  It’s also interesting to note that 100% of loans made through Kiva so far have been repaid in full!

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Unlike with my most recent post, I’m not going to tag anyone.  But I think it’d be a marvelous meme—SEO-blog or otherwise—having this opportunity propagated throughout the blogosphere.  So feel free to reverse-tag me and support Ms. Wamaitha or another worthy businessperson from Kiva, post about your contribution on your blog, and encourage others to do the same.  Let’s see if we can meet her modest business loan need by the end of this year, and—even better—see how many other businesses we can support .

Lastly, props to my friend Huy (yes, the awesome Huy of Orkut fame ) for letting me know about this wonderful site.

What if you could build a better world, from the ground up?  What if you could even start “yourself” over… You.v2 or even New You; a different hairstyle, thinner, maybe even a different race or gender?  What if you could escape the hellish aspects of our world whenever and for however long you liked?  Glamorous, confident, rich, powerful, whimsical, witty YOU.  What if you could, indeed, have yourself a Second Life?

You can.  Via the amazingly powerful and immersive Second Life world online, you can build or even just experience your own 3D world… with thousands of other people from around the world in real time.  Music, art, religion, geekery (of course!), and (duh!) sex.  It’s all there, and discovering—even participating in it—is practically as easy as pointing and clicking.  When I first tried out Second Life ("SL") years ago after meeting one of the founders of Linden Labs (Second Life’s creator), I was floored by the fluidity of the experience, just how easy it was to join, get around, meet people, and actually have interesting and entertaining conversations.

But after exploring SL for about ten hours over a long weekend, I grew wary… and have infrequently returned.  I’ve thought quite a bit about SL since then, and have been reluctant to voice my thoughts; as a geek who has indeed made some true friends (and, yes, even met stunningly brilliant and beautiful members of the opposite sex) via online interactions even back in the 80s, I worried that I’d seem hypocritical discussing my dismissal of SL.  However, an essay today by Ted—”Second Life? How ‘bout getting a First Life”—has prompted me to blather on a bit about my thoughts on virtual reality.

I’ve spent much of this weekend dealing with my blogfeeds.  I have well over 200 (haven’t bothered to count ‘em exactly), and I’m tens of thousands of posts behind.  Some feeds I’ve just had to (often regretfully) unsubscribe from, others I’ve “reset to zero” (admittedly just masking a larger problem), but—most interestingly to me—I’ve become more acutely aware that some blogs have a thriving community and others do not.

Some examples of blogs I perceive to have strong communities:

• Apophenia
• Google Blogoscoped
• Aaron Swartz’ “Raw Thought”

What indicates a strong community on a blog? (I’m not counting “meta” sites like Digg, Slashdot, MeFi, etc., by the way)

• Entries tend to have many comments.
• Commenters tend to stick around over time (there aren’t just a lot of one-off commenters on individual entries).
• Commenters aren’t just “talking” to the blogger, but also to each other.

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.
   
    
   Read the full entry...

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   - Blathered by Adam on Monday, July 3, 2006 at 16:52 Permalink
   - Filed under Personal • Society
   - Commented on by 21 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 .

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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.