In just a few hours I’ll be boarding a plane headed headed for Buenos Aires, Argentina. Myself and 5 other friends have rented this ridiculous house for a vacation that’s a little less spring break and a little more The Real World. I don’t want to give away too much else about our plans yet, mostly because it’ll give me something to write about when I get back (not that our plans involve much else other than drinking).

I’ll be back with tales of our adventures (and hopefully some manlier pictures) in ten days. See you then.

I know I promised to put up more pictures with my new camera, but the fact is I still suck at photography. Here's one good shot out of like 150 that I took in San Francisco this weekend. I know flowers are girly and all, but whatever. I drank a beer like ten minutes later.

Late last year, I wrote about how my roommate and I accidentally overtipped our doormen. Well, this extreme generosity was not a one time occurrence. Today, I overtipped our cleaning lady.

Our apartment had been in pretty bad shape. Embarrassingly dirty, to be quite honest. A half hour into the cleaning job, the cleaning lady’s daughter showed up to help out. Yeah. The lady needed reinforcement. A couple hours later, they wrapped up and she told me the total would be $70. I gave her a folded up wad of cash containing $90. Percentage-wise, it was a pretty big tip (~29%). But for the effort it took the two of them to clean up the microwave explosions, crumb spills, bathroom grime, and general accumulation of dust, I thought that a $20 bump was reasonable.

But apparently, the cleaning lady herself didn’t agree. 10 minutes after she left I heard a knock at the door. When I answered, she asked me to confirm how much I had given her, implying that she herself was shocked to leave and find $90 in her hand. Unable to bring myself to back into a smaller tip, I sent her on her way with the full amount.

I’m afraid of what sort of dangerous precedent we’ve inadvertently set here. Next thing you know, I’ll be handing benjis to the dog walker. And I don’t even have a dog!

Alternate title: Hi, I’m a geek.

I’m currently in the middle of the two busiest weeks of the year at work (hence my lack of posting). For the last 10 days in a row or so, I’ve basically done nothing else but sit in front of a computer all day. I shall now talk about that.

I consider myself to be a pretty adept typer. I attribute this entirely to being an early member of the “IM generation” (a phrase I think I just made up). I was a two-finger typer until AIM came along early in high school (Who remembers AmishY2K? Man that screenname was awesome. Except for when the chicks I know started calling me Amishy. That part sucked.) Next thing you know I’m a five-finger fury (actually ten-finger, but the alliteration worked with five). Anyway, now that I’m in the professional world, this skill has come quite in handy. However, I’ve noticed a couple of odd typing traits that I have, and I’m curious as to how prevalent they are among others. For example, I only use my left hand for hitting CTRL or SHIFT. I have attempted to introduce my right pinky to these keys on the right side of the keyboard but have never been able to make using them a habit. Those keys remain the cleanest on my keyboard. Hell, I even use the function keys more than them (F5 = Refresh, F9 = Manually refresh calculations in Excel when you have automated calculations turned off, bitches!)

On that note, despite using my left hand exclusively for CTRL and SHIFT, I have never once used it on my space bar. I only use my right hand for the space bar. Actually I only use my right hand for a few other things, but we don’t need to go into those here.

(I was talking about driving a stick shift.)

(I use both hands for the other thing.)

(Now I’m talking about eating a burrito. Gotcha twice, sicko!)

I am also an Excel junkie. I. LOVE. EXCEL. I took an entire class on it in college. Got THREE credits for it. I tutored people in it. I even taught a class about it at work. I don’t know how to explain it, but I just love using it. Its a good day at work when I get to bust out some conditionally formatted IF(ISERROR(’s, and a great day when I get to make a sick PivotTable. And the feeling I get when I kick loose a perfectly designed macro, sit back, and watch spreadsheets whizzing across my screen in a blaze of automated glory? Let’s just say VLOOKUP(Amish, Feelings_Table, 2, FALSE) = AWESOME.

(Wow. I’m still single?)

Perhaps one of the functions of Excel I use most is the Paste Special. Sometimes its a simple pasting of formulas or formats, but every now and then I get a taste of the elusive Values/Skip Blanks/Transpose combo. Regardless, I seem to use it every day. My friend Sharad and I were recently discussing “what makes us unique” (a question we’ve both had to think very hard about lately), and he joked about his awesome paste special skills. He took it a step further, explaining that he once told one of his junior team members “master paste-special, and you can conquer all”. This opened the floodgates to even more ridiculous quotes involving paste-special, some of which you may have seen in my GChat status messages.

“Is that a paste-special in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?”
“These paste-specials are making me thirsty.”
“I got a fever, and the only prescription is more paste-special!”
“I’m not a policeman, I’m a paste-special.”
“Littering annnnd, littering annnd, literring annnd….. smoking the paste-special.”
“Walter! He paste specialed on my rug!”
“I like paste special and I cannot lie (you other brothers can’t deny)”

I’m also a HUGE fan of keyboard shortcuts. I use these things everywhere, from Shift+Space in Excel (select row) to Shift+3 in GMail (delete message), to Alt+Tab to switch from Gmail to Excel (when the good old boss walks by). I just I love the productivity gains created by them. In fact, I love them so much that I have even improved upon them. For example, while the Alt-E-S-V-Enter combo for Paste Special - Values is certainly faster than performing the same action using a mouse, I have determined that the five-step nature of it is just too ineffecient for me. So I created a macro to cut down that same action into a simple three-step, Ctrl+Shift+V.

Yes, I may be a geek, but at least now I’m a 40% more efficient geek.

A short little long time ago, in an effort to better understand Google’s advertising products, I signed up for an AdWords account. While playing around with my account, I created a few ad campaigns centered around some of the primary content that sits here on this blog - you guessed it - posts about Michigan and posts about Taco Bell. I put together some ads, set up a max monthly spend amount (I think it was like $2 or $3), and let Google work its magic. Eventually, I stopped my experimentation and moved on to other things.

Except I never shut off the ad campaigns.

This morning, I got an email from a friend of mine from school who I hadn’t spoken to in a while.

I hadn’t even realized that my ads were still running (either no one was clicking them, which isn’t surprising given the terrible grammatically-incorrect copy, or I need to do a better job monitoring my bank account), so this was both surprising and amazing. I had never really thought about where these ads would be showing up, let alone anyone I knew actually stumbling across one of them. And now I can’t help but wonder - where else have my ads been seen? And who else has seen them? Have you?

Last night, I was lying idly on my couch when I heard a knock at my door. I answered, and found my roommate standing there with his hands full, unable to fish out his keys and unlock the door himself. I got out of the way as he hobbled in carrying his laptop bag, dinner, cell phone, and approximately $90 worth of laundry and dry cleaning (no joke… dude has a LOT of clothes).

I retreated to the couch as he shuffled around the apartment and his bedroom, unwinding from his day at work. After a few moments, he emerged from his room and asked, “Hey, have you seen my food?”

“Nope,” I replied, taking a cursory glance around the room.

“I have no clue where I put it.”

After eyeing the living room and kitchen, he retreated back into his room, and a few minutes later, began laughing uncontrollably.

“Dude you have to come see this.”

“Just explain it,” I said, not wishing to get up AGAIN.

“I can’t. Just come.”

I walked into his room, and my eyes shifted to where his finger pointed. There, nestled in his closet, miraculously pinned alongside his newly washed shirts, was his foot-long Subway sandwich.

I’ve been wanting to learn photography for a while now, so I splurged and bought myself a new digital camera a couple weeks ago, a Nikon D40 Digital SLR. While the verdict is still out on whether dropping a few hundred bucks on a fancy camera will actually make me any better of a photographer, here is one of the first pictures I took after pulling it out of the box.

This was taken out of my bedroom window, looking up Third ave. (Yes, I was wearing the neck strap so as to prevent any more accidental electronic free falls.) I honestly have no clue how I got this picture to come out so well… I’ve been unable to replicate anything like it in the week and half since.

Anyway, I’m planning on posting more of my photography as I become more familiar with the camera, and I welcome any comments or criticism you have. I’m also hoping to integrate one of the photo hosting services (like Picasa or Flickr) with this site, so if you have any experience with this, please let me know.

Thought I’d take a break from narrating my usual shenanigans and help promote a pretty interesting project a close family friend Naman is currently working on. He’s spending a year in India doing a fellowship through Indicorps. One of his main projects is a social entrepreneurship competition called the Piramal Prize. In his words…

The Piramal Prize is focused on democratizing healthcare in India. The competition seeks to encourage and support bold entrepreneurial ideas which have a profound impact on access to higher standards of health for India’s rural and marginalized urban communities. The award recognizes high-impact, scalable business models that propose innovative solutions which directly or indirectly address India’s healthcare crisis. Entries may include, but are not limited to, innovations in service delivery, technology applications, health-related products, or mechanisms to address public health necessities such as potable water.

We are looking to make this into the premiere competition in India. Nothing of its size has been done yet in India. Winners of the competition will receive over $25,000 in seed funding and access to further venture capital support to get their ideas off the ground. Additionally, winning models will be given incubation support at the Indian Institute of Management – Ahmedabad (IIM-A).

Initial entries are due April 1st, 2008. I believe that this competition has the potential to produce some amazing ideas that will save lives and change the landscape of healthcare for India. Thanks for the support.

In you’re working in this field, attending medical school or business school, or even just remotely interested in healthcare, I encourage you to enter this competition. Check out the website at www.piramalprize.org or contact Naman directly at admin@piramalprize.org

To echo Naman’s words, thanks for your support.

In case you need explanation (though with those drawings, how could you?), the story goes: I got home from the bar at 4am. Was talking on the phone (blackberry) and held it to my face with my shoulder so I could use my hands to open my window. Phone slipped out, got a terribly unlucky bounce, and fell out the window. After a ridiculously long free fall, during which my phone book flashed before my eyes*, it crashed on the sidewalk 27 floors down. A new phone has been ordered.

*Luckily, I regularly sync my blackberry to my computer, so most of my numbers are backed up. But I had JUST gotten someone’s number that night. Chelsea, if you’re reading this, call me.

In the absence of anything meaningful to blog about right now, check out this video, which had me laughing the hardest I’d laughed since, well… since earlier this evening when I caught up on the most recent America’s Funniest Videos. (Yes, I still watch - and DVR - that show. What can I say? Giant rubber ball nailing a toddler in the head? Never. Gets. Old.)

Anyway, here it is. Dude’s got one of the best Indian accents I’ve ever heard.

For 1 minute 22 seconds more YouTube fun, check out Lev’s John-Travolta-featuring Crank Dat mashup.