New web site for the new year

Hey all,

Happy new year!

I’ve moved my blog over to my new personal web site at ialas.weebly.com. I’ve been wanting a personal web site for some time now, and after discovering Weebly on TIME’s 50 Best Websites of 2007 list, I decided to make the switch. So please update your bookmarks and RSS feeds, and I’ll see you there!

Cheers,

Ian

Dream bike

I was dreamlining the other day, and decided that I’m going to start bicycling as a hobby. It has a number of benefits:

• easy exercise – I’ve had difficulty being diligent with my fitness routine.
• fresh air – It’ll encourage me to take breaks. I get so focused when I work that I usually don’t leave the house.
• productive thinking – When I’m having trouble coming up with ideas or finding solutions to a problem, I’ll get on my bike. Motion encourages progress. (see: Einstein)
• transportation – I can bike down to Old Town Pasadena or Glendale instead of wasting gas – good for the environment, for my body, and for my wallet.

Well, coincidentally, my buddy Rich was dreamlining the same day and also decided he wanted to take up biking. (What are the chances?) He was in Amsterdam a few months ago, where bicycles are the transportation of choice, and was inspired to buy a Dutch bike. He introduced me to this beaut:

For $550, the Electra Amsterdam Classic 3. Official site.

Hoops with Obama

From Andrew Sullivan’s blog:

Can you tell anything about a presidential candidate by playing basketball with him? I guess this is Matt Yglesias’ bailiwick, but this Sports Illustrated piece is fun:

Obama was confident but not cocky, unselfish but unafraid to shoot. On court he showed the same balance that has fueled his political rise; he could talk trash without seeming mean, compete feverishly without seeming angry. Yet few knew how central the sport — “my first love,” he calls it — was to his self-image as a mixed-race child: How the greatest gift from his absent dad was a basketball, how playing gave him his closest white friends and a place where black skin wasn’t a disadvantage. When a coach, a close friend, casually threw out the word n—–, Obama says, “It reminded me that race is complicated, that people are complicated, that you could have ugly strains even among people who were otherwise decent…. It does not necessarily mean they’re bad people.”

Here’s some classic high school footage of Obama on the court:

Obama’s closing argument

Obama’s inspirational final speech in Iowa yesterday:

If you haven’t read it yet, please read my previous entry on Obama to understand why Obama isn’t just qualified, he’s absolutely necessary.

Jay Smooth on being first

Here’s the latest entry from Jay Smooth, host of Ill Doctrine – a hip-hop video blog:

I discovered this blog a week ago from this excellent list of the “Best Blogs of 2007 That You (Maybe) Aren’t Reading” on Fimoculous. Rex Sorgatz, the blogger behind Fimoculous, writes:

When Ze Frank sadly abided by his promise to shut down his much-celebrated but under-watched show in March (after exactly one year), the internet was left to gasp for unique video programming. Jay Smooth’s Ill Doctrine has been the only video blog to emerge with a distinct voice, a mature vision, and brilliant programming that mixes essay, criticism, and attitude.

My thoughts exactly.  I’m a fan of Ze Frank’s work, and until I stumbled upon Ill Doctrine, I hadn’t found any content online as comparably satisfying.  And if you’ve never seen Ze Frank’s show, here’s a clip to show you what came first:

Random act of kindness

Taken while checking on my car (the silver Prius) to make sure I wasn’t getting a ticket while reading at Barnes and Noble in Old Town Pasadena. Two girls bring food and drink to a homeless woman with two cats. They didn’t just drop it off impersonally; they knelt down to talk briefly with her, looking into her eyes with genuine compassion.

The Best of “What I’ve Learned”

My favorites from Esquire’s The Best of “What I’ve Learned”:

You gotta try your luck at least once a day, because you could be going around lucky all day and not even know it. –Jimmy Dean

Garry Shandling always said to me, “Don’t get mad, get funny.” It changed my life. –Rip Torn

Sometimes I think there’s no reason to get out of bed…then I feel wet, and I realize there is. –Homer Simpson

Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die. –Carrie Fisher

It’s unequivocally clear that life begins at birth and ends at death. And if most of the people on this planet understood that, they would lead their lives very differently. We always try to find religious or mysterious forces to fill in for our inadequacies, but heaven and hell are both here on earth every day, and we make our lives around them. –J. Craig Venter, molecular biologist, mapper of the human genome

I don’t gamble, because winning a hundred dollars doesn’t give me great pleasure. But losing a hundred dollars pisses me off. –Alex Trebek

Being a Baptist won’t keep you from sinning, but it’ll sure as hell keep you from enjoying it. –Jimmy Dean

Maybe when you die, you come before a big, bearded man on a big throne, and you say, “Is this heaven?” And he says, “Heaven? You just came from there.” –Kirk Douglas

We’re all just animals. That’s all we are, and everything else is just an elaborate justification of our instincts. That’s where music comes from. And romantic poetry. And bad novels. Sometimes when I finish a bad novel, I say, “You wrote seven hundred pages just to say that? Couldn’t you have just said, ‘I want to fuck’?” –Elvis Costello

I’m not a masochist, but I always take a cold shower in the morning. It’s a great beginning of the day, because nothing can be worse afterward. –Roman Polanski

This just happened

MOM: Who’s playing? Chicago?
BROTHER: Lakers against the Suns.
MOM: Who’s winning?
BROTHER: The Lakers. By seven.
MOM: The Lakers are beating Chicago?

Happy holidays!

I probably shouldn’t show this, but in the spirit of the holidays…

As part of the opening act for Troy Phi’s Entertainment Night last April, the men of the executive board performed “Jingle Bell Rock” from Mean Girls. (I’m second from the right.) If you haven’t seen the movie, here’s the scene I based the choreography on. I still can’t believe our video has 93,000+ hits on YouTube!

Anyway… HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

How to think

Ed Boyden of MIT’s Technology Review has written fantastic tips for “managing brain resources in an age of complexity.” Here are some choice excerpts:

1. Synthesize new ideas constantly. Never read passively. Annotate, model, think, and synthesize while you read, even when you’re reading what you conceive to be introductory stuff. That way, you will always aim towards understanding things at a resolution fine enough for you to be creative.

2. Learn how to learn (rapidly). One of the most important talents for the 21st century is the ability to learn almost anything instantly, so cultivate this talent. Be able to rapidly prototype ideas. Know how your brain works. (I often need a 20-minute power nap after loading a lot into my brain, followed by half a cup of coffee. Knowing how my brain operates enables me to use it well.)

3. Work backward from your goal. Or else you may never get there. If you work forward, you may invent something profound–or you might not. If you work backward, then you have at least directed your efforts at something important to you.

7. Make your mistakes quickly. You may mess things up on the first try, but do it fast, and then move on. Document what led to the error so that you learn what to recognize, and then move on. Get the mistakes out of the way.

[Practical note for time management] I really like what I call “logarithmic time planning,” in which events that are close at hand are scheduled with finer resolution than events that are far off. For example, things that happen tomorrow should be scheduled down to the minute, things that happen next week should be scheduled down to the hour, and things that happen next year should be scheduled down to the day.