Stupidfool.org

David Chang in the New Yorker

The profile of David Chang in the latest New Yorker (not online, sadly) is brilliant & scary all at once--I wonder if Chang is as manically miserable as the profile makes him out to be? He's certainly an incredible chef; our meal at Ssäm Bar last year was one of the more memorable eating experiences I've had.

The article's filled with great quotes, but here's one of my favorites:

"I'm so sick and tired of how awesome it is to work at Google or fucking Apple or one of those tech companies," he says. "Why can't it be awesome to work for a food company? Why can't we create an environment where people are trying to push each other to do great things, and we're not trying to steal from anybody, we're trying to be good to our farmers and run an honorable business, if there is such a thing anymore?"

Joel on standards

From Joel on Software: Martian Headsets:

If you’ve ever visited the ultra-orthodox Jewish communities of Jerusalem, all of whom agree in complete and utter adherence to every iota of Jewish law, you will discover that despite general agreement on what constitutes kosher food, that you will not find a rabbi from one ultra-orthodox community who is willing to eat at the home of a rabbi from a different ultra-orthodox community. And the web designers are discovering what the Jews of Mea Shearim have known for decades: just because you all agree to follow one book doesn’t ensure compatibility, because the laws are so complex and complicated and convoluted that it’s almost impossible to understand them all well enough to avoid traps and landmines, and you’re safer just asking for the fruit plate.

This made my morning, and it's only one of many fantastic quotes.

Fire Eagle and Movable Type

Having had a longstanding interest in geo-location--and, well, its intersections with blogging and online identity--I'm really excited about Yahoo!'s new Fire Eagle service.

I'm also really excited that we now have Fire Eagle for Movable Type plugin connecting an MT profile to a Fire Eagle account. This makes an MT profile location-aware and, just like Fire Eagle itself, opens the door to tons of other interesting features that the plugin provides: adding a map of your current location to your blog; tracking changes to your location in your Action Stream; &c.

I've written more about Fire Eagle for Movable Type on sixapart.com.

Where I am

I'm posting over at Vox, now.

Small victories, or How I learned to shop at companies that hire people, not robots

A brief update to my last post: I went in to Best Buy again today (in person) to speak to the manager. Over the phone they'd offered me a floor model version of the television we had bought, for pretty much the same price as what we had paid for the new model—nice! So I headed in in person, and after talking with the manager for about a minute, realized that this was a futile exercise, and so I just returned the television that we'd never received in the first place. [1]

Contrast that with Costco, which is where we bought our original television more than a year ago. I've spared my tens of readers the drama that brought us to buying a new television in the first place—seriously, it would make an entertaining set of posts—but suffice to say that over the past three months, we've had our television for about two weeks. The rest of its time was spent at a completely ineffectual "authorized" repair shop & in discussions with Sharp (the maker of said television).

So finally, Mena & I happened to mention to Barak that we'd bought the television at Costco, and he said, just bring it back there and return it. I was quite skeptical, but here's the thing: I brought the television in to Costco today and spoke with two people (a rep handling returns and his manager), both extremely competent, and who gave me a full refund for the amount at which I'd originally bought the television (and this one year later!). All while juggling about five customers at once.

Which is really the point of it all: Costco—or at least, the warehouse I've been going to—has made a point of hiring people who can think, who are empowered to take action & make decisions, and who actually care (or, at least, do a great job at pretending) about customers. Best Buy, on the other hand, has hired—or perhaps trained—a set of mindless drones who could very well be robots for the amount of critical thinking that they possess and/or are allowed to perform.

So, with that, I refuse to shop at Best Buy ever again. And yes, I'm realistic enough to realize that they don't care—but then again, isn't that the problem in the first place?

[1] Of course, they couldn't resist fucking with me one last time: when I went over to get a refund for the television, the service representative handling returns told me that he couldn't refund me the money for the delivery, since that was a separate company. But I got my way, & my refund.