News Travels Fast Fred’s post was Day 1 of the currently-seems-silly TSA ban on liquids on airplanes. One day later, today, I had the pleasure of traveling from Idaho Falls to Boise and back (one metropolis to the next!), and I noticed almost no difference in security and passenger behavior at either airport. Most people in line zinged out one bit of sarcastic resignation after the next about the silliness of banning all liquids. My favorite was “next thing you know, we’re going to have to travel naked” — yikes — YIKES! — but as terrorists find new and exciting ways to terrorize us, and as our now-nationalized airport security staff doesn’t seem to understand the phrases “anticipation” or “long-term…
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Current Affairs
Maybe I Should Shave My Beard
Maybe I Should Shave My Beard I just couldn’t resist. I’d apologize to Mel if he weren’t such a jackass. Not that I don’t love the Lethal Weapons and other fine films, mind you. But if anything in the last four years has nudged me towards shaving my beard, or at least keeping it neat and trim, it’s this stark comparison: <g>
Social Computing: An Amusing Anecdote About Who is Participating
Social Computing: An Amusing Anecdote About Who is Participating We learned something about Wikipedia tonight. Mariquita was reading an article on Castro on CNN.com entitled “Castro Blames Stress on Surgery” about his upcoming intestinal surgery. [Quick detour — I’m sorry, Castro blames the surgery on stress? Isn’t it good to be the king? And he’s handing the reins of government over to his oh-so-younger brother Raul, at the tender young age of 75?] Anyway, we were debating over whether Castro took over the government of Cuba in 1957 or 1959, so of course we turned to Wikipedia. Ok, so Mariquita was right, it was 1959. But more important, we learned something interesting about Wikipedia and its users. There were three…
9/11 Redux: Deja Senti
9/11 Redux: Deja Senti I’m not sure if Deja Senti is a real phrase in French, but it should be. It’s at least the grammatical, if not idiomatic equivalent of Deja Vu, but for smells (literally “already smelled”). That’s what it felt like coming home to Tribeca last night, after yesterday’s horrendous fire that destroyed seven abandoned warehouses in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, right across the East River from downtown. It smelled just like it did on 9/11 and for three months afterward while Ground Zero’s rubble and oil tanks were still smoldering and spewing out a constant acrid smell across downtown. There are some kinds of Deja Senti that are quite pleasant — baking bread, campfires, fresh cut grass, even Elmer’s…
Doing Well By Doing Good, Part III
Doing Well By Doing Good, Part III In Part I of this series, I blogged about my friend Raj Vinnakota and his amazing adventure starting the SEED School and Foundation in Washington, D.C. In Part II, I extended the conversation to some of the things we do at Return Path to help make the world a better place — even though our business model is less “inherently virtuous” than that of many other organizations, particularly non-profits. One thing we did last fall in the wake of the hurricane devastation on the Gulf Coast was pledge to send one or two groups down to New Orleans with Habitat for Humanity to assist in the recovery and reconstruction efforts, giving people the…
Buying Back Your Own Left Leg
Buying Back Your Own Left Leg There has been much written about the spectacular sale of Pixar to Disney for $7.4 billion this week. The fact that Steve Jobs is now Disney’s largest individual shareholder is amazing news on many levels. Fred has a great posting on this today from the investor perspective. Another angle that I find interesting about this transaction is that it reminds me to some extent of Yahoo’s purchase of Overture a couple years back. Yahoo OWNED the search business. For years. Invented it. Synonymous with it. Then they let others lap them they became more of a diversified online media company, and voila! Others focused, innovated, and created a massive business in paid search. Yahoo…
Four Balls or One Strike?
Four Balls or One Strike? In baseball, four balls is a walk. Today in New York, all it took was one strike, and lots of us were taking long walks – to work, from work, to dinner. Even though I’m a CEO and “management” and part of the establishment, I don’t have a systematic bias against organized labor or strikes. Sometimes, they’re entirely warranted. (Perhaps it helps that my mother-in-law is a senior exec at a major union – hi, Carmen.) Also, to be fair, I am not up close and personal on the issue of the transit strike here, so maybe I’m missing something. Those caveats aside, I have a limited amount of sympathy for the TWU and the…
Armistice Day
Armistice Day Back in May, writing about Decoration Day, I promised an exciting conclusion to the “forgotten past names of minor American holidays” series this week. I’m on vacation the rest of the week, so I’ll post today about Friday’s holiday, what we now call Veterans Day but what Grandma Hazel still periodically calls Armistice Day. Once again, Wikipedia to the rescue. Armistice Day is the anniversary of the official end of World War I, November 11, 1918. It commemorates the armistice signed between the Allies and Germany at Compiègne, France, for the cessation of hostilities on the Western Front, which took effect at eleven o’clock in the morning — the “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh…
Book Short: The Most Rapacious Guys in the Room
Book Short: The Most Rapacious Guys in the Room I just finished The Smartest Guys in the Room, by journalists Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind. This is the story of Enron, and what a tale it is! The book is a good quick business novel read. It reminded me a lot of Barbarians at the Gate, except that it made me far angrier. I’m not sure if that’s because I’m at a different place in my career now than I was 10 years ago and therefore have a different appreciation for what goes on in companies, or if the Enron guys were just far worse than anyone surrounding RJR Nabisco. But in any case, as my Grandpa Bill would have…
Decoration Day
Decoration Day Today, Memorial Day, is the day my Grandma Hazel always calls Decoration Day. That’s obviously a name that pre-dates me, so I thought I’d look it up today and figure out what it originally stood for and when the switch happened. According to Wikipedia, the holiday originally called Decoration Day was first observed in 1868 to honor fallen Union solidiers of the Civil War. As you can imagine, southern states didn’t really recognize the holiday until at least 50 years later, and many continue even today to have a separate Confederate Decoration Day (now Confederate Memorial Day or somewhat disturbingly Confederate Heroes Day in Texas) for years. After World War I, the day came to honor all American…
The Bush Dilemma
The Bush Dilemma I think I’ve finally articulated The Bush Dilemma that I am having as a moderate Republican with the upcoming election. Here was my dialog with Fred, an ardent but utterly rational Democrat, the other night at dinner. Matt: Kerry is clearly a much smarter person than Bush, but I tend to agree with Bush’s philosophy and positions on more issues than I do Kerry’s. Fred: If you agree with him on the top 10 issues, then you should vote for him. Matt: I agree with him on most of MY top 10 issues…but not on most of HIS top 10 issues. Fred: That’s a dilemma. I suspect many other moderate Republicans have this same dilemma. Whether they…