Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

Blogs are really useful because they give anyone the forum to talk about whatever they want, and the popularity and influence of the blog is generally determined by the quality of the material they produce. After all, most people don’t want to read junk.

Since blogs are usually informal, you need to learn to forgive typos and minor errors, but too many or just bad mistakes can really take away from your message. For example, just today I read the following in different posts, “Education is emenselly over-rated” and “Their is even language in their for …”

I just can’t get past those mistakes. In the first case, it’s a really bad misspelling and an unnecessary hyphen when talking about education being overrated (that’s good irony). The second sentence uses the wrong “there” twice in six words! I ended up missing the message of posts, because of the distractions.

And yes, I openly admit that I’m a typo-intensive writer and I’m generally to lazy to go back and edit my posts (it’s a blog after all). I just hope that I don’t come across as stupid because of any of my typos.

Recently, I noticed that I’m more likely to make a typo with smileys. A lot of times, I write :-) instead of :-(. This is awkward if I write something like, “Sorry I’m busy that night, so I can’t see you when you’re in town :-)”

Someone should write a spell/grammar checker that will catch those mistakes. I can guarantee you’ll have at least one customer. :-)

Lately I’ve been coming up with lots of new business ideas. Some are pretty good ideas that I need to dedicate time to; the others are definitely profitable, but likely to cause bad karma (but tend to be very amusing). Today, I discovered a new one that rides along with the “marketing is everything” philosophy of business: fake-healthful food. (A quick pet peeve: you want food to be “healthful” not just “healthy”. “Healthful” means the food is good for you; “healthy food” just means the food isn’t sick.)

There’s lots of healthful food in places like Whole Foods Market, where they are priced at a huge premium since they have the words “organic”, “100% pure” and “No GMOs” on the packaging. The implication from this marketing is that the food is good for you (and a lot of it is). A large number of brands, like Amy’s Kitchen, are built on the “good for you” theme. I personally like Amy’s food; as far as frozen dinners go, it’s pretty good. And a number of the dishes are pretty healthful too; so a lot of people are loyal to the brand because they are trying to eat right.

However some of dishes are really bad for you (which would make it a good brand-marketing study). Take the Cheese Enchiladas, one serving has 240 calories, but has about 20% of your daily fat intake and salt intake. Roughly 10% of my daily calories would account for 20% of my fat and salt? But wait, a serving size is half the package (who eats half of a frozen dinner?). Now we’re looking at 480 calories (about one meal) being 44% of your fat (60% of your saturated fat) and 36% of your salt. Not terribly bad, but not exactly healthy.

So anyway, what’s my business idea? My idea is to start a consulting firm that solely specializes on gearing your products and marketing to take advantage of trends. Is low-carb popular? No problem, we’ll make your slices of bread one third smaller, label it “33% fewer carbs than brand X”, and mark it up 125% (if you think I’m kidding, pay close attention next time you’re in the bread aisle). Or, if fair trade coffee is big, charge the customer a markup 10 times the cost of purchasing “fair trade beans”.

The list of potential use cases goes on and on. Sure similar firms already exist (it’s just basic marketing after all), but my differentiating factor would be that I would be completely open about it, including having paid seminars explaining to consumers how not to be duped. :-)

In reality, I wouldn’t actually start this business (it feels too sleazy), but it’s fun to talk about. :-)

The past few weeks have been good for randomly reconnecting with lost friends. First, I found a few college friends through LinkedIn (it’s like MySpace, but for professionals who want to stay connected with all their business contacts). It’s weird to see how much old friends have changed, and also weird to see how much they haven’t. :-)

Last week, I discovered that an old high school friend also worked at Google, though in the New York office. I was looking through some docs and I saw that a Product Manager with the name of Alexander Vogenthaler worked here. I thought, “That can’t be that common of a name”, so I sent a “Are you the same Alex?” email to him. And of course, it was my friend, so we got to catch up on the last nine years of our lives.

Nine years, it’s crazy, but it’s really been that long since high school. Which means the 10 year reunion is coming up! I need to hurry up and become handsome or rich soon. :-)

I recently signed into my old AIM account, which I haven’t touched since college. The first thing I noticed is that I no longer know who half of all the screen names are. I plan to IM people and say something like, “Hi there. You’re on my buddy list, who are you again?” :-)

Josh, my old friend from my Xilinx days, IM’ed me today and we got to chat about the past 6 years since we last talked and reminisce about our wacky adventures eating enchiladas while working on HDL Bencher.

Let’s hope that this trend continues!

A lot of recreational sports leagues, including my hockey league (GSHL), keep pretty good statistics . For example, you can see my very unimpressive stats on my stats page. Of course, it doesn’t take into account things like what position you were playing; for example, defensemen are generally rated more on plus/minus than on points, but GSHL doesn’t track +/-. Nevertheless, it’s pretty interesting to look at.

So it got me thinking, for players with less than stellar core stats, could we introduce new stats to make them look good? Think of it as standardized test score inflation (like the SATs) or just part of the “self-esteem is more important than education” movement.

Here are my candidates for some stats that should be kept:

• RF (Random Falling) - you get one RF when you fall for no apparent reason
• SR (Skates on Right) - you get one SR for each game that you get your skates on the right feet
• GW (Good watching) - if you were on the ice and watched your teammate make a good play, you get one GW
• SP (Swinging at the Puck) - if you swing at the puck as it goes by, you get an SP
• HP (Hitting the Puck) - if you swing at the puck (SP) and hit it, you get an HP
• NE (Nachos Eaten) - after the game when you go out with the team, you get a NE for eating nachos