October – 2007 – Steffan Antonas

Interview Skills: What Really Matters to Interviewers?

In my final year of business school I remember being inundated with a lot of pre-interview advice and prep materials from my professors and from the feel-good folks at the career center. In retrospect I think a lot of it was supposed to serve as some sort of scare tactic – Prepare-them-for-the-worst kind of stuff. My favorite prep sheet was a grandiose list of questions you could be asked like If You Had To Move Mount Fuji, How Would You Do It? and What are 10 ways to use a pencil other than writing? While I’ve heard of people being stun-gunned with ridiculous questions like “What’s 1300 divided by 17″ in interviews, in a real-life situation, being on the other end of a question like that would make me curious about the real motivations of the interviewer. Should you really expect obscure test-your-mental-agility type questions in most interviews? The answer is no, and here’s a few reasons why.

Feelings, nothing more than Feelings

Consider this excerpt I pulled out of my book notes from Stumbling On Happiness:

Nothing more than feelings? What could be more important than feelings? Sure, war and peace come to mind, but are war and peace important for any reason other than the feelings they produce? If war didn’t cause pain and anguish, if peace didn’t provide for delights both transcendental and carnal, would either of them matter to us at all? War, peace, art money, marriage, birth, death, disease, religion — these are just a few of the Really Big Topics over which oceans of blood and ink have been spilled, but they are really big topics for one reason alone: Each is a powerful source of human emotion. If they didn’t make us feel uplifted, desperate, thankful, and hopeless, we would keep all that ink and blood to ourselves. As Plato asked,”Are these things good for any other reason except that they end in pleasure, and get rid of and avert pain? Are you looking to any other standard but pleasure and pain when you call them good? Indeed, feelings don’t just matter — they are what mattering means.

Huh.

San Diego Wildfires Threaten Chula Vista and Del Mar: More Links To Resources

From the hills of Malibu to the Border of Mexico, California is on fire. More than 500, 000 people have been evacuated as of 9am this morning – just to put it in perspective, that’s more people than were displaced in hurricane Katrina. Try to wrap your noodle around that. More than 1200 homes have been destroyed, Qualcomm stadium is packed with people with no where to go, and the hotels have been completely booked for 48 hours everywhere in California. Firefighters need the Santa Ana winds to die down to even begin to start containing the blaze. Julie and I have been extraordinarily lucky – all we have to complain about is that our kitchen smells like a Texas Rib cookoff.

Book Review: Stumbling On Happiness

If you chose to only read one book this year, I strongly urge you to consider this one. It ranks at the very top of a small collection of books that have fundamentally changed the way I think. Daniel Gilbert is not only brilliant, his writing style is irrepressibly humorous, charming and entirely accessible. Stumbling on Happiness, which won the 2007 Royal Society Prizes for Science Books, is a joy to read and will change the way you look at just about, well, everything.

Stumbling on Happiness is based on a very simple but powerful concept – that what makes human beings unique is our ability to think about the future. Gilbert draws on the latest scientific studies from psychology, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy and behavioral economics to provide answers to some of the most profound mysteries of how the human mind really works. In these pages, you’ll learn, among other things, the science of how our experiences of the here and now color our memories of the past and imagination of the future, why our innate drive to predict and control how we will feel a day or a month or a year from now today often leaves us ill-prepared when the future finally comes, and, most of all, how happiness itself is elusive. I’d be lying if I told you that the lessons in this book didn’t haunt me on a daily basis in both times of joy and stress. Gilbert argues his points expertly. Trust me, you owe it to your yourself to read this book. Gilbert himself admits this point – “No one can say how you will feel when you get to the end of this book…but if your future self is not satisfied when it arrives at the last page, it will at least understand why you mistakenly thought it would be.”

Buy The Book (Hardcover) on Amazon

Buy The Audio Book (Unabridged) on Amazon

A Sobering Morning Commute: Fires Rip Through San Diego County And Blacken The Skies

Last night Julie and I took a gander outside our apartment to try to find out who could possibly be holding the BBQ in our neighborhood that was sprinkling ash all over our kitchen. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen a black sky. We’ve been tuned into the news and the radio ever since. Fires, fed by roaring Santa Ana winds are tearing through San Diego county. Check out the NASA picture to the right – even from space, the fires look biblical.

I woke up this morning to a declared state of emergency just north in Del Mar, Carmel Valley and Rancho Bernardo. More than 8 Fires have covered immense ground and the buzz is that the winds are so strong that they may make it all the way to the ocean 15-20 minutes drive north of our house. Thousands of people are being evacuated all over San Diego just north and just south of us. Qualcomm Stadium has been opened for evacuees (sorry, no horses – I never knew that that would be a problem, but there are frequent no animals warnings from every news source). No one is equipped for this. Read More

Speech Patterns and Intonation: Why Audio Books Read By The Author Give You A Little Something Extra

I first got hooked on audio books some time in the summer of 2005 when I began working as an IT Auditor/Consultant. I travel a lot – more than most. Some weeks I spend as much as 10 to 15 hours in my car or in airports, which leaves me a with a lot of time to fill. Audio books are a great way to turn commute time into something productive.

My audio book addiction has seen a significant resurgence these past two weeks due to heavy commuting – I polished off 4 books in traffic over a two week period – my first read of Po Bronson’s Why Do I Love These People, and my second read of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling On Happiness and Howard Zinn’s A People’s History Of The United States. It had been a while since I’d listened to an author read their own work, but I’m realizing all over again why I’ve come to appreciate the experience of consuming a book that way for all the reasons that make it different to turning pages myself. Here’s why I love (and recommend) audio books read by the author: Read More

Must Have Tool For Developers: The Ardvark Firefox Extension

Advark Firefox Extension Web developers and designers, rejoice. Welcome to your new favorite Firefox extension. The Aardvark extension offers, among other things, a new variation of the “View Source” command. It generates Javascript rather than HTML code. The Javascript code will then build the elements using “w3c DOM” techniques…a far, far better way to do things than, say, using inner HTML.
HOW IT WORKS:

After installing the Firefox Extension and restarting, with a quick right click you “Start Ardvark” and you’re off. As you glide the mouse over the page, you will see a red rectangle framing each element under the cursor. You’ll also see a little yellow caption showing the HTML element type and its class or id if they exist – great for figuring out any wordpress CSS style coding.

THINGS YOU CAN DO WITH ARDVARK:

See (only) what what you want – Clean up unwanted banners and surrounding ads prior to printing a page.
Learn How Great Design is Done by Reverse Engineering a Page – See how the page is created, block by block. This is by far my favorite feature – especially when I find a really cool piece of java/dhtml that I’ve never seen before and want to know how it’s coded. You can get an exact snap of what the code looks like.
View the source code of one or more elements

Don’t take my word for it – go and run the demo. If you’re a developer/designer, I promise, it’ll be love at first click.

How Many People Are Listening to What You Have to Say?

The best way to measure the influence of any blogger is readership (traffic). Thanks to companies like Feedburner and Alexa, we can measure readership statistics and trends. In fact, displaying RSS and traffic rank stats in a visible place on a blog is one of the best ways to advertise (and measure) the popularity of a site. Some might even argue that it’s a marketing technique that turns a popular blog into a REALLY popular blog overnight, as visitors subscribe in droves just to see what all the fuss is about. I have to admit that I find it totally fascinating in the geekiest possible way that a single person/blogger can develop a readership in the tens of thousands a DAY. Can you imagine 50 to 100 thousand people getting an email or a feed every single time you posted a thought or an idea? It’s difficult, if not impossible, to picture that many people in one physical space paying attention to one person. To put it in perspective, it’s the equivalent of an entire football stadium listening to one person sing the national anthem. Considering that the most popular blogs are posting daily, some of them multiple times a day, the “who’s-paying-attention” figures can be staggering. Read More

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Month October 2007