my Avatar adventure story

Before the scifi film Avatar came out I was pretty excited about it. I bought tickets months in advance and posted this pic on facebook asking "who wants to go see the 12:01 opening day premier midnight screening with me?

A friend, seeing my enthusiasm invited me onto the Fox studios lot where she worked (exciting) and gave me a full sized promotional poster (awesomeness!). My roommate and I, being total nerds, hung it up in the hallway. This only helped get us more excited about the film, and the night we were to see it, I went hours early to wait in line to get us good seats. Now, my roommate had had blue face paint from Halloween, and I brought it to the premier. I figured "if I am going to really geek out on this film, I might as well geek all the way out." I decided to abandon all fear and shame and convinced the girl next to me in line to help me paint my face blue. I hadn't anticipated it, but soon every camera there wanted a picture of me. Then a video team was interviewing me, and then the guy in charge of promoting IMAX nationally was having me pose for pictures. I realized this wasn't going to work. Who cares what one dorky guy does? I told them to wait a minute (boy was that a powerful feeling) and I went outside and started asking everyone if anyone wanted to paint their face blue and get their picture taken. Honestly, I knew we needed a woman for to make it work but there were no takers.
I walked back surprisingly defeated. Then the gal who painted my face trotted in, and volunteered. Hot! So I painted her face while her boyfriend waited outside (double hot!), and then the two of us posed for pictures. She was really nervous about it, so I told her how to pretend this was normal and look really excited. I think she had a good time :-) They gave us free t-shirts and Avatar toys, which was pretty cool. Like we'd won a contest or something!


Then, the IMAX guys told us James Cameron, the director of Avatar, was coming. We were going to get to meet him and pose for a picture! Hot damn! When he showed up we weren't supposed to talk to him, but he ended up talking to us. He shook my hand and said to his friend/associate "See this is what I'm talking about." When we posed for the picture (as you can see below) we used the pose and face we had practiced before (with less eyes bugging out). And despite the fact that we were the one's wearing blue face paint, Mr Cameron managed to out-geek us by saying "no no, you are supposed to be like 7 ft tall, we should make you look taller than me!" Well played sir, truly your are a king among the nerds!



I got the email address of the cameraman, and asked him to email me the picture, which he did at 4am. I posted it to popular social news site reddit.com at 5am, and by midnight it had 25,000 page views. Wow. I had succeeded at making myself the most visible person in the role of avatar fan. So of course, the next day ABC news in New York called me and asked if I would be interviewed for a segment on Avatar to air on Good Morning America. Holy shit! How did they even get my number? I told them I would do it if they promised they could interview me in under a half hour and have everything ready for me when I got there. NYC agreed to my terms. So I took an hour off of work, and drove over to their studio. On the way there I called to check they were ready for me and the receptionist said "I'm sorry, who are you?" OH NOES! but when I called back 10 minutes later he was super apologetic "I"m sorry Mr. Mahdroo, yes we are ready for you, everything is set up!"
Outstanding! I painted my face blue as I drove, so that they could interview me blue-faced (dangerous yet worthwhile). Then I called my mom who called everyone she knew and told them I was going to be on tv. Apparently the mayor of my mom's town called her to say he'd seen me on tv while on vacation in Maine. Epic win! Here is the clip below:



Our pictures were included in Entertainment Weekly two weeks in a row (good gracious! see below) as well as being featured on the Yahoo homepage, and on my favorite scifi blog io9.com <---pretty much anywhere they needed to represent Avatar, the put up the picture with me.

My Obama airplane crash dream!

Okay, I know dreams aren't normally worth posting, but this one has amazing special effects and Obama was in it!


Last night I dreamnt I was flying on board air force one and sitting next to Obama. Except it was more like he was on a passenger jet and sitting in coach. He and the other lady in our row were jabbering away. Then he turned to me and I was so excited to ash him questions. I was asking him if he had aides who helped him with email. Like if he wanted to read an old email he remembered, did he log on & find it, or delegate the search to an aide?

He laughed and told me it was an interesting question. He was about to answer when the plane started a steep dive and began turning in a tight circle. I looked out the window and saw flak everywhere. Fighter jets were shooting us down. I braced for death, and found I was surprisingly calm and at peace. I made sure my seatbelt was tight and wove my carry on thru my legs so it wouldn't hit anyone in the head. Then the back of the airplane exploded off and we began spinning and falling/flying like a frisbee. I remember thinking Joe Biden would be president, and another JFK-like amazing leader would be lost to us.

What I didn't know was how close to the ground we were at that point. A few second laster we crashed into an Iranian soccer stadium, wend across the field and ended in a sea of busses. I was alive. Most of us were alive!

I was telling people to run out the back, and I ran up to the front. One pilot ran out, but the Senior Captain was injured. I told her what a good job she had done saving us all, and picked her up and carried her outside. While running down the aisle sideways so as to not bumpt the captain, I saw there were grandparents with kids still seated. I wanted to help them off the plane but the captain said no, the most important thing is to protect the president.

I could not find anyone as we'd all split up, so I hid in a nearby school, in a vacant gym, behimd two vending machinesl for a week. A white Labrador Retriever who had been on the plane with us ran back and forth between all our locations and delivered notes. Obama was alive but injured and Robert Gibbs was protecting him.

Then a kid found me and ratted me out. They realized the dog was our agent. I ran and ran and ended up hiding in the shrubs in some suburb. After a day the dog found me and walked up all leprosied and died right next to me. A man came chasing after him, but didn't find us. I took of over a set of rolling green hills nearby and woke up.


-Mahdroo

What does a Mahdroo want?

A list of things I want:

-pants (jeans and khakis)
-shirts (button up short sleeve shirts)
-shoes (saucony sneakers)
-a t-shirt from Swingers (with the presidential seal of swingers on it)

-car tires
-car bumper (rear)
-car driver side mirror
-car oil change

-iPod for Jessica
-iPhone (the new one when it comes out)
-new mac (maybe in 2010)

[EDIT] followup.
Mahdroo eventually got new jeans, car tires, a driver side mirror, and oil change. Jessica got a new iPod. At this much later date, Mahdroo still wants all this other stuff.

The EXCITING! origin of hiccups

Now known: The EXCITING! origin of hiccups.

I am pleased to report that the cause for hiccups has been figured out by scientists (according to Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin). Hiccups are a remnant of the evolutionary transition from gills to lungs, from fish to amphibian. Imagine a new baby tadpole swimming around in a pond. I is born as a fish-like thing with gills and develops lungs later as it grows. But at one point it has both! Golly, how does that work? This is where hiccups come in. The tadpole swims up to the surface of the water, takes a big gulp of air into its lungs (hic) and then closes it epiglotis, and dives down and resumes breathing with its gills. The repetition of this process is what we experience as hiccups. Turns out all animals can get hiccups and the same part of the brain controls it in all animals. Apparently natural selection never selected it out of our gene pool.

the iPhone of the future!

The following are my thoughts on "if I could have my iPhone do anything, what would I have it do?"

Okay, I am so in love with my iPhone.
The phone part, it's okay, but the personal computer? Wow! That is something I would like to see developed further.

So now here is what I want.
I want first of all to be able to talk to my iPhone and to be able to tell it to do things by voice command.
"iPhone call Pete mobile" or "iPhone google charles bronson"
better yet would be
"iPhone, access facebook, update status 'I am riding a segway.'"
even better,
I would like my iPhone to periodically check in with me and tell me things or ask me questions.
"Mahdroo you have an Doctor's appointment today at 4pm."
"Mahdroo, would you like to update your twitter status?"

Now given that, if I really dream, I want the following.
I want my iPhone to run multiple databases tracking my life.
So like imagine 5 excel spreadsheets running:social life, diet, finances, travel, mood
At regular intervals my iPhone would Ping me,
"Mahdroo what is your current mood"
I'd reply "engrossed" or "anxious" or "happy" and it would enter that emotion on a database but also, at that date and time, it would enter the current time, temperature, my location, as well as keep track of how much I spend, and what I eat
"Mahdroo whadya have for breakfast?" "Hummus, Pita Bread."
It would track who I hung out with and what we did.
"Mahdroo, I see that you are moving, what are you up to?"
"Going to festival with Jessica and Paul."
And it would upload this information to my computer, or it would have a built in analyzing AI, which would cross reference all the variable factors and begin looking for patterns [I do not care how BIG an iPHone would have to be to do this, I'd wear a backpack if I had to for this kind of interface].

"Mahdroo, 1 hours after you drink coke/soda your mood becomes Anxious 91% of the time."
"Mahdroo, you have listed friend/contact Zelmo as your 5th best friend, but he is 12th on the list of people you regularly interact with."
"Mahdroo, you call your mother, on average, every 10th day. Would you like iPhone to prompt you to call her more frequently?"

This would be AMAZING. I could add to my subjective understanding of my life and objective report to give me realistic perspective. I think this would be very useful if I wanted to understand my life and make it fit more in line with my dreams, desires and ambitions.

Now, I want to take a moment and address the concerns I can hear people voicing to this. There are two kinds of concerns. The first is the external threat. "Oh no, our data will get in the hands of giant evil corporations." While this is 1984 thinking model is valid, I think this could be easily resolved. The purpose of a phone/personal computer, even though it is on a network, should be to serve its user and not the corporation that made it. We would likely end up with a situation where corporations offered to buy your data rather than steal it or force it from you. That said, this is a tertiary and resolvable concern that people would throw out to cover the more deep fear they would have about the technology I am discussing.

----

The primary concern I think people would have with this technology is that most people don't want to know what is going on in their life, because not knowing is one of their chief psychological & social protections. For example, imagine one day you have double booked an evening. You call Jimmy to say "oh sorry Jimmy, I am so sick, I can't hang out tonight" and then go to a party with other friends. We tend to think of this as a polite way of covering up the fact that we are rejecting Jimmy, and that protecting him from this harsh truth was better than telling him our plans honestly. Now imagine if your iPhone announced "you have cancelled 6 of your last 10 scheduled interactions with Jimmy." You might feel guilty about this. You'd say "shut up iPhone, don't ever tell me anything like that again" because you want to keep the mental protection of not knowing. However, once you got past feeling hurt because you thought it was bad of you to reject Jimmy, and your mean ol iPhone called you on it, you might go on to alter your behavior towards Jimmy, either hanging out with him more, or ceasing setting up events with him. You could even prompt your phone to remind you to do either.

Between those two reactions is the problem with the technology I am envisioning. On the one hand, we think we could not psychologically handle this information. On the other, if we had it (and a useful AI-personal assistant-bot) then we could use it to order our lives more in line with our intentions. Most everyone I have talked to about this idea has proposed altering the technology to fit our psychology. I however propose that instead of changing or limiting the technology because we could not handle it psychologically, we should aim to change our psychology to handle the reality of the situation the technology would present us.

Two different points of view from which to stand are "what is wrong with me?" versus "I'm great, now how do I get what I want?"One of my core beliefs is that if everyone understood what everyone else was actually like, then we wouldn't have as much shame and guilt and fear in our lives, and this would diminish the degree to which anyone is engaged asking "what is wrong with me?" We would be less likely to label things "wrong" and more likely to understand differences in others. I think any given person's perception of how one should act is created from limited access to a realistic understanding about how people DO act (including themselves). To a head, my theory is that if you understood yourself better/more accurately, I believe that you would see that you are the way you are, and the things that you think are wrong with yourself aren't. Instead of not accepting your own thoughts. feelings, behavior, actions, desires etc, and trying to change any of those so you can be how you think you should be, I think people could come from a space of greater-self acceptance. To be clear, access to greater information would not perfectly correlate to increased self acceptance. Another influence would likely be required, such as psychology, to help people choose to accept their life instead of deciding they are a horrible horrible person and getting really depressed. I feel confident that such mechanisms exist and could be utilized. And they aren't nearly as much fun to talk about as awesome talking iPhone AI-bots that help me lose weight.

Yes, AI bots that would make my life more understandable and a secretary to help. That is what I want. Okay, Apple, get to it (maybe I should start learning how to program?).

my hotmail using mother

My 60+ year old mother.
I was helping her with her computer this morning.
I got her off a pc and onto mac 5 years ago.
She is running OSX 10.3
And using Safari v1 for a browser.
Yeah, they invented Safari in 2003, and she is still running v1
and there are no longer any 10.3 compatible updates for it.
This means Hotmail is no longer compatible.
(yes she uses hotmail).
She can't send and delete emails on hotmail.
Oh god. Why?
Like herding cats,
I have trained her how to download and install browsers
and now she has ie, safari, firefox, camino and opera.
And one by one we found that none of them worked, until...
Opera! Hooray! The only one!
So we're going to let her use opera
and go take her mac to a mac store to get
osx 10.5 so she can use safari to check her
hotmail.

Whhheeeeeee

A blog topic about blog topics (gackkk!)

If you are reading this, you've probably already thought "why does Mahdroo have a blog?" And the obvious answer is not that I want to keep you appraised of my life (gosh, go find my Twitter account for that. jk) but rather because I like wasting time on the intranets. So to further clog the pipes, here is a list I found of all the blog topics I could try out (or you!).

http://weblogs.about.com/od/startingablog/tp/BlogPostIdeas.htm

1. Lists
People love lists, and just about any kind of list is bound to attract traffic. Top 10 lists, 5 things not to do, 3 reasons I love something, etc. Start with a number then take it from there.

2. How-to
People love to find easy-to-follow instructions to help them accomplish a task. Whether you want to teach your readers how to throw the perfect curve ball or how to avoid getting bitten by a mosquito, the choice is yours.

3. Reviews
You can write a review of just about anything on your blog. Take a look at the following suggestions:
* Products
* Websites
* Books
* Movies
* Music
* Restaurants
* Hotels
The possibilities are nearly endless. Just think of something you've tried and write about your experience and thoughts.

4. Photos
Post a photo (or photos) related to your blog topic.

5. Link Roundup
Write a post that includes a list of links to other blog posts that published great posts or to websites you like.

6. Current Events
What's going on in the world? Write a post about an interesting bit of news.

7. Tips
Write a post to share tips to help your readers accomplish something in an easier, faster or cheaper way.

8. Recommendations
Share recommendations for your favorite books, websites, movies or other "favorites" related to your blog topic.

9. Interviews
Interview a prominent figure or expert in your blog topic then publish a blog post about it.

10. Polls
Register for an account with a site like PollDaddy.com then publish a poll related to your blog topic in one of your blog posts.

11. Contests
People love to win prizes, and blog contests are a great way to drive traffic to your blog as well as encourage visitors to leave comments. Blog contests can be used to write several posts such as an announcement post, a reminder post and a winner post.

12. Blog Carnivals
Join a blog carnival (or host one yourself) then write a post about the carnival topic.

13. Podcasts
Sometimes it's easier to talk about something than it is to write about it. If that's the case, try audio blogging and post a podcast.

14. Videos
Share a video from YouTube or one of your own, or host a video blog.

15. Quotes
Share a quote from a celebrity or prominent person in a field related to your blog topic. Be sure to cite your source!
16. Links to Interesting Content from Digg or StumbleUpon
Sometimes you can find some really interesting submissions on Digg, StumbleUpon and other social bookmarking sites. It's fun to share links to some of the best submissions related to your blog topic or of interest to your readers in one of your own blog posts.

17. Your Turn
Turn the tables and post a question or comment then ask your readers what they think about that question or comment. Your turn posts are a great way to spark a conversation.

18. Guest Posts
Ask other bloggers or experts in a field related to your blog topic to write a guest post for your blog.

19. Point/Counterpoint
A point/counterpoint post is where you present two opposing sides to an argument or issue. This type of post can even be separated into two different posts where the first presents one side of the argument and the second presents the other side.

20. Answer Reader Questions or Comments
Look back through the comments left by your readers and find any questions or statements that can be used to spark a new post.