No Direction Home: Road Map to Somewhere

Nike Plus and iPod

2006-08-09T15:08:00.000-05:00

Well, I bought the Nike + attachment for my iPod nano about a week ago.

Everything has worked fine - haven't found it to be 100% accurate, but good enough for my efforts - but now the Nike site hasn't worked for me for 2 days, so I haven't been able to retrieve or upload any of the last 3 workouts I've had.

I called customer service and they said they're working on it.

The graphics are pretty cool but the interface plain sucks. Do they really need to do it with flash? Can't they combine it with regular html, php, asp, ajax or whatever the heck they program with nowadays?

Take something like Google Analytics... It's an awesome interface, you can customize reports and it's not freakin' Macromedia Flash.

Please, Nike, I know you're reading this... So go ahead and fix your site so I can go back to being happy.

Brookline, MA: #3 Most Educated City in the US

2006-07-17T15:03:00.000-05:00

This is what I call home... good ol' Brookline!

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/bplive/2006/top25s/educated.html

I never really trust these things as they tend to be a little subjective. However, a simple measurement such as this (education) as % of the total population of the city is pretty straight forward (as opposed to income, which doesn't take into consideration income distribution, quality of life, crime, etc)

Convergence: Google AdSense Revenue vs. Page Impressions

2006-07-12T12:53:00.000-05:00

Here's the latest update on one of my other projects. I ran a linear and log regression to see how things are looking in the future.

Pretty obvious from this chart, that in order for me to maximize my Google AdSense Revenue, I need to increase the # of hits I'm getting, otherwise I'll be stuck at the same Earnings per Click and Earnings in general.

I've included the two equations for Earnings and Clicks that helped me forecast my estimates.

I'm hoping to achieve the same amount of revenue ($100 in 115 days) in 90 to 100 days. I'll keep you guys posted!

If you would like me to show you how to do this for your own purposes, just drop me a quick comment.

PS: Note that there are two lines, one flat and the other one not-so-flat (that's genius). One is the log regression and the other is the linear regression. See how they diverge? What do you think this means?

I'll post the answer in the upcoming days...

Sidekick bussinesses

2006-06-02T10:13:00.000-05:00

Well, I finally bought a new domain (retailpowerhouse.com and retailpowerhouse.com/blog) to try and expand what I write about a bit more.

My other webpage, which is not in english, is giving me about $0.69 cents per day. I'm hoping I'll be able to ramp up my new blog sooner rather than later, and just because it will be in english, I'm hoping will attract more readers.

Unfortunately, this blog hasn't attracted a lot of people but I will keep it up and will detail how the new webpages progress.

Wish me luck!

The Economic Repercussions of Riding a Bicycle: A Simple Model

2006-05-05T12:30:00.000-05:00

I will create a short model to show what the repercussions of people riding bicycles in major metropolitan areas (Boston, Philadelphia, NYC) could look like. This is by no means an exhaustive statistical or econometric model, but it lays down the foundation for… well, no, not really, it’s just a neat idea to come up with things like this, really.

Assumptions:

People who can ride their bicycles (from here on called bikes) live within a 5 mile radius from their workplace.

Going to work doesn't involve hoping in highways or too complicated streets to ride a bike on, which probably deters most people from riding their bikes in the first place.

We'll use an example such as my office, where approximately 15 people fit this criteria (about 20% of the total employees)

Train or bus passes average $35 a month. All the people in my example use public transportation.
One can buy a bike for $300 (including all the necessary gear like helmets, lights, etc).

So what?

The tables below are a summary of what I have realized. Table 1 shows the price of a monthly pass for public transportation, as well as the prorated price that was paid for the bike (aka $300 dollars spread evenly throughout 6 months. Why 6 months and not 12? Just for sake of simplicity)

Table 2 shows the yearly calculations under these assumptions. I originally did a 3 year version, but by the third year your bike might need some maintenance. Mine hasn’t had any in 2 years, so I figured this model was fair game. (Click to enlarge)

Table 3 and 4 are replicas of the above tables, except that they account for the 15 people that could be riding bikes in my office. (Click to enlarge)

What we come to realize, is that if people rode their bikes for two years to work instead of paying for public transportation, they could collectively save $8,100 dollars (or 14,000 in 3 years, and it grows exponentially for every year after that).

If we take the multiplier effect into consideration, which basically means that injecting those $8,000 dollars into the economy would transfer into more money in the end, merely because other people would be getting that money and would be able to ‘multiply’ it, the end effect is much larger than the initial amount.

Nonetheless, there are a few (more like a lot) of caveats to this model. What happens when it rains? What if your bike breaks? What if it gets stolen? But I’m not going to list most of the possibilities here. This is the argument, and I hope that if you can come up with a better idea you share it with me.

For now, I’ll stick to riding my bike, which is now going on more than 2 years… And keeps saving me money.

MyMoneyBlog - Personal Finance and Investments Weblog

2006-05-02T12:44:00.000-05:00

One of my personal favorite blogs - lots of good interesting and every so often some very interesting articles. Check it out!

MyMoneyBlog - Personal Finance and Investments Weblog

Presenting and Sweating

2006-04-28T11:06:00.000-05:00

Had to do a presentation today. My armpits sweat a bit. Much like the good days in high school. Except now I do it for a living, and get paid a lot for doing it.

Ah, gotta love it.

Not so popular

2006-04-27T08:12:00.000-05:00

PRESIDENT BUSH'S approval ratings - ouch

Source: WSJ

Weeks Bridge Photo

2006-04-25T21:57:00.000-05:00

A photograph I recently took of rowers going under the Weeks bridge in Harvard

Deal... or no Deal

2006-04-24T19:04:00.000-05:00

Did you know it utilizes the concept known in statistics as expected value? (common notation: e(x))

The expected value of the game - that is, if we were to play this game over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, until the last case, we would come realize that the average gains would equal about $131,477.539 dollars

So if you're ever playing the game and you get to the point where you're above this amount, consider yourself lucky as you're winning. If you're under, the house is winning.

Simple, yet not so simple

New beginnings: A focus on focusing

2006-04-21T13:14:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking about what I'd like to do my blog about and I just can't come up with an original insight.

So, I've decided to try and focus on writting about possible business ideas or just my general comments on different types of bussinesses.

I will write indiscrimentaly though, so no matter how silly the idea might be I will be posted here.

Here's a thought, for example:

I already run a different webpage and I've started using Google AdSense. So far, the first month made me $20. If I had at least 3 webpages just as succesful, that'd pocket me $60 a month... Which is a heftly $720 bucks a year!
The webpage I'm using as an example is all in spanish though. Spanish speaking countries, such as the one where I come from, are behind in technological advances (read internet) If I crated an english version of the site I am sure I could get more than that (current site stats: 150 visits per day, 2,000 pageviews)

I'm into photography so one of the sites could sell cheap photographs with a semi-pro quality of just about anything (panoramas, city scapes from my travels, maybe even a few random corporate if I put myself into it)

I need to do more research about this, and procrastinate less (which is my biggest problem) and see if I can put up-to-date a few sites and pocket some extra money.

In the meantime, it doesn't hurt to write down all these thoughts so that I don't dish them for some quality guitar playing time.

Note: Information above is only revenue. Doesn't take into account any expenses or opportunity costs

some spare change and a sense of belonging

2006-04-18T09:10:00.000-05:00

There's a guy outside the Trader Joe's that I shop at (don't really know if he's homeless, but my guess would be he is) who sells the a newspaper under the ‘Spare Change’ name.

I’m not sure the newspaper is called Spare Change itself, but the idea is that you give him some spare change and you get this newspaper/newsletter instead (talk about Bartering)

He’s not a very strong salesman, and is always saying in a very monotone voice ‘Pleeeease buy the latest issue. Pleeease buy the latest issue. Support the homeless. Pleeease buy the latest issue’ (so never mind my comment before; he is probably homeless)

Yesterday night I stopped by to get some sushi and decided to get 10 dollars cash back after my grocery purchases. I rolled the ten, stepped outside and tried to hand it to the guy.

‘Here you go my friend’

I expected to walk away right after that, but he insisted on giving me one of the issues. I said, no thanks, keep it, but he insisted.

‘I have two different issues. Oh, wait, this one is from last week. Which one did you say you wanted? Wait okay, here, take this one’

And so I did.

As I walked away, I realized how I could have offended him by giving him money and not taking his newspaper. I realized he probably feels accomplished when he gets money from selling and issue. I know I probably would.

So, in retrospective, I realized how important it is to be a part of (or feel a part of) of something that we think as greater than ourselves… or maybe not greater, but just be a part of something… and yesterday I was glad I made the Spare Change guy feel that he was being a part of something.

10,000 and a fresh start

2006-04-14T14:31:00.000-05:00

So, say you're given $10,000 USD.

What would you invest the money in?

I'm looking for ideas to invest some money I stole, uhm, I mean, earned

Suggestions are welcome

P.S: I'm talking investments outside the Street... sorry, finance gurus

Wal-Mart's leverage on major CPG companies...

2006-04-12T09:14:00.000-05:00

Scary...

Google Adsense and YTD Results

2006-04-06T15:58:00.000-05:00

YTD Adsense earnings for Google Adsense:

It's only been half a month (NOTE: the earnings are NOT for this website, it's a different website I run in spanish... so don't feel like you're being robbed, but please, be kind, click the google links on the right)

So far there's a trend that's very apparent... I wish I would get more on impressions and less on just clicks, since my visitors are very inefficient when it comes down to clicking on every single ad they see and they tend to do so at about 1 per every 100 ads

What do you guys do to increase your earnings on your site?

Update: What I've been reading lately

2006-04-05T07:56:00.000-05:00

Forgivness I ask to my avid readers (yes, all three of you, including myself and my girlfriend) for not updating this more often.

I've been reading what has been thus far a very basic book on strategy and game theory, called 'Thinking Strategically: The competitive Edge in Business, Politics and Everyday Life' by Avinash K. Dixit and Barry J. Nalebuff.

Strolling down Harvard square I found this book at the Harvard Bookstore... With such a title, how could anyone resist to read this?

A lot of times the most obvious things written concisely and eloquently are what I find the most useful. So if you were to get anything from this book (and I quote), I'd recommend you to get this (and some of it is a bit out of context, but it's still valuable)

"...The strategic insight is that other people's actions tell us something about what they know, and we should use such information to guide our own action"

Print it, frame it, and hang it.

Kaufman @ Boston University: Running out of oil?

2005-08-03T08:24:00.000-05:00

Today's WSJ has an interesting little debate with feauturing a professor from my alma matter. Robert Kaufman is a professor in the Center for Energy & Environmental Studies at Boston University

I won't bother to write the whole article:

We know that oil production will peak within our lifetime, we think market prices may not anticipate this peak and we know that not having alternatives in place at the time of the peak will have tremendous economic and social consequences. So, if society does too much now, as opposed to later, there will be some loss of efficiency. But if society does too little now, as opposed to later, the effects could be disastrous. Under these conditions, doing too little now in the name of efficiency will appear in hindsight as rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Earlier in the discussion a different professor from the university of california said that he trusted the markets to know when an oil production peak would occur, going as far as saying that it won't be anytime soon as you can get a futures buy for delivery in december 2011 for USD60 (makes me wonder if kaufman knows more about this, is he stuffing his face with futures like this?)

Point is: can we trust the markets to let us know when a peak in oil production is about to occur? when that day comes (which according to kaufman will be in our lifetime) what will the price of a barrel of oil be?

Seems to me like a very lucrative business too. If I could, I'd be stocking up barrels of oil in my basement. Buy it for USD50 bucks today, sell it for god-knows-how-much-more in the future. Why hasn't anybody thought of this? Sometimes I amaze even myself :|

rema...

2005-08-02T08:51:00.000-05:00

gustavo santaolalla, musica de diarios de motocicleta (if you like him, you can listen to his playing in cafe tacuba's unplugged)

Clavo mi remo en el agua
Llevo tu remo en el mío
Creo que he visto una luz
al otro lado del río

El día le irá pudiendo
poco a poco al frío
Creo que he visto una luz
al otro lado del río

Sobre todo creo que
no todo está perdido
Tanta lágrima, tanta lágrima
y yo, soy un vaso vacío

Oigo una voz que me llama
casi un suspiro
Rema, rema, rema-a
Rema, rema, rema-a

En esta orilla del mundo
lo que no es presa es baldío
Creo que he visto una luz
al otro lado del río

Yo muy serio voy remando
muy adentro sonrío
Creo que he visto una luz
al otro lado del río

Sobre todo creo que
no todo está perdido
Tanta lágrima, tanta lágrima
y yo, soy un vaso vacío

Oigo una voz que me llama
casi un suspiro
Rema, rema, rema-a
Rema, rema, rema-a

Clavo mi remo en el agua
Llevo tu remo en el mío
creo que he visto una luz
al otro lado del río

in other words...

2005-07-28T13:08:00.000-05:00

this is a great essay I found on a jazz drummer's webpage when i was looking today for some drum solo transcriptions (you can look it at www.stevekorn.com) he also had this essay by jazz pianist keith jarrett.

not only is the essay interesting, the list of musicians he mentions is a great way to get started into jazz (in case you're out there, trying hard to do so) i've also highlighted some of my favorite drummers in that list, saving you hours of incalculable research

so, here's the essay, hope enjoy it s-much-s-i-did.

"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise: Seek what they sought." - Basho

When did jazz become a theory - a thing, not a process; a package, not an experience? When did the players begin to love their image so much that they forgot it was supposed to be about the validity of their own ongoing personal expression? Real jazz is never generic; it can only thrive on individuality and independence.
Jazz is nothing without the players. It's not jazz on paper, only in the air. Jazz is not a commodity, it's a process of self-discovery and revelation. It's about ecstasy, not greed; heart, not attitude; musical validity, not race; inclusion, not regression; struggle, not coasting; content, not virtuosity; practice, not theory; risk, not safety; motion, not stagnation; original voices, not mimicry.

In the early '60s, when I was a teenager, the following jazz players (in no particular order) were all actively creative and all completely different from each other: Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan, Lee Konitz, Bill Evans, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Wynton Kelly, Sonny Rollins, Coleman Hawkins, Sun Ra, Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler, Phil Woods, Paul Bley, Gary Peacock, Jack DeJohnette, Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams, Jaki Byard, Charles Mingus, Charlie Haden, Ed Blackwell, Don Cherry, Percy Heath, Wayne Shorter, Jimmy Giuffre, Stan Getz, Pete LaRoca, Max Roach, Paul Motian, Art Pepper, Chet Baker, Lennie Tristano, George Russell, Cannonball Adderley, Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard, Paul Chambers, Art Taylor, Ahmad Jamal, Bob Brookmeyer, Mel Lewis, Hank Jones, Tommy Flanagan, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Randy Weston, Jimmy Garrison, McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones, Cecil McBee, Ron Carter, Jimmy Cobb, Dollar Brand, Roswell Rudd, Beaver Harris, Art Farmer, Jim Hall, Steve Kuhn, Steve Swallow, Hampton Hawes, Sunny Murray, Warne Marsh, Dave Izenson, Bud Powell, John Lewis, J.J. Johnson, Dizzy Gillespie, Pharoah Sanders, Andrew Hill, Eric Dolphy, Sam Rivers, Sam Brown, Milford Graves, Lowell Davidson, Milt Jackson, Joe Chambers, Pepper Adams, Reggie Johnson, Jimmy Knepper, Johnny Coles, Blue Mitchell, Booker Little, Herb Pomeroy, Henry Grimes, Red Mitchell, Carla Bley, Jim Pepper, Roscoe Mitchell, Lester Bowie, Ran Blake, Jimmy Lyons, Alan Shorter, Ralph Towner, Glen Moore, Dave Holland, Louis Hayes, Vernell Fournier, Connie Kay, Billy Higgins, Horace Silver, Kenny Dorham, Eddie Gomez, Jimmie Woods, Shelley Manne, Israel Crosby, Hank Mobley, Red Garland, Gene Stone, Bobby Timmons, Albert Stinson, Eddie Marshall, Victor Feldman, Roy Haynes, Harold Land, Giuseppe Logan, Billy Hart, Leroy Vinegar, Mal Waldron, Philly Joe Jones, Paul Desmond, Steve Lacy and many more.
I would guess that about 30 of these names could have claimed ascendancy to the jazz throne more legitimately than Wynton Marsalis.

The incredible breadth of musical styles represented by these names means that jazz was what it was supposed to be: a melting pot of truly original voices. Of course, in an age of insane fascination with technical achievement (never mind to what goal), elevating a mere technician to godhead is, finally, possible and, hey, why not? But don't call it genius.
What would the corporate media/marketplace do with any of these guys today? (After all, they were just guys, not schools.) Mass advertising needs predictability and conformity, but this was democracy, not monopoly.
When I heard these players, I was influenced most by their individuality, not their virtuosity or even their competence. They each showed me something of the potential that jazz is. This is important. They weren't scared of not being accepted, and they hadn't sold out. (By contrast, today's Young Lions can stand in for each other because they've chosen the rules and they are doing the same basic imitations.)

Now were told it's a new jazz age by the same blind media industries who, along with a bunch of opportunistic critics, lackeys, panderers, cronies, hangers-on, bought the Young Lions in the first place. It's easy to handle them because they're ultra-conservative, not risk takers and easy to track. But jazz is about risking everything to your personal muse and accepting the consequences. Otherwise you don't get to sing your song. The young and old players in the '60's were singing their own songs. But today we have the Lions' Club, and the media seems to have no room or interest in anything else, even though real jazz is always alive somewhere.

I'm supposed to have something constructive to say about what to do now if what I said is true. It's really not about doing something. It's about how much we would risk to get the right something. If you're a young player, my advice is: Don't buy a ticket to the club. You don't want to be another prisoner in the lion cage; you want to be free.

If you're a consumer, stop consuming what you see in the pictures and listen to the music first. It should move you (or disturb you) if it comes from the heart, assuming your heart is intact. It shouldn't move you from A to - A; it should place you in a more intensely real world. But in the age of virtual reality there are bound to be virtual artists and virtual educators. And they will be most visible.

There's an old Bulgarian proverb: "If you wish to drown, don't torture yourself with shallow water."

Jazz is about ecstasy, and ecstasy depends on connectedness, and connectedness depends on sensitivity, and sensitivity depends on life and life depends on heart, and this heart is a gift and this gift can be used wisely or foolishly, too soon or too late, half-heartedly or whole-heartedly. All of our great jazz musicians did not question how much to use and to what purpose. Technically competent and virtuoso players of today (genius or otherwise) beware: These waters run deep.

The state of jazz is, as it always has been, dependent on the guts of the players to choose the real discipline, not the virtual one. But it seems it must have been better understood in the past, when more of the world we see and hear every day was real.

Nowadays, if legitimacy is conferred only by the media and not by peers, we can claim to live in a set-piece created by corporate power, where it is unnecessary to corrupt sensibilities because they have already been tampered with. In this scenario there is no jazz.

Back in the early '60s there was a melting pot of individual voices, a democracy. There was no single expert on jazz. Jazz was the music then, not the image; the ideas, not the ads; the content, not the hype; and jazz soared in those days whether the media wanted it to or not because there were listeners, each equipped with a pair of real (non-virtual) ears and a real hunger for the real thing.

So who will jazz players of the future be able to use as a beacon from this age of mimicry? There was a comic book series called Plastic Man, back when I was a kid, and in the last issue there appeared an exactly identical but fraudulent imitation of Plastic Man who could do everything the original could do: stretch his arms for miles, take the form of any person or object, etc. In this issue there was a dialogue between them that went something like this:

"I am the real Plastic Man." "No, I am the real Plastic Man." "No, you're an imitation." "But plastic is already an imitation." "Yes, but I am really Plastic Man." "How do you know?" "Because you are the imitation Plastic Man." "No, you are!" "But…plastic is already an imitation, and we're identical in every way, so I'm as real as you!"

I have two sons who are both musicians, one already a working musician. It is my hope that they can hear great jazz musicians of their day-live, if possible. But if the media becomes the Mafia and Plastic Man keeps selling, those great musicians will be harder to find.

The hostile takeover of jazz within the media (or the "infotainment telesector," as Benjamin R. Barber calls it in his book Jihad vs. McWorld) has happened. Let's hope there will be young players who see this as a new set of prison bars, meant only to be flown through. If you are ready to fly, you don't put on a suit and join a club. You talk to the birds.

Jazz is probably the only art form whose existence depends on resistance to theories (whether those theories are by blacks or whites). Unlike other kinds of music (and most professions, corporate or otherwise), jazz asks that we speak from our being, not about our expertise in the field. If someone is an expert on jazz, you can be pretty sure he/she is not a vital jazz musician. Where a young player today can have a long enough apprenticeship (so the being-work can get started before Mr. Sony or Mr. Columbia eats him over a two-martini lunch) is a question I can't answer in the age of McWorld. But it's up to the players to know when to say no. There is no way to demystify jazz except by playing convincingly. It is a mysterious occupation.

And the reason no musicologist, critic, virtual educator or brand-name can get a handle on it is this: Jazz is about closeness to the material, a personal dance with the material, not the material itself. And this personal dance is validated not by the media, not only by other dancers. A virtual dance doesn't count in the real world of jazz.

If the phrase "whatever is the most personal is the most universal" is true, it goes far towards explaining why the true jazz giants up to the present time are who they are: They danced up a storm.

Keith Jarrett

bedtime picture

2005-07-27T22:23:00.000-05:00

a panoramic shot of downtown boston at dawn
(ignore the color line in the middle!)

unshameless bastards

2005-07-27T08:01:00.000-05:00

From the economist.com:

More bad news for Andrés Manuel Lopéz Obrador, the popular mayor of Mexico City. On July 10th, auditors announced that about $30m was unaccounted for from funds to build an elevated highway (or “Second Floor”) above the city’s ring road. The audit of money spent in 2003 also found that many of the columns propping up the new road were not as strong as they should be. First proposed by Mr Lopéz Obrador in 2002 to help alleviate the city's traffic problems, the highway now boasts plenty of pillars with no road on top—it is anyone's guess just when it will be finished. This follows June’s inauspicious inauguration of the Metrobus, meant to improve transit on Insurgentes, the city’s main north-south thoroughfare, which has actually made traffic worse.

Money aside, the elevated highway has other problems. The finished sections are often clogged with traffic, and its inexplicably sharp turns and narrow shoulders make it remarkably unsafe, like a video game come to life. No one knows where the $30m went, though a common assumption is that contractors skimmed off the top. While apparently not personally corrupt, the mayor clearly has been unable to keep such abuses out of his administration. This all hurts Mr Lopéz Obrador, because he seems incapable of tackling the city's transport problem. Although he remains the frontrunner, this may harm his campaign for president in 2006.

... the after

2005-07-25T22:01:00.000-05:00

...and here it is. the colors are nice but there's much to be desired about my pulse (and my artistic abilities)

still, it's a huge bowl and perfect for the 1lb box of cheerios we got from wal-mart over the weekend

aaay dios mio, urban outfitters!

2005-07-25T10:41:00.000-05:00

apparently they got in trouble for selling this shirt. don't understand why you would, given that the shirt just states a truly well known fact of life, but oh well.

wow, first two posts!

2005-07-20T17:45:00.000-05:00

wow!
so today i'm checking my email and i realize two people commented on my posts... that's awesome! now i feel obligated to post something today in case my avid readers are out there, getting no sleep waiting for me to write something up...

well, since i don't have much to say i will leave you with the first of a series of installments of ankle exercises. that's right, ankle exercises.

i've suffered several sprains from playing sports and i've been doing some of these at the gym lately. so go ahead and give them a try...

countdown 'till the pottery is back: 2 days

the before...

2005-07-19T21:49:00.000-05:00

here's the cheerio's bowl as it stands today... will find out how it looks once it's 'baked' on friday!

happy 5th of july

2005-07-04T23:59:00.000-05:00

happy 4th of july everybody. it's 1AM and i have work tomorrow. here's one of the pics we took tonight.

the 18 pounder

2005-06-29T10:40:00.000-05:00

we finally cracked open the 18 lb. watermelon. not only did i do my part but i had to contribute to eating what my girlfriend couldn't eat.

felt a little sick afterwards but if you ask me, it was totaly worth it.

anatomy of the fridge of a trader joe's junky

2005-06-28T14:06:00.000-05:00

checklist:

reduced sugar strawberry jam
low fat cottage cheese
non-dairy skim milk
orange/mango juice
watermelon (current record: 18 lbs from stop & shop)
others

not a lot of 'stuff' scare me, but...

2005-06-28T08:33:00.001-05:00

now i'm very upset. i wrote a very long message and it didn't go through.

it went like this:

google's market cap is 80 billion, same as home depot.

however, google doesn't have a lot of assets. they are mostly an idea (not really, but part of their cap is due to their future growth and the expectations people have of how many ads they will display, i guess not very different from selling hardware at a store)

however, doesnt it seem weird to you that two companies that are so radically different would have the same market cap? it's more compliated than this, of course, but if this stupid thing wouldnt have deleted my first message it could be more clear.

GOOG balance sheet for fiscal '04:

HD balance sheet for fiscal '04:

there's something fundamentally weird about this picture, and it's not the only one. it almost seems to me that as long as you give the tape to somebody else you won't die, but it's that persons responsibility to give it to somebody else and eventually, somebody will have the tape and see the ring... and then the bubble will pop

disclaimer:
i have no clue what i'm talking about so dont hold me responsible for any implications that might arise from this post

2005-06-28T08:33:00.000-05:00

we baked a cake

2005-06-27T19:46:00.000-05:00

so, we baked a cake last night. it was supposed to be one cake but we decided to split it and make two.

if you know spanish and want the ingredientes, here they are:

1 TAZA DE HARINA
1 CUCHARADITA DE BAKING SODA
1 TAZA DE AZUCAR
6 HUEVOS COMPLETOS

Coke negotiates to add Arizona teas | ajc.com

2005-06-27T15:56:00.000-05:00

Coke negotiates to add Arizona teas | ajc.com

mmm a move from coke to appeal more to the "healthy" conscious consumers. if it goes through, arizona tea can really leverage coke's distribution capabilities.

keep an eye for this one!

livestrong

2005-06-27T14:28:00.000-05:00

today i finally got myself a LIVESTRONG bracelet. my co-worker bought 120 of them and now is giving them away.

so, if you're wondering what i look like, just look for the guy wearing the bracelet on the left. i work in cambridge and live in brookline so it should be easy to spot me.

if you have one and there's a storey behind why you wear it, feel free to drop a comment

the purpose? simple

2005-06-27T09:35:00.000-05:00

pur·pose
( P ) Pronunciation
Key (pûrps)n.
The object toward which one strives or for
which something exists; an aim or a goal: “And ever those, who would
enjoyment
gain/Must find it in the purpose they pursue” (Sarah Josepha
Hale).
A result
or effect that is intended or desired; an intention. See
Synonyms at intention.
Determination; resolution: He was a man of purpose.
The matter at hand;
the point at issue.

so, with the above in mind, the purpose of this blog is for me to actually start a blog and keep it up for longer than one day. tomorrow will show whether or not this will hold.

first test

2005-06-27T09:14:00.000-05:00

of yet another blog

let's try inserting a quick picture