Why cars drive without their lights at night in California....

*Just to caveat, this is definitely not a rant entry, just a small observation.*

Riding my bike at night along Wilshire / Main Street / Santa Monica Blvd at night, I realize a lot of cars drive without their lights on. This almost never happens in New York. It's not because people are less forgetful in New York, or they have more cars that automatically turns them on.

I think this really speaks to the sociological aspects of the two places. There has been a few times where I forgot to turn on my lights in New York, but people would high beam me to remind me. Everyone knows to do that, and everyone knows what it means. In contrast, I was driving in torrential downpour (yes, it does rain in LA) one night, and kept high beaming the car in front of me who forgot to turn on his light. He didn't understand why I was highbeaming him, so I drove next to him and opened my window to try to tell him. Not only did he not understand again, but he turned at the next intersection thinking I was a crazy aggressive driver.

Because of the population density in New York, people need to look out for one another. Because there is human interaction on a daily basis, people have unwritten rules. Case in point, when merging two lanes in New York, it's always left lane merge in, then right, then left, and so forth. In Los Angeles on the other hand, you have certain drivers that just never go, and certain drivers that are too aggressive that prevents the driver from the other lane from entering.

So though New York is chaotic, crowded, and full of crazy people, some kind of order is naturally established. On the contrary, this kind of natural order never developed in Los Angeles.

Why my job is so painful....

Don't want to innudate my facebook with negativity so will rant here and would rather strangers see than my friends. My job sucks because while I get in at 9AM, working fully ramps up at 10PM. FML

Bonjour, Happiness...

Kinda stupid but I bought this book Amazon: Bonjour, Happiness! The writing is painfully bad, but I did learn a few things from the book about happiness. Don't really want to elaborate on it now, but I realize I need to chill the fuck out. Another thing I've learned is to find happiness in simple things. I've done this excercise before where I list things that make me happy, which is actually really effective in brightening my mood. In light of my pessimestic posts about an internet crash, misogynistic men, and potential WW3 arising from developments in the MENA region, I'm going to list things that make me happy. Remember this is a personal blog, so I don't care if you don't care! :)

• Reading my French Vogue at the Urth Caffe in Santa Monica
• Listening to Kaskade, Morgan Page, Sebastien Tellier, or 90's music
• Santorini scented reed diffuser by Antica Farmacista 
• Driving with the windows down in beautiful Southern California weather
• Macarons with coffee
• Gossip girl and seeing New York City in the backdrop and their beautiful outfits
• The Police, Sting that is
• Riding my awesome Linus bike along Wilshire Blvd with a baguette in my basket pretending I am in Paris....
• Singing letters / emails with "xx"

xx

The next big thing...

In light of the Blake Lively's hacked pictures and iOS5 hacked the day after the release, I anticipate the next big thing to appear in our zeitgeist is internet security. People definitely don't take it seriously enough. Most people don't realize that sitting at a cafe with public wifi access, anyone on the same wifi network can access your files / what you are doing through a simple app that anyone can download. Don't believe me? Read this NYTimes article. I know absolutely nothing about hacking, but I am an ardent believer that anything and everything can be hacked. The consequences of this can be huge and potentially cripple people's lives, large corporations, and even economies. More and more hacking incidents will happen in the years to come.

The implications of this relates to valuations of internet companies. I understand that the dotcom boom 2.0 is not as irresponsible as dotcom bubble 1.0, but the valuations for some of these companies is a bit ridiculous. I am a product of the 21st century and cannot live without the internet, my iphone, and google, but I also realize how relying too much on technology can be potentially crippling.

Groupon is now valued at $20 - 30Bn. Just to put that into context, Starbucks has an enterprise value of $25Bn. Starbucks has 137,000 employees. They have 17,000 physical locations. Groupon has a server somewhere and a few people working for them. All of Groupon's value may potentially be wiped out with a click of a button by a hacker (i.e. customer data erased, domain hijacked, credit card information stolen). As for Starbucks, that will never happen. The $25Bn would take months to liquidate. The only button that can wipe Starbucks' value is a button to detonate an atomic bomb.

I understand that they are very different companies and I'm comparing apples to oranges. But my point is this. Because of the implications of hacking, the internet is so fragile and one easy catastrophe away from it all coming crashing down. Doomsayers mentality? Maybe.

iCloud / iTunes

Why would I use the iCloud / iTunes interphase, where users can only listen to the songs they have paid for on iTunes, when I can use Pandora, which gives me access to songs I never paid for. Besides, the bulk of my music collection was not purchased on iTunes. Good move on Apple's part though. They don't need to pay for storage individually for each person's music library since its an aggregate library people can access (but only if they paid for it). I would much rather support the Music Genome Project and pay for Pandora Premium than to help Apple's earn a buck and plans of world domination.

Speaking of a buck, I am loving this song: I Need a Dollar by Aloe Blacc.