Boo for me! Yay! for Massachusetts
Today my first Amazon order with sales tax. Too bad for me, but good for our state!
Blog Posts
All my blog posts and articles
November 2013
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2013-11-06
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2013-11-03
(De) bunking some myths about those $1b startups
I want to direct your attention ton interesting article about $1 Billion Startups – “Unicorns” – on TechCrunch today. Some myths debunked and others confirmed:
So, we wondered, as we’re a year into our new fund (which doesn’t need to back billion-dollar companies to succeed, but hey, we like to learn): how likely is it for a startup to achieve a billion-dollar valuation? Is there anything we can learn from the mega hits of the past decade, like Facebook, LinkedIn and Workday? (from: Welcome To The Unicorn Club: Learning From Billion-Dollar Startups | TechCrunch🙂
October 2013
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2013-10-28
Do it for free!
Read more →Tim Kreider’s essay could apply as easily to all those people who complain that an iPhone app is not free, or is so so expensive at $5.99. Not too long ago a piece of software would get $99 or $495. Makes you wonder how long Adobe can keep on charging through the nose for Photoshop and Illustrator. Anyway, here’s a bit of the article:
“People who would consider it a bizarre breach of conduct to expect anyone to give them a haircut or a can of soda at no cost will ask you, with a straight face and a clear conscience, whether you wouldn’t be willing to write an essay or draw an illustration for them for nothing. They often start by telling you how much they admire your work, although not enou...
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2013-10-25
[FUNNY] Congress investigates problems with healthcare.gove
Really, this is NO JOKING MATTER
Rep. Upton said that “looking serious and nodding our heads a lot” contributed to the illusion that committee members had even scant comprehension of what was being discussed. “At the end of the day, a lot of it came down to not asking the questions you really wanted to ask,” he said. “Like, ‘What exactly is a Web site?’” (from Congress Spends Several Hours Pretending to Understand Internet : The New Yorker)
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2013-10-23
The Apple Store: Fascinating look behind the scenes
This was a fun read with lots of cool insights. If your blood pressure surges and adrenalin courses through your veins as you approach the big white electronic temple then read on. Here’s an excerpt from: Retail Therapy: Inside the Apple Store:
Let’s explore Loss Prevention. Theft hurts profit. Theft matters more with portable items of great value, like say a laptop, or a smartphone, or high-end speakers. Multiply that value by how many different models and spare parts an Apple store needs to keep in stock, and you have a few million dollars of goods on hand. Scale up more if it’s a big flagship store. That warrants not only video cameras and bag searches of employees, but armed professionals. Apple stores have the equivalent of undercover Federal Air Marshals on hand, like my friend Brock.
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2013-10-21
Gripping story of restaurant
Who knew that a story about behind-the-scenes of a big restaurant could be gripping, but this one is. I guess it’s a combination of a fascinating operation with outstanding writing. Check it out.
22 Hours in Balthazar – NYTimes.com:
Produce comes in, too — 50-pound cases of russets from Idaho stacked head high and six deep; spinach, asparagus, celery, mushrooms, tomatoes — as do dry goods, dairy and some 500 pounds of insanely expensive peanut oil for the French fries. The restaurant employs six stewards to deal with deliveries and storage alone; they weigh goods and check them against invoices, putting everything in its proper place, keeping the Health Department happy. At a typical restaurant, as much as one-third of the overhead goes to food costs, and so efficiency is an imperative. “Monday, you’ll see,” Kelvin Arias, the head steward, tells me, “all the walk-ins will be empty.”
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2013-10-19
More about GreenGoose and the Brush Monkey
Read more →Amazing story of a great looking product, and awesome demo, on the spot investment of $100,000 and still… It didn’t work. The story was told by Scott Kirsner in the Boston Globe:
“Today, GreenGoose is out of business, and Krejcarek is grappling with $80,000 in credit card debt — his approach to funding the company after investors’ money ran out earlier this year. When he says, “I’m trying to scrape together spare change to buy gasoline,” it’s hard to tell if he’s kidding.” (from The Boston Globe)
You have to admire that the founder of Green Goose (Brian Krejcarek) was...
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2013-10-19
Amazon reminds me of Raiders of the Lost Ark
The only difference is that Amazon seems to know exactly every little item is in this crazy warehouse. Look here for a bunch more amazing pictures!
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2013-10-07
Bizarro News from Fox
Fox News debuts bizarre, giant tablets in its outrageous new newsroom | The Verge:
Fox News has just unveiled a breathtakingly ridiculous newsroom, complete with novelty-sized Windows-based touchscreens, a Twitter wall, and a wannabe Minority Report-style display, which it hopes will connect it with generations of viewers who use smartphones and apps.
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2013-10-07
Scary Tongue
[
](Y.Squarespace.Utils.lightboxAsset()Here’s how folks in Canada are convinced not to buy cigarettes. This is a box of cigarettes that I happened across in an airport in Canada. Pretty gross. yes, I am convinced! -
2013-10-05
Fascinating article about the technology behind Healthcare.gov
Read more →Pretty amazing that the govt is actually placing all the code for healthcare.gov on github for all of us to inspect. There’s only one commit, and it’s 3 months old. Also there’s a reasonable amount of developer information available.
Somehow I suspect that it is not all there or how fast it will be updated, but still whatever’s there is a big step forward from the SOP of the past!
...
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2013-10-01
Interesting behind-the-scenes look at NSA
Zegart joins scholars at NSA for rare briefing on spy agency’s woes – CISAC:
CISAC Co-Director Amy Zegart and nine other national security and intelligence scholars were recently invited to the headquarters of the National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Md., for unprecedented talks with high-ranking officials. They discussed cybersecurity, the plummeting public trust in the agency, its relationship with Congress and how to rebuild the agency’s reputation and rethink its program operations.
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2013-10-01
I wouldn’t put it past them
Read more →How much do you want to bet that somewhere someone in this country a malware or other attack is being launched against the new “Obamacare” Web site?
I have great sympathy for the team(s) that put up that web site, back end and other support infrastructure for this site. And in the best of possible conditions there will be hiccups in deploying such a complex system. Add to that that at 8:00am today everyone on earth knew that the site was up and that they could start playing with it, and you are facing a real challenge. So don’t be surprised if there’s a small or big hiccup in the first few weeks and months.
But it occurred to me that over and above that, there ...
September 2013
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2013-09-25
[security] Fascinating ID Theft saga
It is quite amazing (but not surprising) the degree of sophistication, care, and patience these hackers apply. Their engineering and business savvy are at the same level as the best of Google and Amazon.
Data Broker Giants Hacked by ID Theft Service — Krebs on Security:
An identity theft service that sells Social Security numbers, birth records, credit and background reports on millions of Americans has infiltrated computers at some of America’s largest consumer and business data aggregators, according to a seven-month investigation by KrebsOnSecurity.
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2013-09-24
[teaching] A student’s perspective on course selection
Read more →I stumbled across this article while waiting for a meeting to start. It is a bit “inside baseball”, in this case “inside brandeis” but it was revealing to me at least. Students can “shop” for courses for the first two weeks of the term, attending classes and adding and dropping at will during that time as they settle for their choices. I guess when I went to college they had that too, but I wasn’t aware of how it worked, so I never did it.
It makes for odd dynamics in the class room as for the first two weeks you don’t really know who to expect to see, who will show up next time, and whether they are keeping up or not. This writer does not seem to be enjoying his college experience as much ...
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2013-09-20
30 Year TV Show
I just saw that the final “Season” of Mad Men will be delivered in two mini-seasons, 7 episdodes in 2014 and 7 more in 2015. I had this idea for a TV show that has not been done yet.
Just like the contrivance of 24 hours is that it occurred over a 24 hour period, in real time, my show, called 30 Years, occurs over a 30 year time span, in real time, with the same actors. Here’s how it works.
We commit to 30 years (calendar years) of seasons, with 4 epiisodes each. The actors start out in year 1, and the same ones, appear year after year, so you actually see them aging and the world changing around them. It’s one cogent story line which is determined up front, but it runs for 30 actual years, 4 episodes at a time.
(c) Pito Salas, 2014. Patent Pending.
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2013-09-17
Engraving an iPhone knocks $25 off resale value
Good news: I looked up what the trade-in value is for my iPhone 4S 32Gig. Much to my pleasant surprise, it’s $195. Almost enough to pay for my new iPhone 5S!
Bad news: If I hadn’t stupidly engraved it, the trade-in price would be $220.
Word to the wise: Don’t engrave.
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2013-09-13
Theory and Practice
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. Yogi Berra
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2013-09-12
Looks like a fun book: “Cockpit Confidential”
The Many Mysteries of Air Travel – NYTimes.com:
If you’d like the answers, I highly recommend Patrick Smith’s new book, “Cockpit Confidential.” Mr. Smith is a pilot and blogger; much of the book’s format and contents are on display at his Web site, AskThePilot.com, or in the archives of the “Ask the Pilot” column he wrote for Salon.com for years.
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2013-09-09
Gender Equity at Harvard: great article
Harvard Business School Case Study – Gender Equity – NYTimes.com:
The administrators and the class of 2013 were parting ways, their experiment continuing. The deans vowed to carry on but could not say how aggressively: whether they were willing to revise the tenure process to attract more female contenders, or allow only firms that hired and promoted female candidates to recruit on campus. “We made progress on the first-level things, but what it’s permitting us to do is see, holy cow, how deep-seated the rest of this is,” Ms. Frei said.