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Showing posts from December, 2009

Whirled Peas or a Really Cool Tablet?

Warner Crocker just posted his annual wishlist at GottaBeMobile.com. I am an inveterate wisher, so I made a comment to his post that I liked so much, I decided to just post it here too. Click the link above and see if anyone else added to the discussion. Here it is: Warner, Best wishes with your wishes. My grandfather used to say "Wish in one hand and %$#^ in the other and see which gets filled the quickest." For all of the absolutely horrible, unwanted products released into the wild, why can’t one company just give us what we have all been wishing for for over a decade? I read a statistic that 99% of all products released in Japan in a given year fail. What are these designers thinking? Do they test anything with real people? Do they read blogs? Do they even read their own support forums after they release a turkey? I think not… My perfect tablet would be big enough to simulate a piece of 8 1/2″ x 11″ paper, maybe fold in the middle for carrying and protection and be pretty

Rage against no machine

Where I am from, you don't send out Christmas cards with plain ol' stamps. You have to have Christmas stamps (or at least holiday stamps or something festive.) So, I bought some surplus Christmas stamps from my office and brought them home to put on our Christmas cards. But, wouldn't you know, we had 46 cards, and I only had 40 stamps, so we had to get more stamps. The reason that we didn't have any stamps in the first place is that the post office that my wife went to earlier did not have any stamp machines and the lines were too long to wait in. All of the stamp machines had all been pulled. This was the post office for our ZIP code, and it is not a particularly big post office, but I thought that was still kind of strange. In fact, this particular shopping center where the post office is located had one of the first stamp machine kiosks way back in the early 1960's, when you had to feed it a bunch of coins and then pull that big lever out and hope that the glass

Medicare, OxyContin and other addictions

Yesterday, during the steady rain that we endured while everyone else on the East Coast was getting buried with snow, I was sitting at my keyboard catching up on 'stuff'. The TV was on and I clicked away from Fox News just after the post-mortems on the Senate Health Care Reform cloture vote. Two channels down from FNC on DirecTV is Current, Al Gore's channel. There was a piece playing about Hillbilly Heroin , or OxyContin and the drug trade between Florida and middle America to supply this wildly addicting drug. This situation with 'OC' is very sad. Most of the people caught up with the addiction (and the illegal trade to feed it), by their own admission, did not want to get involved. But, like many things in life, crap occurs . In fact, the sherrif of the Kentucky county where the report was shot, said that everyone in his county was touched by OC in some way. No one was immune from the influence. Today, I watched Meet the Press and Fox News Sunday. As the question

The Biggest -ism of All

I am having a difficult time reconciling something... For the past several months, I have been following Tom Peters' blog at tompeters.com . I even post a few comments from time to time (if you can imagine that.) A recurring theme lately has been about health care in the US. Tom has a number of readers and posters from the UK. Many like the system that they have and they have posted anecdotes to support their feelings. Another recurring theme is that something needs to be done about health coverage in the US, that we are the only developed country in the world without some sort of full coverage and that we as a country are slackers for not doing so. The word socialism keeps cropping up. Tom made the following comment following a recent posting " The "horror of socialism" is a uniquely (?) American thing. We do allow a socialist military--though with our second ammendment, many of us are mini-militias. (I personally think that any Congressman who votes against some fo

No Skin in the Game

I just received a nice logo watch as a gift. I opened up the tiny, little booklet that came with it to see how to set it (nothing is easy anymore...) The little booklet turned out to be the 10 Year Warranty certificate. Here is what it says in a 2 pt font: "All timepieces carry a 10 year limited warranty against any original defect in materials and workmanship. (Warranty excludes: batteries, wear to crystal, strap, bracelet, crown or damages resulting from accident or abnormal use or from repairs made by others.)" Later on it continues: "Should your watch require servicing covered by the warranty, send to the following address... a check for $12.50 to cover handling, postage and insurance charges." Now, what are the odds that anyone would use this warranty? Or be able to find the postage stamp-sized 'brochure' in 2019 which will instruct them how to make it all happen? If your warranty is unusable, why even have one? I sure hope they don't require a pro

Watch your back, Audible!

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I was moving around my collection of 'stuff'' during the recent nor'easter after I discovered that a leak in one of the rooms in my house had saturated the carpet with water. I discovered this little box in perfect condition. It is a set of two cassette tapes containing an abridged Audiobook of Tom Peters' Liberation Management - Necessary Disorganization for the Nanosecond Nineties . It was read by the author, ca 1992. (I remember the nineties. They seemed to blow by in a nanosecond...) Even then, I had discovered that the quickest way for me to get through a book was to have someone read it to me. I have bought other books by Tom, and most recently, I have listened to his Audible reading of Re-imagine! Coming up from Tom in 2010 is his new book, The Little Big Things (163 Ways to Pursue Excellence.) He writes interesting books, talking more about enterprise than small business, but great food for thought, never-the-less.