I’ll just put this post up early and say that 2007 has been quite an extraordinary year of sorts (people that know me will know why) and somehow I think the pace will slow down for 2008, but my resolution is fairly simple – concentrate and get the job done.
Whenever I go into stores, I try to remember prices of nearly everything there. This especially comes in handy in grocery stores since you can usually see that the prices bounce up and down with predictable periodicity. By purchasing items that are on the lower end of their price cycle, you can usually save up to about 25% of your grocery bill. Most people only have experience doing this with retail gasoline prices, but the swings in gasoline are typically around 5%.
Note that this does not apply to items like fresh produce – for this you have to wait until the fruit/vegetables go in season, so it means in spring time that you have no chance of getting good prices without a corresponding sacrifice in freshness.
I really wish there was a way to automate the process of mentally recording prices since the mental database contains plenty of errors and is not as comprehensive as I would like it to be. Of course, the only way that most modern grocery stores keep in business is by dynamically shifting around prices and getting people to buy products that are priced at full margins, so the more alert shoppers will at least be “rewarded” for their mental work.
So when it comes to boxing day, I always find with amusement the “promotions” that certain places offer with respect to products. The highlight for this year had to be a certain furniture store that was advertising a certain article for $249 before boxing day. After boxing day, they replaced the tag with a $355 price tag, and then that was crossed out and replaced with a “Boxing day sale! Everything is 30% off, now $249!”.
The only caveat was that the item was now an “as-is” sale, with no recourse for refund or exchange if purchased.
I went along my merry way, knowing that after this “sale” was over with that they’ll probably be marking it down to $199 in due course.
Not the prime minister, but a Meagan Harper of Oregon got charged with driving under the influence with a 0.55% blood alcohol level. While drinking and driving is not something to be proud about, the fact that she was able to get in the car at that intoxication level is.
Normally anything above 0.4% is sufficient for one to go unconscious, but Harper took it up to the next level. Assuming she was 100 pounds, it means that she must have had 12 drinks in a short period of time. This would be the equivalent of ordering a “Grande” sized drink at Starbucks, except with the contents being pure hard liquor (e.g. Vodka or Gin).
Harper has drunken driving convictions in Washington and Multnomah counties. She was also convicted of operating a boat while intoxicated in Wasco County.
It looks like she wasn’t inexperienced at getting drunk.
This article is just too funny. Getting 13 shots of espresso means that this drink can last a week if you just drink a little of it at a time.
The other issue is that you could seriously do some short-term damage to your neurological system by drinking the whole thing at once – you’d probably put yourself out of commission for the next three days as the caffeine withdrawal takes place. I wonder if Starbucks will come up with a store policy that will limit customers to 4 shots per drink to prevent the inevitable class action lawsuit that will occur when some idiot drinks his 10-shot espresso drink and then complains that he went temporarily insane while OD’ing on caffeine.
I was pleasantly delighted to see last year (December 2006) that in the case of Barbour v. UBC, that the BC Supreme Court certified the case as a class action lawsuit.
You can see on the lawyer’s website that the ruling was upheld on June 5, 2007. Finally, the case is up for trial starting September 2008.
The ministry of transportation paid for a report to investigate speed limits in BC. This report was delivered in Spring of 2003 and they came to the conclusion there are plenty of stretches of provincial highways that had speed limits that were too low given the condition of the roads.
The report can be found 2003 BC Speed Review Report.
Of particular interest for most readers are the following speed change suggestions:
The ministry never enacted these speed limit suggestions, nor did they enact many of the other suggested changes. Instead, we continue wasting police resources trying to nail vehicles going at speeds which are perfectly safe.
Ever since the big scare in London a couple years ago that prevented passengers from taking liquids through the carry-on baggage scanners, it has been a royal pain in the ass to move liquids from place to place – either you have to risk it in your checked-in baggage (hoping it won’t break), or don’t take it.
This becomes problematic when you’re taking duty-free items and you’re going through an international connection (which requires you to go through security again). One passenger in Germany had a litre of Vodka and security asked him to either throw it away or pay a heavy fee to have it checked in. Instead, he just drank it.
This reminds me of when I tried taking a small amount of yogurt (250mL) and security caught it. So I just ate it. Fortunately I wasn’t hospitalized after everything was said and done.
The restriction on liquids is really unnecessary.
The reason is because programmers and designers are not evaluated on whether they can produce good code or design, but on the basis of whether they can stick to schedule. Although it is very possible to crank out garbage code or design and still be able to complete projects on the basis of requirements, when it comes time to maintain the project or to hand the work off to somebody else, sloppy code or design will always result in costs far greater than had the project been coded or designed in the first place.
Above a certain complexity, when managers evaluate their subordinates’ code or design, they generally will not recognize whether something is “brilliant” or “incompetent” and just sign it off and give the person a pat on the back for getting it done. There is no automatic way of recognizing whether the execution has been good or bad – the only results that people tend to pay attention to is whether the user interface works.
This is a classic short term vs. long term proposition. Most agents in the process will prefer to take the short term route, but smart managers should be able to guide development to ensure maintainability and expandability of the projects in question.
I made a post earlier about paying for Facebook with your privacy, but Anthony makes a brilliant comment, so brilliant I will post it here:
… [in response to my statement] That’s true, but I think the more obvious cost is the implicit increase in consumer goods. For example, I recently went to the grocery store to buy popping corn. The Orville Redenbacher was $4.xy. I looked around for a cheaper alternative. The organic popping corn was about the same price. Finally, I looked down and found what I was looking for – same amount, $2.xy. Everyone who pays $4+ for OR popping corn just paid an extra $2 for watching tv.
To say FB is a ‘free’ service is to get it bass ackwards. FB charges – lots – for its service, which is privileged access to a particular market for advertisers (in this case, usually young, better educated Americans). What we usually think of as FB’s service (social networking tools) is actually how they create their service.
Besides for cleverly avoiding the profanity filters by saying “bass ackwards”, Anthony hits the nail on the head – effectively, we voluntarily pay for the service by purchasing products that advertise on Facebook. One other conclusion you can get from this is that even if you don’t use Facebook, you still pay for the service anyway.
Fortunately, the mitigating factor is that I don’t think the “reach” of Facebook is as powerful as Google, mainly because targeting advertising to people on Facebook (other than the demographic) is more difficult. At least Google knows what you’re trying to search for – Facebook can only take a guess given what you’ve put up on your profile. Their intrusive Beacon advertising service was probably trying to bridge the gap by monitoring what you do off the site.