Versions of the truth

I see a lot of sites. I make a lot of sites. I own a lot of sites. So when I see a site of note that I am impressed with I feel like passing it along. Today’s site of interest is twistori. It’s a mix of emotions, technology, and creativity. It lists messages run through twitter. The messages are ones that match a keyword - of which there are six: love, hate, think, believe, feel, and wish. The snippets scroll on by, actually up. It’s fun to watch. It looks like this:

Check it out!

Weird,
A neighbor rings the bell. I answer. He is holding a pie, wrapped in foil. “Is this yours?” he asks, “It was sitting on the trunk of your car.”
No, not my pie, nor do I have a clue who would leave a pie on my car. Is this pie for me? Hhhmm, I don’t think so. Think about it. If someone wanted to give me a pie, and got so close to the door, that they instead left it on the car - makes no sense.
I took the mystery pie from the neighbor and kept it inside over night. The agony! What to do?! Did someone leave me a gift? Is this someone else’s pie (left on my car on the night before Thanksgiving). What flavor is it? Can’t tell without driving a utensil into the pie, but then I could be accused of being a pie abuser. No thanks!
So the next morning, today, Thanksgiving, I put it back on my car around 6:00 am. It is now the afternoon and the pie is still there. I have to drive somewhere soon. What to do - put the pie on someone else’s car? It could be the car of the neighbor who rang the bell. I don’t know which car is his. What would he think if the pie he gave me ended up on his car. This is like musical chairs. Last person left holding the pie, what - has to eat it?

Yesterday, November 7, Joni Mitchell turned 65. Happy Birthday!

There are few musical artists that spin an influence over such a diverse group of - other artists. Joni is one of those golden few. With a career that has altered multiple genres - folk, pop, jazz, and endless variations of those, Joni just does her thing and we follow along, often in deep gratitude.

Although Joni is from Canada and has lived in various places, I never associated her earlier years as a folk musician with a bustling place like New York City. From the Clouds album is a song, Chelsea Morning. For years this tune would ring around my head but without a thought of the song’s history. Then one day I discovered the scenario of the song is looking through an apartment window in New York City’s Chelsea district.

With a line like “Woke up, it was a Chelsea morning, and the first thing that I saw
Was the sun through yellow curtains, and a rainbow on the wall” it seemed to be somewhere else. Chelsea is just another busy New York area of Manhattan.

Here is the story behind the song:
In a 1996 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Mitchell explained: “I wrote that in Philadelphia after some girls who worked in this club where I was playing found all this colored slag glass in an alley. We collected a lot of it and built these glass mobiles with copper wire and coat hangers. I took mine back to New York and put them in my window on West 16th Street in the Chelsea District. The sun would hit the mobile and send these moving colors all around the room. As a young girl, I found that to be a thing of beauty. There’s even a reference to the mobile in the song. It was a very young and lovely time… before I had a record deal. I think it’s a very sweet song, but I don’t think of it as part of my best work. To me, most of those early songs seem like the work of an ingenue.”
Story courtesy of SongFacts.

Bill and Hilary Clinton named their daughter after the song.

Hey, and that is just one song! From an artist who has written songs in the hundreds.
Your fans of long are aging with you but your art and music is as fresh as those days in the ’60s. Please don’t stop. We love you.

When helping my son with homework recently, we worked on a “real-life” problem. This has to do with efficient carton packing. The correct answer, to me, is the wrong answer. Here is the problem:
Marvel Models produces 53,716 model cars each month. They want to design shipping cartons that hold more than 3 but fewer than 10 models each. They want to pack each month’s cars in the cartons, with no cars left over. What are their choices.

OK, the lesson was on division and the goal was to arrive at a number, per carton, that would leave no remainder. The answer is 4: 53,716/4 = 13,429 cartons, with an even number of cars per carton and no remainder. The overall instructions surrounding the larger lesson on division was looking for divisors that would leave no remainder.

A carton can hold up to 9 models (more than 3 but less than 10). The optimal packing would be 5969 cartons. That is, 5968 with 9 models per carton, and one additional carton with 4 models.

So what in a real scenario is the logical choice - 13,429 cartons, or just 5,969? If your job was optimizing shipping and you used 7,460 unnecessary cartons, well I don’t think you would be getting a bonus that year, or even likely to keep your job.

I know school is meant to teach operational fundamentals, but when a question like this one is phrased as a real business problem, I find it hard to swallow that the “correct” answer is so obviously a “bad” answer. Just my little tiff for the day.

Dateline Sept. 2 2008. First day of sixth grade. Which means first day of middle school. The alarm clock didn’t go off! Shorts or long pants?! Lunch - who forgot the grapes??!!

And all this before 7:00 am.

7:15 am. At the school. Kids, cars, confusion. Buses, lots of them. Which door? That one, no that one. He’s in. It’s official. Our son is in. He did it. A sixth grader through and through. I can now collapse.

2:30 pick up time. Which door does he come out of. WHICH DOOR, YIKES. Kids are pouring out of two doors. I run to one, I run to the other. I run, I run, I, hey good thing I have my sneakers on.

There he is! He did it . We did it! Oh my, oh my, let’s celebrate. Ice cream of course.

Whew!

Yes, here it is 1:30 am. I have been noodling on the computer for too long. Why am I awake you ask? My cats, Ace and Jinx, keep me up. I nod off, and they get to work to wake me up. They have a method for this. Jinx is hungry. Ace is hungry. But Jinx just lounges about and tells Ace to wake me up. It is always Ace. He muzzles my face, and paws at me till I wake up.

But that is the cats’ behavior. There is no explanation for me - that after I give them some food I don’t go back to sleep. I noodle around first for a bit. But them, well, see for yourself!

A song by any other format is still a song!
My grandparents had 78s. My parents had 33s, at least they were onto Long Players when I was born. I remember when Satisfaction by the Stones was #1 and you could buy it on a 45. Back then my allowance went more to baseball cards.
But as time went on, I lived through many musical formats. I never bothered much with buying 45s, but my sister - she had a stack of them. At an appropriately pube age I bought my first L.P. - Axis: Bold As Love, by the then alive and kicking Jimi Hendrix and his superhero sidekicks, Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding, a.k.a. the Experience.
The record player, some had many, most had one. Built into a console, connected wire-wise to a stereo, didn’t matter, every household was in on it. Music rang out of every door, at least until the neighbors called the cops. The 1960s was going strong, right into the next decade.
Along the way the 8-track came and went, the cassette came and stayed. L.P. albums grew into more than just music, but a whole persona onto itself - which such culture smashers as the White Album (the Beatles),Tommy (the Who), Led Zeppelin, the Zep, with whichever of their hard to distinguish albums had Stairway to Heaven.
My defining moments in my L.P. life were getting that first Hendrix album, and years later borrowing Stage Fright from the Band from a friend, and holding it the wrong way (open side down -oops) as I walked home. The album slid right out of the jacket and broke when it hit the pavement; and I had to pony up five bucks or whatever to buy my friend a replacement.
Fast forward a decade or two - disco came and went, punk rock came and sat around, glamor rock came and went, cutesy British bands came and stayed or went. And through all this time we all amassed huge album collections. Some of us had thousands! You would need a circa 1968 Volkswagon minivan just to move them all.
Fast forward some more thanks to some real forward thinking tecno guys, the CD was born. What was this thing, little, light, no cover of any reasonable size?? And no scratches when you played it? How dare they improve the sound and ruin our culture!
And still I bought albums, and more albums, and more. But one day while in Sam Goody in Manhattan I saw the future written on the wall, well not the wall, it was the ration of CDs to albums. CDs had gained the majority. The LP was dead, long live the LP.
Over time I replaced most of my album collection with the equivalent CDs. Gone were the days of album cover art as a serious thing to put on the wall. And how much green did the music companies get out of me to make this replacement? I shudder to think what I shelled out.
And here we are, the fine year of 2008. MP3s have been around for years but like that moment in Sam Goody, I had de jevu last week at Best Buy. The CD Walkman I had for years had ceased all operations, shutting down for good. So what I thought, I’ll go buy another as I had several times over the years. In Best Buy, I saw the future written on the wall. No, not the wall here either, the ratio. Along a large aisle of portable music devices - meaning this was MP3 player city, was one last lonely CD Walkman. Just one model, and just one of it. I was crushed. I have been into digital file based music for years, but my huge album collection of the past century had become my huge CD collection. Smacked in the head again. I better not buy another CD. The CD is dead, long live the CD. And as I think of the MP3, which isn’t even a tangible thing, I hear Roger Daltrey’s voice ringing out from the Who’s Next album: meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

I remember going to Seattle a long time ago and seeing a cute local coffee shop. Good coffee too. Spring ahead to today and you have a conglomerate struggling in a faltering economy. How much of a need is gourmet coffee? Oh yeah there is also is that Starbucks experience. Buy the coffee, buy a muffin, resist the point of sale to purchase a CD of the Greatest Hits of the Police; or whatever is being pawned this week. Take your caffeine fix and sit down a table. Tables! there’s an interesting concept for a food establishment. Really!

Coffee, muffins, chairs, tables - the Starbucks experience, which interestingly enough we get to experience at non-Starbucks establishments. Well they sure got the lock on that one. I can go into Dunkin Donuts, follow the same steps and have a Starbucks experience in Dunkin Donuts. This is amazing!

My gotcha Starbucks experience is how they have the nerve to offer three sizes named Large, Grande, and Venti. Only a wimp would ask for something smaller than Large, which is their version of small anyway. How much caffeine must flow out of a Starbucks establishment. How many people become caffeine addicts while enjoying the Starbucks experience.

Alas, as much as a business tries to differentiate themselves economics will still bite them in the you know what. Today a list of of closing stores was released. Over 600 stores bite the dust. I panicked scrolling through the list - could it be? could it be? No, I’m saved, rather the local Starbucks as been spared. We will live to see another day. After our eyes can open after the first dose of daily caffeine.

“Anheuser-Busch agrees to $52B takeover” so says a recent headline. The maker of Budweiser, an american icon, will now be a Belgian icon, being consumed - still in America. I don’t know the inside skinny, in fact I didn’t read up much on this whole story because the headline is pretty much the whole story.

When you think of things American, treasured and true; what comes to mind? Apple pie? Ford Mustang? The Yankees? Budweiser? Oh yeah, Budweiser! The King of Beers. Royalty is a common part of European culture. Maybe we will see a king or two drinking the King of Beers.

But a Bud by any other name is still a Bud. Does a business structure mean much when going to the local grocery for a six-pack? Maybe, maybe not. I guess this sort of emotional dilemma will be like when TV making went to Japan, as so much of the car market did too. These days I think more people are relieved to be driving a Toyota Prius than anything American. Not surprising, when cost is involved attitudes melt away in dread of losing your dollars. Your American dollars. Those haven’t been bought out yet.

Not much point here, drink your beer, forget who sent it here, think about again next year. And remember : “When you say Bud, you’ve said it all”

July 9, 2008 T minus one day to the new iPhone 3G.

What great timing I thought. My Treo is crapping out, it rings I answer - “Hello”. Nothing. Then from me more hellos “Hello? (pause) Hello! (pause) HELLO HELLO.” I can’t hear them, can they hear me? Oh my god, out of touch, off the grid, in techno hell. Why me!?

But hey, I’ll get one of those new nifty iPhones. My 11 year old son nailed the demo model down in 5 minutes, which means I might get to learn all the features in 6 months or more. To me it’s a phone. To an 11 year old it’s an MP3 player, video player, Internet browser, and oh, it can make phone calls too.

Looks like I’m going to have to get two - one for each of us. And sure enough at $200 a pop, the salesman has the perfect rationalization. If I buy my son a decent iPod I’ll spend the same amount. Can’t argue with that! So OK I say to the salesperson, what should I expect tomorrow when they go on sale?

“The store opens at 8, you should get here at 7 and wait on line.” I used to do that for concert tickets. This is a phone, isn’t it. Wait, an update from the manager. “Better get here at 6am”. Oh I see, wait on line for 2 hours for - a phone? No, not a phone, an iPhone, the next generation Star Trek communication device. I hear the next version will actually beam you, not up, but to the closest Apple store. Once an Apple customer we will not let you go, you are tethered to us, face it. Our designs are so cool that you just cannot afford to not have one. Without an iPhone or iPod, then you do not pass Go, do not collect $200 (that’s Monopoly talk for those who don’t know). But if I don’t pass Go and collect the $200 then I don’t have the bucks for the phone. Hhmm. Catch-22 (that’s a book for those who don’t know).

Well here we go, it’s Friday morning, the first day of the rest of your Apple life. But I should have had an Apple clock as well. Before I realize it - it’s 7:15. An immediate tough choice, run or wait. Ah well my son wants breakfast. Family obligations take precedence.

So we get to the phone store at 9:30. The parking lot is empty. Dread. No line at the door. Dread. We walk in and everybody turns to look at us, all with a smirk hiding behind a smile. We are losers. No words are needed. I shake my head no, they respond with a shake of yes. I failed. I couldn’t pull off what millions around the world could do. I just blew it, blew it bad. And I am still stuck with a temperamental Treo that works only when it is in the mood. I need a new phone! When will more be in I moan on my knees looking up at the store manager who now has complete control over my life and social standing. “We can order one, should be here in 7-10 business days” he says. But I’ve lost all ability to believe in anything. I crawl out of the store. At least my son had the nerve to walk out, giving his sobbing dad a wide berth.