An Inconvenient Truth

If you haven't already, go watch it. It's Al Gore's documentary about Global Warming and I think it's very well made. Watching it leaves you with this feeling of sadness and depression. I hope as many people as possible get to watch this and maybe start worrying about it so that eventually a politician with an interest in the environment and its protection gets to be the president of the United States. Oh yeah, and tonight, I hope Al Gore wins the Oscar for his film. That would be well-deserved and add extra publicity to his cause. Hopefully, there are not too many oil companies sponsoring the academy awards.

And if you really think about it, there is so much we can do. But as long as the government doesn't promote alternative fuel/energy the people are unlikely to change here in the U.S. unless it hurts or helps their wallets. So make alternative fuel cheaper by subsidizing it. Pay half the cost for solar electricity and require every new house built to have some form of alternative energy usage, whether it is using solar to heat water or produce electricity. Just like Al says, we have the technology, let's use it.

What I do at Yahoo!

What I do at Yahoo!
Originally uploaded by jmeyer.

Here is a screenshot of what I have worked on at Yahoo over the past 12 months. It's called Contextual Shortcuts and it's running as part of Yahoo! Mail. As of today, you will have to use the old style interface, we are hoping to add it to the new Yahoo! Mail Beta sometime this year.

You can read about what it is in the Yahoo! Mail help pages in the Shortcuts section.

The system has many parts to it but in short the Contextual Shortcuts platform tries to indentify interesting and relevant pieces of text and then offer you an in-place user experience that is appropriate for the detected item. For example, if we detect an address, we will show you a map and let you add it to your address book. If we find the name of a place (e.g., New York City) we offer you Search results and a map. All of this without requiring the user to leave their current context (that's one of the reasons we named it Contextual Shortcuts).

We are adding more features and improving detection right now and if all goes well you will see this elsewhere too. Wish us luck.

Back to the roots - another name story

I started this blog a while ago because I thought I'd share my experiences using my first name here in the U.S., especially in coffee shops. Now, that doesn't happen that often anymore, simply because I now get my caffeine fix at work. One of the more enjoyable benefits at Yahoo! is the free coffee. We have fully staffed espresso bars where you can get everything from a simple espresso to something more complex like Low Fat Sugar Free Vanilla Half Decaf Latte with Extra Foam. Personally, I'd like to outlaw the latter but unfortunately I don't have a lot of say in this. Anyhow, the name problem in coffee shops went away but one problem that still lingers is the email problem. The email problem is this. I sent someone an email and end it with the line

-Joerg

Clearly, I don't know how to spell my own name because a large number of people (especially first timers) will start their reply with Jeorg. Drives me nuts. Makes me wnat to butcher their name too. Now how hard is it to get Joerg right? It's only five letters and only 4 if you were to use the proper umlaut ö. Do people not proof read? One thing everyone should do is to at least get the name right. But maybe that's too much to ask.

Super Bowl XLI, the Inverted TiVo Experience

Everyone always talks about the Superbowl ads and how great they are. So I programmed my TiVo (it's really a Comcast DVR but everyone knows what TiVo is) to tape (oh excuse me, record) the Superbowl, all 4 hours and 5 minutes of the broadcast. And as I was watching the Superbowl yesterday it dawned on me that A Superbowl TiVo recording is probably one of the only shows, if not hte only, that people fast-forward through, just to get to the commercials. In a way, it's inverted TiVo. Kind of odd, isn't it. Oh and by the way, most ads were rather boring, except for the Bud commercials. They are mostly funny or cute but the beer still sucks. With that, congrats to the Colts and too bad for the Bears. At least Rex Grossmann lived up to the very low expectations that compared him to one of the worst quarterbacks in SuperBowl history, even before the game had started.

Scientifically Funny - Nailing jelly to a wall

I have been enjoying the blog from Improbable Research for a while and found a post today that investigated the feasibility of nailing jelly to a wall. It is scientifically funny.

When seemingly good ideas backfire ...

... or the 101 dumbest moments in business. Check it out.

Painful Presentations at Work

We have probably all witnessed one of these, either at school, at work or at some event in our spare time. A painful presentation. What makes a painful presentation you may ask? Here is my list of things that indicate a painful presentation:

1. The presenter apologizes for the readability of his/her slides. Never a good thing, if you know it's unreadable, don't use it or break it into more than one slide. Making good slides takes skill and a few tries but everyone who gives presentation should know that a picture says more than thousand words and is a good thing. On the other hand, too much text on a slide and too many slides make for a bad presentation.
   
2. Soft-spoken presenters. I know not everyone can have a booming voice and assert himself well and look confident. However, if the entire audience has to collectively hold their breath to be able to hear the words than you are witnessing a painful presentation because a listener spends all his concentration on making out the words.
3. Presenters that can't speak the language. I know, sometimes they don't have a choice but to me it's the same issue as #2. It is so tiring to make out the words and try to understand what the hell is being sad that I lose interest and look out the window. The inability to master a language coupled with a monotone voice simply sucks.
   
4. A presenter who tries to be funny but who is not. Yeah, I know, we all like to be comedians but very few can pull that off. So , unless you have a good feel for an audience and what kind of style they respond to, keep to your roots. After all, in my line of work, most presenters are scientists or engineers and teh majority is not funny.
5. A color-blind presenter. How can you tell? Look at the slides. They may be readable but looking at them makes you want to vomit or reminds youof wallpaper from the seventies? Than you are witnessing a presentation by someone who is blind, color-blind or simply has bad taste.

So, I think you can survive a presentation if only one of the above holds true and the presenter can offset one shortcoming like crowded slides with being a good speaker. But if you can check off more than one of the above issues in a presentation then it is time get out. Reminds me of the Southwest slogan: Want to get away? All I can say is run, run fast otherwise you will be wasting an hour or more of your life that will never get back. What else can save a bad presentation. Well, free food of course but it'd better be good or else your brain and your stomach will hurt.