I know I am not a geek (I am certainly a nerd), but I thought I would take this test, Geek Social Aptitude Test 2.0, anyway with the score below:

You Scored a 16 Out Of 50

You wear a “Can’t sleep, clowns will eat me” shirt you bought at Hot Topic, but you rarely have trouble gathering a crew to play Left 4 Dead at your place. Sure, you might not have been prom king, but you’ve found your niche and similar people to you and you’re making it work for yourself. You can’t really argue with that.

Bookmark To:

Slashdot has some of the best stories for nerds around the net, with the latest on a social skills class for nerds:

“According to Reuters, Potsdam University in Germany is now teaching social skills as part of their IT courses. This is intended to ‘ease entry into the world of work’. The 440 students enrolled in the master’s degree course will learn how to write flirtatious text messages and emails, impress people at parties and cope with rejection(s).”

A modern nerd has no need for a social skills class while the pre-Bill Gates nerds would not care about taking such a class, unless it was to persue the opposite sex. A modern nerd understands how to have social skills as it would be a dork who would not have those skills, however, he may still take the class out of pure hilarity.

Bookmark To:

Here’s what I’ll be doing on Christmas:

Bookmark To:

A Happy SERPs Holiday provided by Google Search Results!

For you Christmas lovers–search “Christmas”:

Not a fan of Christmas? Me either! Let’s go get some Menorahs:

Still not your cup of tea? Celebrate Kwanzaa?

Non-religious? All-encompassing? Love Seinfeld? Go Festivus!

Okay, I allow myself to be corny once in awhile with these posts…

Bookmark To:

This is the kind of kitty my wife wants (Persian cat)–”Mine” reminds me of what my wife says on everything I own too…

Bookmark To:

Slashdot humor:

“From the Download.com article: “It slows down your browsing. It makes some Web sites inaccessible for no discernible reason. It doesn’t even offer you any xiao long bao or pu’er tea for your troubles. But if you want to know what life behind the Great Firewall of China is like, then the Firefox plug-in China Channel is the cheapest and fastest way to experience using the Internet in China without actually being there.”

Okay, so it’s some plugin that uses a China IP proxy on download.com, humorous, but I recall you could get around it with *shudders* AOL five years ago…

Bookmark To:

The perfect picture between a cat-lover and a proud nerd:

Bookmark To:

If you are in marketing, or ever want to know what marketing is like, then you should get a feeling for it by watching the below video.

Now, for myself in SEO, it is not nearly as bad since we do not do the creative work all the time and most clients do not have a large understanding of SEO, so oftentimes it is difficult for them to suggest a lot of changes to make our lives harder… thankfully.

Bookmark To:

(click to enlarge)

Yes, you read that right, it says:

Who needs a search engine? Ctrl+F

A little inside joke at Google perhaps?

Bookmark To:

A fun article about one of my favorite cities, Shanghai, in the New Yorker titled “Buy Shanghai!” talks about the lifestyle and changes (both good and bad) that the city has gone through in the eyes of the author. I stack up my experiences from 2003 and 2005 against this article along with a few quips of my own.

The assorted finials on the tops of skyscrapers will make you think of a bottle opener, a Jell-O mold, a crown roast, a bamboo steamer, a chuppah, a Mobius strip, a snake that’s swallowed some golf balls, the Eiffel Tower, Lady Liberty’s headpiece, and the spiny back of a stegosaurus. Don’t breathe! The air is smelly with garbage juice. The sun, if visible at all, seems dimmer than the full moon on a hazy night. Need more light? You can see everything better after dusk, when the lunatic neon is switched on.

I would have added a skyscraper face that looks at you from four directions, but beyond that the description is sound.

“You can do business with them,” Helen Noh, a Korean who lives in Shanghai, said, referring to the Chinese. “But you should realize that, in the end, they are always going to win.”

Actually, I would say that this is more specific towards the Shanghainese–no matter how low you can bargain on prices there, if you are not speaking in 上海话 (Shanghai dialect) and are not a 上海本地人 (native Shanghainese), then you’re being ripped off. That’s why I had my friends help bargain for me instead–saved both time and money, and at least I don’t lose as badly, because no matter how good your Chinese or Shanghainese, you are still going to lose. It’s a game, so play it well.

There are markets for everything in Shanghai, including crickets. These come in varieties meant for competitive fighting [...] and for keeping as pets[.]

Now, mind you, I never actually saw a market place for crickets, but rather saw single guys with two loads (one on each side of a stick that he put across his back) that likely had 100+ containers filled with one cricket each in them. You can imagine the noise they made just walking down the sidewalk.

“Beijing’s short and wide. Shanghai’s tall and compact.” “Shanghai is more refined. More attention to detail.” “Shanghai’s female, Beijing’s male.” “Shanghai is New York. Beijing is Washington, D.C.” “Shanghai is New York. Beijing is L.A.” “Shanghai is Tel Aviv. Beijing is Jerusalem.” “Beijing is China. Shanghai is Shanghai.”

One cannot get a closer comparison to Beijing and Shanghai than comparing them to Washington D.C. and New York respectively. Whenever I went to a Beijing store, almost every other salesperson would ask why the US invaded Iraq (2003), whereas those in Shanghai would ask if I was French. Nonetheless, to understand Shanghai, remember the last quote — “Beijing is China. Shanghai is Shanghai.” — to understand the respective views of the Chinese people in the respective cities.

[T]he best deal? The underground eyeglass market near the railway station. In this bazaar, jam-packed with booths, you can get a pair of stylish, albeit no-name frames, complete with lenses ground to your prescription–all for a negotiated price of about $22.

Tempting, but good luck trying to find ones that will fit a European face–I actually lost a pair of my glasses in 2003 and could not for the life of me find any that would fit my “American” face–even in a store called “American Eyes.”

In China, it’s not always easy to know what’s going on, even today. CNN periodically blacks out for twenty seconds or so, and good luck navigating your way around the Great Firewall as you trying to get information online about anything having to do with what are referred to as the three “T”s.

True, although back in 2003 as a foreign exchange student I could often get around this through, and this will be the only time I recommend them, AOL. With their own wall-garden, you can access any of your favorite sites blocked, but good luck finding AOL at any 网吧 (Internet cafe).

As I told my friends on why I went to Shanghai instead of Beijing as a foreign exchange student–I wanted to do more than just study the Chinese language, but also learn about China’s history, culture, and economy. In the end, I believe I came back richer for the experience and luckier in terms of a fabulous wife.

Bookmark To: