Happy Thanksgiving and positive celebrity influences

I’ve been watching lots of The Ellen Degeneres Show and aside from the fact that it’s a very funny, very fun, and very entertaining show, I have to give props to Ellen for the great charitable work she does through it. Thanksgiving week and the holiday season in general is usually the time for special giveaways and the like and Ellen is no exception. She has been sponsoring the Ellen Thanks-for-Giving Food Drive, encouraging people to give funds, food, and time to America’s Second Harvest, the nation’s food bank network. She directs people to the Web site to give to the food assistance group and she encourages people coming to see the show to bring bags of food– her recent shows have included clips of audience members bringing bags and bags of food and companies like M&Ms and Starbucks have also been contributing large cash donations through the show as well. The key to this giving campaign though, I think, is that she only asks people to bring one food item or give one dollar, recognizing the influence she has through her television show and that by asking each of her viewers to give a little bit, she can put together huge charitable gifts. On top of this giving campaign, her Thanksgiving show audience was filled with the family members of soldiers serving overseas and more important than the free cruises she gave to every single audience member and the care packages and gifts she sent to the soldiers, she set up the opportunity for the soldiers to send video messages to their loved ones.

But the holiday season isn’t the only time Ellen has been seen giving to those who need and deserve it. As part of her RSVP Ellen program, when she wasn’t able to be the birth coach for a pregnant mother, she instead sent lots of presents, including a $2000 gift certificate to Drugstore.com, and invited the couple to an all-expenses paid trip to see the show and vacation in the area. On top of regular interviews with celebrity guests and musical performances, the show is filled with giveaways like this, small and large, and regular contributions to various charitable organizations.

And the combination of how fun the show is in general and the giving spirit is what makes this show great and what makes me truly respect and love Ellen. She doesn’t have to do many of the charitable things she does on the show, but it seems to me that she recognizes the influence she has as a celebrity, a public figure, and a talk show host, and uses it to support important causes. It’s this balance between celebrity and charity that I respect and admire. I don’t begrudge the large salaries of actors and actresses, but I think that anybody who has something should try to give back to those who do not, whether it’s a few dollars or millions of dollars. If you can, I believe you should try to give as much to charitable causes as you can. I believe you can balance enjoying your money and living a comfortable life with giving to important causes in a significant way. And for celebrities, I truly respect those who take it one step further and use their influence to encourage charitable work. For example, here’s a cool thing– Michael Rosenbaum who plays Smallville’s Lex Luthor, instead of accepting birthday gifts from his fans, tells fans to send money to Ronald McDonald House Charities on his behalf. The point is that he doesn’t really need the birthday gifts from thousands of fans, but if they really want to send them, he can at least turn that into something charitable. I think it was a great idea and one that everyone, celebrity or not, should consider embracing.

In the end, acts like these reflect a generosity of spirit that makes me not only enjoy the work of these celebrities, but respect them as people as well. And it is a lesson for all people who are public figures on whatever scale– that being a role model isn’t necessarily about living a perfect life or keeping the world from seeing anything possibly negative in your life, but more about setting an example in small ways and instead of putting the spotlight on the good things you might do, putting the spotlight on the good things others can do.

The world catches on to the life of programmers

The NY Times has picked up a story on the long hours and poor compensation for young programmers at EA– the story was originally picked up by Slashdot as a LiveJournal entry by the spouse of an EA employee. Reading the LiveJournal post, I really do feel for those EA employees that are experiencing too much crunching and not enough compensation (in the form of money or time off), but it is somewhat amusing to find that the rest of the world is finally catching on to the lifestyle of programmers and how, in the end, it’s not really that good for you.

The truth is that, for better or worse, high tech work culture has become an extension of late night hacking sessions. When I was in college, engineering students were characterized as the ones who were pale, a little sickly, stayed up all night coding, and were never seen before 11 am. While the occasional all-nighter is a fact of college life, for engineering students, it was a way of life. While some of those late nights probably could have been avoided by less procrastination and more focus, I don’t think anyone could keep up with the curriculum without pulling all-nighters on a fairly regular basis.

Many of my Stanford classmates will argue that their majors required late night study sessions too– the HumBio core was notorious for the ridiculous amount of assigned reading. The issue is that eventually, that lifestyle comes to an end for most people. Unfortunately, for high tech folks, the long hours only continue. Every year, I see a bunch of Stanford computer science students graduate and head off into the work world. Many of them are lucky enough to get jobs doing work they are really excited about– going to Microsoft, EA, Google, and other popular companies– and I see the same thing happen to most of them: they are so excited to be doing the work they’re doing and getting paid a decent amount of money suddenly that they’re willing to devote all of their time and energy to their jobs, just like most of them did with academics when they were in school. But eventually, they realize they’re six months, a year, five years, ten years out of school and they’re still living like college students, just maybe with better stuff than they had before. And for some, this isn’t that much of a disappointment– some love it– but for some, it’s a turning point and this is when they start working normal business hours, getting hobbies, meeting new people, dating, getting married, having children, seeing sunlight, etc. But no worries, another generation of young, naive people fresh out of school and so excited just to be working on the next cool new game or the newest version of an operating system will be there to fill their shoes.

One of the secrets to the tech industry’s success is this buy-in from employees. And at many of these places, they’ve drank the Kool-Aid so much that they consider some of the things companies do as perks. It started with getting a laptop and having your home Internet connection paid for– at first, you say, wow, I get a computer to take home and free Internet service. But then, the expectation is that since you have a computer at home and you have high speed Internet at home, there’s no reason for you to stop working or stop emailing when you get home. High-tech companies, especially startups have reinvented these perks: companies are letting people work non-traditional hours, letting them surf the Web at work, even setting up quiet rooms for quick naps, etc. Places like Google take it a step further with catered lunches, car washing services, and commuter buses with free Wi-Fi servicing employees who live in San Francisco. It might sound cool– hey, free lunch brought to you, a free car wash while you’re at work, a free commute– but all of this is designed to encourage long hours and more work. If your employees don’t have to leave campus to get lunch or run errands or anything else, they’ll be more likely to spend that time doing work. If you can take a quick nap while you’re at work, staying until 10, 11, midnight seems easier. The whole idea of calling the workplace a “campus” represents the very crux of the issue– the line between work and home becomes so blurred that you can no longer tell the difference.

Now, I’m not saying that long hours are a bad thing– if there really is a good reason to spend so much time working, then that’s great. Teachers, doctors, nurses, and others all do incredible work that require long hours, extreme dedication, and at least some personal sacrifices. Take an extreme example– could you imagine if the President of the United States punched out at five everyday? (Let’s not get into our current President’s vacation history.) Could you imagine if you couldn’t get in touch with the President because he refused to be called at home? There’s a reason why the President lives and works in the White House. And aside from how life-or-death important your job might be, if you really love to work, then that’s great. Living to work rather than working to live isn’t always a bad thing, but expect to make sacrifices.

The real problem is when companies don’t stop their employees from voluntarily working all the time and/or start expecting their employees to work 60, 80, 100 hour weeks with no vacation or overtime. For example, even if a company doesn’t expect employees to work long hours, many employees will do it because they truly love their work or they simply don’t have anything better to do. But reaching burnout can be a voluntary process and in the long term, good managers keep an eye out for it and step in before it happens. Moreover, if the majority of people are working long hours all the time, soon it becomes an unfair competition– people who choose to work all the time even when it’s unnecessary end up pushing out the people who don’t and the latter is punished under the idea that they’re not meeting some standard. But there is a line between failing to fullfill responsibilities and duties and choosing to have a balanced life and by federal law, a 40-hour week with mandatory breaks is the standard. Twelve to eighteen-hour work days, ten minute lunch at your desk or no lunch at all, and no vacation should certainly not be the standard.

To be honest, I’ve drank the Kool-Aid too– my boss is always telling me to take more vacation, to stay home and really not do work when I’m feeling sick, to keep the line between work and home clear. And to be honest, I can’t really imagine only working 40 hours a week and don’t expect any job I apply for in the future to have that guarantee. In the end, I don’t know how or if this problem will ever be solved, at least in the tech world. Although we complain about the late nights and constantly comment on how tired we are, there is a certain geek bravado associated with this lifestyle– you can just tell by how often people talk about how long or how late they’ve stayed up or how many hours they worked this week or how they haven’t had time to have a proper meal. We’re complaining, but deep down inside– or maybe right there on the surface– we all believe we’ve earned some bragging rights. In our own geeky way, they are our own war stories.

CMU, more debt, information security, and privacy

*sigh* I finally got my official acceptance letter. So, I’m getting geared up to start my Masters through Carnegie Mellon (West Campus). Goodbye free time and hello debt!

Here’s a thing though– the program is in Information Security and Privacy. That’s right. Information Security AND Privacy. They go together. You can’t talk about one without the other. Maybe more people should remember that.

What do you consider “an interest in technology?”

Living in Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area can really screw up your perspective. Take, for example, what average people consider “an interest in technology.” We finally finished filling a position in our office and let me just tell you, interviewing really does reveal a lot about the interviewee and people in general. After about six months of on and off searching to fill the administrative support position in our office, the lesson we (or least I) were quickly learning was that to work in our office and to really make the most out of this position, the ideal candidate would not only be good at pushing paper, but also have a genuine interest in technology and related issues. Now, I’m not saying the candidate has to be extremely technically skilled or even have an overwhelming passion for technology, but he does have to at least be genuinely interested in technology, including both the nuts and bolts (“techie”) and relevant social issues (“fuzzy”). While most of our days are filled with technical tasks– writing code, tracking down problem computers, imaging public computers– our eye is always on the prize, so to speak. The heart of our program’s mission isn’t the technical ins and outs, but the overarching goal of supporting the use of technology in the residences and student life in general. It’s college application time right now and as high school seniors wonder where they’ll spend the next four years of their lives, we must remember that most of the Class of 2009 (who will start their freshman year in the fall of 2004) will have been born around 1987. They will have never known a world without a microcomputer, they will barely remember a world without the Internet, and an overwhelming percentage of them will have come from homes with at least one computer and even a broadband Internet connection. These are kids who grow up typing on keyboard, gliding around mice, and surf the Web. Cell phones, IM, and email are native fixtures in their lives. Technology is embedded in who they are and how they live their lives– if we don’t remember that and share an interest in those technologies, we can’t do our jobs as part of an educational institution.

So, the question is, how do you tell if someone is genuinely interested in technology? Just because someone is interested in technology doesn’t mean the words come falling out of their mouths all the time, especially if an interview is focused on evaluating organizational skills, attention to details, or the ability to communicate effectively. So, at first, we asked questions like, “what’s your comfort level with technology? How do you find answers to your technical questions or learn how to do something new on a computer?” Unfortunately, this line of questioning usually ends with a shrug and “I’m comfortable with computers” or “I call the Help Desk” or “I ask someone for help” or “I just figure it out on my own.” So we started asking more specific questions like “How interested are you in technology? What kind of technology issues or topics are you interested in or do you try to keep up to date with?” And living in Silicon Valley, working in this office, and constantly reading sites like Slashdot, you expect answers like “Oh, well, I find the whole file-sharing phenomenon interesting and the rise of digital media” or “I think it’s very interesting how we balance personal privacy with information security in a world with an increasingly dangerous computing environment.” But no, we got answers like, “Well, I don’t really write software or buy the latest gadgets, but I like technology.”

To many people, “technology issues” means things directly related a specific software program or piece of hardware. I think our question was a pretty broad one, but very few people responded with answers about how technology affects your life, your personal relationships, how you learn, how you think, and more. Very few people talked about how technology fits into student life and not just how they submit their homework assignments or visit their class Web sites, but about how email and IM and cell phones have changed the way in which students communicate with their peers as well as professors, how computers and the Internet have changed the way in which students learn and get information about anything and everything, and how technology can be used to enrich academic and residential life. The answers are not so much “How do you set up a wireless network?” but “How would wireless networking benefit students?” You don’t have to necessarily know how to set up the wireless network– there are people for the technical how-tos– but you should be thinking about how 75% of students have laptops, how wireless network access would allow students to work and study in different places, how it affects group study opporunities and team efforts, etc.

Certainly, there will always be people working on the hard technical issues– how do you build more secure operating systems, how do you develop great human-computer interfaces, how do you break technical barriers– but the social issues of tomorrow will be inexorably tied up with technology issues and socially aware and involved people of tomorrow will have to be interested in, curious about, and aware of technology.

Winter in California

After 16 hours of sleep and fear that my head was going to explode at some point, I’m feeling a bit better, thanks to finally being diagnosed with a sinus infection and some hope through some good ol’ antibiotics. This would finally explain the weeks of headaches, tiredness and general crappy feeling I’ve had. So, as I sit at home, finally taking the sick days I’ve had coming to me, I’ve decided to finally update my Web site for winter and the holiday season. Of course, I live in California, so even if it is winter, there really aren’t snowflakes, snow, or anything else “wintry” in feeling apart from the winter illness and occasional cold weather. Oh well.

West Wing envy

Is it wrong that I wish I lived in the world of The West Wing instead of the real world? Even though I loved The American President, I didn’t watch The West Wing when it started and only recently started watching about a year or two ago– ironically, after Aaron Sorkin had left the show. But I quickly caught up with all four previous seasons and am now a truly devoted, truly addicted fan.

But what is is that makes me want to live in this world? Well, the Democratic White House is obvious, especially with Martin Sheen’s portrayal of President Bartlett. He’s highly educated, intelligent and talented. He’s a man of character and integrity, knows the Bible like the back of his hand, and while a devout Catholic, he is also modern and tolerant, understanding that the Bible was written a long time ago by fallible human beings. And while the show does tend to shy away from the radical policies and programs that are very unlikely to happen in real life (they often attempt them, but by the end of the episode, you realize why it’s so hard to do those types of things), there are some great moments that you can live out in this fictional world: the appointment of the first female Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, peace (or something close to it) in the Middle East, and most recently, the rise of a woman to the position of White House Chief of Staff.

But aside from great writing, interesting story lines, and the opportunity to watch a West Wing staff pursuing Democratic party ideals, the real reason I want to live in this world is that, at the end of the day, it makes you feel good about government. It makes you feel like even those who you disagree with, even those whose ideas you would spend a lifetime fighting against are, in the end, patriots and really do have the country’s best interest at heart. It makes you feel like while the culture war is real, the left and the right can come together to do great things. It makes you believe that government really is a place that people come together to have a great debate and that even though everyone doesn’t agree how to do it, everyone shares a common goal of serving the public and making America a better place for everyone. It’s a feeling that many of us have been missing for the past four years and will most likely miss for another four.

The Wisdom of Average People

Waking up on Wednesday morning, I quietly waited for some huge voter fraud to be discovered (most likely linked to bad electronic voting machines) because I could not possibly believe that there were actually so many people in this country that would want to reelect the President. I just could not believe that after everything with Iraq, after a new video from Osama Bin Laden serving as a reminder that the man behind 9/11 was still out there while we waste American money and lives in Iraq, after horrible performances at the debates, after a complete lack of fiscal responsibility on the part of this administration, Americans would still reelect the President. I just could not believe that, with record turnout at the polls, the majority of Americans would choose President Bush over Senator Kerry or frankly, anybody else. So many people came out of the woodwork to vote this past Tuesday– who knew that they would be Bush supporters?

Many are saying that supporters voted along moral lines in support of President Bush. Well, I wonder about our own moral compasses if the majority of Americans saw President Bush as moral and sharing the same values, values that we wanted to see in our leader. So many questioned President Clinton’s character because of his extramarital affairs and impeached him because he lied about them. But why are we not holding President Bush to the same standard when it comes to going to war on false premises and continuing to risk American lives on a fool’s errand? Why are we willing to ignore that, to let President Bush get away with that, but we find it so hard to forgive President Clinton? In the case of President Clinton, I would say his wife and his daughter paid the greatest price for his indiscretions, they are the real victims. But President Bush’s crusade? The real victims of his mistakes are those we lost on 9/11 as well as their families and loved ones. America’s presence in Iraq is disrespectful to their memories– the tragedy of their deaths are used to wage an unjust war and their murderers walk free. And ultimately, the victims of President Bush’s mistakes are all Americans as our tax dollars are spent and our brothers and sisters are sent overseas while real social, political, and economic problems continue at home.

The problem with democracy is that the majority wins. Unfortunately, the majority isn’t always right and it’s strange to think that when it comes to choosing our political leaders, a candidate winning the popular vote means he has a mandate (although, interestingly enough, this was not President Bush’s story four years ago– his mandate was from the Supreme Court). In so many other areas, the common wisdom is that “average people” aren’t that bright and that more often than not, popular opinion isn’t always the right answer. The times when the minority opinion has been able to push through and win have often been the most important turning points in our time– American independence, abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, the civil rights movement. They were not popular efforts, but in the end, they were the right ones.

So, how do we balance out this struggle between a committment to majority rule and the realization that popular opinion isn’t always the right choice? I’m not quite sure of the answer to that one, but I think part of the responsibility is in our political leaders. We have a representative democracy in this country and most political leaders are elected through a popular vote. Unfortunately, with the way elections and campaigns are run, political leaders are often more worried about keeping their jobs than doing their jobs and while they are representing the interests of their constituents, sometimes political leaders need to step out and go against the majority and fight for the minority opinion. And what if their constituents don’t like it? Well, then convince them of why the less popular choice is the better choice and in the end, maybe it won’t be less popular after all.

Of course, I’m not saying the minority opinion is always the right one, but just because a lot of people want something doesn’t mean it’s right. A lot of people want tax cuts, but a tax cut today doesn’t mean you’ll never have to pay. It just means you’ll pay later. We’re slowly marching toward a society where we’ve bankrupted important social programs– social security being the biggest one– and while we may not pay now, our children and grandchildren will certainly pay the price in the future. Is that the kind of legacy we want to leave our children?

The truth is that as we move further into the new millenium, the world will only grow more complicated and the problems of tomorrow are far beyond the comprehension of “average people.” The problems of tomorrow will not be easily solved by sticking to “family and faith” because with the growing diversity of this country, the question always comes: who’s family? Who’s faith? Yours, mine, his, hers? With new technology and a whole new field of complicated social, political, and economic issues, the problems of tomorrow will not be easily solved by smart people or moral leaders. Intelligence, talent, character, integrity and courage must come together to solve the problems of tomorrow. The real question is– how long will we have to wait for that? Right now, it looks like at least four years.

Election day, Election day

Well, the polls are slowly starting to close and everyone is watching eagerly. I won’t say much since I got around to writing on this so late, but here are a few tidbits:

For live reporting of election results (based on exit polls), check out CNN. From a pure technology standpoint, this is great use of Web technology– clear representation of detailed data, at a glance and with variable levels of granularity. Especially cool is how you can click on states and see gradients of color that show how strong each party won in each county.

Cool video: Eminem’s Mosh. He’s not exactly heading up Creative Commons, but from what I’ve seen, Eminem takes all the file-sharing hoopla with a grain of salt (and a sense of humor)– on MTV a while back, he walked into a record store and bought his own CD, commenting to the cashier and customers that he downloaded it off of the Internet, but it didn’t sound as good. On top of that, while his last album was one of the largest uses of copy protection at the time, his new album actually includes an incentive program. People who buy his newest album (instead of downloading it illegally off of the Internet) when it’s released on November 16th will be eligible for prizes. And now he’s freely distributing his music video for “Mosh,” expressing the rage that many of feel toward President Bush and his administration as well as spreading a great message to get out there and vote. What’s even better than that? That the group of hooded crusaders get together and storm… the polling station and get in line to vote. For all the horrible things that people think and say about Eminem (not me– I’m a big fan), Mosh is certainly a throwback to a time where rap music was more about politics and activism, giving voice to an unheard community, rather than bitches, hoes, and the bling. Bling.