When I picked up my now-fitting wedding band on Friday, I learned what “laser resizing” means. Basically to resize the band, they cut a wedge out of it (like a piece of bundt cake) and then push the ring back together.
The “laser” part is because they use a laser to cut the ring. It’s cool; but not as cool as I thought. I was hoping for something involving sharks with lasers on their head.
The Japanese have developed a method to create square watermelons. Apparently, this solves the reported tough problem of storing and cutting a round watermelon. In reality, I think the demand is that it’s just a cool gift.
The method is fairly simple: the fruit is grow in a box and as it grows it fills the box shape. Presumably then, you could grow a dodecahedron watermelon. :-)
One thing from the article that caught my eye was this comment from Damien Sutherland, the exotic fruit buyer for Tesco (a large British grocery chain): “[The price of a square melon in Japan is] absolutely extortionate and although extra work goes into growing these that vastly inflated price cannot be justified.”
Wow! According to Sutherland, when the buyer pays the price that the seller offers, it’s extortion! From his sake, I hope this was just a verbal slip; it would be embarrassing to be someone who presumably went to business school who doesn’t understand basic market economics.
Though, in his defense, as a society, we’ve gotten to the point that we hate demand based price changes for commodities; especially when there isn’t any perceived increase in value.
For example, non-commodity goods and services like plane tickets are expected to change price depending on demand. However, when a soda machine changes price based on outside temperature, people get very upset.
The criticism here is that there was no additional cost of doing business. On closer inspection, though, I think that it is an adverse reaction to the free market dynamic, where regardless of lack of additional cost of doing business, if a good is in more demand, sellers can increase the price to match.
I think that part of this viewpoint, is that as Americans, we don’t have any supply problems for commodities. We always have fully stocked grocery stores, our gas stations always have gas, and so on. However, for plane tickets, there is a supply limit.
So from a consumer perspective, commodity supply is infinite. So if demand goes up, there is no reason for price to go up.
This reasoning is a big reason we have “price gouging” protection laws. For example, if there’s a crisis, a gas station owner will probably want to raise prices. From his perspective, his supply chain may be broken and people are willing to pay more.
Obviously, this can be considered predatory and unethical. But if a transaction occurs, where the terms are agreed on by the seller and buyer, is this really a crime?
The answer for that depends the sort of government you have. For us, when price gouging occurs in an emergency situation, it is illegal, since it interferes with the government’s ability to restore order. Which, of course, makes sense to me.
At least my finger is… my wedding ring arrived at the store today. We ordered a 9.5 and when I tried it on, it almost fell off. Just to double check we tried the ring sizer and it confirmed that 9.5 is too big. Two weeks ago it was perfect (if not a little tight).
Since I haven’t lost enough weight to translate into a finger size decrease, we’re guessing I must have been measured on one of those really hot days a couple weeks ago.
So my ring is off to be laser-sized. I don’t know what that is, but it sounds cool.
Wordpress recently came out with a new version (2.0.4). Since I had been using 2.0.3 and this was a security release, I needed to upgrade. I used to work in a servicing team, where we made patches for Visual Studio and the .NET Framework, so I was curious to see how hard the Wordpress upgrade would be.
Since I moved to hosting my own blog, I no longer have people doing all the upgrades seamlessly for me. The old spaces blog got a new look and I didn’t have to do a thing. I don’t like the new look and feel, but that’s a topic for another day. (Speaking of which, I still need to finish tweaking this website.)
Anyway, the wordpress upgrade was a piece of cake: (1) backup your files and database, (2) do a flat file copy over the existing files, (3) open the upgrade page (starts the upgrade script). All nice and easy - no worries about side by side shared files, clobbering, admin deployment, or any of those horrible things Jason and I used to worry about.
In 1989, William Lind was primary contributor to the idea of Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW). The simple definition of 4GW is any war or conflict where one of the major players is not a nation state, but a group that is bound by an ideology. Initially it was used to describe the Cold War period, where “warfare” used secrecy, terror, and subversion more than tanks, planes, and ships.
Since ideology is deeply involved in this sort of warfare, traditional military tactics can be detrimental. This analysis provides very interesting conclusions about American operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with Israeli operations in Lebanon and Palestine.
I found a good article on what the generations of warfare are here. The first generation is when battles were formal and orderly. Armies would dress nicely, meet on a field, line up across from each other and then kill each other.
Once more powerful weapons began more prevalent, this strategy became suicidal and was put aside. The second generation was developed by the French army in World War I: massive firepower. The goal is attrition, and can be summed up by, “The artillery conquers, and the infantry occupies.”
For all the Americans that make fun of the French, you should keep in mind that our army today uses the same tactics that French developed almost 100 years ago (i.e. “Shock and Awe”).
The Third Generation was popularized by the Germans: maneuver warfare (i.e. blitzkrieg). The goal here is not to use brute frontal force, but to get to an enemy rear position and collapse his army inward. Speed, surprise, and dislocation are much more important
With the US military stuck in second generation tactics, you can see why it takes so long to put a sufficient force on the ground. You have to move men and massive amounts of ordinance and infrastructure. For example, take Camp Anaconda: one of four major military bases in Iraq. It has 28,000 soldiers and 8,000 civilian contractors and offers movie theaters, American fast food and dance lessons. The air traffic is so heavy, that it is the second busiest airport in the world. I saw a PBS documentary on this camp. It’s fully air-conditioned and quite nice; especially compared to the tents and shacks that the native Iraqis live in next door.
There are very interesting things in the framework of this analysis, including the how the culture of martial order is changed through generations and how morality of actions may now be more powerful than any weapon.
Much more on this later…
I put Windows Media Player 10 on my new computer to manage my slowly growing music library. Overall, I like all features and stuff, but I’m really curious what it’s doing that needs to take over 50% of both of my CPU’s cores and 250 MB of RAM.
Yes, I see the irony in this comment, since I worked on WinFS. :-) Fortunately, I know enough folks that work on WMP that I can probably get some good advice.
I just added a bunch of old pictures to the photos page:
- MS Interview Trip (March 2002)
- Some WashU Graduation Pics (May 2002)
- Mount Si Hike (August 2002)
- DevDiv Christmas Party (Dec 2002)
- Memorial Day Trip to the Olympic Pennisula (May 2003)
- Orville and Mandy’s Wedding (June 2003)
- Halloween (Oct 2003)
- Orcas Island (June 2004)
- Halloween (Oct 2005)
Enjoy!
In the past, all the groom had to do for the wedding was show up and you’d get bonus points if you remembered pants. Now, the modern man isn’t so lucky. As I work through my massively long list of things to get done, I have yet another thing that is deceptively hard: get a haircut.
I should stop here to note that, even though my “To Do” list is long, Crissy’s is much worse. After all, she’s in charge of all of the things for Saturday, plus a bunch of stuff on Friday.
Anyway, back to my hair. Last time, I got it cut I thought it looked pretty good about 15 days afterward. Now, at 35 days since, I think it looks ok, but maybe a tad too long. Now with 16 days to the wedding, when I get my haircut, how much do I get taken off? Should I get about three fourths of what usually is taken off to be safe?
