Alexandru Blogu

So I have to write a (real) letter to the UK government

Wed, 04 Jun 2014 18:28:00 +0300

It’s probably a bad idea to send this letter to the UK Department for Work and Pensions.

Google Glass first impressions

Thu, 09 Jan 2014 22:37:00 +0200

I am probably the first person in Romania to take Google Glass out for a spin. Not in a booth-demo setting, but out, having a casual lunch at a restaurant in the center of Bucharest.

First of all, no, they didn’t kick me out of the restaurant. The waiters were very nice and did not seem to notice anything off. They probably did, and they politely hid it.

Everyone knows about the technology, everyone knows about what Glass can do. That’s not the point of this article, so i’m not going to review that. I’m going to review the social aspect. The “glasshole” phenomenon.

I was a glasshole for a day. And yes, right now, if you have glass, you are a glasshole. Because, to put it lightly, it’s not unnoticeable.

The first time I put on Glass, I was at the Google office. It took about 5 minutes to set it up and tether it to my Android phone. It took another five to test out the basics: learn to tilt my head up the make Glass hot-word sensitive (“OK, Glass”), try out some voice commands (take a picture, record a video, do a google search, bring up navigation). And I was set.

They say (in the reviews) that people feel uncomfortable around Glass. I instantly found this out to be true. Around my Google colleagues in the office. I went out on the balcony to get some air. One googler based in Mountain View was visiting our office at the time, and he was out for a cigarette. The moment I walked on the balcony with Glass he told me “dude, cut that shit out” or something along those lines. And he’s the guy that was telling us about Glass the last time he visited months ago. He got to test them and had colleagues back in Silicon Valley that wore Glass 24/7. Still, he felt uncomfortable.

People feel uncomfortable around Glass. And it’s not about not understanding technology. It’s something else. People well versed and used to technology have a strange aversion to Glass.

Having lunch at the restaurant, my colleagues kept saying “You know, you have to get specific approval from me before you film me” even though I made a conscious effort not to activate them.

Walking out of the restaurant, I opened the door and, wanting to record a short clip, I tilted my head up (to bring up the display) and whispered “OK, Glass. Record a video”. A group of three young people walking by instantly stopped and looked at me. I did not want to record anyone, but I could’t help myself to not look at them, even though I tried to make conscious effort not to. I literally couldn’t help it, because it all seems so natural. If it would have been a phone, I would have naturally put it in my pocket, no challenge. But these things are on your head.

And, I learned, after 28 years of experience having a head, you can’t help moving your head if something grabs your attention.

And that’s the point. Glass is natural. It’s so natural it’s crazy and surreal. It gets out of the way. It’s something obvious on your face, but it works seamlessly with how you’re used to act on your daily life.

Think about the latest gadget you bought. Think about how you’d show your friends “hey man, check this out” and you’d proceed to pick up the device and plug it in somewhere or push buttons (thinking of my fitbit flex right now). Glass is nothing like that, it’s a totally different experience. Because you can never “show off” Glass. You have to try Glass.

That’s the whole point of the “glass explorer program”. I think Google could have never sold the idea just with great advertising. It doesn’t matter how many YouTube videos you see of Glass (and I’ve seen about a thousand) it can’t possibly convey the feeling of using it. It’s something else.

You ultimately get the feeling that something is “off” about using Glass. Something is simply not right. You definitely can’t put your finger on it, you can’t really explain it. But let me give it a shot:

The only thing that is “off” about Glass is simply that not everyone is using it. Just like the first asshole that started using an umbrella. How ridiculous did that guy look?! In our times, the asshole is the one strolling in the rain without one!

Fine, i'll admit it

Sat, 04 Jan 2014 18:32:46 +0200

The only reason I have a tumblr blog is Marissa.

I sometimes miss my stop

Thu, 12 Sep 2013 21:33:00 +0300

I ride the subway every day to work. About once a week I miss my stop, reading an article on The Verge, listening to Bill Burr on his Monday Morning Podcast or just thinking about what the hell is Denis Rodman doing in North Korea.

Sometimes I see that the subway stopped at my station and I just sit there, because it would be ridiculous to jump out of my seat just to have the doors shut in my face. Then, I would have to sit there and suffer the humiliation up until the next stop. Feeling the other people judge me: “Look at that sorry chump, he missed his stop, how stupid is he?”. I would sit and wait, and if the doors don’t shut in two seconds, I would feel even more stupid because I knew I had a chance to get out.

One time, I was sitting in my seat and noticed the sub was in my station, with the doors open. I knew I missed my stop, so I just figured I would wait and get off at the next station and take the subway back. And I hear the announcement “the train will be stationary for another minute.” Here’s my chance to get out. But I don’t, because they… they will know. I could maybe come up with this little ploy, pretending that I am annoyed at the wait and just get out right there: “You know what, fuck this, I’ll just get off here, even though this is not my stop.” But as I’m contemplating this, the train leaves.

Today coming home from work I was contemplating this very thing. Why do I keep missing my stops? Should I come up with this strategy, to count the stops, and take a mental note when I have one more stop to go, and dial down the immersion? I could put my phone in my pocket and get up? But that would ruin the experience, I really enjoy reading my things.

Thinking about it, the meta-stupid happened. I missed my stop while thinking about missing my stops.

This is how a major news outlet in RO looks like on 1366x768...

Mon, 19 Aug 2013 19:01:00 +0300

This is how a major news outlet in RO looks like on 1366x768 resolution without AdBlock. Never mind content, you can’t even see all the ads properly. Who is responsible for this? How can they keep their advertisers? Can they complain about making money from publishing in RO?

For comparison, this is what the same website looks like with adblock

My first encounter with Bucharest police in traffic

Sat, 27 Jul 2013 22:38:42 +0300

Bucharest is known for it’s hellish traffic and draconian drivers. Wednesday morning I drove to work, which I usually don’t do. Because it takes about 30 mins to get there and another 30 mins to find a parking space. Then it takes about one more hour for me to calm down.

I left work at about 8 PM, got in my car with a colleague and headed home, navigating the maze of narrow one-way streets around the city centre. I had my (phone) GPS on, missed a turn and found myself heading in the opposite direction on a three-lane street, with no possible U turn opportunity in sight.

So I took a chance, slowed down at a green traffic light and swiftly turned 180 degrees. I was back on track, but in about 10 seconds I hear a police horn behind me. I slowed down, the police changed lanes and went parallel to my car. I could see them in the corner of my eye, but I did not turn my head or slow down. That would be an admission of guilt, right?

So in about 15 more seconds I had to stop at the traffic lights. So I looked to my left. There were THREE police men in the car. Old guy driving, slightly younger guy sitting in the passenger seat and a young guy in the back. It was like a police gay family. And they all stared at me, looking really mad.

The guy in the right seat singed gestured me to roll down my window. I did, stuck my head a bit out the window and put on a stupid smile on my face. And I waited. The guy goes “What would happen if all the drivers would do what you just did”?

This is how I answered him: “What exactly do you mean?”. Stupid, I know. The thing is, I was not trying to be a smart-ass, I literally did not know what he was referring to, because when I took the U turn I also had my phone clearly in my hand.

"You just took an illegal U turn" the policeman said. I nodded and replied: "Sorry, I have no idea what I’m doing or where I’m going, I’m new to driving in Bucharest, as you can probably tell from the licence plates".

By now, I was feeling like I was in the clear. If the guys wanted to give me a ticket (or take away my license, to be more precise) they would have me pull over already.

Now here’s my surprise. The policeman doing the questioning asks: “Where are you heading”. I tell him my destination and he replies “Do you know how to get there”?. Perplexed, I tell him “Yes, I do now, it’s that way (pointing forward), thanks a lot”. “Okay, take care” the policeman replies and drives off.

How I came to work at Google, an introduction

Sat, 29 Jun 2013 22:42:00 +0300

I’ve been working in online marketing for about 7 years. In the first year of university I met up with a few of my friends at 11 am in a local pub. I told them that my father was willing to let us bum a storage / basement space he had at his local business. We could get it refurbished for cheap, buy a couple of desks, bring our own computers and start a digital advertising agency. Between us we were reasonably skilled in graphic design, web development, flash (those were the days), 3d art, copywriting, ad planning, and the likes.

Looking back, I don’t know how we managed to book our first client. We learned really fast that our sales skills were much better than our hard skills. Which is ironic, because, later on, sales started to become harder and harder. But i digress.

Anyways, there we were, in 2005, 5 cocky guys, running our own thing from my father’s basement. Thinking back, I was really lucky to come to know a bunch of people so talented, let alone work alongside them.

Many things happened since, much of which are not the scope of this article. We eventually moved out from the basement, to a proper office, then to a house, many joined our team, many left, and in early 2009 the economic crisis hit us like a ton of bricks. Most of us kept working together up until today. But the team was no longer a team.

Yours truly kept close (business-wise) with one of those guys. We make a great online/offline team. Our small marketing consultancy business was going (relatively) okay. And I always said: “I will never work for some other guys”. Not that there were a lot of “other guys” fighting over me. It’s just that I felt that spending the last 7 years, honing my marketing skills into a swiss-army knife of digital communications, no company could (and should for that matter) just poach me and pick up the fruits. [By the way, this is my third draft for this article and I can not make this last bit sound less braggy, so I humbly extend my apologies. As they say, if you cannot be humble, then apologize humbly. (I just made that up.) At the very least, I’m great at using parentheses.]

So here comes 2012, I’ve since finished bachelor’s degree and enrolled in some master’s programs. Because why the hell not. One day, winter 2012, I was strolling along the uni’s corridos and saw a monitor displaying an ad for “Online Marketing Academy” by Google. I enrolled when I got home. Went to the Google seminars and took the first exam - Google Online Fundamentals. You see, the scope of this program is to develop the skills of the students and for them to eventually become “Google Qualified Individuals”. For one to become GQI, one must take two exams. Advertising Fundamentals and one of the following two: Advanced search (which deals with running Adwords campaigns against searches in Google) and another one called Advanced Display (which deals with running Adwords campaigns on the Google Display Network).

I had the best score in the Online Marketing Academy program and was called in for an interview for an internship position at Google Romania.

The rest of the article, describing the interview process, my first month at Google, and the project I’m working on will come at a later date. Because it needs to be approved by our Public Relations. This is the first time in my life to utter that sentence. And it feels very eerie.

"I don’t believe in anything you have to believe in."

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 09:49:46 +0200

“"I don’t believe in anything you have to believe in."”

- Fran Lebowitz

"As Donald Norman said in 1990, “The real problem with the interface is that it is an interface...."

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 07:50:03 +0200

“As Donald Norman said in 1990, “The real problem with the interface is that it is an interface. Interfaces get in the way. I don’t want to focus my energies on an interface. I want to focus on the job…I don’t want to think of myself as using a computer, I want to think of myself as doing my job.””

- The best interface is no interface | Cooper Journal

I really hated travelling in the sleeping car

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 14:37:00 +0200

I get on the train early and stumble around the dark car, trying to find my compartment along with my seat. I had tickets in the sleeping car. There are a total of six beds on like three square meters which was the size of the compartment. Think about something like this but with six beds instead of four. It’s a box from hell with two rows of three-level bunk beds.

I was the first one there and really hoped they under-sold the seats. “I may be the only one here, and that wouldn’t be so bad”, I thought. People start coming in the train and keep going past my compartment. YES! A man enters. NO! “Good Evening”, I greet him cordially. “Good Evening”, he responds, looking around for the bunk numbers.

"It’s a pretty small compartment, do you think they sold all the seats?" I ask the man. He seemed like he knows trains. He responds with something along the lines of "Yeah, probably" explaining that last week he took the exact same train and it was full. I fucking knew it, dude was a regular.

I notice on the top bed pillows and blankets. Pillows and blankets with no covers. I immediately picture flakes of dead skin from past disease-ridden passengers. My train of thought was interrupted when an old lady enters the compartment. She was sporting a bag on her shoulder and a fucking plastic square (?!) the size of a chair, wrapped in paper. I knew it was plastic because I had to help her with it.

"Where are we supposed to store this, mam, it doesn’t look like it fits under the lower bed". Of course it didn’t fucking fit, the thing probably needed an extra ticket. "Just put it on my bed, sonny, I’m short enough to fit". Mother of God.

One more lady, about 45ish gets in the compartment. “Good Evening, is the number 43 around here?” “Yes, it’s right over there” I pointed, thinking “along with forty, forty one, forty two, forty for and forty fucking five”. Shit, I was in a bad mood. I was 10 minutes in and was already having trouble breathing. We were 4 people in a two-and-a-half-meter-square box.

15 more minutes until departure. I quickly develop faith and start praying that no more fucking people come in. I’m sitting down, touching knees with the man, touching elbows with the old lady and the woman stomping on my feet trying to put her bag on the (middle) bed. I’m pretending to be on my phone, thinking happy thoughts. I can barely sleep with foreign objects in my room, let alone three other humans of unknown (and questionable) origin, upbringing and health. And right then, the middle-aged woman lets out a wet cough, that sounded like puss-ridden flesh tearing apart in her throat. Fuck… me…

I put my phone back in my pocket, remembering that I need to conserve battery for what was about to come: an orchestra of snores, a concerto of coughs and a symphony of heavy breathing. Right then and there two more heads pop in (because there was no room inside): “Hello there, we think our seats may be in this compartment.” Two younger ladies. They could have been elven queens, it didn’t matter, I wanted them out of there. They brought the number of individuals in the two-squared-meters enclosed space up to SIX. We literally didn’t fit standing, we had to get in the beds.

"We should go get the beddings, set things up", says the man. We get beddings? We get clean beddings? Sweet, sweet, low expectations. We put them on by turns. A cloud of dust and lint covers the already thin air. I struggle with mine and the old lady helps me put them on. I take off my shirt, my shoes, put on a t-shirt and slide in my middle bed. Get this: with my elbow still touching the bed, I could rise my hand and my fingers would reach the bottom of the top bed. I was like Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, the scene where she gets buried alive in a box. I grab my phone and start surfing. Anger turns into resentment and depression, and I fall asleep.

I’m a child.

Disclaimer: I occasionally make things sound worse than they were for dramatic appeal.

New Kindle commercial is breaking stereotypes.

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 11:58:58 +0200

New Kindle commercial is breaking stereotypes.

The day Adam reaches and touches the machine

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 12:22:26 +0200

The day Adam reaches and touches the machine

Cult of Done Manifesto

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 18:30:42 +0200

Just came across this

The Cult of Done Manifesto:

There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
There is no editing stage.
Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
Once you’re done you can throw it away.
Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
Destruction is a variant of done.
If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
Done is the engine of more.

Gmail serving you ads based on email contents is not an invasion of privacy

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 12:49:00 +0200

If you use Gmail, the contents of your email are being analyzed in order to help Google serve you relevant ads. Say you email with your friends about bicycles, Gmail might show you a text ad for a bike shop nearby.

Keep in mind, there is no person going through your emails and making lists. This is an automated process, your email is being crawled much like a search engine robot goes through a website content. The Gmail ads are served automatically based on data from these crawls.

So calling Gmail’s method of serving ads an invasion of privacy is much like being bothered when taking a shower, that the shower-head can see you naked.

Early this morning my office chair broke, I fell under the desk...

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 08:14:16 +0200

Early this morning my office chair broke, I fell under the desk and spilled my coffee all over me. Maybe I was working too hard?

I's a bad sign when politicians agree

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 07:36:00 +0200

The strength that lies with the democratic system is not in the left or right wing political spectrum. There is no ‘correct’ solution to social and economic issues, it’s the compromise between the left and the right that’s correct, it’s the outcome of the political struggle, it’s alternating policies in order to be on cue with the reality of the time.

No voter should hold a position of firm belief in one political doctrine, because it won’t always be the best choice. It’s the politicians that must adhere and publicly identify with a specific doctrine, and always fight for implementing the policy that identifies with their beliefs.

In a country with a healthy democracy, the ‘system’ will eventually find the best solution to a certain problem. Those are the countries in which politicians argue and debate. So be wary of countries where politicians overly agree with each other.

LATER EDIT: Yes, this is sarcasm, what is wrong with you...

Thu, 22 Nov 2012 09:48:00 +0200

LATER EDIT: Yes, this is sarcasm, what is wrong with you people?

using your brains to think of an idea, and your skills to implement it… that’s the old model. and like anything that’s old and requires effort, it’s inefficient.

companies don’t care if their followers are real or not, so they’ll pay you either way.

ideally real human users will leave social networks altogether and all there will be left will be thousands of robots, talking to each other, who we can then advertise to. robots don’t yet buy products, but that’s not our concern.

Why is “letting oneself go” more often than not associated with selfish, antisocial...

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 09:21:06 +0200

Why is “letting oneself go” more often than not associated with selfish, antisocial behavior while exercising restraint is preached in company of virtues and good morals? What does this say about human nature?

"If you want to criticize the digital world, start by criticizing our wishes and desires – and not..."

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 14:37:05 +0200

“If you want to criticize the digital world, start by criticizing our wishes and desires – and not the technologies we develop to satisfy them.”

- http://www.theeuropean-magazine.com//752-friedrich-joerg/894-the-dark-side-of-the-internet#894

China responds to piracy criticism

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 11:50:00 +0200

Here’s what China’s top official in charge of fighting copyright piracy, Tian Lipu, told Reuters:

"For example, China is the world’s largest payer for patent rights, for trademark rights, for royalties, and one of the largest for buying real software. We pay the most. People rarely talk about this, but it really is a fact. Our government offices, our banks, our insurance companies, our firms … the software is all real.

"Of the goods made for Apple, most are made in China. Once Apple’s brand is added to it and it is exported to the United States its value doubles. This could only happen because China’s intellectual property rights environment sets foreign investors at ease allowing them to come to China to manufacture."

These are the accusations:

The International Intellectual Property Alliance, a U.S. coalition of film, software, music and publishing groups, estimates that U.S. companies lost more than $15 billion in 2009 due to international copyright theft. About $14 billion of the total was due to software piracy, with an estimated $3.5 billion in losses in China and $1.4 billion in Russia.

Here’s the problem with these outrageous revenue losses attributed to piracy: one copyright-infringing downloaded song (or movie or software) does not equal a lost sale! This is absurd. I may have pirated 3D Studio Max when I was 13, but it doesn’t mean that Autodesk lost $4000 due to piracy. Because if it wouldn’t have been freely available for me to download I wouldn’t have bought it! And the same goes for movies and music.