People who giggle to themselves a lot when they talk are really annoying.

Nice flash work... terrible taste.





This explains everything in the video...

If you've ever spent more than 6 months online, you've seen the different how-to guides to do lots of different things. Things like how to paint your stock wheels, how to crochet, how to buy stocks, etc... but never in my life would I have thought that there would be a how-to on adopting a baby from China.

The common thread among car stuff, knitting, and the stock market is that it's something people do for fun, for work, and as a pasttime.

The thing about adopting a baby, ANY BABY is that it's more of a LIFE CHANGING EVENT. It's not some hobby that you can pick up on a whim and put down when you want to go out for a movie. Having a how-to on adopting a baby from China makes the process seem so simple that anyone can try it just to try it.

What the hell? Since when did the knowledge needed to adopt a baby become so hard to find that anyone who was really serious about doing so could not find the information at their local adoption agency? Meaning... if you really want to adopt a baby from China, Korea, Germany, wherever- you need to be finding information through an adoption agency, not some how-to written online. It almost makes Chinese babies a commodity.

I've actually met a couple who were adopting kids from China. The man wasn't particularly enthusiastic about the idea but his wife was very excited about it so he let her do it. But her excitement wasn't that of - oh we're going to have a baby and be parents of a child who is going to have some issues when they grow up - it was more of like - we're going to get a Cabbage Patch Chinese baby from the Toys-R-Us of China! I kept thinking to myself - are you retarded?

Do you know what kind of issues an Asian kid has growing up in a Caucasian environment?

A lot.

You grow up getting asked whether or not you know Karate.

You grow up wondering when your hair will turn brown or white (blonde).

You grow up with sensing this non-verbal communication that you're some second class citizen because people who don't realize that China accounts for 20% of the entire world population look at you when you walk into a breakfast joint and hang out with your Caucasian friends.

I grew up with a Korean friend and in 8th grade, she was a total mess because she was adopted and her parents weren't receptive to the issues she would have to face when she grew up.

Maybe I'm not necessarily pissed off that there's a How-To on adopting a baby from China. Maybe I'm more pissed off that there isn't a How-To on raising a baby from China.

The coolest thing since the ipod.


"analog girl (live)"
ken oak band
director: inda reid
rand productions LLC

my life is a comedy movie.
Confession #1: I really like the techno version of the brokeback mountain theme song on XM 81.

Confession #2: I carry wetnaps in my wallet to wash my hands if I come across something dirty. I know it's totally OCD but in the past, I've just jumped into the pool in place of taking a shower before going out. Go figure.

Confession #3: I have a white whispy hair on my forehead that I allow to grow for fun.

Haaahahahahhahaha

Confession #4: I have a bad habit of collecting car parts. Case in point:



Confession #5: I want to blow glass when I retire. And my dream job would be to run a small scale incubator company for my business fraternity at ASU.

Confession #6: I'm on my old high school's 10 year reunion committee. Does that make me a dork? Does that term still apply if you're 27?

I recently found interviews on CNN with some pretty busy people.

The articles helped show how people work.

Marissa Mayer
VP, Search Products and User Experience, Google

Executive summary: Don't just cope with information -- revel in it.

I don't feel overwhelmed with information. I really like it. I use Gmail for my personal e-mail -- 15 to 20 e-mails a day -- but on my work e-mail I get as many as 700 to 800 a day, so I need something really fast.

I use an e-mail application called Pine, a Linux-based utility I started using in college. It's a very simple text-based mailer in a crunchy little terminal window with Courier fonts. I do marathon e-mail catch-up sessions, sometimes on a Saturday or Sunday. I'll just sit down and do e-mail for ten to 14 hours straight. I almost always have the radio or my TV on. I guess I'm a typical 25- to 35-year-old who's now really embracing the two-screen experience.

I'm very speed-sensitive. With TiVo, for example, I just seem to spend too much of my life looking at the PLEASE WAIT sign. I adore my cell phone, but there's just a second of delay when you answer it: Hello, hello? I do have a BlackBerry. I don't use it at work because we have wireless throughout the office. I like my laptop a lot more, especially now that I have an EVDO [broadband cellular] card that gives me online access almost everywhere.

I almost always have my laptop with me. It's sitting with me right now. We are a very laptop-friendly culture. It's not uncommon to walk into a meeting at Google where everyone has a laptop open.

To keep track of tasks, I have a little document called a task list. And in the same document there's a list for each person I work with or interact with, of what they're working on or what I expect from them. It's just a list in a text file. Using this, I can plan my day out the night before: "These are the five high-priority things to focus on." But at Google things can change pretty fast. This morning I had my list of what I thought I was going to do today, but now I'm doing entirely different things.

I've been trying to figure out how to make time that was previously unproductive productive. If I'm driving my car somewhere, I try to get a call in to my family and friends then. Or during dead time when I'm waiting in line, I will hop on my cell phone and get something done.

My day starts around 9 A.M. and meetings finish up around 8 P.M. After that I stay in the office to do action items and e-mail. I can get by on four to six hours of sleep. I pace myself by taking a week-long vacation every four months.

I have an assistant, Patty, who handles calls from the outside, answers e-mails, letters, and requests. She does a great job with scheduling. In an average week I'm getting scheduled into about 70 meetings, probably ten or 11 hours a day. On Friday, Patty lets me out early -- around 6, and I go up to San Francisco and do something interesting.

From 4 to 5:30 every day that I can, I'll sit at my desk to answer any question that shows up on my doorstep. We have a big sign-up sheet outside. We joke that we should get one of those deli number tickers -- "Now serving No. 68!" But we have nice couches and power for laptops and things outside the door where people wait.

The average seems to be around 13 people per day. Sometimes they show me mockups or new demos of ideas they want to advance. Sometimes they have a presentation they're working on. Or sometimes they just want to ask me a question about Google's overall management. Anything is fair game. So if they ask, "Why are we in China?" I try to answer as candidly as I can.

-- Interviewed by David Kirkpatrick


Carlos Ghosn
CEO of Renault (France) and Nissan (Japan)

Executive summary: Focus relentlessly, especially if you're running two Global 500 companies.

I go from Paris to Tokyo every month and spend between one and two weeks there.

The week when I am in Tokyo is the week when I have the Nissan executive committee meeting, the design meeting, the product decision meeting, the investment meeting, the board meeting -- all the important meetings are taking place during this week. I do the same thing at Renault. To put decisions into action, I hand them to the executive committee.

Every month is different. In March, I will be one week in the U.S. (I'm also head of Nissan's North American operations), one week in Japan, two weeks in France. But everybody knows that the first week of the month I am in Paris and the third week of the month I'm in Japan.

I have an assistant in France, one in Japan, and one in the U.S. They are all bilingual: Japanese and English, French and English. My assistants screen all the mail and documents. I'm very selective. They know exactly the topics I am interested in and what should be diverted to other members of the executive committee.

For meetings on a single topic that aren't regular operational meetings, I'm very strict. The maximum is one hour and 30 minutes. Fifty percent of the time is for the presentation, 50 percent is for discussion.

I do my best thinking early in the morning. I always ask that my first meeting not happen before eight. When I need more time to think, I wake up earlier. If I don't do six hours of sleep I'm in bad shape, but I'm usually up by six.

The risk in holding two jobs is that you are going to lose some details. We have organized ourselves in a way where I still see many, many people in both companies, so I consider myself in really good contact with reality. Some things I have to sacrifice. When I was in Japan running Nissan, I used to visit one dealer a month and one plant every two or three months. Now dealer visits are once every six months, and plants are once every year.

It is also important to take a distance from the problem. I do not bring my work home. I play with my four children and spend time with my family on weekends. When I go to work on Monday, I can look at the problem with more distance. I come up with good ideas as a result of becoming stronger after being recharged.

Stress builds up when you know that there is a problem but you do not clearly see it, and you do not have a solution. We're all human. I want to assure you I feel the same pain and the same stress and the same jet lag as anybody else. You have nights when you cannot sleep, and the stress is unbearable. It happens to every single person in a job like this.

-- Interviewed by Alex Taylor III

Amy W. Schulman
Partner, DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary

Executive summary: Be compulsively organized -- and delegate.

Many successful women have become successful because they're just awfully good at being compulsive and organized and doers. But it's hard to be successful and be a control freak, because if you cling to things, you're going to be a bottleneck. Delegating to other people -- appropriately delegating -- is very liberating. There isn't anybody on my team I don't trust 100 percent. Remember, I've been building this team for ten years.

I have two assistants now. I have an assistant from 7 in the morning till 4 in the afternoon, and then an assistant from 4 to midnight. I wake up somewhere between 5 and 6 A.M., and get to the office about 8, before the phone calls start. On the days that I'm not traveling -- I travel probably 50 percent of my life -- I try to get home by 7:30 P.M. I typically don't sign off e-mail until midnight.

I get around 600 e-mails a day. I divide them into four categories, and I deal with them immediately, by and large. First are e-mails that I forward to someone else. Next are where somebody's giving me information that I need to cascade to somebody else with instructions. Third are the ones that I can read later on an airplane. Fourth are those that require me to respond immediately.

I used to have two cell phones because coverage is erratic. I decided one service provider worked best here and the other there. At some point I decided that was insane.

I don't leave my cell phone on. I'm often in meetings or with clients, and I don't want people to assume that they can dial my cell phone and get me, unless it's an emergency. You can't leave it on if you're in a meeting with the CEO or a witness. It's really important to focus on the problem at hand. You get into a rhythm of a conversation, and you have to honor that rhythm. People get anxious when they feel they're going to be interrupted. What a good lawyer brings to a problem, in addition to creative solutions, is a quality of attentiveness. You can't listen with half an ear.

The BlackBerry was at first a significant intrusion on family life. But my family has gotten used to the fact that I'm more relaxed if I can take care of my e-mails. I don't generally look at my e-mail during mealtimes, and I try not to look at it in movie theaters.

-- Interviewed by Roger Parloff

Hank Paulson
Chairman and CEO, Goldman Sachs

Executive summary: Work the phone -- and the clock.

I've never used e-mail, but I'm a huge voicemail user. I do a couple hundred voicemails a day. And I return every call right away, whether it's a client or someone in the firm. There are positives and negatives to this. I don't have a lot of time for small talk.

Occasionally there are wing nuts who call, and I pass them on to Julie, my assistant. But Julie doesn't screen my voicemails. The people at Goldman Sachs have to be able to get to me. Clients have to be able to get to me.

I've always spent a lot of time on the phone. Even when cell phones were a novelty in the 1980s when I lived in Chicago, I was using one of those huge Motorola phones as I walked from the train station to the office. This past Christmas, my wife, Wendy, and my daughter, Amanda, and her husband and I spent ten days hiking in Chile, and my daughter took so many pictures of me with this big satellite phone attached to my ear.

When I got back to the office in January, I called 60 CEOs in the first week to wish them happy New Year. I had never done that before, but it was great. I asked them about their business and their relationship with Goldman. I spend at least a third of my time on Goldman people and culture -- we have to be the employer of choice in our industry. So I spend time at business schools and am very involved in recruiting.

Last year we started a Chairman's Forum to raise awareness of the importance of business judgment. I taught more than 25 sessions to all 1,200 of our managing directors in Asia, Europe, and the U.S. That's culture-building. Forty percent of our earnings comes from outside the U.S., so I travel a lot.

Whenever I travel, I take time to exercise. When I go to China -- which I've been to about 70 times in the past 16 years -- I book my flight so it arrives at 6 a.m., which is the earliest you can land. I check into the hotel and go right to the treadmill in the gym. Then, starting at 8 a.m., I'll go back to back to back until 9 at night. I'll get up the next day and do the same thing. I make sure to leave in the evening so I can be back at work in my office in New York the next morning.

I've always been very efficient and disciplined. If I have a business dinner, people know that it should start at 6:30 and be over by 8:30. When I'm home in New York, I'm asleep at 10. I'm up at 5:30 and try to work out four or five times a week. Once or twice a week, I run four miles in Central Park. I used to do seven-minute miles. Now I'm up to eight and a half or nine.

-- Interviewed by Patricia Sellers

This morning I was so tired. I found myself trying to fold the bed while still lying in it. I figured, if I just slipped out from under the covers after I was done - it would look nice.

It didn't.

I don't know what I was thinking when I thought I might be able to just slip out of the bed without disturbing the covers... maybe I was just too tired altogether.

I'm still tired.