New word of the week

PayPal is just chock-full of interesting vocabulary. Today's literary revelation comes from a senior editor:

"Uncomfortabilitiness."

As in, "A robotic-sounding status message could really add to the user's uncomfortabilitiness."

An innocent mistake

Oh this was fun. There's been a long email thread about some feature requirements for an in-progress project, and a new technical product manager (TPM) was just added to the fray. In one of his first responses, he quoted & agreed with something I had said and referred to me as "her." He's never seen or heard of me before, so I guess the "ele" at the end of my name could be seen as a feminine "-elle" by someone who didn't know better, but for some reason I found it exceedingly comedic. I was actually sharing the fun with a co-worker when my phone rang. Who showed up on the caller ID? Why, if it wasn't that same TPM. I tried my best to go straight-faced, and when I picked up the phone, I mustered up the deepest voice I possibly could, and answered, "This is Bamidele..." The silence that followed on the other end was priceless.

I know, I'm mean. It was just too good to pass up.

Blast from the Past

Today PayPal successfully brought back a UI designer who had gone off to work at Yahoo for a bit shy of a year. He used to be on the team I'm now on, and he stopped by to chat it up with folks, vets and newbies alike. In talking with me privately for a short stint, he noted that I had built up a solid reputation at the company.

Huh??

Many thanks but, do I know you? I know you can't know me. What's goin on here...

Yo JANG, what've you been up to?

What do you mean what have I been up to? You follow my blog don't you? Oh, I haven't written anything lately? Oh. I can see how that could be a problem. Sorry about that. Well, I think a better question would be, what have I not been up to lately? Alright smartaleck, blogging is an easy one. Too easy. Can we move on now? Thank you.

Work has continued to be "challenging," but I'm changing gears in that realm and continuing to try to find or make an area where I can be fully effective at making the PayPal site/application look & function better for its users (against all odds). I continued to be courted hard by recruiters, though, so I'm not too concerned about things not working out in the end. Regardless, I'm going to continue to do my best to make sure it does work out.

On my RC sites I've been pushing forward as hard as ever, nearly completing the migration of a site I bought about 1 1/2 years ago to its new and better home beside my own creations. I've also been getting back into my projects as well as pushing forward on reviews and videos on which I've remained way behind schedule. I've even finally gotten my feet wet with RC helicopters, something I've been planning to try for several years now.

I'm still driving the Ralliart hard while waiting for the Evo X to come out. No complaints yet, though my left knee is getting a little tired of using a manual tranny on the daily commute. Speaking of driving, yesterday I went back out to my favorite road in Marin County, only this time I only hit it at 50-70% since I had a passenger. I stopped at the halfway point and took a few new photos, to boot.

Oh, and those of you who check out my MySpace page may have noticed that my status recently changed from "single" to something else...

Don't tell anyone but...

At this very moment, one of my coworkers is watching The Bachelor instead of finishing an IPP report...