Damn, I go away on vacation for a single day and my inboxes are flooded. Catching up sucks.
Finally, for those who don’t know what gmail is, take a gander at gmail.google.com. Basically, it kicks the crap out of yahoo/hotmail/etc.
I still have 6 invites left.
Ok, I still have 6 gmail invites left to give.
To the random internet people leaving comments in my blog requesting an invite: I have no idea who you are. So if you want an invite, you must reciprocate by entertaining me. Tell me who you are and how you found my blog. Did you just google for “gmail invite” or what?
WTF is going on? I’ve gotten three separate emails from three separate groups of friends today about the beer drinking bear. It was also posted to a newsgroup that I read. The article was mildly amusing, but not terribly so. I’m amazed at how quickly and at how widely this story has been disseminated on the internet.
Did I miss something? Are beer drinking bears really that funny?
Not every Elvis movie is as good as Bubba Ho-Tep.
Anyone else notice that this basically Point Break but using Elvis as a disguise rather than former presidents? Courtney Cox’s voice and physical appearance are remarkably similar to Lori Petty, and Kurt Russell starred in both. Creepy.
Update: Kurt Russell didn’t star in Point Break, it was Patrick Swayze. In my defense, they do look very similar. Thanks to Jake for pointing that out.
The water problem in the west isn’t going away. It’s especially bad in Denver.
This is one of those problems whose only solution is more or less unacceptable to about 99% of the population, and that is to stop population growth dead in its tracks. That sort of proposal would never pass amongst the constituency.
The only other solution is to avoid having children and hope that you are dead by the time that the situation becomes urgent. That’s the path I plan on taking.
Life is depressing sometimes.
Today’s corporate strategy lesson is an excerpt of a post I made on an internal discussion forum concerning senior management’s globe-trotting to meet with customers. The contention was that if the regular employee’s are under all sorts of cost-cutting measures, such as travel restrictions, then why do the senior VP’s and CxO’s get to fly around the world in their $30 million jets and visit with customers?
Customers *want* to be schmoozed. If I were about to buy $500 million of equipment from any company, I’d be ecstatic if the CEO flew out to personally thank me for my business and show me that he or she cares about my company too.
As much as the marketing folks try to differentiate, our servers and IBM servers aren’t *that* different in features. Sure, IBM has a better virtualization implementation than us (HP) right now, but we have better storage, etc. In other words, there is — more or less — feature parity between the large server companies.
At that level of commitment (a couple hundred $million and above), you’re *not* going to get that sale based on features alone. You’re no longer purchasing a box; you’re looking to form a relationship with your supplier. This is the equipment that will become the lifeblood of your company, so you want to damn well make sure that the product is good enough, but more importantly that the vendor will be there with fabulous customer support when the box breaks.
Since there is parity — more or less — in the solution stack, you are now shopping for a vendor that can prove to you that it has great customer support. If a VP or CEO is going to fly out to your site, you know that you’ve got the vendor’s attention. You know that if you have a problem, the vendor is going to dedicate itself to fixing the issue so that *your* business continues uninterrupted.
It bears repeating. In this context (couple hundred $million), executive stroking in the pre-sales stage is meant to assure you that you’ll have executive-level attention if there are any issues in the post-sale stage.
Someone else points out:
And the job of the CxO is to look the customer in the eye and tell them that HP will be there for them now and in the future, especially when they have problems (because there will *always* be problems).
So if you’re a company peon and you’re wondering why the upper management is always travelling around and schmoozing with the customers, there’s your explanation. It’s part of their job description, along with creating budgets, deciding which markets to enter, and allocating resources for various products. A senior VP is also a glorified sales rep.
It’s also why — if you’re an engineer and aspire to be senior management some day — you’d better get some people skills. Like it or not, your raw intellect alone is not enough for you to be a good senior executive. If you’re a brilliant analyst or strategist but you can’t talk to a customer, you may as well give up hope of becoming a true company leader right now.
Incidentally, this is why a good company has two parallel career ladders. More on this tomorrow.
A San Francisco trio filmed a fake beheading “as an experiment to find out how quickly erroneous information could be spread by the Internet.”
Apparently, the answer is: pretty damn fast.
They injected the film into the kazaa network where it smoldered for a bit until it was picked up by an Arabic website. From there, the Associate Press and Reuters picked it up and without verifying any facts, proclaimed that yet another American had been beheaded in Iraq.
Sloppy journalism knows no borders it seems. I’m not surprised that some janky Arabic propaganda “news” site posted the clip without bothering to find out if it was real or not, but that both the AP and Reuters just accepted some random story out of a questionable site is somewhat disappointing. Maybe I’m too idealistic and naive, but I expect a news source to be primarily focused on providing news to me as opposed to selling advertisement space and winning ratings for itself. Silly me.
The other very disturbing aspect of the SFGate article is the quote from FBI spokesperson LaRae Quy. Apparently, the FBI decided it needed to investigate the trio, for what, I don’t know.
“It’s a very unusual situation,” Quy said. “It may come down to freedom of speech, and we’ll defer to the U.S. attorney’s office here on that. The question is: At what point does he step from freedom of expression into something that makes a mockery out of the pain suffered by families that have had beheadings of loved ones?”
Hey FBI guys — he took that step as soon as he pressed the little “record” button on his camcorder. Guess what? That’s the WHOLE FUCKING POINT of the 1st Amendment. Last I heard, offending people was not a constitutional offense.
Martin and Kirchner expressed regret for any harm caused by their hoax. “If any families, such as the families of Daniel Pearl or Nicholas Berg have been caused undue stress, we apologize,” said Kirchner. “It’s not our fault. It’s the media that made this real. This was intended to be a ridiculous little parody.”
Exactly.
David over at Mind Poison points to a Reason article on fat. (btw, if you’re not reading his blog, you should because it’s way better than mine)
He’s right, the Jacob Sullum’s War on Fat is great. Sullum completely and totally dismantles Kelly Brownell’s agenda in an intelligent and thoughtful manner.
As for myself, I could only think that Brownell and his colleagues represent all that’s wrong with America. Repeat after me kids, the government’s job does not include social tinkering. The mentality that we need the government to protect us from our own poor decision making skills and lack of self-discipline sickens me.
Look, *everyone* wants to eat the finest meats and cheeses in all the land all the time. I know a thing or two about binge eating — I’ve participated in the Wendy’s Challenge. But I also know that if I don’t want to become a fat fuck, I have to exercise (har har) some self-control for the majority of the time and eat somewhat healthy. There’s also that whole getting off my ass and exerting some physical effort once in a while.
Why is this concept so hard for people to understand? If you want to live longer without suffering from some crappy disease like diabetes or getting a heart attack, make it a goddamn priority in your life. Don’t just throw up your hands and cry boo hoo, McDonald’s is so convenient and I don’t have time to exercise.
Insight: you can’t just passively become healthy. Health is not just avoiding certain bad inputs like carcinogens and fatty foods and whatever else. You also have to actively do stuff to maintain your body. Go fucking figure.
People who die from being unfit deserve it. Harsh, but true. It happens in nature all the time. Kelly Brownell should go rub a Big Mac all over the barrel of a shotgun and pull the trigger while he’s greedily licking the special sauce off so as not to pollute our gene and meme pool with his garbage.
Ugh.
It’s Friday and my brain isn’t working well enough to create my own content, so I’ll resort to pointing out how funny and creative other people are, namely, the staff at the Onion, and Dan Savage.
Firstly, CIA Asks Bush to Discontinue Blog. Classic.
Bush said he could not understand McLaughlin’s anger, characterizing his blog as a “personal thing written for friends and family or whoever” and therefore “none of the CIA’s business.”
The other bit of Friday humor comes from Dan Savage, a syndicated love columnist. He writes:
I’ve never actually seen an extremely beautiful goth girl myself—most of them seem to have weight problems, which has always struck me as strangely contradictory. From the neck up, the look cultivated by goth girls seems to say, “O, we despair of this world and long for the sweet embrace of death!” From the neck down, their look seems to say, “I’ll take the bacon cheeseburger, two orders of fries, and a Diet Coke, please.”
Yeah, I don’t get the goths either.