The 10 Least Reasonable Air Bud Remakes

By JoshPetersel in Josh and the Arts 0 Comment

The Air Bud series is getting more and more ludicrous with each installment. What started as a dog who could at least remotely feasibly bounce a basketball off its nose to make free throws into a dog that has, among other things, won the MLB World Series and FIFA World Cup.

Some metrics that loosely helped guide discussion and rank: Does the sport typically necessitate the use of opposable thumbs? How funny is your mental image of a dog trying to do this? Can a cutesy movie title be concocted? Perhaps most importantly, how inappropriate is the notion that a dog would be better at this simply because it’s a dog?

It made for a few ridiculous bar conversations. In select cases, I managed to come up with the most likely title.

10) Air Bud: Bulldog’s Eye (Darts). Arose naturally, as the debate occurred in a bar.

9) Rowing/Crew.

8) Air Bud: WWooF (Wrestling) . Though those animal rights activists would probably be all up in arms over this. Edges out Boxing/MMA because I was actually able to come up with a cutesy movie title.

7) Air Bud: Pool Hall Poodle (Billiards)

6) NASCAR. Why so low? Because you have to think like a mentally incapacitated movie director and/or 3-year old. The mechanics of driving a race car are pretty complex—but from what little I’ve ever seen of NASCAR, the casual observer never actually has to see the driver operating the vehicle; you only ever really see his head poking out the window. Besides, I’ve already seen a vehicle successfully manned by a dog at speeds of up to 88 miles per hour; Hollywood can definitely make this concept happen.

5) Paintball. The other reason NASCAR was so low? I don’t think it requires the participant to have fingers.

4) Surfing. And now, we enter the zone of dogs riding increasingly silly things. I’d advise you to take exactly 15 seconds to ponder each of the following concepts. Any less, and the weight of the absurdity may be lost. Any more, and your head will surely a’splode.

3) Rock Climbing.

2) Air Bud: On HorseBark (Horseback Riding)

1) Air Bud: World Series of Pawker (Poker) . Because the prerequisite need of opposable thumbs, as well as an understanding of both mathematics and human psychology. But also because it’s a neat hat tip to that nifty painting.

Honorable Mentions: Jai-Alai, Polo, competitive eating (all not really mainstream enough)

Did I miss anything?

“Resuma”

By JoshPetersel in Josh for Business 0 Comment

I can never remember the keyboard shortcut for “é.”

I used to have it down pat back in high school when I was churning out papers for Spanish class. Lately I’ve just been using it for the word “résumé.”

Lazy solution: type the word “resuma” into Word, right click when the red squiggly line appears, choose the correct iteration.

(Actual solution: Hit CTL+’ then the letter you want an accent over. This would have made life WAY easier if it were implemented in Word 2003.)

“What’s This?” (CV2 / Credit Card Security Code)

By JoshPetersel in Design 7 Comments

Every single online checkout page—ever—asks you to input your credit card information in more or less the following way:

“What’s this?” leads to a page like this:

The CV2 / CSC / CVD / CVC / CCV / CV2 / Card Security Code / (…Seriously???) / CVV2 / Verification Code was implemented as a security measure for when you do transactions and the card isn’t physically present at the register (like when you’re buying menial crap on the internet).

But that doesn’t answer the question: Why does this page still exist? We’ve been doing this internet thing for well over a decade. People have pretty readily figured out what the Credit Card Number and Expiration Date. Why are we still struggling here? Isn’t this silly?

Two thoughts:

1) Label your crappy credit cards better. “Credit Card Number” is pretty intuitive because those numbers are big and imprinted. Every card I’ve ever had has said something like “Valid Until” or “Good Thru” or “Expiration Date” next to the expiration date, so that’s handled. Why the secrecy surrounding the CV2?

On this credit card, there’s no indication at all that the number 7379 has any significance whatsoever. With about fifteen seconds’ labor…

Any question now? This sample card wasn’t really designed too well; I added the white box to make it clear that “CV2:” was referring to 7379 and not 01001. With a little more thought and care, the two number series might be distanced and the white box rendered superfluous.

2) Pick a name. There’s obviously some serious confusion in this department—The Wikipedia page for “Card Security Code” lists seven different names with ten corresponding acronyms. Pick one! I’d lean towards “Verification Code” since I guess it’s a bit more intuitive (consider how much trickier it’d be to remember what an “EXD Code” was instead of an “Expiration Date”). I used “CV2” above for the sake of size. The face of a credit card has a pretty limited amount of real estate. And also I didn’t really feel like reorganizing and squeezing things around.

Basketball in Developing Countries

By JoshPetersel in Josh for Business 0 Comment

Through a discussion with a friend about the NBA’s nascent interest in promoting basketball across the globe, I uncovered the following insights:

  1. What makes soccer (football) so universally popular? Sure there’s the network effect; it’s what all your friends and family watch. But it’s also the sport with the lowest input costs—probably by a significant margin. All you really need is a ball. Whatever’s available around you—the hallway, the tree, the wall—becomes a goal at a moment’s notice. Imagine a group of schoolkids in a developing country trying to play a pickup game of hockey or lacrosse.
  2. Basketball has pretty low input costs, too. And it’s fairly adaptable to different formats, such as one-on-one, or playing half court. Baseball can’t really do that. There is the hurdle of needing at least a rim. And, I suppose ideally, a non-grassy space to allow for dribbling (though realistically, games like H-O-R-S-E and Knockout won’t require this).

I say the NBA should develop an outreach program along the following lines:

  1. Develop the cheapest possible rim. My guess is that this would be a simple metal ring that could adhere to a brick wall. Maybe a backboard could be a similarly-adhered piece of paper/advertisement. Put these everywhere for awareness.
  2. Get basketballs in the hands of youths. Or, perhaps, develop a soccer ball that’s colored or stitched to look or feel more like  a basketball. Basketballs are typically heavier than soccer balls and probably not suitable to be kicked around. It’s fine to maintain soccer ball standards for weight and density. My guess is that youths in developing countries aren’t really concerned about whether their sports ball adheres to NBA/Spalding standards. The goal is to simply open youths’ minds up to alternative uses for their sporting ball, and likewise, alternative interests and aspirations to growing up to be the next Lionel Messi.

Toilets.

By JoshPetersel in Design 0 Comment

I’ve decided to branch my thinking out into a slightly new direction: Design.

I don’t necessarily mean the sort of creative work that my friends Matt and Logan are capable of. Maybe someday. For now, I’m referring more to business design. Way more human interactive experience, way less Adobe Illustrator (theoretically).

So I thought I’d kick things off by talking about toilets.

Yes, it was totally weird to be taking a snapshot of something while in a bathroom. It was entirely empty at the time.

In case you haven’t pooped any time in the last decade or so, there’s been a fairly significant innovation in the world of public toilets. That little black square on the left side of the pipe is a motion sensor: It can tell when you’ve stood up, and will automatically flush the toilet for you so that you won’t have to physically touch a handle (how outdated!).

Here’s the thing, though: These sensors kind of suck. Most of them can apparently detect the movement of anything bigger than an oxygen particle, and will flush repeatedly throughout the course of one, *ahem*, sitting. I’d guess this is also a waste of water, but as far as I’m really concerned, it’s just a broken experience. And I think it can be easily fixed.

See Figure 2, below:

Now, with more lasers!

Here’s the thing with the toilet flush sensor: Its success doesn’t hinge on the fact that it activates the second you stand up from the seat. All we want to do is alleviate the need for you to touch a handle and spread germs. It’s not necessary for the monitor to be fixated on your back while you’re reading a particularly funny Calvin & Hobbes strip or after you’ve consumed more than your fair share of late night Taco Bell. This contrasts starkly with the motion sensor on the sink (which, I believe, was first to market), where the design completely fails unless your hands are directly under the sink when the sensor activates.

All I did above was make two excruciatingly simple changes to the design. First, I rotated the sensor 90 degrees. No more excessive flushes from seat shuffles. All you have to do is hover your hand over the sensor when you’re done. If we were to get really fancy, you might even move the sensor over to the other side of the stall so that patrons don’t have to reach over the toilet. (I don’t know; they’re the germophobes, not me!).

Second, I added a thin red light. Figuring out the three-dimensional depth of where I need to place my hands to line up with the bathroom sink sensors usually works after a few seconds of trial & error. It’s not a terribly big inconvenience, but heck, we’re fixing things anyway. We solve this modern day crisis with the red light, which is much easier to line your hand up with spatially. My guess is that common sinks don’t employ this because they’re usually pointed horizontally and might get in childrens’ eyes. No such problem here.

Anyway. I hope there will be more crap like this to come.

Just Write.

By JoshPetersel in Josh for Business 0 Comment

Getting stuck in a trend is tough. A rut, worse yet.

Routines, even (perhaps especially!) bad ones, are hard to break. “It was no big deal last time,” and “what’s one more week?” are compelling arguments.

The trick to getting unstuck: Just start doing anything. Flailing around. Whatever. Something, anything to break the regime.

This post is pretty useless. But it’s a kick start in the right direction.

We’ve got a lot of good ground to cover soon.

Just write.

India

By JoshPetersel in Josh surfs the Internet 0 Comment

Whoops, I’m in Mumbai & Goa for two weeks. Everything is gorgeous. But internet will be sparse.

Incidentally, I missed the entirety of January 7th due to travel. 27 consecutive hours of airports, airplanes, layovers, and meals in tin foil. What a beautiful holiday from the world. And it probably helped everything come out all the more regal on the other side.

What I Learned at Harvard Business School: Part I

By JoshPetersel in Josh and the Arts 0 Comment

Save yourself the fifty million tuition dollars. Here’s everything I learned through one semester at Harvard Business School, summarized in concise, easy-to-read blog format.

FINANCE

1. If you ever find yourself not doing a Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) Model…just remember that you’re wrong.

The DCF is a fancy modelling tool used to project future growth and expectations of a company or a project. In the simplest terms possible: take what you know about a business (we sell ten sodas every year!), add in your estimates for the future (we’ll sell 10% more sodas every year because of how popular we’re getting!), and discount the value of the future cash flows based on how risky you think the idea is or how much/little you value money next year compared to this year (I’m pretty sure people will still like soda next year, so this is low risk). You’ll end up with a number that’s either positive or negative (if, for example, someone said “you can buy the soda business for $100” but you find it only sells $12 worth of sodas), and you’ll want to pick whatever makes money.

It sounds simple, but I promise that the bigwigs in finance have found plenty of ways to make things impossibly complicated. If you want to get serious, you’ll need to do things like figure out how your assets are going to depreciate, how your working capital is going to grow, how your company typically expects returns from its current projects and values for its future cash flows, and more. Still curious? Get started with an Introduction to Present Value at the Khan Academy.

On a more practical note…

2. Everybody’s pretty much just (educated) guessing. Don’t trust things blindly.

So…maybe the cases we discussed in class were oversimplified. And maybe the lesson above is a bit extreme. But the points still stand.

At length, we explored instances where even minuscule differences in estimates had unnervingly large effects on really big decisions. Expecting a Discount Rate (r*) of .09 instead of .085? Suddenly, your business which draws $100,000 in perpetual yearly cash flows is worth $1,111,111 instead of $1,176,470.  You just destroyed $65,000 in value because of a whim…or a rounding error.

Worse, perhaps, is the notion of how easy it is to build—even subconsciously—projections and valuations that conform to your own desires and expectations.

Granted, we’re not picking numbers out of a hat. We’ve at least, through hours of careful analysis and years of expensive education, been able to narrow down our field of expectations to something on the order of just over a million dollars. Nonetheless, the lack of true accuracy and transparency, and the subjectivity to error should be quite alarming.

Easy to apply this lesson beyond the finance realm. How much does any expert really know anything? In business, and in life, always exercise reasonable doubt and tread very, very carefully.