Kiss, Bow or Shake Hands?

Ah, the venerable ironic headline made so famous by our dying newspapers. Thank you for the standing ovation for my direct reference to the seminal work on international culture. Of course it is now back as a hot topic thanks to the President of the United States Barack Obama bowing to the Japanese Emperor.

El President gets a good ol’s Colbert Bump from me. As far as my half-baked knowledge of the Japanese culture goes, there are three types of bows. A shallow one is reserved for peers, a medium bow for elders and more-important-than-oneself people and a third deeper bow made only to the Emperor of Japan. Take that Sean Insanity.

Blogging

This is tough, especially when one is working on a startup.

The Flu

It is usually the not-so-glamorous-news that is the real deal.

36,000 Americans die every year from the flu. Regular flu. Can we stop panicking about H1N1 alone? Where are the PR gurus when you need them to do any kind of good for the public other than helping to push more products down our gullets?

CDC.

It’s a Brand New Day

Reporting live from sub-tropical southern India.

The energy is palatable, the people are energetic and organized chaos reigns supreme. Is this the face of the new world?

idea for a documentary

What if we acted on every single every single advertisement we are bombarded with on TV?

How badly will it put one in debt?

How many things or services bought are totally useless?

What can one end up spending in a month?

How are these advertising techniques convincing us to buy stuff?

101 Blogger Tax Deductions

Richard Banfield of Fresh Tilled Soil sent a tweet (tweeted?) on a blog post that shows 101 deductions you can take if you blog.

Pretty cool. Thanks Richard!

What the Twitter!?

Gawker blogger Owen Thomas says “We Twitter to reassure ourselves that we are alive.”

A clinical psychologist interviwed by Times Online and quoted in the post says “Twittering stems from a lack of identity. It’s a constant update of who you are, what you are, where you are. Nobody would Twitter if they had a strong sense of identity.”

I’ve heard anywhere from 1 million (a little dated) to 6 million. So I do not think that group is reflective of anything significant. Yes, Twitter is cool. But it is mostly used evangelize an idea or a product or service. Another distribution channel one that I’d compare to RSS in spirit. It moves information quickly from me device to you. I do not believe it can live as a stand-alone application. It’s like push-to-talk. Eventually, you have to merge with someone who offers much more.

If you want to analyze the sense of identity or lack thereof, then I think Facebook is a far better example than Twitter.

Working with some you hate?

A number of search queries leading to my blog ask this question.

Is it really that bad out there folks?

Its hard out here for a student!

It is getting harder by the day to find work. The problem is further exacerbated when it comes to international students, a demographic I am passionate about. These students spend billions of dollars a year in the US and in return, they are the most worried and harassed bunch. One could write a book on all the trials and tribulations they undergo, but that book will never get completed, because the immigration system grows convoluted on a daily basis.

The WSJ has an article about finding work after graduating from one of these tier-1 or ivy league schools.

Starbucks saves a career?

I don’t think Starbucks as such saved Michael Gates Gill’s career, rather his ability to start from scratch did. Here is a ex-advertising executive, possibly a former millionaire now working the toilets and coffee machine at his local ‘bucks. An uplifting story and a humbling one at that – if he can do it, then even I can do it in these troubling times. The only thing stopping one from this type of a paycheck is society and what it might think of the former successful us, now seeking menial jobs.

I say, quoting Nike, just do it.