Every night (almost) I exercise while watching a video. Here’s how things shaped up during 1Q11:
days 90 exercised 86 (96%) skipped 4 total exercise: 2 days, 19 hrs, 25 min avg daily exercise: 44.9 min/day avg. wt. recorded: 214.23, 13 records
It’s kind of amazing to think I’ve spent almost three days exercising. Notice too that, out of 86 days in which I recorded my exercise, I chose to record my weight only 13 times. If you think that speaks volumes, well, shut up.
About half the houses in my neighborhood are empty. Well, it’s actually more like 20%, but it seems like half. So what could make owning a home in Yucca Valley even less appealing?
A zombie apocalypse? No, that’s so 2010.
Roving packs of bloodthirsty hyenas? Nah!
I know! How about a nice dose of Xylella fastidiosa? That’s the ticket!
You start with oleander shrubbery that looks like this:
Then you give them the infection. That will give you bushes that look like this:
Now repeat about 30 or 40 times, all around your backyard:
There’s no such thing as a brief internet outage! What did people do with their time 20 years ago?
Ours lasted from sometime last night until late this evening, and it was caused by the stupid way our ISP does tech support. They aren’t bad, they just won’t be reasonable, unless you know the secret word. Which I do–it’s “shibboleet“–but I wasn’t home all day.
Anyway, it turns out the problem was that the “modem” reset itself to factory defaults and quit working, because the factory defaults are incompatible with the network. Very clever of the ISP to design their firmware that way, don’t you think?
Well this stinks: “Existing home sales tumble 9.6%.” And you’ll never guess what kind of news this is:
“The report was worse than economists had expected.” A whole lot of bad news has snuck up on economists over the past couple of years. It’s almost like they can’t see what everyone else is pretty clear about.
This is pretty much how I feel, too, especially the final thought:
Motorola and Samsung…they’re both large companies with a lot of buying power and strong brand recognition. The problem is, they don’t understand the game that Apple’s playing in the mobile space, so they’re playing it wrong. They’re so caught up in catching up that they’re not even trying to innovate in this space. Maybe HP or Rim will figure it out, but I’m not going to hold my breath.
Which is unfortunate. If Apple’s doing this kind of amazing stuff without any viable competition, can you imagine what they’d be doing with strong, viable competitors nipping at their heels?
I’ve been struck by how much better Apple products are than their competitors. Who, honestly, would pick a Dell or an HP laptop over a MacBook? And that’s the space where Apple is least advantaged and has a clear premium price.
In other markets (music players and phones) the Apple “premium” is much less clear. For tablets, it’s negative: the superior product is actually less expensive.
Why is this so hard? Surely there are smart, design-oriented marketing people out there who don’t work at Apple. Why don’t some of these hapless technology companies turn them loose. I’ve worked at some of those companies, and, sure, the engineers need firm direction to produce something that doesn’t stink. But why can’t people look at Apple and say, “Let’s try it that way for a change, instead of continuing to flounder like we’ve always done?”
For Valentine’s Day I was given a cookbook called the Indian Slow Cooker, by Anupy Singh. We’ve only eaten two things from it so far, but, wow! they were awesome. The first meal was Punjabi Curried Kidney Beans, and the second was Goan Black-Eyed Peas. Oh. My. goodness. Totally awesome.
I’m doing this project in 2011, where I try to re-acquire some of the Hebrew I’ve forgotten in the five years since seminary. This morning, I translated some narrative (the easiest kind) and I got through four whole verses in just thirty minutes. (Yay!) I had to guess at about half the word endings (is that feminine? maybe it’s first-person plural?) but I only had to punt on 3 verbs. I’ll look them up later.
Tonight’s movie was Follow Me, Boys! from Disney. Being a Disney movie of a certain age, it therefore stars Fred MacMurray and, not so much, Kurt Russell. I was amazed to see it also featured Lillian Gish. She was only 22 when she appeared in Birth of a Nation, so it’s not like she was ancient in 1966, when this movie appeared, but, still … Lilian Gish!!
The movie itself was like watching It’s a Wonderful Life, only not nearly so hard on the protagonist. Like Jimmy Stewart, he never got to do what he always wanted, but unlike him, he learned better all along the way instead of all at the end. And he had plenty of rewards at the end, too. The plot didn’t have an arc so much as a train with lots of individual box cars, to the point when you began to wonder if there would ever be a caboose.
My favorite line: “Oh, the Troop Committee? They’ll gum everything up!”
In (of all things) a discussion of last night’s SOTU address, Megan McArdle describes listening to CEOs talk to financial analysts on earnings calls. I never used to do that; all the times I’ve heard CEOs talk to me it was because I was one of their underlings. But one thing certainly seems to be the same, no matter whom the CEO is talking to:
The absolute favorite tactic, however, is the management reorganization. You may be in a saturated market where your second-rate franchisees are slowly destroying your brand, making it impossible to attract higher-quality franchisees . . . but that’s nothing that can’t be fixed by creating a new Chief Strategy Officer under the CEO, and giving that officer oversight of marketing, research, and HR. Perhaps a much larger competitor whose cost structure allows them to undercut your prices by 32% has entered your niche, but can they really withstand the fearsome might of your ISO 9000 certification and your new cross-functional product teams? The government regulators who just outlawed your three top-selling products and made two-thirds of your capital plant obsolete may be powerful–but not as powerful as your revolutionary sales force compensation scheme!