Like many people, I find it irritating whenever I hear meaningless business phrases used over and over again. You know, things like:

1. We should leverage the engineering team for this project.
2. Can we gain any synergies by doing this?
3. We don’t have the bandwidth on our team to take this on.
4. Let’s discuss this offline (as in not in the current meeting).

Meaningless business jargon is so commonplace in daily corporate life that someone created Business Buzzword Bingo a while back — a fun game to play while sitting in meetings.

I recently heard a new term which a quick internet search reveals isn’t apparently all that new: “bad optics”. I saw this in some meeting notes that were being sent around, and I chuckled at the time, thinking whoever took the notes either misunderstood what was being said (perhaps “OpEx”, often short for “Operating Expenses”, or “Operational Excellence”) or had an overly aggressive spell checker.
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I don’t think this is new, but it’s still worth taking 5 min. to watch and definitely will make you smile :)

The org behind this is called the Playing for Change Foundation and its goal is to build and connect music/art schools around the world. Pretty inspiring.

We’re a few weeks into seriously starting to look at the Bay Area housing market (as in actually going to open houses and going on trips with our real estate agent to get to know neighborhoods).

Although we’re starting to get a bit more accustomed to prices of houses in the area, I still can’t get my head around the idea that a basic 3bd/2ba house will likely cost nearly $1M. These are houses that would run in the low hundred thousands anywhere else, let alone in Tennessee, where I spent most of my childhood.

We’re basically looking for a solid house that will retain (or possibly even appreciate) in value over time and that doesn’t involve an unreasonable commute time to my work; nothing fancy, and we don’t even care if it’s new, although not having to cross the Bay every day would be nice.

Here’s what I’ve been able to pick up so far from our trips:
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