Themes on an Examined Life

Comic Charm: the 'friend zone' - my thoughts

comiccharm:

So, despite my on-going optimism about the World and its inhabitants, I’ve been seeing far too much of this ‘friend zone’ entitlement BS over the past couple of weeks and I wanted to address my own personal problems with the term.

And how if any of my Facebook / Tumblr / Twitter / real life…

I, too, have seen people whinge on about being in this imaginary “friend zone” too many times over my (admittedly vast) span of years, and it always comes down to douchery.

I’m guilty of falling in love with one or two very nice people who didn’t feel the same way about me. I’m still friends with most of them, but I’ve lost track of some. You know what? That’s life.

What I most certainly was not was: demanding, threatening, complaining or dismissive. Sad? Sometimes. Grateful for wonderful friends? ALWAYS.

Friends matter. Feelings matter. You can have both, and not be a nasty cockbite.

In fact, this whole thing could be summed up as, “Don’t be a nasty cockbite.”

So. Yeah. Don’t be that.

Because, Anna.: TL;DR

becauseanna:

Writing is one of those luxuries I usually don’t give myself the time of day to do. This quite a problem because really, if I think about it. Writing is my creative outlet. I’m not an artist or a musician. And aside from baking (which I’ll concede gets a little creative with me), deep down, I’d…

I hope that Anna finds her feet with this. Knowing you have it in you to create is a burden.

"Hard Tech"

parislemon:

Googler Jed Christiansen takes issue with my previous post about battery life. As he writes:

MG comes across as an Silicon-Valley-centric arrogant jerk saying that “battery technology is really ripe for disruption.”  It implies that all he needs to do is call attention to this problem, and two hackers in a garage will start experimenting and build a battery that’s better than anything else on the market.  The reasons improving battery technology is tough is because the chemistry and material science problems are orthogonal; the work isn’t x*2, it’s x^2.  Even once you’ve solved the key problems, manufacturing at the scale required for specific use cases becomes a third problem, since it forces a re-evaluation (and sometimes a complete re-design) of the original chemistry and material science problems.

Ad hominem aside, it’s a fair point. But I also don’t claim to know how to solve the problem, nor am I arrogant enough to think a short post on my blog will lead to a solution. I’m simply pointing out the obvious: that this is a major problem. And it’s going to get worse.

Obviously, a lot of people are working on this problem. And many are doing good work, no doubt. But I still hold out hope that there’s something out there right now that no one has thought of yet that will completely change everything in the space. True disruptions are never obvious. And it’s foolish to brush the possibility aside. Then again, that mentality often opens the door to disruption…

MG notes that poor battery life is causing him and others some grief. He then goes on to suggest that battery technology could be an area of exploration.

Given that the chemical energy in a standard phone lithium polymer battery is larger than a stick of dynamite (and this was from a lecture I sat through in University some number of years ago now), I’m not betting the farm on any big improvements coming through. The issue isn’t power density; we can probably make batteries more powerful. The trick is to make them give back that power slowly enough that they don’t burn you, or explode. That’s a tall order.

I agree with him about battery life in general being an issue, but I think we’ll see this attacked from the other side: better radios, better chipsets and better displays that suck down far less power.