Category Archives: Introductions to…

What is Love?

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     …baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, no more

     Don Mach asked me last night what I thought love was. I didn’t realize until then that I had been struggling with that question for over 2, possibly 3 years, or even longer. It took Don, that amazing motherfucker, to get me to come back to it.

     I struggled with it all throughout my one and only real romantic relationship. The two competing themes were “capital L” Love for Real Romantic Love with one person, and “little L” love for friends, family, and community. I didn’t know if there was such a thing as Love, but I knew for sure that love existed. But if Love existed, then what was love? Some kind of less noble, less Loving love?

     I decided that Love was worth believing in, and if I was going to believe in it, I was damned if I wasn’t going to live it. When you are in Love with someone, I believed that we both held on to each other no matter what, that we worked to overcome everything, every emotion, every circumstance, even every thought that would keep us apart. When things didn’t work out, it became a matter of how could I change? What could I do? What part of me or my personality is wrong? I committed, completely, to my girl. Or so I told myself.

     I believed in Love until I could believe no longer. I committed myself to Love too soon, too idealistically. After fighting with my partner and twisting my very soul for too long, I snapped. The religious fanatic broke, his faith now smoke drifting in the air, the only thing left in the aftermath of an explosion.

     Picking up the pieces of my life, I found a little love here and there, pieces spattered on the walls, a little at the bottoms of deep wells, glinting like gold. A door held open, a friend calling just to call, a blanket placed around shoulders rising and falling with reassuring rhythm while half lidded eyes blink themselves to sleep.

     Something I could believe in. Because I saw it every day.

     I found love. It wasn’t hard. It was seeing it that was difficult. I found it in the parks, with old men playing chess and feeding pigeons. I found it in a brother’s over protective watch over his younger sister. I found it meeting up with friends and sharing jokes, sharing food, sharing words. I saw it everywhere. I felt it when I breathed in. I heard it playing on the radio. The whole fucking world ran on love, and that’s just the way I would have it run.

     ”What are your thoughts on love?” Don asked me. I thought about it for a while before I could answer. We finished eating our fast food and sat for a while before I could formulate an answer.

     Love, for me, is you reading this and knowing that I believe every word. Love is you closing this, going back to facebook and commenting on your crush’s status. Love is the sun coming up. Love is driving a friend a few blocks because he’s lazy and you both know it. Love is going running with people in the morning when everyone else is asleep or at night when everyone else is asleep. Love is finding a brother in mind and spirit that you never expected. Love is dancing in class. Love is singing in the streets. Love is letting you know that I love you. Love is listening.

     In a sentence, for me and I think for everyone, love is…

     …well, Don knows my answer. But I’m not happy with it. When it’s in a sentence, it’s just words strung together. I tried several times while writing this, but I just can’t bring myself to just say it. I’m not happy merely writing it here for you to read. I want to live it.

     But more and more importantly than that, I want you to live it with me. So ask me sometime. I’d be glad to hear your thoughts, and in the meantime we’ll keep dancing this crazy dance called Life.

TLH
Kung

Top 25 Majors at UIUC by Enrollment

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     I recently found out about the Division of Management Information after calling the admissions office and decided to hunt around and see what kind of data I could pull up. As it turns out, you can grab the enrollment numbers by major quite handily, which is what I was looking for. Just for fun, here are the top 25 majors at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign for Spring 2010, graduate and undergraduate combined:

RANK	Code		Major				# Enrolled
1	NONE		Undeclared 	  		2574
2	BSLAS 		Psychology 	  		1210
3	BSLAS 		MCB			 	901
4	BS 		Electrical Engineering 		890
5	BS 		Accountancy 	  		843
6	BALAS 		Political Science 	  	792
7	NONE 		Curric Unassigned 	  	781
8	BS	 	Civil Engineering 	  	724
9	BS 		Mechanical Engineering 	  	705
10	BS 		Computer Science 	  	659
11	JD 		Law 	  			602
12	BALAS 		Communication 		  	587
13	BALAS 		Economics 	  		586
14	NONE 		Biology 	 		584
15	BALAS 		English 	 		582
16	BS 		Kinesiology 	  		520
17	BS 		Architectural Studies 	  	513
18	BS 		Finance 	  		505
19	BS 		Advertising 	  		499
20	DVM 		Veterinary Medicine 		453
21	BS 		Computer Engineering 	  	429
22	BS 		General Engineering 	 	428
23	BS 		Chemical Engineering 	 	415
24	BALAS 		History 	  		401
25	BALAS 		Sociology 	  		385

     I was somehow surprised by the fact that the highest number of students are undecided, and the #7 spot is taken up by “Curric Unassigned” which I assume is similar. Combine those and you have about 1/10th of the undergraduate student body deciding what they want to do.

     Also out of the blue in #11 is Law (JD). I didn’t know we had so many law students. Combined with Veterinary Sciences (DVM), about 1,000 enrolled students out of the top 25 majors are graduate students. Seeing as those 25 majors are comprised of 17,568 students, or a little under half of the entire enrolled population (40,038 students, grad and undergrad), that’s a pretty small fraction of the whole, but more than 1/10th of the graduate student population (9325).

     Here’s the data so you can poke around with the numbers yourself.

     And look, it’s just in time for Welcome Week!

     Have a good one, guys

Marketing With Social Media is Completely Different…Not.

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     This is something I wrote up to clear my head before attempting to develop a social media strategy for my internship at MōR Marketing.

     Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, reddit, YouTube…what do these have in common? They’re Social Media, and pundits say they have changed the rules entirely.

     Gary Vaynerchuk grew his business from the $5 million venture his father had founded to the $50 million name brand it is today using a combination of easily shared videos and a constant social media presence.

     Eight months ago, Dell announced that they’d made $6.5 million in sales from their twitter account, @DellOutlet.  Dell has a following of 1.5 million on Twitter alone, not counting its other social media ventures.

     This summer, I used Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook to connect with entrepreneurs in Urbana, Chicago, and Los Angeles to arrange informational interviews.  What I learned during those meetings may not have had cash value, but what I learned was priceless.  Without social media, I may have never had a chance to talk to them, Dell would have missed out on a sizeable profit, and none of us would have ever heard of Gary Vaynerchuk.  Like I said, everything is different with social media.

     Or is it?

     Let’s take a look.  Social media allows people to connect more quickly, to specific people, in an authentic manner.

QUICK

     OKCupid is a dating site mostly run by Harvard trained mathematicians; stats geeks whose sole job is to improve the matchmaking capabilities of their website.  Members can view photos, search for potential mates and sort by personality, and message as many other members as their hearts desire.  Members can very quickly assess what kind of person they’re looking at through their photos, profile, and personality matching questions.  The best part? There’s no entry to getting an account because it’s free.

SPECIFIC

     Google revolutionized search, but today, search is taken for granted – every website worth its salt has search and filters to narrow down specifically to your interests.  Twitter is known for its usefulness as a publishing platform, but its secondary, less obvious function, is that it is a handy site to search for interesting topics and for the people who are talking about them.  If you want to know the latest news in any subject, there is almost certainly someone talking about it on twitter.

AUTHENTIC

     Shaquille O’Neal goes by the moniker @THE_REAL_SHAQ on Twitter, and is followed by over 3 million people.  What’s more remarkable is that he actively engages with the twitter community.  In public he has been known to update his twitter and call for members to “show themselves” when he “senses the twitterdom nearby.” In one case, he met up with two fans who updated their twitter upon seeing him in a restaurant.  In another, he gave out free basketball game tickets to the first twitter users to physically touch him.  With so many conversations going on with so many people, it is impossible to be anything but authentic.

     But more than just having to be authentic, social media allows people to be authentic effortlessly, to respond to individuals, and to build trust.  And that’s what it all comes down to.

     Not social media.  Business.

IT’S ALL ABOUT TRUST

     We trust Ford to build tough, quality vehicles.  We trust Apple to build the most detail oriented devices in the world.  We trust Google to organize the world’s information.  That’s why we buy Ford, that’s why we buy Apple, and that’s why Google is the number one search engine in the world.

     When it comes down to it, social media doesn’t change business all that much. What it does, and does very well, is help find who is worthy of our trust quickly, specifically, and authentically.

Brain Workshop

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     I just started exercising my brain using dual n back mental exercises. It’s REALLY tough, to the point where I don’t even want to do it. I haven’t quite gotten into the groove where difficult = fun…yet. I’m on the cusp, though. I have to take a break before that happens.

     Anyway, for the skeptics out there, here’s the Wired article on dual n back (dnb) exercises:

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/04/smart_software

     And here’s the game I’m using to train:

http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/

     Anybody know any way that I can measure my “working memory” or “fluid intelligence” so that I can start benchmarking? That way I can let you know if there are any actual results from this exercise.

Hosting, WordPress, PHP, Oh MySQL!

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Just finished messing with the back end of this enough to be (just barely) acceptable.

AHEM!

Dear Sir or Madame,

Congratulations on discovering Call Me Kung, guaranteed to be the Kungiest site on the internet. Here, you will find a great deal of nothing for month- or even year-long stretches at a time, followed by a frenzy of activity for a short time, and then another long stretch of boring inactivity punctuated only by the occasional short, yawn-worthy posts that could very well have just been twitter updates.

I’m a bit inconsistent.

Best,
Kung