Watching these kids try to is hilarious.
The researcher brings them into a room and says they can either sit in the chair in front of a marshmellow thats meant for them and eat it immediately, OR wait for her to leave the room and return to bring them ANOTHER marshmellow! But if they want two, they have to wait to eat the first one. Awesome experiment in self control.
Oh, The Temptation from Steve V on Vimeo.
I used to intern for TechCrunch, while I was in school. I loved it. I love the industry and the people, the things that get written about, and the controversies that arise. But most of all, I like the tech “insider” world, where the CEO’s of the most powerful companies get written up by their first names and treated like celebrities. For me, Silicon Valley has the coolest celebrities, not Hollywood.
That’s why I am SO excited I get to go to this year’s TechCrunch50 conference! I took two days off of work so that I could stay in San Francisco for the event, and today I went to help with set-up. Tomorrow I will be on the main floor, helping to represent the Crunchbase demo display. If you’re there, come see me!
Setup entailed many a lanyard.
Can I just mention how confusing it can get, over time, to do work in two different time zones while you also travel between two different time zones?
There are feelings associated with time, I think. When you’re at work and you look at the clock, it stirs an emotion in you, whether it be “holy shit, can this day go any slower?” to “Oh gosh, I only have 20 minutes left to finish this report!”
When I’m shuttling in between time zones, its funny because it throws me so off balance. I have a daily 9:30 am ET meeting, which means I had to get up at 6:30 for it here, at home. Following that, I decided to get some work done, and watching the clock as it nears noon, I know that noon my time is when somebody at work is due to send out a weekly defect report which I have to fold into an overall assessment of the weeks events. Noon, according to the computer, is in 15 minutes!
So I walk into the bedroom to change my shirt, and notice the time on the clock is before 10. My brain did a flip, and then I realized I had it all wrong. Oh, time shifts. You toy with my heart so!
Tonight, after work, Diana and I hiked up 10 Philadelphia blocks (which is to say, we walked at a leisurely pace for maybe 15 minutes) until we came upon Kanella, a BYOB Greek restaurant in Philadelphia’s Olde City, where we stay in a hotel for work.
One of the major advantages of Olde City (and probably the only reason anyone on the team tolerates the 40 minute commute to and from the client site each day) is that it has some majorly awesome food, all clustered around a very small perimeter. In addition to always being sunny (*right*) Philadelphia is a very foodie friendly city! To that effect, which is to say to the effect that I enjoy food, which is to say, a FRIKKIN lot, evenings spent exploring have been pretty sweet.
Remember yesterday’s wine story, then? The one where I had the Hyatt deliver me a bottle of Chardonnay, to enjoy on their dime for my being so loyal and so awesome? Well, we took that bottle with us to dinner, where the waiter cheerfully uncorked it while reciting the daily specials. For free! I already like this place.
I was super excited for the food to come out for several reasons.
1. I had never had rabbit before. Rabbit was ON THE MENU! Therefore, rabbit was going in my belly.
2. Haloumi cheese, which I was introduced to at an Israeli place during a team dinner, blew my mind then and I was mentally preparing for it to blow my mind again.
3. Diana! A young, virile, fully meat eating no diet bound young lady who shares my sentiments about food! Do you KNOW how hard that is to find? Are you a vegetarian? Do you have anything you refuse to eat on principal? Do you need everything to be fried in order to find it edible? Then you wouldn’t excite me as an eating partner like Diana does.
Then, these things happened:
The Haloumi cheese blew my FLIPPIN mind.
Haloumi is a middle eastern cheese made from goat and sheeps milk and it has an extremely high boiling temperature, which makes it especially friendly towards baking, broiling, and frying. And OH-MY-GOD was it friendly. I wanted to croon sweet nothings in its ear and coax it to take its clothes of to the promise of my passionate and attentive lovemaking skills. (Instead, I just ate it. And moaned like an animal.)
That rabbit? Yeah. Well, it uh...tastes like chicken.
And I don’t particularly favor chicken. To me, to walk into a restaurant and order chicken is like admitting you have zero imagination and enjoy reading articles from the dictionary and/or thesaurus for fun. Meh. I left most of it behind.I didn’t feel bad for wasting my dinner because I genuinly didn’t know how bland it would end up being– I was so excited for the bunny to arrive! Now I know. Fluffy-Longears is nothing better than a wrinkled, skinny Cock(adoodle-doo).
And finally!
Diana ordered goat. Do you SEE why I like this girl?
Goat! I had a fab evening. Sometimes all you need is a good gossip hour (or two) with a girlfriend to take the load off your workday and week. Or a bottle of wine. We still need to do a controlled experiment to see which one had more impact on my attitude. (Clinical trials begin next week.)
This morning, when I arrived at my hotel after my all night flight, I was greeted by the concierge with the statement, “Hello, Ms. Papaya! [This is not what she actually said, but it's more fun this way] I see you are now a Diamond Member.”
And this is where the floodgates opened. Diamond membership is the highest level of status a guest can attain within the Hyatt chain. Once achieved, after 25 stays or 50 nights, (which having attained, I can tell you is not necessarily a happy milestone to mark, 50 nights in a box [albeit a nice box] by yourself) you are treated like the creme de la you know what within the company. It’s always nice to be treated nicely, I think, especially when its so amusing to me the mildly confused look most attendants take on when they see little ole me with my 22 year old face and outfit, and then have to treat me all shpecial like some sort of celebrity. But hey, I’ll take it.
The woman at the desk this morning whipped out a fanily printed card which listed two columns of welcome amenities I could choose from. Among the drinks column, there were bottles of wine, my choice of two domestic beers, 2 bottles of Fiji water, gourmet sodas. (But wait. Fiji water? On the same list as a bottle of wine? Doesn’t that seem silly to you? I mean, YES, in an airport, you would likely pay around $6 for one bottle of Fiji water, which is likely greater than the bottle of wine the hotel orders in bulk…but still!) On the food side, there were baked cookie platters, some things I don’t remember anymore, and a fruit and cheese plate.
Me, having been taken off guard with the surprise of free gifts (and fancypants gifts, which made me feel like a fancypants girl) circled this:
If I eat this, will I gain a more pronounced cultural refinement?
When I came to my room in the evening after work, I had that lovely platter waiting for me along with a 2008 Chardonnay (from Canvas winery in Napa, CA…ironic, much?) I ate all the fruit on the plate and probably 1/4 of the least smelly cheese. Did I forget to tell you I don’t like cheese that much? Or wine?
That’s my mistake. What was it then, that made me order these two things when offered? Maybe it was some internal desire to come off as refined and cultured (which, in my mind, people who enjoy wine and cheese paired together, and I mean ACTUALLY enjoy it, seem to come off as?) Especially now that I am DIAMOND level, I should be the type of person who likes this stuff right? I don’t know. Next week, I’m just going to circle the bonus points.
(By the way, no, I didn’t drink the whole wine on my own. I left it unopened and am bringing it to a BYOB dinner tomorrow night with my coworker Diana, who also stays in the hotel, but ALAS, is not DIAMOND. Are you reading this Diana? That’s right, I am SO much cooler than you.)
But we already knew that.
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