Welcome!

I'm glad you found your way here to the new blog.  As you can see, the design is a little different, but it's still the same guy behind the scenes writing.  I'll be tweaking the design a little until I get it set to something I like.  In the meantime, enjoy the new blog, and stop by the old site, where I'm cooking up something good.

How I Met Your Mother, Part 2

So you heard about how I met Mary, but what you didn't know was that we started seeing really quickly that we clicked in just about every way.  I realized that she was the kind of girl that I had been looking for for a long time.  So we got to talking about marriage, kind of in that half-joking-but-not-really-joking way at first, and when we realized that we were both serious about it, we knew it was no longer a matter of "if," but "when."

Now fast-forward with me to several weeks later (that's how long it took to design the ring and have it ready).  Mary knew the ring was coming, but she had no idea when.  She had almost caught me receiving an email from the jewelry place saying that the ring was ready and that I could come pick it up the next day, so I quickly made up a story saying that the ring had been delayed and that they were very sorry but bla bla bla and it would be another couple of weeks or so.

The next day I picked up the ring and went to her house.  I was kind of nervous because, let's be honest here, who isn't nervous the day they're planning on proposing?  Mary's mind was elsewhere, though, so for now I was ok.  I had thought of some ideas on how I was going to do it, but I was also going to go with the flow and be spontaneous if the situation came up.  It was a nice day outside, so I talked Mary into going to the beach at Corona del Mar and the Montage resort in Laguna Beach, a private beach and favorite of ours.  So we drove down there, walked around, and took some pictures, then climbed up on this big rock at the Montage to watch the sunset.

As we sat there talking, I turned around toward her, trying to be subtle, on both knees.

"Whoa! What are you doing?  Sit back down!  You're making me nervous!" she said, having picked up the hint somewhere that something might be coming soon.

"Would I make you more nervous if I did this?" I asked, as I got to one knee.

"WHAT ARE YOU DOING? ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!"

I reached into the hoodie I had to my side and pulled out  the ring box, and asked her to marry me, and she said yes!

The date is February 11, 2011, just over a month away.  I couldn't be happier or more excited!  I always thought it was cheesy when people used to say this, but I think I finally understand how good it feels to say that I am marrying my best friend.

How I Met Your Mother, Part 1

So I've kind of taken a break from the blogging routine, and a lot has changed in the past few months. I have a lot to catch you up on. So, without further ado, here's the update. Drumroll please, and I promise you won't be disappointed...

I'm engaged!

Up to now I haven't shared many personal details or stories on this blog. It's been mostly thoughts, opinions, and essays really. Well today's update will more than make up for it.

Let me take you back to mid-July of this year. (Yeah, I know. I work fast.) You might chalk it up to having moved back into my parents' house and going to school full-time without being able to work much, or single twentysomething Mormon subculture, or my little brother having gotten married in May and moving off to make a name for himself in the world. Maybe all of those, but whatever the reasons, I decided to take a more proactive approach to some aspects of my life, specifically to dating.

For those who aren't familiar with the intricacies of Mormon culture, dating and marriage are huge. We tend to date a lot of people to learn what we like and don't like in a potential partner, and it's not uncommon for us to move fast when we finally find what we like.

Anyway, back to my story. I was at a bachelor party for a longtime friend of mine, and he was telling me about how he had met his fiancée (now wife) through a mutual friend, Lauren, the same mutual friend who had been responsible for my brother meeting his wife. Having long suspected that the same networking principles I was learning about in my business program at school could also be applied to other "business," I was already thinking of talking to her and setting up some way to mix people up and get us all paired off, and hearing that clinched it. I talked to Lauren and told her that we were going to have a game night at my house. I was going to invite some of my guy friends and she was going to invite some of her girl friends, and see what happened.

On the evening of the game night, the first group of friends showed up. (Girls, as you know, always travel in packs. It doesn’t matter if it’s to a party or to the bathroom, and this was no exception.) It was a group of about five girls, and among them was a girl I had never met named Mary Pitton. When I saw her I immediately knew that this mix-up thing was a good idea. Who knew if anything was going to come of it, but she was definitely cute. So we all had a good time and I spent a lot of time trying to flirt. Luckily for me, she flirted back, and things kind of took off from there.

What, you wanted more of the story? Stay tuned for more…

The Spaminator Strikes Again!

Since I started a blog, my eyes have been opened to the wonderful world of spam comments. Many of you will know what I’m talking about.  It’s always nice to get comments on a new post I’ve written, to hear what people think of it.  However, the trend seems to be for random, no-name internet companies to spam people’s blogs with comments containing links back to their own sites, in order to give it a higher search engine ranking.  Luckily for me, however, Wordpress has a setting so I can screen comments before allowing them to show up on my blog, so it didn’t take long for me to start using that.

An interesting perk of this new widespread SEO tactic is that I get to read the weird things that get posted.  While a good chunk of them just write random crap about health insurance rates or whatever, some of them pretend to actually try their hand at a real comment.  It’s pretty evident that these are being written by people who don’t speak English as a first language, or don’t even look at the page.  Here are a few of my favorites:

hi,good apple in your post,I love thatelegantapple,I need to find one for me,jane
Thanks, Jane.  I’m glad you noticed.  I hope you find the apples you’re looking for.

This has genuinely sparked up an concept in my brain.
Ouch. That hurts just thinking about it.

Hey myself came across your page by lucky on ask while hunt for something total irrelevantly but myself am very glad that myself did, Yourself have just captured yourself another subscriber.
Ah, yes.  Engrish.

Wow I'm honestly the only reply to this amazing read?!?
This was like the fifth comment on the page.  At least it was a coherent sentence though.

gratefulness you for your information.
You’re welcome…I guess...

gives use a terrific ınternet site decent Gives appreciate it for the working hard to support me personally
Wait, what?  I think you spilled a little bit of dictionary on my page.

To those of you who actually read, gratefulness you!

StreetWars

I can't remember where I heard about the idea for StreetWars, but I think sounds like a fun idea.  It was invented (I guess that's the right word for it) by an organization of the same name, that sets up and runs games in big cities all over the world, and thousands of people get in on it every time.  Each person is assigned a "target," who they have to hunt down and "kill" with a squirt gun.  When you kill someone, they give you the information on their target, who then becomes your new target.  This continues until everyone except one is dead.

I decided to run an experimental group game involving several of my friends.  I figure in a way it's an exercise in marketing, which is one of the subjects I'm focusing on in my MBA.  I had to decide on the Product  (the game itself), the Place, the Promotion (mostly word of mouth and Facebook), and the Price (participants have to buy their own squirt gun, at the dollar story or whatever, so as not to end up too expensive).

If this little experiment leads to any interesting results or insights I will be sure to publish them.  In the meantime, the game is afoot!

Facebook's Quest for World Domination

Fifteen years ago, we all assumed that either Coca-Cola or Disney would be the first corporation to take over the world.  Five years ago, it was Google.  However, it now looks like world domination will come from an even newer entrant: Facebook.  In fact, it’s looking more and more like Facebook is positioning itself to do to Google in the 2010’s what it did to MySpace in the 2000’s.

The 2000’s saw the rise of online social networking, in which people could set up their own profiles and connect to other “friends” online.  Friendster was the first network to really take off, and it was soon supplanted by MySpace, which in turn was soon overtaken by Facebook.  Interestingly enough, MySpace seems to have reinvented itself as a vertical network geared toward music artists, as it is now still the go-to place for artists and bands looking to be discovered.  Facebook, meanwhile, has become by far the largest online social network, boasting over 400 million active users.  If it were its own country, it would be the third largest in the world population-wise, 33% bigger than the United States.

Google was established in the late 1990’s.  Its innovation as a search engine was its method of searching.  Whereas most conventional search engines of the time ranked results based on the number of times the search terms appeared on the page, Google set up a new system that analyzed the relationships between websites.  This system, called PageRank, determines a website’s relevance by counting the number of pages that link back to a given site, and the importance of those pages, relying on “Googlebots,” or programs that automatically browse the internet looking for new pages, changes to pages, and new connections between pages.  This system is what gave Google its competitive advantage over other search engines, propelled it to the top of the search industry, and helped it become the behemoth that we know and love today.

You may have seen how you can now log in to several third party (not Facebook) websites and applications using your Facebook identity, and “Like” stories from other websites such as CNN, Fox News, or Cracked, which then show up in your News Feed.  What’s actually going on is that Facebook is relying on a principal called collective intelligence, or “crowdsourcing,” to crawl the internet for relevant pages and make them more easily accessible, in a way similar to Google’s bots.  The difference is that Google relies on computer programs to algorithmically determine a given page’s relevance.  Facebook, on the other hand, relies on its network of 400 million human beings, each equipped with human intuition and linked to an average of 130 friends, to comb the internet in search for useful and relevant pages.  This gives Facebook a huge competitive advantage because computer logic is still no match for human intelligence and intuition.  It’s still in the beginning stages, but I suspect that in the coming years we will begin to use Google less for our search needs and use Facebook instead.

Bottom line: if you think Facebook is huge now, you ain’t seen nothing yet!

In Defense of Moderation

One thing I really like about the Buddha’s teachings is his emphasis on the “Middle Way,” which he describes as a path of moderation between (among other applications) the paths of overindulgence and extreme asceticism.  Petronius gives similar counsel, reiterated by Joseph F. Smith: “Moderation in all things.”  This idea seems pretty straightforward and intuitive, and there are many applications for it.  After all, when two people are arguing and each is telling his or her side of the story, it is often the case that the true story is somewhere in between.  The middle of a normal distribution curve is where most of the occurrences lie, with the extremists on either side numbering much fewer.

It seems however, that the extremists tend to be the most vocal.  Today’s political situation is a perfect example of this.  Whereas I would wager that a large chunk of Americans’ political views depend on the issue, and fall somewhere in the middle of the political spectrum, it seems that those few on the far ends of both sides are the most visible and vocal about their demands.  They seem not to be willing to cooperate with those on the other extreme, and sometimes even those in the middle, and often resort to bickering and name calling.

As a political moderate, having scored high in Empathy on the StrengthsFinder test and taken courses dealing with negotiations, it seems to me that the best way to achieve harmony in dealing with other people is to work toward negotiated agreements.  It is rarer than we might think, that two opposing parties want the exact opposite of each other, so in many cases it is possible for each side to concede little, and in exchange gain something that is worth a lot more to them.  Hateful rhetoric and fear-mongering don’t do anything to help, and in fact only hinder progress and dialog by convincing constituents that the opponents are really enemies who can’t be negotiated with.

In many decisions we make, we can encounter information overload.  We want to consider all of the available information in order to make the right decision, but often there is simply too much information available, and it is difficult or impossible to internalize all of it and all the while keep an objective point of view.  Sometimes the only thing we can do is take in all the information we can, make the wisest decision possible, and respect others who don’t make the same decision as we do.  They simply absorbed a different subset of the available information than we did.  Whether it is the decision to believe in God or not, or what political positions to take, we can’t possibly process all the available data out there without already having tentatively placed our allegiances.  Therefore, we are very unlikely to all come to the same conclusion.  As I mentioned in a previous post, sometimes the only way to coexist with those whose beliefs are different from our own is to practice mutual respect and implement the golden rule: “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.”  In an increasingly diverse society, this rule only becomes more vital.

The duty of a scientist is to form the best intellectual framework available with the information at hand, and always be aware that further truth may still be forthcoming.  We should therefore be open to adjusting our theories to accommodate new truths we discover.  Being willing to admit we were wrong is not the mark of a flip-flopper, but of a wise human being more concerned with learning and growing than appearing right.

An important caveat to this philosophy is revealed when we take a look at Petronius’ whole quote.  What he actually said was, “Moderation in all things, including moderation.”  Sometimes we have to take a stand for what we believe in.  We can’t let people take advantage of our respect and allow ourselves to be walked on.  Furthermore, we need to have the moral courage to stand up for what we believe to be right.  In situations where moderation would require a compromise of our integrity, we need to stand firm.  We can, however, be respectful about it.  That, in turn, is how we earn the respect of others.