The world is flat and changing fast

Since my graduation about a month ago, I have been wondering how to utilize all the free time I suddenly gained upon leaving school. I work a more, but the addition of workload does not fully cover those seven hours I used to spend behind a desk, taking notes and competing during tests with my classmates, who regrettably lacked the competitive spirit. The golfing lessons (and especially the commuting part which over the last month doubled the carbon footprint I created since January till May) take several hours a day; nonetheless the time spent on wild swinging of the clubs is not substantive. Therefore I read even more than used to and thanks to the Internet and its endless supply of semi-legal ebooks, I never have to wait more than few minutes before starting another piece (which brings me to an idea of the low exposure the ebooks are getting; on Amazon you can either buy a printed copy, a recorded audiobook, or a digitized Kindle edition for Amazon’s proprietary reader, however no downloadable PDF file. I’d be willing to pay up to say 70% of a price of a hard copy, just to have what I want quickly on my desktop and subsequently in my Blackberry. It’s infuriating the length of delivery of my five new Richard Dawkins’s books spans for over two weeks and the package is still not in sight. But I am digressing…)

After finishing The Selfish Gene (Dawkins), A widow for one year (Irving), Jacques the Fatalist and his Master (Kundera’s adaptation of the novel as a play), and a short paper by Dwight H. Perkinson on The Challenges of China’s Growth, I began reading another book that very often cites China’s (and India’s) and its problems and, on the other hand, also the recent accomplishments and contributions to the leveling of the world. It’s called The World is Flat and it was written by my favorite NYT columnist Thomas L. Friedman back in 2004 (revised editions followed in 2005 and 2007 I believe).

I am about one third through the book and my feelings are mixed. Friedman has been so far looking at the milestone events that contributed to the flattening of the world such as the fall of the Berlin wall and a release of Microsoft Windows 3.0, the day when Netscape, the company behind the Internet browser with the same name (now Firefox), went public, or the burst of the dotcom bubble that India virtually overnight a computer superpower, thanks to the overabundance of fiber-optic that connected India’s thousands of low-cost world-class computer scientists with American companies that had to — amid the stock market downfall — slash their development costs and were thus looking for people to whom they could outsource their work. Simply, Friedman is focusing on the role of the information technology and the ways it affected the business is done today. In my opinion, the individual chapters that describe those ten factors that influenced or even fueled the current wave of flattening globalization place too much importance on computer – especially software – and related development. I think the globalization is good and at the end benefits everyone, however drawing conclusions on the consequences of globalization solely from the point of view of software developers is too narrow – I believe the main benefit comes and will come from sharing the developed views on social values, with economics serving only as a proxy. Nevertheless, the book is filled with interesting bits of interviews with the leaders of Indian and Chinese hi-tech companies and therefore enjoyable to read. But it also shows how fast the world is moving and how our perceptions of policies change from advantageous towards detrimental. Especially these lines, written back in 2004, must draw smile to anyone familiar with the matter:

Fortune magazine (Oct 4, 2004) quoted a study by Morgan Stanley estimating that since mid-1990s alone, cheap imports from china have saved U.S. consumers roughly $600 billion and have saved U.S. manufacturers untold billions in cheaper parts for their products. This savings, in turn, Fortune noted, has helped the Federal Reserve to hold down interest rates longer, giving more Americans a chance to buy homes or refinance the ones they have, and giving businesses more capital to invest in new innovations. (Emphasis mine).

Friedman is lauding a study by Morgan Stanley lauding a fact the cheap Chinese imports saved the Americans almost negligible amount of money (note just this year’s stimulus was worth over $100 billion) and therefore allowed the interest rates to stay low, consequences of which are now felt by those crunched in the credit crisis. Interesting how things change during only four years, isn’t it?

Businesswoman paradigm

Because of my work I often have to spend hours looking through databases of photobanks. From a man’s perspective, this shouldn’t be a boring work, because one is usually searching for photos that with a high marketing potential — our despicably sexists society is unfortunately more incline to buy anything if a photo of a nicely smiling woman is somewhere near the product. Sometimes I stumble upon the right picture right away, sometimes it takes longer. Far longer.

Last year I was doing a work for a client who was opening a clinic that specialized, among other, in botoxing lips. For some reason, the young women living in Florida decided last summer that only full lips with a strong red lipstick on are sexy. Thankfully, the photobanks were aware of the full-lips phenomenon and amassed a large number of macro shots that focused almost exclusively on the lips and snow-white teeth of women with perfectly smooth skin. What the photobanks didn’t know, though, was an alternation in the phenomenon — symmetrically full lips were no longer 100% sexy; a slightly (only slightly!) larger top lip was the new hit. Until this day I can recall dozens of pictures of mouths I have sent in for reviews and that, until this day, occasionally scare me.

I am doing a similar work now. The client wants to have a smiling woman (full woman, not only lips) in the header image of his website. I found a great shot five months ago when I was designing the initial draft, but unfortunately the photo was taken down during the hiatus between accepting the draft and requesting recoding it into a website. So once again I was tied to looking at dozens (or hundreds, more likely thousands) of women. I found the following points interesting:

- there are no “women” in photobanks anymore. Every woman now is a businesswoman.

- not only that, every businesswoman is a successful businesswoman, always smiling and gesticulating at a frustrated male employee, signaling to get back to work. A search for “happy businesswoman” yielded over 13,000 results; when I replaced happy with “unhappy”, the number dropped to only 150.

- every successful businesswoman must wear glasses. No glasses = no success. The “unhappy businesswomen” rarely wore glasses, contrary to their happy counterparts.

- there is no diversity among the happy and successful businesswomen. Every such person is young, brunette, and Caucasian (I once read a quote that disliked Columbia’s mandatory Literary Humanities syllabus, because it consisted of works of dead white men).

- I now, at 1.37 am, see smiling women everywhere.

Seinfeld, Kafka & Andy

After going through the first 37 episodes of Seinfeld and a firm determination to finish viewing all nine seasons before the summer is over, I find myself subconsciously imitating certain gestures so typical for the Seinfeld characters. Take the reactions to surprising findings: when Jerry or George learn something appalling (usually connected to their cars that someone just bumped into, or women they broke up with them), they start throwing their hands into the air and repeating the just-learned surprising fact with a jovial and unbelieving tone in their voice.

This is exactly how I reacted after learning the train this morning is 36 minutes late. 36 minutes? 36 minutes?! Did you here that, Jerry? Unbelievable! Unbelievable! It takes the train 20 minutes to get from its initial departing station to get to me! Why can’t it at least once be on time?

Also, I noticed I am starting to find an increasing number of striking parallels between the events in my life and the ones in the books of Franz Kafka. My least favorite book of his (frankly, the only novel I read; the short stories are bearable because they’re short), The Castle, tells a story of a land surveyor K. who’s throughout the book attempting to schedule a meeting with a nobleman from the castle. Unsuccessfully, of course. I have such a desire to officially complain about the problems these delays are causing me, but why do I feel I’d share the fate of K.?

A website to remember

Oh no, my infatuation (or more like an affair) with Wikinvest.com is over, here comes a website that would be accompanying the Seinfeld sitcom when I’ll have nothing better to do – WikiCapital.com

Research in Motion’s profit doubles, shares fall nearly 9%

This is what I find strange about the stock market. I acknowledge the fact that with the shear exception of the moments when the quarterly results are posted, the whole trading is based on speculations and expectations created by analysts who look “thoroughly” at the company, industry, and overall market conditions and then keep issuing ever-changing verdicts about the future of the firm.

So if their made-up calculations end up expecting the results to be greater than they actually are, the shares can tumble regardless the fact this year’s profit exceeds the last year’s by 100%. This is what happened with one of my favorite companies.

Research in Motion is the manufacturer of my beloved BlackBerry. Although every single feature of the over-hyped iPhone is always covered by virtually every newspaper, the BlackBerries have been finding their new users despite the much tougher competition. I, too, have become an avid BlackBerry user (or does my morning routine, when I navigate myself through the menu to my email account before I even fully wake up, classify me as an addict?) and upon my arrival to the U.S. will probably decide to exacerbate my thumbs’ sufferings by subscribing to unlimited data plan. In total, Research in Motion added 2.3 million new subscribers over the past three months, its per-share earnings hit $0.39, missing analysts’ expectations by only a penny, this being a reason for the steep slide down.

Last summer and fall I enjoyed trading virtual stocks via Facebook. It’s a pity I didn’t have enough money to trade real stocks, because during those four months I spent glued to the monitor, alt-tabbing between The Wall Street Journal and Virtual Stock Exchange, my account indicated a 40% appreciation on assets. It’s of course questionable how I achieved such a breathtaking result. For example, some 20% of my profits came from a trade where I shorted stocks of a Chinese battery producer I had never heard of before. It’s unlikely I’d ever enter such a position with my own money. One time I bought stocks of Amazon.com. They made a fortune, but missed the expectations; I lost 12% of the investment. One other time, I bought a bunch of shares of Citibank. It was at the beginning of the credit crisis and although the “night was still young”, the pessimistic and catastrophic views already prevailed at Wall Street. Citibank had to write down some $15 billion dollars on assets tied to mortgage-backed securities. Despite the loss, my shares jumped some 15%, only because the analysts thought the disaster will be even more apocalyptic. A question arises: can anyone actually predict them? Or does the market really work like The Economist put it on its famous cover back in 1987?

Wishlisting courses for next year

The preparations for the Democratic National Convention are meticulous. There is a reason why Denver, CO, wants to have everything perfect; they must have messed something up the last time it hosted the convention, because it the city had to wait exactly a century before being honored with such privilege again. This time the mayor wants the event to be remembered as the most blue-collar American, and the greenest get-together in history. Examples?

The host committee for the Democratic National Convention wanted 15,000 fanny packs for volunteers. But they had to be made of organic cotton. By unionized labor. In the USA.

Official merchandiser Bob DeMasse scoured the country. His weary conclusion: “That just doesn’t exist.“ […]

To test whether celebratory balloons advertised as biodegradable actually will decompose, Ms. Robinson buried samples in a steaming compost heap.

Of course, the today’s featured Wall Street Journal article doesn’t mention the fact the thousands of delegates and their entourages will fly from all over the U.S., thus leaving an obvious carbon footprint as a part of their visit.

Why am I telling this? Because after submitting all the necessary forms and taking various placement tests, I was finally able to wish list my courses for the fall semester. It wasn’t very hard to do, because I selected my classes several months already, but now I had to also choose the instructors and times of meetings. Econ 101, Math 105, and German 201 were easy to decide on. But, on the other hand, choosing between two professors of PoliSci 101 turned out to be a greater conundrum than I first expected.

The class is taught by two female instructors. Ratemyprofessor.com has records about each of them and I’ve read all the reviews and comments, but still hasn’t made a decision. The problem is that one of them is supposed to be a very extremist liberal and let her opinions penetrate her teachings, while the other appears to be a feminist with a gender bias (which seems illogical to me; I’ve always thought the feminists want to prove women world are just as good as men, therefore leniency when grading girls’ tests, as described by one of the female students, is an acknowledgement of weakness).

Right now I am unsure if I want to be in either’s class, but if I really had to choose on the spot, I’d decide to go with the ultra-liberal one. I probably wouldn’t later ask the teacher for an internship recommendation, but at least the potential for heated discussions would force me to wake up early every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning.

Serious business of bed linens

Sitting in a train for over an hour at least gives me an opportunity to look thoroughly through all the college-related retail mail I received over the past week. While contemplating my options regarding the bed linens, the following advertising line caught my attention:

“In previous years, some students always showed up with their sheets that did not fit the beds on campus. Parents were frustrated, and some students were left literally “short-sheeted” and unable to properly make their beds. This is now how we want your student’s first nights at college to be remembered. “

Right now I am on verge of ordering the over-priced “Value Pak” (it includes even an extra-long egg crate pad and a bedside buddy!) because a frustration from an improperly made bed is something I certainly don’t want to carry in my memories and give me shivers whenever I think of my first college endeavors.

Train ordeals, the sequel

The leaders of various union organizations (doctors, teachers, train conductors etc.) decided to strike this afternoon in order to express disagreement with the latest steps of the government and its social, retirement, and who-knows-what-else policies. The strike ought to begin at 1pm and although the spokespeople claim an ordinary citizen should not experience any inconvenience, that will be rather difficult to accomplish if the trains will stand still for 75 minutes.

I do not necessarily concur with the reasons of the strike; the reasons are short-sighted and don’t take into account the need for economic reforms. But let’s say that I respect everyone’s right to strike.

What angers me, though, is the situation where yet another maliciously scheduled railroad repairs are in progress and the train from my station will be 10 minutes late. Those extra ten minutes will overlap into next hour, when the strike should start. So it’s very likely that I will get stuck on a train once again, this time because of brilliantly coordinated sequence of obstructions designed to slow down the travelers as much as possible.

Take a break

The latest version of Firefox includes a nifty feature – by clicking at the favicon in the addressbar you have a chance to see how many times you have visited that particular website. I installed Firefox 3 yesterday and randomly checked the number of visits I paid to my Gmail account since then.

145, wow! I have not yet figured out the exact mechanism the script uses to count the visits (perhaps it counts pageviews on the domain and not unique visits), nevertheless such a number is pretty high. It’s also true that I have been rather busy and communicating with people throughout the world for the entire afternoon.

Software upgrades have been generally prolific this week. For example Gmail implemented Labs into its interface, allowing users to turn on functions that are currently under development (just like their parent application). Two of them especially captured my attention — one that allows me to choose between different kinds of stars, thus allowing further to differentiate between important emails, and one that puts a semi-transparent blue background over the entire GUI and disables all links for 15 minutes, an ideal feature for people check their emails on their phones as the first thing in the morning, simply for email-abusers. It is also equipped with an insightful advice that it displays in the center of the screen; it reads: “Take a walk, get some real work done, or have a snack. We’ll be back in X minutes!” How did I interpret this message? I logged into my wordpress account and wrote these paragraphs. Real work done!

Windows Vista not so bad

A rare combination of evanescent naïveté and greed that overwhelmed me a few days ago allowed several vicious spywares to make themselves at home in my computer. My friend emailed me a phenomenal book but in an obscure format which I was hoping to convert to PDF for reading on my Blackberry, however the suspiciously easily available converter came bundled with an unwelcome guilt of trolls. Thus my computer became infected. No anti-spyware was capable of a proper clean-up, and because the malicious software was even apt of cutting me off the Internet (unless I was logged into the emergency mode where sound didn’t work so I couldn’t watch Seinfeld), I decided to format my hard drive and install a new copy of Windows. And because I had owned no installation CD and the prices of software upgrades are no longer unbearable, I went to my favorite computer store to buy Vista Home Premium which I promptly installed on my laptop.

I am actually very surprised how smoothly the new operating system works. I was expecting lags in the new eye-candy-dominated user interface, given my graphics card isn’t the latest technological miracle, but so far I can only object the ridiculously slow process of application installations. I had to wait for at least three minutes before the initial set-up screen for my synching software appeared, and then another five minutes when the files were slowly copied. Nonetheless, the first skepciticms is overcome and with Firefox3 being available tomorrow, I am looking forward to several days of experimenting, just like in old days.

Update: by the way, the new Office allows blogging from its general interface. That’s lovely!