So last night was the annual Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year awards at the Salt Palace. Our good buddy and fearless (former) leader, Josh Coates, was nominated as one of the finalists for the award this year, so a bunch of us tripped it on up to support him.

This award ceremony was awesome for several reasons.

1. The company paid for it.
2. I had an excuse to wear a tux.
3. It was as close to the Oscars as I’ll probably ever come, what with the eveningwear and high-class clientele and all that.
4. We totally won. (and by we I mean Josh. But we helped.)

Here’s me at the event. As more pics become available, I’ll try to post them.

(Not impressed by the competition.)

Nate over at TheBigBags.com showed me this site. If you’ve ever gone to BYU, UVSC, or just lived in Utah Valley, this blog is going to have a very familiar feel to it. Seriously, I think I know people who are really like this.

http://seriouslysoblessed.blogspot.com/

So yesterday someone stole my car antenna. I suspect GoYin (our soul-sucking MLM next-door neighbors).

One of the unwritten rules of being a guy is that, if given the proper opportunity, you are not to shave. (Proper opportunities include camping, significant other out of town, midlife crisis, etc.)  These opportunities are called “excuses,” which we need in order to justify “laziness” to “women.”

Generally, at the end of these opportunities, we drag a razor across our faces and create a presentable front for ourselves, earning us praise for our clean-shavedness and non-laziness from the womenfolk. However, occasionally, we decide that since we put all that laziness work into getting our facial hair to grow thus far, it would be a shame to throw all that effort away. Thus, we grow either a.) moustaches, b.) goatees or c.) mountainman beards.

In my case, I chose to go with the goatee. I imagined that it would make me look cooler, tougher, more debonair. Instead, I just got older. Every time I’d look at myself in the mirror, I pictured a 35-year-old me, stuck in a dead-end job, potential wasted, slightly overweight, overworked, and underpaid. Needless to say, the goatee is now gone. Remind me to regrow it when I’m 35.

If you tried to hit Towering Intellect yesterday and were unable to get the site to show up, I apologize. I was performing my first successful blog brain transplant, and, well, there were a couple of complications.

Since Towering Intellect’s beginnings, way back in 2005, it has been generously hosted by my buddy Preston, the guy that first got me into blogging, Internet marketing, and 90% of the other cool stuff that I love today. Anyway, this week I decided to upgrade my version of Wordpress to the most recent release (finally). However, when I tried to access my site, I found that the access password had been changed.

So here I stood at the crossroads with a decision to make. Do I call Preston and harass him about my blog (yet again), further imposing on his hospitality, or do I transfer my blog over to my own hosting account so Preston doesn’t have to worry about me any more? It seemed like a no-brainer (pun!).

Anyway, to make a long story short(er) and less technical, after a few bumps, bruises, and DNS issues, I got my blog moved over to my own host, and the backend is now running the latest version of Wordpress. Sexy. So to all you readers who tried to check up on TI and were denied, I apologize, and I hope the improved performance and security of my upgraded blog will makeup for it.

I remember reading in some economics book about the diamond-water paradox. Basically, this paradox comments on how water, though far more useful to sustaining life, is generally valued far less than diamonds, relatively speaking. There are various theories that seek to explain why that is.

I, like many others, contend that as long as water is more plentiful, it’ll remain less valuable than diamonds. But just jack up the utility that you get from water, and see what happens. Here’s a real-life example, which is really the story that I wanted to tell in the first place.

So readers of the blog will no doubt remember The Rash. Well, The Rash was well on its way into oblivion, until it mysteriously reappeared, this time on my fingers and lips. “Dismayed” hardly begins to describe my feelings about this. After a couple of days of trying to fight this on my own, today I decided to call my doctor.

You’d think the second time around he’d react a little bit better, and you’d be completely wrong. He had another freakout, very similar to the one he had the first time I went in. He called in a prescription to the pharmacy nearest my work, and demanded that I come by in a week for another checkup.

So I walked into the pharmacy and picked up my prescriptions. As the pharmacist pulled my prescription, he stopped and said “Woah. What’s wrong with you?”

“Umm, I just have this rash that I need to get cleared up.”

“Well, this is a really heavy dose of antibiotic. I mean, REALLY heavy.”

“Umm, I guess he doesn’t want things to get infected?”

“I guess. But at this dose, you’ll be at risk of yeast infection instead.”

At this point, my brain said Woah. Stop. Yeast infection? Sounds like a feminine problem. You’re lacking some essential real estate for that problem, buddy. It’s not possible.

However, if the pharmacist says it’s a risk, then it must be a risk, right? So I told my brain to shut up and tried to play it cool, like I wasn’t panicking. “Yeast infection huh? Umm, anything I can do to avoid that?”

“Just drink plenty of water when you take it, and you should be fine.”

Done and done.

Fast forward a few hours. I had just finished a Bleu Ribbon Burger at Red Robin (delicious!), taken my medication (scary!) and was on my way to see Kung Foo Panda (hilarious!), when I realized that I hadn’t drunk nearly enough water with my meal for my medication. So once we were in the theater, I went to the concessions counter and asked for a big drink of water (because there’s no way in hell I’m getting a yeast infection). When the guy working the counter tried to hand me a small cup, I told him No way. It has to be a huge cup. You see, I need PLENTY of water. PLENTY. That’s big cup, even huge cup, but not little cup. The employee then informed me that if I wanted a large cup, I would have to pay for it like it was a large soda, even if it was just full of water. Obviously this was a total ripoff. No way a measly cup of water was worth the outrageous prices they charge for sugar water (and Dots) at movie concession stands.

But all of a sudden, the specter of a yeast infection loomed menacingly within my mind, crowding reason and thriftiness out. As I walked away from the counter with my $4 cup of water, I decided that Adam Smith would have had a way easier time with this paradox if he had been threatened with a yeast infection.

Tags: rash, yeast infection, decisions, economics, diamonds, water

During this last year of college, I wrote a paper entitled “The Anxieties of Freedom and the Perils of Choice.” This paper centered around a Henry James story about a man who returns to his childhood home after an absence of many years. As we walks around the empty halls of the house, he finds that it is haunted by the ghost of who he might have been had he chosen to stay at home instead of traveling abroad.

This story has come to mind several times recently as I’ve experienced the vicissitudes of graduated life. I was just commenting to a friend about how, before I graduated, I used to think I had it all buttoned up. I already had a full time job, decent salary with benefits, a (relatively) clear life plan, and an intense desire to be done with school so I could get on with it. But something strange happened when I walked across that podium and received that piece of paper. It was as if somebody had taken my neatly-planned and projected life and shook it up. All of a sudden I was presented with a dizzying array of choices. I mean, if I decided to pack up and move to New York City and become a waiter, what was to stop me? And then there was the even more terrifying status-quo.

Here’s where the anxiety and peril comes in. When you’re faced with so many viable options, how do you choose? And moreover, what don’t you choose? Because for every choice that you make, there are a thousand other selves that will never be because of the decisions that take you away from who you might have been had you chosen differently. And how do you choke down the paralyzing fear that, at some point, that alternative self might come back to haunt you?

Ultimately, I guess we have to choose and accept the consequences, whatever they might be. I just hope I do a good job of choosing.

(Thanks to this article from The New York Times for the awesome title and some of the ideas contained herein.)

Tags: choice, introspection, graduation

Let me say two things about where I work. First of all, our engineers are really busy, so getting extra engineering cycles is nigh impossible. Second of all, Rock Band is the official company obsession. We have an XBox 360 hooked up to a projector and sound system in our break room, and Rock Band is continually on. Coincidentally, it seems like it’s always the engineers who are playing it.

Anyway, today one of the engineers came into our office and offered to give us an extra day of his development time (with his boss’s encouragement) if someone in marketing could beat him at a Rock Band tug of war. We were obviously stoked at the possibility of getting some extra work done, so my fellow marketers and I headed for the break room to determine which of us would take the challenge. The problem (and the genius of the challenge) is that nobody in marketing plays guitar hero, probably because engineering has monopolized it. Anyway, after about a half hour of half-assed simulated guitar playing, it was determined that I sucked the least. So tomorrow I go head to head with a programmer to try to get us some engineering time. *sigh* The things I do to get my work done… I’ll let you know how it goes.

Update: Yeah, I totally got worked.

Tags: work, guitar hero, challenge, lazy

Spending all day on the Internet has its perks. One of those perks is that I come across some pretty awesome sites along the way. Here’s a couple I thought were really cool.

http://www.ecodazoo.com/ - This may be the most amazing use of Flash I’ve ever seen. It loads quickly, and once it’s loaded, the 3d animation is smooth as glass. Pay particular attention to the details - the way the walls of the foldout book houses pop in and out depending on your point of view, the way the shadows dance, and the lens flare when your view faces the sun. Delicious.

http://the1secondfilm.com/ - Like the website name says, these guys are making a 1-second film - with an hourlong documentary for the end credits. The novel part is that they’re allowing anyone, and I mean anyone to be a producer. Just front as little as a dollar and you’ll be included in the credits. You’ll be in good company if you fork over. Kevin Bacon, Keifer Sutherland, Tom Green, Pierce Brosnan, Stephen Colbert, and Seth Green have all donated. Oh yeah, all proceeds go to charity, so you’ll also be helping out as well. Make sure you watch the YouTube videos posted all over the site. It’s worth it.

Tags: video, links, flash, cool, interesting

As I relieved myself in the men’s room today, one of my coworkers (new guy, I don’t know him at all) came into the otherwise empty bathroom and just stood there behinds me to wait for me to finish with the urinal instead of just using one of the other two empty stalls. Why? Who knows. But I’ll tell you this: I was royally weirded out. This is going to give me stage fright for a month.

Tags: stagefright, bathroom, work, weird