Moving..

Moving is the battle of emotional inertia and an urge of trying something new. There will be bloodshed no matter what..

Sort By Uncomfortable!

Last month, I blogged about personalization tradeoffs. This is Eli Pariser’s TED talk on the same topic. IMO, a must watch!

Urban Eats Cafe!

On Sundays, I play guitar at a cafe in Mount Rainer. Mount Rainer is a less wealthy neighborhood in Maryland. The Cafe is located on the ground floor of a building which homes local artists. The current people took over the business around the same time that I moved here. I feel affinity with the cafe because of that. I play for tips and a free meal. (Although, that is not really the reason I play there.)  I have heard that several businesses have tried the place in recent years and they have failed. As a result, locals say among themselves that the location is sort of ‘cursed’.

Urban Eats is managed by a mid-age African-American woman named Annette. The first time I met her, I got an immediate vibe that she is not an ordinary woman. She is a fighter! A true fighter!  She started the business very well knowing the risks as she told me so. And ever since, she has been trying so hard to make it work. We have been through sweet and bitter. I remember, one rainy day I entered the cafe and found myself the only patron for their Sunday brunch. Except that I wasn’t supposed to pay for it. I tried to pay, but she refused. She said that is ‘the arrangement’ between us.

Last week, I had a gig after a while. It was horrible outside. But to my surprise, there were quite a crowd.  I asked her how the business is doing lately. “It is finally picking up!” Annette cheerfully responded. It was a delightful day. I was moved, seeing people enjoying the food, or rather enjoying the Urban Eats Experience. Annette was all over the place.

I am bummed that I won’t be around for much longer in Maryland to witness the story of Urban Eats Cafe. I’m not sure if the rest of the way for her would be all smooth and bump-free. After all, a bump-free road is not that much fun. But, one thing I know is that she has turned the curse into a blessing.

Personalization: A blessing or a curse

One of the things that distinguishes our time from the past (and I mean only a couple of decades ago) is how much more data is available to us. These days, Google and Wikipedia answer pretty much any questions of ours in a matter of seconds, Facebook and Linkedin connect us to the people that we have forgotten where we met and so on. This has introduced a problem called ‘data explosion’: How in hell are we -as individuals- going to deal with this ever-expanding database?

The answer that the current technology pushes is ‘personalization’. Yahoo shows you the ads that are interesting to you. Google News only reports the news that you want to hear. Pandora plays the songs from your favorite genre, etc.

I beg to question personalization: Does personalization allow us to take full advantage of the massive data that is available to us? Aren’t we feeding ourselves with more of the same thing over and over and stay on a little island of information that we happened to land at some point? If this is the case, then not only we are not moving towards the promised globalization and the information age, but instead we are departing from it.

Courtesy of an unknown photographer

Eli Pariser is one of the Internet scholars who expresses doubts on whether personalization is a blessing or a curse in his book, The Filter Bubble. My answer is that personalization is both a blessing and a curse at the same time. However, the interesting part of this story, in my opinion, is the business opportunity that lies in the curse aspect of personalization. I think future Tech companies will eventually need to come up with elegant solutions on feeding their users with the information that they should have in addition to the information that they like to have. The challenge is to architecture the elegance.

When you do your “thing”, you don’t have to try that hard.

Remember Steve Job’s commencement speech at Stanford, when he said, you should search and never stop searching to find the role and the career that suits you. This weekend, I had a chance to go, see Andy Warhol exhibition at National Gallery of Art (http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/warholinfo.shtm). For those of you who don’t know him, aside from the obvious wikipedia, maybe you should check this out.

I’m not still sure how to feel about his art. But, sure I can tell that his work is creative, engaging, and thought provoking. And at the end of the day, aren’t these supposed to be the characteristics of good art? More importantly, he takes the most ordinary subject of our day-to-day life and makes something interesting out of it. So simple and almost effortless.

So the question is how did he become the Andy Warhol doing what he did? What was so special about his art? I think the answer is that he did his “thing”. And when you do your “thing”, you don’t have to try that hard.

Happiness is a blow of warm air

This painting is a homage to the wonderful years I spent in California. I am about to finish it!

Living in the digital era makes your basic skills rusty. However, every once in a while you are in a situation that requires to dust off the rust. Only then you feel the enormous joy in practicing the caveman skills. Getting the mysterious corn heater working in this cold November Saturday night was certainly a joyful experience for me. The blow of warm air is worth the failed attempts.

I was so close to give up.. I’m happy I didn’t.

I’m Mahyar, fresh 28. Welcome to my world!