"Oh yeah, and you don't get from the first picture to the last picture in 16 weeks, not gonna happen."
Someone who looked like the second picture when dehydrated, oiled, posing, and flatteringly lit could perfectly well make themself look like the first picture when bloated, unflatteringly lit, and letting it all hang out.
You can see where I am going with this. For some amounts of making himself look awful in the first picture, great in the second one, and 16 weeks of steroids and working out, those "before and after" pics are not implausible.
But I do realise that wasn't what you were saying. Your point was that if we take both pictures in good faith then it's "not gonna happen" and you would be right. I bother to point out what I did because it is reminiscent of those "get ripped" banner ads where - to me at least - it often looks like the same person on the same day 2 hours apart, first posing and tensing on the back of a fasting session and after, slouching, having stuffed themselves. And of course the advert reverses the "before and after", and pops 6 weeks with whatever they are selling into the timeline.
I do not have a corporate job, nor have I ever. The closest I have come is teaching in schools. However, I find your sentiment at odds with the experience of many I know in the corporate world. Most work long hours, but they find time for what is important to them and they find their work rewarding. The family time comes from what used to be Call of Duty or sport-watching time. When the kids grow up they get to do those things with them too. These people take care of their health, travel, and have rewarding family lives, they just have to be ruthlessly organised and priority-driven to focus on what is important to them (of which a respectable career is one aspect).
In the past I have thought the way you do and the way the original post outlines, but I concluded that I was actually a little jealous of people with more stable, better-paying jobs who were well enough organised that they could still do the things that they considered important and I was actually just looking for ways to frame the situation to my superiority. When I hung out with these people I almost wanted them to sneer and demonstrate values that "someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interest and activities is considered a flake", but they never did. I feel like most corporate folk I know totally "get" what people who haven't taken the same path as them are doing.
At the moment I live in Japan and have friends who work some insane hours. Their Facebook efficiency to set up band practice and baseball (and even now cricket!!) for the few hours they have to spare is a source of constant astonishment to me.
Right now, I'm looking at getting myself organised in that way and heading for a corporate job, not fleeing from one.
I love the short timers on blocks of text too large to read properly before it moves on. I kept clicking back and of course starting from the beginning of the quote to remind myself of the flow and then SWOOSH it moved onto the next one. I did that about half a dozen times and definitely felt my stress levels rise. It makes the point very well!
That seems the most likely, doesn't it? I'd love it if somewhere there were an official diplomatic language glossary with translations for what these terms really mean, e.g. groundless and unacceptable: "justified and permissible".
[Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov] criticised what he termed US attempts to blame Russia for his disappearance, saying they were "groundless and unacceptable".
and
Meanwhile, China has also described US accusations that it facilitated the departure of fugitive Edward Snowden from Hong Kong as "groundless and unacceptable".
Does anyone else find it slightly odd that they used identical wording? Is this a case of the Chinese saying "well the Russians nailed it, let's use the exact same phrase", or what precisely?
In so far as I have had "success" with speed reading it has been to force myself to run over the words more quickly and so interpret the commonly seen structures as single units. This means that if a piece is written in a very formulaic style then I can get through it fast because most of the stock sentences read like single words with only the unique modifiers jumping out of the page.
Think about when you look at code and automatically chunk the bits you have seen a million times before but are somehow magically able pick out the needle in the haystack which tells you what is special in this instance. The layout of code helps enormously for us, but I find the effect is the same with reading if I go quickly and with specific purpose to reformulate the information as it is scanned. And the more you do it the better you get because you have more data to draw from when identifying structures. It gets to the point where often I want an author to be formulaic rather than stylish and idiosyncratic because it makes it much quicker to reorganise and internalise.
Nowhere. It was speculation on my part extrapolated from the premise that the piece was written as a joke and nothing in it could be taken at face value. A little research on the guy suggests I was reading too much into it. Here he is http://www.linkedin.com/in/rishilakhani and his languages are listed as "Hindi, Swahili, Gujarati, Punjabi" - we don't need much more than that to connect the dots.
What others have said about commenters/lurkers and not being able to downvote, but also I think the "sentiment" is more that SEO sucks than that this piece is garbage per se. I upvoted it because it's entertaining and it did, along with the discussion here, broaden my perspective on SEO.
I read it as a joke by the end but, worryingly, didn't automatically recontextualise it as racist in light of that. Which, I think I agree with you, it is, if it's a joke and all the East Africa stuff is made up for "comedy value".
Totally with you. I was enjoying the amusing tone of the piece but he lost my sympathy at:
"Before, SEO was the game of really skilled people, you know like professional poker players. You had to know the game, know when to raise, and when to bluff."
Then with the "Maybe I should find another job?" I thought this has got to be satire. Well played, sir.
The way the piece is framed, the writing style, surely a work of humour?
As a Mathematics graduate I was going to call you out on your comment, because I feel the subject does not lend itself to the kind of wiggle room necessary for maneuvering such as you describe. Then I remembered this: http://www.futilitycloset.com/2013/01/23/the-indiana-pi-bill..., and thought better of it.
Indeed. Reading the Wikipedia entry on Cassagnes I wonder: 'idea' or 'discovery'?
"Cassagnes, an electrician at the Lincrusta Company, was performing a routine installation of a factory light switch plate wrapped in a translucent decal covering. During the installation, he removed the decal and wrote on it with a pencil, noticing that image transferred to the opposite face. Cassagnes tinkered with his discovery, which led to the world's first prototype of the Etch A Sketch."
I love these stories of something chanced upon by accident being turned into a product. It wouldn't surprise me if most successful ideas come about this way, rather than from a 'visionary' entrepreneur brainstorming the 'next big thing'.
If you asked someone to build a three page "We're Hiring" site and got this, you'd "probably tell them no thanks and stop returning their emails". Why?
Their main .biz site looks fine to my eyes too, like thousands of other business websites settled on functional and simple - I'm sure all of this was built closely to spec. What am I missing here?
A general point and not meant as a criticism of you, but is there a gender-neutral way to express "This, of course, makes him a gentleman" as you use in your final paragraph? Or a clear female equivalent? It seems "This, of course, makes her a lady" does not mean the same thing at all, and an obvious alternative (either non-gendered, or symmetrical to "gentleman") does not readily spring to mind when, one feels, it ought to.
Thanks, muellerwolfram. This guide is excellent and dear to me as someone once stuck in the exact same position described in the opening paragraph. Indeed, flitting between operating systems was so natural that even now I instinctively want to take issue with your "dual boot sucks" but if I could use one OS for everything (and I do mean "everything", other OS emulation included) then I would, so quite simply: you are right.
For what it's worth, I chose a different route in solving my Photoshop dependence: I forced myself to learn alternatives. But I don't mean just that I learned GIMP (which I recommend, though completely sympathise with the "Regarding GIMP" section); I mean that I made it my goal to be someone who can take new software and ascertain how to do with it what I already know how to do in my "native" habitat, even if the method is convoluted or requires learning a new paradigm. This goes back to days of using elementary school computers with nothing more than MSPaint and enjoying that hit of satisfaction from performing a manual "crop": make a selection, copy it, minimise the canvas to a handful of pixels, ctrl+V, MSPaint automatically resizes the canvas to the pasted selection, BLAM it's a crop! (We've all been young, when figuring these things out for oneself is the next best thing to being a Jedi - and that said, if anyone has their own method for cropping in 2000-era MSPaint I'd love to hear it). Likewise in the "new paradigms" category, learning about Turing machines and formal data structures changed everything for me as a BASIC-minded programmer.
Since adopting this generalised view I have found it's helpful as a core principle: I can't always count on the environments I know, so learning to adapt is crucial. This applies to programming, competitions, and even romantic partners. In the infinite indulgence of our field to give everything a "cool" name, I refer to this as the "Peter Petrelli" skill.
Quite apart from arguing against using Photoshop in Ubuntu, it returns to your piece. Sometimes short of coding something up from scratch there really is only one program that does what we require to solve a specific problem, and sometimes the operating system is fixed. Knowing how to solve the equation for these variables is part of being an adaptable and valuable agent. Great article.
I really don't think that's how it works any more than seeing one's siblings naked is a turn on. With the disclaimer that of course narcissism and incest are some people's thing, but while the former may be more common than the latter I certainly don't think it's an automatic inclusion of homosexuality.
Needless to say I didn't mean it that way, but the imagery in your comment did make me laugh a lot on an otherwise depressingly rainy Monday morning with three meetings scheduled for the afternoon that I'm really not looking forward to leading. Thank you! :)
Ah, got it. Thanks very much for the explanation. The alcohol analogy makes it lucid. When it comes to pornography I'm definitely a "glass of red wine with dinner from time to time" kind of person (TMI?), so it was out of my frame of reference to know what kind of behaviour you were describing.
"I would notice that I would put so much stress on my body, that it would really take me about a week to recover and feel normal, and then the cycle would start again" sounds, well, pretty wild and probably jolly good fun to be honest, but I can see how that could be problematic as a regular and difficult-to-resist habit rearing its head every week or so.