How people deal with insecurity

Over the weekend, I talked with two people who were unnecessarily critical of others.  They focused on the negative: whose product wasn't working, whose company seems too niche, who was overly stressed.  They did this even for friends.  I found it strangely difficult to break away from the conversations while they were happening, but afterwards I felt a lot worse about life.

I mentioned it to a friend, and she said they may have been feeling insecure about their own life, and hence propping themselves up by lowering others.

I have huge respect for when people can admit their insecurities and state them openly without tearing down anyone else.  People at Minted are really good at doing this.  I am sometimes in awe of my colleagues' ability to do it.  It takes so much confidence.

I wonder why it is so hard to break away as the conversations are happening.  Even though i am steadily becoming demoralized, I can't seem to walk away.  Because I am used to people doing this, and it feels familiar?  Because it is like watching a train wreck and you cannot look away?  

willpower

I'm reading a book about willpower:

It makes a few points:

1. Meditation helps you stay focused on your long-term goal. It helps you practice moving your thoughts away from distractions, back onto your breath or your meditative state. Later in the day, when you get distracted by a chocolate cake or a timewaster, you will be more practiced at pulling your thoughts back to your focus.

2. If you label some behaviors as "good" (exercising, saving money) and others as "bad" like a vice (dessert, splurging on expensive items), then doing good things will make you feel entitled to treat yourself to vice. "I exercised so I deserve to eat this ice cream." Instead of good vs bad, if you classify your exercising as contributing to your long-term goal, then it'll make you less likely to deviate.

This recent thinking about willpower also made me reflect tonight on how some products are purely brought into the world by the willpower of their founders. Steve Lawrence willed Google Desktop into existence, via sheer force of will. It seemed like Paul Buchheit did the same for Gmail, though I did not see that one until just after launch. Mariam does the same for expanding Minted into the art and party markets. Sometimes you go into a mode where you become maniacal that you must bring a certain thing into the world, and you become obsessively determined to do it. I wonder what percentage of products are created this way.

dodge bugs using Matrix bullet time

Every Thursday at lunchtime, we rotate having a speaker from a department around the company. It's very informal, and people can ask questions. We've had speakers from every department.

Today one of our lead engineers spoke.

Audience member (designer): "When you look at code, does it look like The Matrix? Do you look at 1s and 0s, and you see a Minted web page?"

Her: "Firstly, it's not all in green. We have something called syntax highlighting, which shows the words in different colors. Also, it doesn't scroll by really fast. I have to scroll myself."

I thought it was so funny that she actually answered seriously, and that she phrased it as "having to scroll", as though code scrolling by quickly would be preferable.

 
These could be bugs whizzing by.

Funniest brother

Me: "For Melissa's birthday, I sent her a Minted greeting card that said 'Happy birthday to the number-one most froggy friend'.  On the inside, it said, 'I am so lucky to spend 5/7 of my days with you, sometimes 6/7.'"

Tom: "You both go into work on the weekends?"

Me: "No, I sometimes hang out with her socially."

Tom: "Oh I see."

Me: "So your natural conclusion is that I work on weekends, not that I might have a friend."

Tom: "Let's be honest, come on."

I swear

Visiting my brother in Irvine.

Me: "My new interns are so funny.  I think the team humor level may be at an all-time high.  The other day, XXX wrote an email to the engineers about doing inserts into a particular database table, in the form of a short poem.  His intern replied with '10/10.  The poem moved me to tears.' Then another intern replied to say, 'For the record, I also cried a little bit.'"

Tom: [chuckling]

Me: "They tell me that normally they are even funnier.  But at work, they are spending part of their energy trying not to swear."

Tom: "You don't swear at work?"

Me: "Only sparingly."

Tom: "At my work, every other word is a curse word.  Every day you hear someone screaming, 'The fucking build is broken!!  Who the fuck broke the build???'. Sometimes the person screaming is me."

Me: "Oh!  But you don't swear when we hang out."

Tom: "We are usually talking about something nice, not why the code won't fucking compile."

Preparing for Sha-mayn's wedding

I feel so lucky to be friends with Sha-mayn. She is perfect.

Ibiza!

Sha-mayn's wedding is tomorrow. I hope I walk correctly during the ceremony!

Ibiza is an interesting island. Very pretty nature, and also good DJs according to my brother who follows that sort of thing.

Ibiza for Sha-mayn's wedding

I am in Ibiza for Sha-mayn's wedding tomorrow! Rehearsal dinner tonight.

It was an 18-hour flight here with two stopovers but felt easy because I was traveling with my brother's girlfriend who is über fun!

Sky

Driving back to San Francisco from Burning Man:

Me: The sky looks like it doesn't have enough polygons and the colors are stripey. What would you say if you saw this in a game?

MB: Faaaaaaake!

Party on Saturday

One attendee brought a machine that has alcohol in its belly, and you use a web app to mix drinks that pour out of the machine.

I like my hair in this outfit. Maybe will cut my hair permanently this style!

Half Dome!

The best thing about climbing Half Dome is that afterwards people will assume you are pretty fit.  In actuality, the person on the cables immediately in front of me was overweight.  But you'll still get loads of positive affirmation about your physical fitness after your summit.

You can see Half Dome in the distance on the right.

Waterfall on the way up.

I went with a group of 25 people.  The organizer divided us into six teams: Team Cheetah, Team Falcon, Team Bison, Team Giraffe, Team Turtle, Team Hedgehog.  I was on Team Turtle.  I was the slowest Turtle!

On top of the sub-dome, facing the last part of the summit.  You can see the line of people going up the cables.

Team Turtle started climbing an hour before Team Cheetah (they were still sleeping when we left the Yosemite cabin), but the Cheetahs had been on the summit for two hours by the time the Turtles got to the top.

The house I lived in at age 5

Since we were in Salt Lake City for my cousin's wedding, my brother and I decided to go look for the house we lived in.  I lived there from ages 5 to 8.  He lived there from 0 to 0.5.  

First I messed up the address and we went to a cemetery.  My brother looked at the tombstones to figure out if the cemetery was new.

We lived in the ground floor of this house.  We paid $100 per month in rent.  This woman is the current tenant in the basement.

The walkway into the backyard and down into the basement.

I spent so many hours in this crevasse between the house and the fence.  At least one hour per day.  I imagined it was a magical land.  Once I found kittens there, so it really was magical.

Entryway to the main door.  

It was a sociable home.  There were chinese neighbors who came over every day.  It was a really comforting sense of community.

Zombies and punny grilled cheese (SIGGRAPH part 2)

The first time I went to SIGGRAPH (computer graphics conference) was 2003 and I felt stuck in a rut.  I'd lived for five years in a city that didn't really fit with me (Seattle).  The whole five years, I felt like a fish out of water, vaguely dissatisfied in a way I couldn't name.  By the end, I wondered what was wrong with me, and how I could change my personality to become more of a content person.

Then I went to SIGGRAPH and I was so deliriously happy, every minute.  I went to amazing talks on camera technology and environment maps.  I presented my sketch on cloud rendering.  I looked at the latest motion capture technology.  I skipped most meals because I was so energized that I didn't need to eat.

I decided I didn't need to change my personality.  I just needed to move.  Two months later, I moved to California.

I went again to SIGGRAPH the next year, to present on rain and snow rendering.  Then not again for eight years, until last week.

The expo floor. There is a lot of eye candy at SIGGRAPH (in terms of beautiful renderings, not booth babes).

These zombies were advertising the 3-d software package used to create the TV show "Walking Dead".

O M G.  Here you see three panels pieced together to form a panoramic display.  You move your viewpoint around the scene via a joystick.  I experienced a tsunami of awe and coveting.  

I saw at least 3 motion capture exhibits on the expo.  Every time I go, there are more mo-cap companies.  Eventually it'll be like Starbucks -- every exhibit on the floor will be a mo-cap studio.

...

The food booths in the main convention center looked bad.  There were long lines for a Chinese take-out box and a sandwich on a plate.  They did not look fresh, or tasty.

Then miraculously there was this grilled cheese stand.

When I got up close to it, I realized all the sandwich names were puns on computer graphics luminaries.  Ed Catmelt sandwich, labeled as "tech achievement"!  Perlin Peach for a sandwich with ricotta and peaches!  (That's what I ate.)  The Phong.  The Blinn.  I literally cried out in amazement when the sandwich names sunk in.

Then I wondered...  does this stand only exist for SIGGRAPH?  Do they change the sandwich names every week for different conferences?  Do they always ask find a conference organizer to help them devise the sandwich names?

The Perlin Peach was an exquisite sandwich.

As I was standing there, I was seized with a fervent desire to contribute enough to the world to get a cheese sandwich named The Wang for one week.

Cousin's wedding!

My 22-year-old cousin got married today in a Mormon church.

The pastor gave specific instructions.  The groom is to avoid going out to eat with old girlfriends.  The bride is to avoid complaining about marital arguments to her girlfriends.  

It is rather binding to put these into the wedding speech since you are agreeing to those covenants!

My brother, me, and my uncle and aunt (groom's parents).

Because this is in Utah, there is no alcohol at the wedding.  For yesterday's rehearsal dinner, one of the groomsmen drove a keg from Colorado so that there would be beer there. 

Siggraph!

I am at SIGGRAPH 2012, the premiere computer graphics conference. I am so excited that I willingly woke up at 4:30am to fly down to LA for it.

Motion capture system, being demo-ed on the exhibition floor.

A poster on algorithmically converting photos into impressionist paintings. There are many examples of doing this, but this technique emphasizes edges rather than blurring them. It ends up with sharp edges on a blurred background.

Poster on improving vector line art. This was the most clearly-communicated poster on the floor. It actually has a plot and characters.

Lobby of one of the conference hotels.

long-ago amusing exchange

Reading journal from the past.  In 2008, talking with another Googler:

D: "How many employees are we at? 30,000? 40,000?"

Me: "Oh my God, surely not!"

D: "At least 20,000."

Me: "That's not so bad."

D: "You can justify that? 'Oh, we're a whale, but we're not yet the blue whale.'"

olympics and the diverse human race

From 2008, right before I went to the Beijing Olympics:

Tom: "You're going to the Olympics next week! Are you excited?"

Me: "Kind of, but I've been to Beijing so many times already."

Tom: "This time will be different. The air will be a lot better. And there will be lots of foreigners."

Me: "There are foreigners here in America."

Tom: "The foreigners here are Americanized. The ones in Beijing won't be."

Me: "That's true! So I'll see one guy in a turban, and another guy playing a ukelele?"

Tom: "More like one guy wearing a Tommy Hilfiger shirt manufactured in India, and another guy wearing a Tommy Hilfiger shirt made in Jamaica."

fascinate

I'm reading a book called "Fascinate", about how to captivate people with your company's brand.

Alarm is one of the triggers that fascinates people. If you alarm people, they will be more likely to talk about your company.

Often companies (and people) shy away from creating any negative backlash. But that actually can create more fascination.

Martha Stewart steampunk bathroom

My college friend Aaron is the Martha Stewart of Caltech.

It is lovely to attend a party with homemade food, rather than chips or store-bought food.

Also he designed his home to have a steampunk bathroom.

Friendship is nice

Tonight I went over to Melissa's, and we watched Olympics. Melissa is the cofounder of Minted.

I am glad she came into my life. She told me that if she were to do her wedding over, she would make me a bridesmaid. She told this to another friend of hers, who got super jealous.

I like being ranked a closer friend than someone else. It makes me happy! Because it sucks to be in the shoes of the jealous person, so you milk it when you can be the envied friend.

These are photos of the heart necklace I got her. It has two chains, and you break it in half, and each wear one half. I got it when she was moving to work remotely in Shanghai for six months. Occasionally we wear our halves to board meetings, for solidarity.