Craigslist founder to give UC Berkeley commencement speech

Read more about it here.

More interestingly he said he’s going to “ad lib” his speech, saying:

“Never read a prepared speech unless you’re really good at it; for a genuine perspective on corporate life, read Dilbert; and brevity is the soul of wit.”

I think if you’re able to set up a web server that receives more than 9 billion page views per month (56th in the world) with 24 employees…you’re allowed to just throw together any old speech off the top of your head.

Update: If your world headquarters looks like this even though you serve > 450 cities in 50 countries you’re allowed to ad lib the speech.

Wednesday stuff

 

- Holy crap! Nalgene bottles are bad for you! Fitness nuts call bullshit. I love me some bisphenol A. Even the act of saying it aloud sounds like it will give you cancer.

- So ‘innit’ has become this sort of universal rhetorical tag on the end of sentences in the UK, a smarter, classier version of our overuse of the word ‘like.’ It is confusing. Try reading some of these aloud at your cube, or try integrating it into your speech in meetings:

 ”We need to decide what to do about that now innit.” (don’t we?)

“Now I can start calling you that, INNIT!” (can’t I?)

“I can see where my REAL friends are, elsewhere innit!!” (aren’t they?)

“I’ll show young Miss Hanna round to all the shops, innit.” (won’t I?)

“I heard he was good in TNA when he was there so he can still wrestle good innit?” (can’t he?)

[BCC via kottke]

- Ben Gibbard is a) awesome, b) confused about Death Cab’s place in music, c) pretentious, d) name dropping dead writers faster than Colin Meloy, d) all of the above. Of course the answer is d.

- This poor masshole lady hit Sandra Bullock. Romantic comedy fans are still reeling. Thankfully, everyone is okay.

- Conor Oberst cuts a solo album and pretends its different than recording as Bright Eyes.

- Uh oh. In news from the beginning of the month, Beirut is going through some stuff. From Zach Condon:

The responsibilities of gathering people around your vision, working with great people like those who work directly for the band and those at the label, wanting to insure that every show is as good as humanly possible so that every single person in the audience sees that we put in a real effort, all of that leads to a lot of issues in terms of doing right by people who have done you right.

Hope to see you back in some form, Zach. Read the full quote on Pitchfork.

- Tuch’s MacBook crashed. Again. When he needed it most. Send your condolences.

[Image of T.S. Eliot confirms that April is, in fact, the cruellest month. Thanks, Syracuse.]

South Park Studios

Good news South Park fans who used to have to watch online episodes of South Park from crappy sources!  South Park Studios is a legitimate website that has all of the episodes from Season 1 up to last week’s episode.  For me, its been great watching the early episodes because the early episodes streaming online before usually were of very poor quality.

I think the greater good is that “big TV” & “big movies” have finally realized that people are demanding that TV shows and movies should be freely available online.  Much like Hulu, South Park Studios is making their money from the commercial advertisements shown 3 times during an episode (although annoying it is clear that the commercials are noticeably louder than the show).  All in all, it makes living without cable TV even easier (and cheaper!).

Improv Everywhere

This the name of a NYC based improved collective that stages public stunts. Their videos will describe it better than I ever would:

“Look Up More”

Green tip of the week: Paper or plastic? Neither!

As an individual striving to live a healthy and fun life while also being environmentally conscious, I hope to impart the wisdom that I’ve gathered on the internet to help you learn how to practically reduce your carbon footprint.

This week - bring your own bag with you to the store! Even though it feels better using paper than plastic at the grocery store, it turns out that both plastic and paper bags have the same overall impact on the environment. Even though paper bags are biodegradable, the amount of energy it takes to process the materials for a paper bag is about equivalent to the plastic that will sit in the environment for hundreds of years.

Considering that the average American uses 900+ plastic bags a year, and that only 1% actually recycle them, where are all the plastic bags going?? The Great Pacific Garbage Patch. (video) Currents in the pacific ocean have corralled so much plastic that the pieces of plastic outnumbers the wildlife (zooplankton) 6 to 1.

The great news is that this can easily be fixed!  Bring your own bag - be it a tote bag, a bookbag, anything - and we can hopefully have oceans (mostly) free of debris for generations to come.