Ed Gutman

If you’ve spent any time with me, you may know I’m not a grand storyteller. I can’t elaborate the subtle intricacies of how x happened at y. I’m usually to the point. There’s no build up or climax, as it’s usually just a statement of facts (arguing with me in person isn’t any fun, either).

Writing fills the gaps. It allows me to verbalize the things I can’t say in the moment. It gives me an outlet for all those funny details I missed when explaining how I learned that making a clam-shaped figure with my hands was not the appropriate way to ask for a to-go box.

Writing is beautiful. There’s an endless supply of adjectives, adverbs, and nouns at my disposal. I can reference facts and figures. There are paragraphs, lists, chapters, outlines, etc. It can empower me to do any number of things, such as:

• Tell a personal story
• Relay important news
• Teach a new concept
• Evoke an emotion
• Argue a point cohesively
• Code a program(!)

Writing gives me freedom. There are some words better left unsaid. Maybe those words are best left written. I can share those words with whomever I want to, be it myself, friends, or the world.

Writing gives me time to think. Time to remember the things I may have forgotten. Time to write the words I meant to, instead of saying the ones I didn’t mean to. It gives me a freedom I might not have in a split second in time: with it I can travel anywhere in time and space. Conversely, I can travel nowhen or nowhere at all.

Most importantly, writing is…

…timeless.

Times flies by so fast when you’re having fun.

The time is April 2005. I’m still working on my thesis. More importantly, I’m five months into “perfecting” my Lindy Hop. Jesse had been repairing the damage done from the previous four months. Sometime in May, he starts teaching a line dance called The Big Apple, and me having a voracious appetite for all things jazz and dance related I’m the first in line to learn it. A couple of weeks later, I’m (pathetically) attempting to dance the damn thing at our local swing dance venue, with Jesse and his wife, Candy.

July rolls around and I guess I had gotten the attention of another dancer, (other than the one’s going, “What the heck was that?”) and being only one of three others up on the dance floor, I guess it wasn’t hard. Emily was cute and had quite the personality, we went on our first date. At Trader Joe’s (romantic!). But before I knew it, I was helping her move (unfortunately) to Long Beach.

Four months of a long distance relationship and a job offer at Google, we move up together to the Bay Area make ourselves a (very) tiny home in Mountain View, CA. We’ve lived up here for almost four years now and we’ve been so lucky to have them together. Now with Emily launching her successful wedding photography business, she’s also inspired me to do great things. Forget about waiting until tomorrow. While we’ve had our ups and downs, I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Although I’m taking offers.

Just kidding!

Thanks for everything, babe… and Happy Anniversary.

Those of you who know me know that I’ve been doing the P90-X fitness program for the last four months or so. Like many Lindy Hoppers, Nick Williams introduced me to the pain and agony of this program, but honestly, it’s done wonders for me. There are some things, though, that you come to accept once you’ve been doing it for that long.

• You can explain where the P90-X acronym comes from.
• You can recite Tony Horton quotes on the spot. Not only that, but you’ve got his voice down, too. Here are some gems:
“Making Gumby look like the Tin Man.”
“Don’t smash your face!”
“German potato soup (in a sappy german accent).”
“Do your best and… forget the rest!”
• You wonder where you can get a copy of “Downward Dog Magazine”.
• You know that there’s exactly a one minute interval where Tony manages to remain quiet throughout the entire set of videos.
• You know the assistants (on and off video) and have given them nicknames:
Pam, The Blam.
Phil, the Smart-ass.
Dreya “thanks for your painful contributions to P90-X” Webber.
Karen, the Pot-stirrer.
Sophia, the Chiclet teeth girl.
The Horton Triplets: Tony, Bobby and Joe.
• You’ve made a made a drinking game for whenever…
… Tony hits on Dreya.
… Katie moans in agony.
… someone does huggers and shakers.
… someone makes an “X” symbol with their arms.
… Tony says he’s “done chattin’.”
• You know that banana-boat is more than a tanning oil brand; it’s something much more painful.
• You get withdrawals when you miss a workout.
• You find yourself excited when finding other P90-X users and talk for hours about it, forgetting the dance altogether. You’ve become a walking salesman for it.
• You’ve bookmarked beachbody.com, even though you’ve never visited the site.
• You equate the “modified” moves as the loser moves.

*sigh*, I’ve thought too long about this.

And it’s about time it stopped. We (and by we, I’m especially pointing the finger at you, guys) have lost our purpose.

Something I’ve noticed in the past few years is how things we do every day have given way to this non-critical, safe, conflict-avoidance mentality. We have become masters of non-offensive, bland, politically correct language.

But, I’ll argue, conflict is a good thing. It presents a wide color of opinions and beliefs, not necessarily precluding that one is more right than another. There’d be no resolution or diplomacy without it.

Facebook is a great example of this; while there is an option to ‘like’ a post, a converse does not exist. I’ve seen this in countless examples elsewhere in our society. Are people so afraid of criticism that they can’t accept that someone might not agree with them?

We don’t discipline our children anymore, for fear of someone yelling child abuse. How are they supposed to know what’s right, when nothing’s wrong? My mother raised me tough, and while I don’t always see eye-to-eye with her, I’m saltier for it today, and know that I can take on the world.

This does not mean an end to equality between the sexes. If anything, it’s time for men to start pulling their weight and act like the men we’re supposed to be. If my grandfather were alive today, he’d tell us to grow a pair.

We are living in rough economic times. The day of the push-over is coming to a close. DiCaprio is out, Hamm is in. Our first duty was to get off our butts and elect the right people into power. Mission accomplished. Now it’s time to pull up our sleeves and get some work done, because no one is going to do it for us anymore.

Chivalry is back.

<rant>

I knew this day would come. Alas, my 7.9% Fixed APR was too good to be true. In it’s place will sit a brand spanking new 12.9% Variable APR, most likely due to my recent stint of unemployment. While I have the right to reject this change (in less than two weeks), it pretty much means I can’t ever use the card again. There will be thousands of customers who won’t even realize this is happening, since the notice comes in a non-envelope that’s dressed up like advertising, likely to go into the junk pile. At least I don’t have much of a balance on it, but for others, it could hurt quite a bit.

You took my precious MBNA away and now this.

</rant>

Anyone have any good, and I use the term loosely, credit card recommendations?

I’ve been getting some flak lately for my seemingly excessive usage of Facebook, and it’s getting a little old. You know how much time I spend on Facebook per day?

About 10 minutes. Tops.

That’s spread out over the day, including my iPhone app. It really doesn’t take long to glance at what people are up to. I’ve found that my community of friends (especially those in tech) are a lot quicker at finding relevant news than the mainstream media is. Plus, I like keeping up with friends I don’t normally see a lot of; in the Lindy community where many of us are spread out across the world, it’s a great communication tool.

A lot of what I do content-wise is done through third party apps posting to my Facebook profile, much like FriendFeed does. I write a blog post, it’s on Facebook. It’s pretty easy to ignore things on a feed; you can click on any item’s option and choose “Less about [username]“. Or you can delete me altogether. Pretty simple, and I won’t be heartbroken.

I’m a social networking power user. I’m fascinated by them and how they are moving toward uber-inter-connectivity. Most successful web applications today have the option to, among other things, post or receive a feed from some other app such as Facebook. I’ve done that on this blog to an extent with Google Connect and Disqus.

Many of the things we do in everyday life may end up connected in some way; this guy hooked up his laundry machine to send Twitter updates. I know many people are uncomfortable with this level of intimacy into our personal lives, but our shift to a more voyeuristic society seems to be becoming a more common phenomena. Our children won’t care as much as we do today.

I must admit, I do spend a lot more time reading my Twitter feed than I’d like, but that’s a different story.

Dear Bay Area Traffic Engineer,

What are you thinking? Yes, I know it’s hard to coordinate hundreds of thousands of drivers every day. I get that. But I’ve seen better. Much better. And since we live in a place where the attention span of the average driver is somewhere around 2.1 seconds*, your job is as important as ever. Let’s discuss.

courtesy aqui-ali via Flickr

Light scheduling. Why is it on a super busy expressway, that it takes merely one car, in a matter of seconds, to trip a light on a small cross street? The timing of these lights are atrocious. There are even some lights in Sunnyvale which do not have a working trip altogether.

Carpool lanes. They don’t work, at least not here. This isn’t really specific to the Bay Area, as they work counter to the flow of traffic. That’s one extra lane everyone else could be using in an area where lane real estate is at a premium. Check out 101 when the carpool lane ends after Redwood City. Traffic is smooth, until the carpool lane picks up again. Get rid of them.

Freeway ramps. No, it is not a great idea to have a singular off ramp for off and on ramp traffic (ex: 262 to I-680). It’s an accident waiting to happen.

Crosswalks. Blind crosswalks do not work. (ex: Mountain View) It’s a constant game of chicken. Heck, those yield signs are better than nothing. 9 times out of 10, I can’t see the pedestrian, so there needs to be some sort of flashing light signifying there’s a pedestrian crossing (see any central coast town for examples). There are even some cases where a stop sign altogether is in order.

Long islands. Given that most people here can’t make a U-Turn to save their lives, there should be more options to make left turns on to crossing streets. There are some stretches of El Camino which go on for almost a mile without being able to make a left.

Construction. No, it is not acceptable to close off an entire freeway for construction before 12am. Why I see this happen is beyond me.

Public transit. This is technically another issue, but I just wanted to quickly point out that public transit options here are far from optimal. It really shouldn’t take me an hour to get across San Francisco. In fact, anything going East-West in the Bay Area is fairly sketchy. I guess we’re afraid of throwing off the Earth’s orbit by traveling along the latitude.

The Drivers. What can I say? This one isn’t your fault.

This is really just the short story. I can go on, but I won’t. There are things here which should have been fixed yesterday. I hope there’s room in our new-fangled budget to hire more you (or at least fire some of you).

Sincerely,

Ed Gutman

*Based on personal observation.

courtesy Jesse Niou

Thanks for being there for me when I needed it, now more than ever. And, thanks for letting me share my wackiness and goofiness with you. I think it technically qualifies as being crazy (as opposed to goofy) when you’re single.

Happy Valentime’s Day!

Love,

Eddie

I’m coming up on nearly four months of unemployment and the job search has been pretty dry. I must admit I’ve been a bit picky; I’ve enjoyed my last couple of jobs and would like my next job to be just as enjoyable.

So far, my tally is:

• Facebook: 5 phone interviews, 1 onsite.
• Blackbag Technologies: ∞ phone interviews, 2.5 onsites.
• Plaxo: 2 phone interviews, 1 onsite.
• Netflix: 2 phone interviews.
• Loopt: 1 onsite.
• UC Santa Cruz: 1 phone interview, 1 onsite
• FBI: 1 passing exam, 1 pending interview.
• Approximately 10-20 random phone interviews
• Applied for over 200 jobs

I did the math: for those 200 or so jobs I’ve applied for, 3% got me an onsite interview. My “successes” month-to-month vary, due to the fact any luck I have that month is based on jobs I applied to the month before. Most of the interviews I’ve had with these companies went well (at least from my point of view), but I haven’t really been able to judge how successful they actually were (obviously not ultimately successful, otherwise I’d be working right now).

I’ve been vigorously trying to get interviews at Apple, Adobe, and IDEO as well, but to no avail. Facebook (my 1st choice) has actually been the most responsive, but they appear to be in a hiring freeze; there’s one role that looks good for me opening next quarter, but I would preferably want a job before then.

While applying at these companies has worked well, I’m also finding that posting ads on Facebook has gotten some positive attention. It’s relatively inexpensive and can be sharply targeted to specific companies or locations.

Most of the companies I want to work for are in tech, be it offline or online. However, I’m definitely open to working for a nonprofit. If I could combine the two, that would be great. I’m seriously thinking about going back to school (economics, stats), but pretty sure I don’t have the money for that right now. Teaching (computers, math, or science) may also be a good option if I can get it. Lastly, the FBI gig is still an ongoing process.

I’ve completely over-analyzed this (this is the condensed version; I have graphs as well). Blerg.