Category Archives: Life

Post Rationalizing: Justifying a choice after the fact.

This research has huge implications for business marketing. I’m certain the best marketing companies dig into this stuff.

Justifying a choice after the fact is nice and all & we’ve been told it happens, but how about a concrete, reproducible experiment?

Here it is:

Have volunteers play a little game. They are shown two pictures of the opposing sex that look similar. When asked which one they are more attracted to, they pick one.

Heres the kicker:

When the volunteer picks the picture on the right, the examiner gives them the OTHER picture. The one they DIDNT pick. When asked to justify their decision, they LOOK at the picture (that actually isn’t the one they picked) and start listing off things like: “I’m a photographer and I like how this one is framed”, “seems nicer” etc.

80% of participants don’t notice that the pictures have been switched. That is amazing!

You look at two pictures. You think one looks nicer than the other. You’ve decided on that and pick one face. The examiner gives you the picture you DIDNT pick, and when you look at that picture, you start listing off reasons why that picture is better than the other one.

Adobe Reader 8.12 — Can not print multiple copies

How ridiculous is this? The most recent release of adobe reader has a bug in it that doesn’t let you print multiple copies of a file to ANY printer. The software simply doesn’t sends the copies parameter to the printer.

Adobe’s response? It will be fixed in the next release. Not fixed in an emergency patch that will be done NOW?

I’m spamming ctrl + p right now because I need 60 copies. I’ll settle for 15.

ATi vs Nvidia Graphics Card Giants. Genius Marketing.

These guys are the two heavy hitters in modern day graphics cards. The cards that run 3D simulations like video games, autoCAD, 3D modeling, and all that jazz.

These two companies have GENIUS marketing. They have been sued and fined over price fixing whereby the two companies agree on pricing schemes to sell their products better.

It just occured to me today as I looked for a cheaper graphics card that their pricing and model numbers are absolute genius.

Take the 8800GTX. This baby was $600 when I bought it last year. It is now something like $300.

The 8800GTS is out, which is a much slower card. Then the 8800GT came out, which is actually faster than the 8800GTS.

Finally, the newest generations numbers are always a new thousand digit (like 6000, 7000, 8000, 9000) and we have been introduced to the 9 series.

But this is the genius part: They ALWAYS do this:

There are always the new “9 series” like the 9600GT. the 9500.

It makes people think they are better than the older 8800 series but they are not. A 8800GT outpreforms the 9600GT and 9500 any day. So this genius marketing is that they always leave you confused, especially those who haven’t learned to use the internet for unbiased reviews (takes digging).

Its just amazing marketing. 90% of people out there know nothing, and this is who they market to.

Here is how a typical graphics card description sounds:
“The latest technlogy lets you run any game at max resolution!”

It’s a load of crap. But genius marketnig. To what extent are Nvidia and ATI partnering I wonder? Who says that last price fixing wasn’t the end? Perhaps these cards are put on the market much higher than they really should be?

Price fixing by the only 2 chipmakers in the marketplace would be utterly effective. You could inflate the price of these parts and nobody would have any idea. The “top of the line” would still be the top of the line via controlled competition. I wonder if that price fixing scandal was the end of it.

Jquery — Not to fear, Firebug causes Extreme Firefox Slowness

At first I was worried that I simply had “too many elements” and jquery was dying on me. Then I found out that Firebug causes problems on firefox. All animations are very heavy and “low-frame-rate”.

It works just fine on Konqueror. I can only hope its fine otherwise : ).

Who uses firebug anyways? The same very small crowd who might turn off javascript.

Jquery — Pull Data From Form Input Field

I’ve had a few problems with jquery where the resources I come across on Google are a little old or something.

My version is 1.2.6

The two issues I had were: passing onComplete parameters to the built in slideUp, slideDown functions & getting data from a form input field.

For slideUp, slideDown, a visit to the docs helped in that you no longer specify onComplete at all.

For grabbing data from a form field, a ton of random searches revealed it is $(“mydiv”).val();

Its .val()

I had seen examples with fieldValue(), and value but neither worked. Here it is!

Japan

Met with a great guy named Tom today. In fact, everyone in the group was very cool. I had missed being surrounded by this type of crowd.

Tom is the first guy I’ve met who knows much about Japanese culture, and understands the differences in the ways of life vs American (er, western?) life. The fundamental values of everything are different.

I could speak for ages about this, but the most important thing that came out of tonight is this:

I should go to Japan, and learn all about it. For 1: It makes financial sense. Japan is the 3rd largest economy in the world. That’s fucking huge. Japan is a ‘hard to grasp’ market with incredible reward potential. Another way to think about this is such: America breeds ridiculous amounts of entrepreneurs. There are products sold left and right. Japan breeds no such thing. Life is more about other things than making the big bucks in any way possible. But thats precisely an advantage for me. Why not make use of this tremendous asset I have instead of throwing it away in a b attlefieldwhere it doesn’t matter?

Tom also kept suggesting I go back to japan for myself. I’ve always shunned my Japanese side (which is entirely, utterly different from my American personality) because it showed me a world that could not be shared with the rest of my life (American friends). This I find very depressing, much like how I think of academia, or at least what I call academia.

For example, politics scares me quite a bit because it matters less who’s right than who’s marketing the best (or who has the most money TO market & pay for PR professionals and mass analysis). In this world, truth, or “who’s right” matters not. People will continue to believe what they want to believe. One great example I came upon recently was a documentary film maker who wanted to show the world how utterly ridiculous Vampires are. That Dracula is named after somebody with absolutely no association to blood sucking people. Yet this film maker was extremely discouraged and stopped filming. Why? Because he realized that publishing this documentary (even with such absolute evidence) would only serve to create MORE believers.

How does this relate? Because so many things I care about don’t matter. Knowing the truth means nothing. It has no impact on the world outside academia. I have been afraid to embrace my Japanese side because my entire life until now does not relate to it. I would be completely distancing myself from my previous life, because nobody would ‘get it’. That was scary. Now, though, I realize that it is quite an asset.

I can only imagine what kind of trust I could develop with Japanese business partnerships that would be largely impossible for others.

So Japan it is. Perhaps very soon. Perhaps not. But thinking about this in terms of Anuva is very important.

After all, my mom’s friends all see the magic and beauty in it. Having 6 bottles to choose from. Which will I choose? Its all great fun. But I have no idea how marketing works there, and I need to live there to figure it out. The most challenging is to learn how to speak professionally in Japanese. I can pick up on the social cues, but I can’t speak in response to them. There are words never used in casual speech that I have no way of knowing, like: “cost analysis”, “projection”,”business plan”,”profit margin”,”operating expense”.

Lots to learn, and hope that Japan doesn’t crumble in the meantime.

About Tomita Designs (My Brother’s Company)

I decided to write a little page about my brother, Ken Tomita, who sells high end bamboo furniture.

In case you can’t find the big link up top titled: “About Ken Tomita”. Here it is.

I’m giving him a huge spot on this blog in the hopes people might check it out!

I figured people who stumble upon this blog might have an interest in his stuff. If you appreciate great furniture, read what I wrote about him & his work and then check out his site .

Get it while it’s cheap, because the world won’t know what hit him/her/it.

I work much better at night.

I work much better when there are zero distractions. No people, no sounds, not anything. Right now it is 2:44AM which is getting late. I feel like I Just woke up though.

I consistently flow more at night. In fact, I’m not sure I have ever gotten into flow during the day while there is so much going on. Phone ringing, people talking, people moving, the world outside moving.

Unfortunately I need to sleep soon, even though I am only starting to get most productive.

Tomorrow there are two of our new guys coming in which is a great (quantitative) distraction. It doesn’t help we have a tasting tomorrow as well. I certainly hope I can meet my deadline for next friday.

Pseudo functioning replacement up & looking all nice.

I doubt I can get all of the shipping calculations working by then so perhaps we will start the marketing with only the club, as previously planned.

How to use pyExcelerator

I found this blog after hours of searching, and I keep referring back to it. I forgot what it was and started searching for it again and had to use terms like pyExcelerator + blog to find the guide.

Anyways, this is a great help for the not so documented pyExcelerator.

http://ntalikeris.blogspot.com/2007/10/create-excel-file-with-python-my-sort.html

 

Note that what comes after here is mainly for me to read back on in the future. I don’t think it makes a whole lotta sense.

I just created something to handle our orders. Currently we have to manually take orders and type out an excel file to do that.

Its the classic programming idea: Spend an hours to finish something in 5 minutes, instead of spending an hour to do it by hand.

Our platform gives us orders in CSV format. Our logistics people take it in a different format. I don’t want to do each by hand.

I wrote something to take the CSV with data, and then a CSV that has a template.

I used the python csv library to split the CSV into keys (the first row) and filled a dictionary with each key having its corresponding value. I then split the template CSV’s data fields into dict keys containing a pair of numbers (row, column).
Therefore, if the original CSV had a field called “BillAddress1”, I would make a template that has the same field and the script would spit back the coordinates.

That way I can write the data from this list into the right spots in the template.

Template CSV to Keys and Coordinates:
reader = csv.reader(file(filename))
 self.d = {}
  reader_list = []
  for item in reader:
  %nbsp;reader_list.append(item)

  for item in reader_list:
    for subitem in item:
      if subitem:
        self.d[subitem] = (reader_list.index(item), item.index(subitem))
    return self.d
This spits out a dictionary of whatever items are in the CSV that correspond to their positions.
If you filled one field in the entire sheet with “Hello” in position (10, 5), it would return a dictionary with key: “Hello” and value (10, 5)

I used those values to position my data in the actual sheet.
For example, say the real CSV has 3 rows.
| Name | Sex | Age |
| Yuji | M | 21 |
| Bob | M | 50 |

My script converts the CSV into a list, so that it can be iterated over.
Simply declare a new list and loop through the object returned by csv.reader() and append each row to the blank list.

I then make a copy of the first item (the keys), and remove that from the list. List.pop(0)
Then, I convert each item in the list to dictionary keys.

So List[0][‘KEY’] = value

Now I just need to create the writing mechanism.

I convert a CSV template to decide where our data goes.

Say I have this template:
| Name | | |
| Age | | |
| | | Sex |

My script converts those into dict keys w/ location pairs. So dict[‘Name’] = 0,0

Therefore, when I write using pyExcelerator:
self.keys = the dictionary with location pairs (the template)
self.orders = list of dictionaries like so [{a:b,c:d}, {a:b, c:d}]


for order in self.orders:
 sheet = self.workbook.add_sheet("Order")
 for item in self.keys:
  a, b = self.keys[item]
  sheet.write(a, b, item)
  sheet.write(a, b+1, order[item])

Done!

I wish I could move entirely to Linux.

My laptop is a dual boot machine with Vista / Ubuntu Gutsy. My Desktop has Kubuntu Gutsy after a little accident killed windows on it (the wind knocked over one of my drives that was in a RAID).

Doing anything on the computer is more efficient and faster on Linux. I always say that a strong motivation for buying overpowered computers is it saves you a lot of frustration from hanging windows. You clicked close 30 seconds ago.. its still “thinking”. You opened a folder.. its taking ages.

Only my desktop with an overclocked E6600 Core 2 Duo + 4GB ram doesn’t reliably hiccup on Windows. Windows reliably hiccups in 99% of environments. You don’t even realize how bad it is until you try Linux.

Everything is snappy. Stuff opens the instant you click on something. It stays this way for as long as your computer is on. Imagine that? It is very difficult to quantify this snappiness. And you don’t even need a great computer. I get a huge productivity gain just by not being frustrated.

So, on that note, the second greatest thing about Linux is the productivity. I am extremely productive on this machine. Everything is a shortcut away. All of the open source programs are literally one command away from installing on any machine. I note below that text-based computing has easily documented productivity gains across the board. It’s easy to see why.

Alt+F2, Konsole, Enter
sudo apt-get install Skype

For development, my workflow is so much faster on Linux. For developing Django I am probably around 300% faster on Linux.

It helps that the same architecture is used for production servers. Linux revolves around terminals, and coding does too. Alt+F2, Konsole, Enter. Navigate to my Django directory. Type Screen. Ctrl A + C to make a new sub screen, start editing settings.py, Ctrl A +n to go to next screen, edit urls.py

Need to test the dev server? Alt+F2, Konsole, Enter, tab complete my way to my project folder, python manage.py runserver. Perhaps Super+N to turn the window negative so that the dev server stands out.
Ctrl+alt+shift+right to move the window to the right workspace, ctrl+alt+left to move back. Alt+F2, firefox, Enter. Check my dev server.

Ctrl+alt+ arrows let me switch between my 9 virtual screens. It works perfectly. I’ve tried a few windows versions and they are not worth the hassle. It doesn’t solve the problem of everything slowing down even on ONE screen, anyways.

It is entirely documented what kind of workflow gains you get from switching from GUI to Type based computing.

It also makes it infinitely more fun. Windows is a chore, Linux is something I could actually enjoy day to day. Ubuntu put fun back into computers.

There are tons of extremely useful programs only on Linux as well. Open source goes a long way into developing what people WANT/NEED/FIND USEABLE.

Every program seems to fit in the operating system.


So why can’t I completely switch to Linux?
My main reason is Adobe products. Adobe hasn’t ported their products to Linux. WHY!?
I need Photoshop and to a lesser extent Illustrator. I also use FlashDevelop which is an open source windows only Flash development tool. It felt so nicely done and felt so “Linuxy” that I assumed I could get it for linux. Nope!

Learning the Linux alternatives will take time. I’ve used GIMP and it certainly is all I need for web graphics but there is just a lot to learn.

One of the main reasons I want a mac is to have more Linux like functionality while still being able to use Adobe products.

I am a total convert to text based computing. I now realize how stupid it is to click through folders to find something. Click through folders to open an image, modify it in photoshop, click through folders to save it, etc. It’s an utter waste of time and doesn’t help by being annoying. To spend a few seconds moving your eyes across the screen looking for a particular folder is really, really, dumb. You just don’t get it untill you try something else that works infinitely better.

Linux is only getting better, and I hope Adobe starts selling Linux ports of their products. Thats the only thing I need. Otherwise I lose quite a bit from the fact that I have to shut down windows and log into Ubuntu just to use it. Therefore, if I’m designing something, and I want to use my email, I stick to windows and put up with the slowness. It wouldn’t make sense to log out every time I use something non adobe.

There is a fair learning curve, but if you don’t think of your computer as magic, you can learn it, and you will thank me.

If you do think your computer is magic, you won’t be able to understand it. The most recent releases are about as user friendly as it gets though. It most likely won’t have a problem detecting and installing the right basic sound drivers/video drivers and you can be on your way.