I’ve visited some homes in the Bay Area that totally fit this description:

U.S. Material Wealth Leads to Clutter - Yahoo! News

To many observers, clutter reflects the mind-set of the modern household — overburdened, disorganized and compulsive. To others, clutter is a broader symbol of a ravenous culture dependent on easy credit, piling up debt and consuming a lion’s share of the world’s resources without considering the consequences.

“People’s homes are a reflection of their lives,” says Los Angeles psychologist and organizational consultant Peter Walsh. “It is no accident that people have a huge weight problem in this country, and clutter is the same thing. Homes are an orgy of consumption.”

The obesity analogy isn’t a joke. While personal spending drives much of the U.S. economy, the resulting clutter from all that shopping is so pervasive that some researchers wonder if it might have a deeper, biological component, similar to overeating.

Their speculation borrows from evolutionary theory.

In some of my jogs around Sunnyvale, I’ve noticed that there are garages that are simply overflowing with stuff. Or, you see a two car garage, with 3 cars in the driveway.

I wonder how these people find stuff - do they ever? And is there anything technology can do to make finding physical stuff easier? Where is RFID when you need it!

Honestly… this proposition system is awful. I spend a lot of researching this stuff, and still I get somewhat confused. Take a look at Proposition 80 for example:

Proposition 80: Electric Service Providers. Regulation - California State Government

Proposition 80
Electric Service Providers. Regulation
State of California
Initiative Statute

Should the state expand its regulation of the electric industry?

Summary Prepared by the State Attorney General:
Subjects electric service providers to regulation by California Public Utilities Commission. Restricts electricity customers’ ability to switch from private utilities to other providers. Requires all retail electric sellers to increase renewable energy resource procurement by 2010.

Fiscal Impact from the Legislative Analyst:
Potential annual administrative costs ranging from negligible to $4 million, paid by fees. Unknown net impact on state and local costs and revenues from uncertain impact on electricity rates.

Meaning of Voting Yes/No
A YES vote on this measure means:
The Public Utilities Commission (PUC) would have broadened authority to regulate electric service providers. The PUC’s current policies related to the electricity procurement process, resource adequacy requirements, and the renewables portfolio standard would be put into law. Small electricity customers in existing buildings could not be required to accept time-differentiated electricity rates without their consent. The current prohibition on new “direct access” for electricity service would be continued beyond 2015.

A NO vote on this measure means:
The PUC would not have broadened authority to regulate electric service providers. The PUC’s current policies related to the electricity procurement process, resource adequacy requirements, and the renewables portfolio standard would not be put into law. The PUC would determine whether and how small electricity customers in existing buildings would be required to have time-differentiated electricity service. New “direct access” for electricity service would continue to be prohibited until 2015, after which time it would be allowed.

Alright… I’m stumped. Ii’m pretty much set with all the other propositions, but just not this one. How should I vote on this one? Thoughts?

Comcast’s customer service sure hasn’t thrilled me lately.

Last Thursday I finally got fed up with having to push a bunch of extra buttons to change the volume of my receiver using my cablebox remote. So I looked on the Internet and found a plethora of sites that tell you how to change it. Except that they all talked about the Setup button.

Huh? Setup button? My remote didn’t have a setup button.

Let’s flash back to late last year when I was one of the first people in the Bay Area to get the HDTV PVR from Comcast. At that time, they gave me this remote:

So on that same Thursday, I called Comcast to inquire about this. Well, it turns out that all this time, I had the wrong remote. I should have had this one instead:

DOH! Well could they mail me one? Nope, on the phone they told me that I had to go to the local Sunnyvale Comcast office to pick one up.

Alright, so I go there Monday morning. When I get there, there is a sign that says “Closed until noon for company meeting.” Great. Just great.

So I go there again today… and this is basically the conversation with the representative at the desk:

Me: Hello, I’d like to get the right remote for my HDTV PVR. On the phone, they said this was the wrong one [presents current remote].

Agent: Well of course. You brought in your own remote. Why aren’t you using the remote that came with the box?

Me: Uh, no. This the remote that Comcast gave me.

Agent: No. Look it doesn’t even say Comcast on it. This I your remote for your TV or something.

Me: Look, this remote is on your own website! Just go to it! http://comcast.com/remote. Even the person on the phone knew about this remote.

Agent: I have never seen this remote before, it’s not ours.

Me: Well, I did move from Mountain View.

Agent: Let me look up your account to see if we’re charging you for a missing remote. (Whuh?) I’ve been here for 8 years and I have never seen this remote.

Me: It’s on your website, go to it! http://comcast.com/remote.

Agent: Well, there’s nothing on your account. Fine, here’s a remote. Use this one.

Me: Uh, thanks.

Well, at least she didn’t call me bitch dog or something.

Sheesh.

This weekend my friends and I went on treasure hunt that was organized by T-Hunts.com. We had done this before, back in 2003, and our team faired pretty darn well - despite having to run up California (super steep) on an abnormally hot September day in San Francisco.

This year… well… I don’t know what we placed, and I’m not really sure I want to know.

I’ve been thinking about our stunning loss a lot in the last 2 days and the more I think about it, the more it strikes me about the similarities between this event and… well… the challenges of the business world.

-Resources: In business (even at Microsoft), you are always resource constrained, and thus you have to make strategic decisions as to how to use what you do have effectively. Back in 2003, our team had 8 people, this time we had just 5 (one of whom showed up late due to a parking snafu). Most of the winning teams I saw this weekend had close to 7 people.

One of the toughest things to do in business is decide what not to do - and our team simply failed to do that. The game started with 8 clues, and with so few people, our team didn’t optimized - we got sucked into the first clue which most teams didn’t get. In retrospect, we should’ve realized that the fact that it was worth nearly double the points of other clues meant that it would be super hard, and with our limited resources, we should’ve made the tough decision early on of cutting it.

-Time: Well this one is obvious. It’s a treasure hunt, and it’s a race. Time was definitely a resource that we didn’t have a lot of. (In comparison, in the 2003 one, we had time to have smoothies and go the bathroom - this year we barely had time to drink water.)

-Quality: When you’re pressed for time and resources, one of first things to go is quality. Looking back at our notes and work, there was definitely some slippage in quality that made things a bit more confusing. One mistake that was made at the beginning of one clue, in retrospect, was so glaring and obvious that if we had taken the time to straighten out, we would’ve saved a lot of time spent trying to figure out the rest. Thinking back, there was also possibly duplication of effort at certain points. The key learning here is that when times are desperate, stay organized, stay focused - or things will get only worse.

-Partnering: After the game, I read the instructions again, and it turned out that you could’ve collaborated with other teams in your division. Doh! Well, not that it mattered since I didn’t see any other teams doing that in the beginning phase. But still, this is an interesting point that reflects to the real world: if you have a lot of problems to solve, do you spend some of your limited time and limited resources to pursue partnerships with competitors? After all, joining forces may make you stronger and fend off other competitors - but at the same time, it means you are taking on a dependency, which requires management. That’s tough to evaluate - especially if you have no leverage like our team.

-Outsourcing: Everyone talks about outsourcing these days and how it’s a great way to lower costs. We tried this too, with friends on the phone at home. They didn’t have to pay $40 per person, and they could ‘work from home’. Alas, like many real world companies, we didn’t adequately account for the cost of outsourcing. A lot of time was sucked up due to poor communication: cell phones faded out, batteries ran down, camera phones sucked, words were misheard, frustration ran high. Lesson learned: if you outsource some work, it might be best to have them centralized and to have a single point of contact on each end. And to make sure that the outsourced team has clear understanding of the problems and the expected outcomes.

-Morale: We had great success in the last game, and we thought it would carry over. But when we saw that all the other teams leave because they had solve the majority of the clues, our teams morale plummeted. This is akin to being in a small product group, and watching all your competitors take off, while your product languishes. When other teams come to ask you “Yeah we got 7/8 of them so far, how many have you got?” and your answer is “2″. To be frank, I’m not sure how this could’ve been improved. How would you have dealt with it?

Well, while things didn’t go so well, I’m still glad we went. It was good to be humbled, and hopefully my team will stick together and we can utilize the lessons learned to win next time.

Kevin Schofield On The Job

Flash back a couple of hours… mid-morning, Bill and I got into a brief but heated argument that ended by one of those “death by silence” things where we just stopped talking. Normally I would talk it out instead of letting it just hang there, but as we were coming up to Bill’s talk to students and I wanted to make sure I didn’t send him out on stage in a lousy mood, I let it go and just made myself scarce. But up until the point where we jumped into the car with the food, he and I hadn’t spoken in a couple of hours, we had unresolved stuff, and it was not pretty.

Bill immediately dove into the cheeseburgers with gusto and you could see him cheer up. Larry was sitting next to him, and I was sitting in the row behind them. Larry starts handing food back to me, and asks me if I want some fries — at which point Bill (clearly cheering up) says “yeah, have some - they’re good for you!” Which was funny and cute, but more importantly gave me the sign that things were thawing out and it was going to be ok. Postscript, for those who care: in the car ride from Morristown to New York City, when I had to brief him on Columbia, we picked up the argument again, talked it all out over about 15 minutes, came to an understanding and everything was cool from that point on.

There are some interesting stories on this blog by Kevin Schofield, a General Manager at Microsoft Research.

Meet the Life Hackers - New York Times

Computer-based interruptions fall into a sort of Heisenbergian uncertainty trap: it is difficult to know whether an e-mail message is worth interrupting your work for unless you open and read it - at which point you have, of course, interrupted yourself. Our software tools were essentially designed to compete with one another for our attention, like needy toddlers.

What a fantastic article! Indeed, people who use computers are simply overwhelmed with information. Whether it was working on Entourage, or MSN Search Toobar now, I strive to do something about it.

Especially since it impacts me

DE YOUNG AGAIN

Finally, it’s finished. Sixteen years after the Loma Prieta earthquake rocked the old museum and made it a seismic hazard zone, San Francisco’s new M.H. de Young Memorial Museum — a bold beauty whose decadelong public gestation was beset by complications — is opening at last. On Saturday, the public will get its first inside view of the sleek copper-clad building that has risen in Golden Gate Park on the site of the old Spanish-style de Young, a hodgepodge of shaky structures demolished in 2002.

The opening festivities begin at 10 a.m., with performances by the San Francisco Symphony Brass and artists from the Ballet and Opera, and speeches at a noon ribbon cutting. For the next 31 hours — noon Saturday to 5 p.m. next Sunday — the de Young will be open nonstop, free to the public (well, you have to pop $5 for the special “Hatshepsut” show). Stage readings, Gypsy swing and Maya marimba music will be part of the cross-cultural celebration taking place throughout and around the museum.

The de Young Museum was open all night - and apparently everyone in the Bay Area decided to go tonight. Parking was so bad that the neighboring neighborhoods were gridlocked. At 1050p when I drove by, there was a giant line of people snaking through the park.

After a long day of Treasure Hunt, I decided I’d just have to come back again some other time. Rats!

Hello Mr. Cheung:

La Avenida will be closed to eastbound traffic (between Shoreline Boulevard and the new road only) but open to westbound traffic during construction activities that will permanently turn La Avenida into a one-way street for westbound traffic.

The reason for the change in access is to accommodate the new off-ramp configuration of Shoreline Boulevard. The new connecting road is scheduled to be named at the next Mountain View City Council meeting on Tues., Oct. 25.

To access La Avenida, northbound Shoreline Boulevard traffic should turn right on Pear Avenue and right on the new road. Southbound Shoreline Boulevard traffic should turn left on Pear Avenue and right on the new road.

For further questions, please contact me directly. Thank you!

That sucks. Now my commute is lengthened by another 3 minutes as I have to go 3 blocks further and make a left turn. Expect Pear Ave to become a major speed trap.