Shabbir's Diary

This is the kind of nerd I am. Fun is...

• surfing the fidelity.com website and trying to see what index fund, etf, or mutual fund has the highest performance to expense ratio for the last 3 years.
• playing microstakes ($0.10/$0.20) Omaha Pot Limit (hi only) and limping every single late position hand, regardless of the quality of my hand.  Just to learn how to steal.

It's not that I'm a big nerd.  I am.  I just express it in weird ways.

Incidentally, this circle of friends also has a gift economy.  I just gave away a Harley jacket, motorcycle boots, and two helmets.  I just got, in return, a nearly new and clean futon and frame.  I also got a marketing researcher and a data analysis guru.

Bruce Sterling, your maneki niko story is made true today.

The great Facebook purge of 2007

My random thoughts:

• the one downside of not having my life heavily segmented is that if something is bothering me that I don't really want 50 people to know about, I'm not sure who I can confide in.  The nature of discretion is complex.  People can't assure you they're 'discrete', you have to learn by process of elimination.  After you've known someone a year, sometimes they tell you something about someone else prefaced with "I shouldn't tell you this but....".  At that moment you cross them off the list of people eligible to keep your secrets.  After a while you learn that one rare person that you know is a vault.  Note that I'm not even sure I survive that standard, but occasionally such people are helpful.
• I just purged 40 friends from my Facebook profile.  I stopped looking at all the friends status page because it was filled with people I kind of half knew, kind of didn't.  And lots of people I'm not likely to see again.  I decided to make LinkedIn my professional social network since it's better at that anyway, and Facebook my really close circle of friends that I'm likely to see often.  I purged a lot of people I used to work with in DC, not because I don't like them, but because I can no longer care about the fact that they're watching the premier of "House" on Fox tonight.  If you're in SF and you're doing that, well that's information that's actually relevant to how I might spend my night.

Ok, this is weird.

I've moved to a place where I have dozens of friends. 

This wasn't unintentional.  It's the main reason Sarah chose this for "her turn" to move us, and ironically enough, researchers have found that happiness and longevity is linked to spending time with friends.  But it's definately a new experience.  In DC I would have counted maybe a dozen friends and they were all in seperate circles so they never made plans together.

Here's they all know each other and do things together.  By the way that includes showing up in our hospital room when our son was in for tests.  That was truly touching, and probably wouldn't have happened in DC unless we were in the hospital for a full week.

I'm suddenly juggling art openings to attend in support of friends and birthdays to remember and parents funerals to send flowers to and all that sort of things.  It is all-consuming, but it's really, really nice.  I end up seeing these people pretty much every week. I had totally forgot what this was like. 

In DC my ability to make friends at work was completely removed because "I was the boss".  And it's such a transitory town that friends I made were isolated from others, and often left town for other jobs and lives.

The last time I can remember this experience was when I was in NY over ten years ago.  Imagine going ten years without a sizable group of friends.  This must explain part of why I became such a recluse.  (There's also the fact that I'm a borderline introvert.)

Weird.  There's a whole set of associated manners I'm re-learning as well.

UK students win fight over interest debt with HSBC

From ABC News: (I've heavily edited this, see the original)

By early August, HSBC formally began applying a 9.9 percent interest to the debts of nearly 250,000 British students. Here in the land of genteel socialism, the response was predictable: fury.

But students are always angry about something. But that is counterbalanced by the fact that they are also usually powerless. The result is typically a whole lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

But this time, something changed. And that change may prove to be very significant. What happened was that 4,000 of those angry students went on to the online community site Facebook, which is especially popular with college students, and joined a group dedicated to getting HSBC to reverse its decision.

The group, created by Wes Streeting, vice president of the National Union of Students (NUS), was entitled "Stop the Great HSBC Graduate Rip-Off" (a classic example of hubris: only postadolescents would characterize the end of a charity as a "rip-off.")

Literally within days the group had 4,000 members, all loudly demanding a return of their preferential treatment. And then an amazing thing happened &

HSBC, the world's fourth largest corporation, with assets of nearly $2 trillion, caved.

Between 1994 and 1996 I organized people mostly through e-mail to fight digital censorship legislation.  Last month college students in the UK organized on Facebook to fight policies of banking giant HSBC in the UK, and won.

The skills are similar, all that's changed is the venue.  It was e-mail, now it's Facebook.  To those who say "It's an entirely new world of skills and techniques" I say no, it's just politics.  Only your megaphone has changed.

"Danny Boy", from the Muppet Show

The Internet is useful in ways you don't understand.  I don't say this because I have some unique insight into it's inner workings, but simply because the sum total of information out there has different value to people in different situations.

Take YouTube, for example.  For you it's a source of funny distraction.  For me it's a toddler entertainment device.  Hours have been spent exploring videos of fire engines, construction equipment, and Muppet show clips with my two year old on it.  It's been a long time since I watched anything for me.  Until today, when Sarah showed me this clip of Beaker, Animal, and the Swedish Chef from the Muppet Show attempting to sing the old Irish ballad, "Danny Boy".

Rapid response skills online

If you follow the Google zeitgeist you know that major news events follow a familiar pattern online:

1. The news event breaks;
2. People rush to their computers to search for news about the event;
3. People start buying domain names related to the event to attract quick ad traffic revenue; and
4. The funny tshirts start coming out.

Last week when Steve Jobs announced that all existing iPhones would have a $200 price drop, anger from people who dropped $500 or more on their iPhone got pissed.  Competing phone vendor Nokia responded with online advertising to try and capture the anger and move them towards Nokia mobile content by placing Google AdWords on phrases like "iphone price drop".

Modern day communications professionals should take note of this technique, and feel comfortable doing it in their sleep.  Get yourself an AdWords account and learn how to do this yourself, or call Mindshare to have us help you do it.

UPDATE: Apple marketers have outpaid Nokia for this traffic, and now two different ads are showing up.  One from Nokia, and one from Apple.  This is the kind of bidding war in which only Google wins.

Burning Man 2007: "You're doing it wrong"

This was my first year at Burning Man as a San Franciscan.  I had great visions of how much better my art project would be due to my not having to haul crap across the country.  I also had developed a larger set of friends here and was excited to spend some time out on the playa with them.  In no particular order, here are the things I saw that struck me about this year's trip.  Note that I am not rendering judgement about whether it was "good" or "bad".   I had some wonderful experiences, and some that sucked, but that's about par for the course. 

I'm not making plans to return next year, mostly because it's way too early to have such a discussion.

"You're doing it wrong!"
This Squircle-inspired catch-phrase really summed up my experience.  So many things went wrong throughout the trip:

• Our camp's gear got sold off by the disreputable storage company;
• My art project looked "jinky" at it's best, and was dust-storm susceptible and had to be taken down in high winds;
• Several hundred dollars worth of Heiniken minikegs spit nothing but foam because I couldn't chill them cold enough in the middle of the fucking desert;
• Our group kitchen's cook (who is an amazing chef) collapsed from the quantity of work that it takes to cook two meals a day for even a small set of people.  After I realized how much of his time this sucked out of him, and because I love his cooking, I made a point of going up and hugging him every meal.
• Oh, and some jackass burning the man early one morning while I slept.

It's still a big fucking camping trip and it kind of works regardless of what else happens

Steve often refers to Burning Man in this way, and at the end of the day, you trek out to the desert to hang around a whole lot of your friends.  This was a lot of fun.  With a little in-camp drama as a distraction, it was basically like we all lived in three blocks from each other and got to hang out for 5 days straight.  "Shut up you fucking whore" goes from a phrase said in anger to a running joke inside of 12 hours with that kind of proximity. 

These experiences are mostly now why I would go again (and why I went this year).  I now am physically close to a circle of friends that mean a great deal to me, and I enjoy spending time with them.  This element of the week was divine.

The Environmental message was mostly ineffective at it's goal (at least for me)

There was a big todo this year about the green tech on display on the playa, whether companies paid to show their stuff, and whether it would commercialize the experience, etc.  Frankly, the whole event is a commercial endeavor anyway, so it's too late for that.  Just dig into the finances to see this.  I walked through the green pavillion twice and had several distinct reactions.  It wasn't pervasive either, so unless you went to the tent, you generally didn't notice it. 

1. Commercial?  Are you kidding?:  Besides the Burning Man LLC itself being a giant business, the commercial presence of U-Haul and RV Rents at Burning Man is way more pervasive than the green tech stuff could ever hope to be.
2. Too preachy: All the copy in the thing came off as way too preachy.  It put me into a full on snark that I managed not to vent at my cycling companions until I saw...
3. The idiotic green carnival games: I actually saw a woman barking at passerby to grab three beanbags and 'take your frustrations out on the oil companies'.  The hypocrisy of this, given that we'd all driven out to the playa with ungodly quantities of gear and were probably all heavily dependent on our oil-consuming cars, was not lost on me.  We bear responsibility for the environmental mess we're in, and railing at the oil companies is neither an accurate assessment of the problem, nor is it going to make it any better.  I was tempted to throw the beanbags at her, but I'm occasionally a competent pacifist.
4. The urban turbine: The coolest thing I saw was in fact a product sponsored by a green company.  It was a small electricity generating wind turbine, designed to mount on the side of your house in an urban area.  It only needs a wind of 7mph to get going, and can put a sizable dent in your electric bill.  I want one.

"Their people came to setup their RVs"
Uncle Kevin, who camped with us, helped direct some Hollywood people's assistants on where to find someone to help them place their RVs in our village.  They apparently came out to "setup the RV" for their bosses.  Kevin's initial reaction, "You have to 'set up an RV?' made me laugh hard on the drive home.  But this was serious.  Apparently such people live in such a bubble that they can't be bothered to drive out their own luxury vehicle and toss it into park themselves.  These people had no impact whatsoever on my playa experience, except to remind me what a soulless void the entertainment industry is, and how it has the potential to ruin anything remotely spiritual or meaningful if you let it.  I'm glad I didn't run into these people in camp.  But then, they weren't going to spend any time with us during a dust storm anyway, were they?  They were just going to hide in their RVs.

After I posted this, Billfrog pointed out this blog post from a woman in Cyclecide who was the "Burning Man Planner" for a bunch of Hollywood types.  I don't know if this is the same people or an entirely different set.

I don't begrudge Hollywood coming to the playa.  And I don't begrudge them the need for some privacy, they're a little exposed out here to the creep factor and I don't really know what it's like to have paparazzi chasing you, so who am I to judge?  I think the story about them flashing their faces at people for the fun of it is vain, but then we are talking about the entertainment industry.  Vain is what makes them money.

 

Did I mention that RVs suck (at least for what I want to get out of the playa experience?)

During one of the dust storms Sarah and I were walking  by this RV and a woman stuck her head out and said, "come in!"  We did and it really fucked us up.  The elements at Burning Man, and the process of surviving them creates a bond with your fellow campers.  When a whiteout hits, Steve puts on some hard danceable music, and you dance your ass off in the camp bar despite the fact that you can't see more than 25 feet in front of you.  That's fun.  You and your friends are demonstrating an ungodly optimistic ability to have a good time despite almost everything nature can throw at you.  That creates awesome shared experiences.

Our fellow campers who spent the dust storms in their RV will never know those experiences.  They just shut their door, cranked their AC, and ate chips and drank waiting for it to be over.   Honest to god I had spent the week camping, taking a shower every other day, and wearing mostly the same clothes, but I didn't feel dirty until I set foot outside that RV and realized I had sucked the soul out of my playa experience.

Burning Man is big, and anonymous
Kevin also pointed out that the thing has gotten so big that people aren't forced into meeting new people as often anymore, and that in fact it can be downright lonely if you're not there with a big group.  This is perhaps something that happened years ago, but Kevin just put a good descriptor on it.  It may or may not have played a role in the two suicide attempts (one successful, one not) that I knew about on the playa this year.

There are three things I go to Burning Man to get: great art, deeper kinship with friends, and well-met strangers.  I've noticed that for the past few years I really only get the the first two.  Ask anyone in fandango if they leave camp much, once they've made their Fandango connections and the answer is no, not much.  This last element of Burning Man (well-met strangers) is all but gone.

I made a really good friend
I got to spend a lot of time with a very unlikely person who will/has become a very good friend.  I really didn't see that coming. 

The party art car is the Jabba the Hutt pleasure barge of the playa
The generic party art car, usually some kind of Mad-Max looking motorized 1 or 2 story platform with a flamethrower on it, doesn't add much to my playa experience.  Hell in India and Pakistan they cram a lot more people on such vehicles than they do at Burning Man.  After seeing one too many of them park next to a piece of art and ruin it either with their loud sound system or their flamethrower, I began to see them all as little Jabba the Hutt's running around the desert with their yachts full of sycophants.  Particularly obnoxious were the flamethrowing art busses that parked next to the Monkey Zoetrope, a piece timed carefully with strobe lights that was unwatchable whenever some jackass blew his flamethrower and whited-out any appreciation you might have gotten out of that art piece.

Once I saw these big art cars as modern day yachts, or futuristic Huttese sail barges, I couldn't see them any differently.  I imagined every one full of sycophants attempting to use the car or its owner to further their personal mini-fame.  And every owner as someone otherwise socially awkward, attempting to overcome their maladjustment by pouring money into this vehicle in the hopes that some girl would stay on it and sleep with them. 

Yes it's a sweeping inaccurate generalization.  No I can't shake it.  It's been confirmed by the creepy story about the custom-built for Hollywood art car.

The art is cool, but not that cool.
I really enjoyed several of the pieces this year, and in fact I took a few years off to ensure that when I returned it would all be new.  And for the most part it was.  The playa was full of things I had never seen before.  But my tastes have changed and now I am a lot harder to engage.  Frankly, I enjoyed the naturally occurring double, complete, end to end rainbow I saw on the playa more than most of the art.  I also was entranced by the lunar eclipse, though I fell asleep for the last half of it and the first burning of the man.  (The one big exception to this was the Monkey Zoetrope)

But I can't ignore the fact that there's some cool art right here in San Francisco that I probably don't get out enough to see.  And I don't have to pitch a tent in a dust storm to appreciate it.

The bottom line, and since I kept all my Burning Man expenses in quicken I know the low four figures Sarah and I spent on this, is that I think I would have done better with the time and money.  I love the people I camped with, save one or two exceptions.  But we moved to California to be closer to them, and so I often see them every week or two regardless.  I didn't need to go to the desert to see them.  With the money I spent I could have invited 16 of them to a cabin in Mexico, paid for the cabin myself, stocked it with food, and I still would have had money left over to help with flights.

The trick is that I find myself drawn to the setup and infrastructure problems of our little camp.   Although I couldn't help build the bar, Sarah and I helped with and donated to the fundraiser, helped pack the truck, helped with the operation of the bar (except serving drinks, I refuse to do that), and when the truck returns from the desert, I'll help unpack it.  I created over 100 badges for fandango campers that gave them a sense of community, and I have a short list of other infrastructure things that I can see myself doing in a future year.

The secret for me seems to be displeasure with the length of the stay.  I really can't do 5 days in that environment.  I get bored.  This is true of pretty much every vacation I go on.  I need to change towns, or change scenery every 3 or 4 days.  The secret may be to go out early, help with the camp setup, and then return and cherry pick a few days at the end of Burning Man (Fri, Sat, Sun, Mon) instead of going out Monday and returning Monday.  (This year Sarah, Kevin, and I ended up leaving the morning of the second burn in fact).  Or perhaps I should go out, setup on Saturday, and then spend 4 days in Reno playing cards, returning to the desert at the end of the week.

I won't say I won't ever go to Burning Man again, or even that I won't go next year.  Who knows, I might.  But unlike previous years, I didn't come back with a long list of things I want to do next year on the trip.