Portfolio Living

No Muslim ever called me Mick

2010-12-16T16:37:00.000-08:00

Enemies are expensive, so the best way to deal with them is probably to get someone else to pay for them.

The very rich and powerful of the world were not democratically elected, you probably know their names, they don't go through airport security (because they have their private jet planes) and they travel to vacation destinations you couldn't pronounce -- let alone find on a map -- because they are private.

Your purpose is to work. Their purpose is to enjoy life in excess. They keep massive amounts of money to themselves and their families.

To maintain their vast fortunes, sometimes they have to invade a country. One thing they cannot do on their own is invade a country, so they get you the worker to do it. If not you, then your children.
They pick a fight with some dictator in the Middle East and concoct a story to make you believe that he is your enemy, that he is a threat to your children and your future. Whereas, in fact, he has no quarrel with you whatsoever.
And so, you get suckered into fighting -- and paying for -- a war that has nothing to do with you.
When Muhammad Ali claimed no vietcong ever called me nigger, he knew he was being duped into fighting someone else's enemy.
Today, powerful interests are at the same old game. They want to exploit the resources under someone else's country so they get us ordinary folk to fight the war for them.

Never let someone else pick your enemies for you.

Top 10 Ways to Annoy People on Facebook

2010-12-14T11:34:00.001-08:00

Top 10 Ways to Annoy People on Facebook:

♦ Use a profile picture with two or three, heck 20, people in it. Let everyone guess which one is you.

♦ Use a picture of your pet instead of you.

♦ Use a profile picture of you and your husband and/or wife so everyone can ooo-aaah about how damn happily married you are.

♦ Post pictures of your dinner half way through eating it. Say things like "yummy" and describe how you cooked it. Everyone needs to know. There's nothing like a cell-phone-quality picture of blackened liver-and-onions on a black plate to get everyone excited. Especially, if you are behind it, with bits of liver stuck between your teeth, making the V sign.

♦ Post a new photo album to your account. Call it "my pictures" to make it REALLY OBVIOUS what the photos are about. Make sure most or all of the 700 pictures are blurred and/or sideways shots of you and your friends. Don't add captions, so everyone can be left wondering "who the f##k are all these blurry sideways people?"

♦ If you always go to Scotland for your vacation, post hundreds of pictures of Scotland on your Facebook. Add lots of captions like "I love Scotland" and "Scotland forever" all over them. Keep the photos consistent by having you and your same cheap handbag in every last photo. Think of a signature squint or frown you can display in each photo.

♦ If you follow a team - Seattle Seahawks for instance - regularly post your feeling about the team on your Facebook wall. E.g. "The Hawks let us all down last night!!!! Arrrggghhh . I hate them now!!!!". Most people in the world think Seattle is in Canada, so "Seattle Seahawks" means diddly-squat.

♦ Start a public conversation with a friend in a way that no one else could possibly know what you're talking about. Like "yes, Dave, I'll make sure I get that package to you" to which Dave responds "make sure you have that other component you promised in it."

♦ Photograph all the pieces of junk and furniture around your house and post them all. Don't forget to add captions, "the carpet", "the wall"so people aren't confused. Title the album "fun with my new camera".

♦ Post a picture of your dog, and tell everyone you have the most intelligent and handsome dog in the world. Yes, your pet is special. Just like every other pet.

♦ Respond to a FB app that works out "how long is YOUR large intestine?" and share the results with all 475 of your friends.

♦ Use a profile picture of you standing 2 miles from the camera. So far away that it could be Saddam Hussein or Mohammed Ali standing there and no one would know. Or simply post a picture of George Clooney if you're a guy or someone from the Victoria's Secret catalog if you're a woman.

When your dog smells better than you do...

2010-05-20T10:34:00.000-07:00

I rescued a one year-old Australian Cattle Dog about eight months ago. For decades I have wanted my own dog and only last year did the circumstances come about to make it practical. For six months up to the rescue, I was visiting the pound twice weekly. Eventually, Buddy picked me.
So, I've been on a steep learning curve with all things doggie.
Starting with human shampoo, I eventually moved up to dog specific products and settled eventually on DERMagic's Shampoo bars. The one I got was the Tea Tree Oil and Peppermint one.
What struck me was how, once Mr. Dog dried off, he had absolutely no scent whatsoever. Even with one more expensive shampoo I used previously, there was also some however vague shampooy-type scent residue. With the DERMagic shampoo bar, the dog was scent-free.
I also loved the freshness of the air in the apartment right after the doggy's bath.
I understand that the solid bar is the way to go because there is no need for additives to control the viscosity of it, so that might explain why there was no scent residue.
These days, Buddy sleeps on my bed and the breed is sometimes called the "Velcro Dog" because it wants to be forever by your side, so I found it worth my while to invest in a shampoo that really kept dog smells out of the apartment.

Now, if I only took care of myself half as well...
Liam

What is a Republican?

2010-01-31T19:40:00.000-08:00

Many of us progressives have stood in disbelief as the likes of Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Savage, Beck and others continue to draw a substantial and loyal following of die-hard Republicans.
What gives? Won't these Republicans ever wake up and smell the coffee? Can't they see that they are being used and enslaved by corporate interests?
And then there's the whole discussion of Health Care. When you look at any other industrialized country, you see that a single-payer system works, but in the US, oh no, we can't learn anything from other countries. We have to invent EVERYTHING from scratch, as if these problems have never been solved before. Ever. We discuss health care ideas as if none of it has ever been tried before.

In the United States, when an employee gets, oh, let's say, cancer, and the cancer progresses despite treatment (covered by their employer's health care), they lose their job (because they've not been turning up to work). That's the point at which they discover, they never really did have healthcare; their EMPLOYER had healthcare.

OK, so back to what a Republican is....

People prefer certainty to uncertainty. In the US, it's "every man for himself", which means you are responsible for your own life. Scary. And full of uncertainty.
It's much easier to hand over control to someone else. A church, a boss, a parent, a politician; just ANYONE who will make the decisions for me so I don't have to deal with it.
Republicans are like that. They just want someone else to make the decisions and they will follow along like sheep. They're big on command-and-control because it relieves them of the responsibility of thinking for themselves.
And the more these Republicans are in control, the more they catalyze the problem that makes them fearful in the first place.

God help us all.

Ads from the Fifties

2008-03-11T09:42:00.001-07:00

The Sensitive Man

2008-03-09T18:11:00.000-07:00

The Sensitive Man

A woman meets a man in a bar.

They talk; they connect; they end
up leaving together.

They get back to his place and as he shows her around his
apartment., she notices that one wall of his
bedroom is completely filled with soft, sweet,
cuddly teddy bears.

There are three shelves in the
bedroom,with hundreds and hundreds of cute,
cuddly teddy bears carefully placed
in rows, covering the entire wall!

It was obvious that he had taken
quite some time to lovingly arrange them
and she was immediately touched by the amount of thought he had
put into organizing the display.

There were small bears all along
the bottom shelf, medium-sized bears covering the
length of the middle shelf,
and huge, enormous bears running
all the way along the top shelf.

She found it strange for an
obviously masculine guy
to have such a large collection of
Teddy Bears,

She is quite impressed by his
sensitive side, but doesn't mention this to him.

They share a bottle of wine and
continue talking and, after awhile, she finds herself
thinking,
'Oh my God! Maybe, this guy
could be the one!
Maybe he could be the future
father of my children?'

She turns to him and kisses him
lightly on the lips

He responds warmly.

They continue to kiss, the passion builds,
and he romantically lifts her in
his arms and carries her into his bedroom
where they rip off each other's
clothes and make hot, steamy love.

She is so overwhelmed that she
responds with more passion,
more creativity, more heat than she
has ever known.

After an intense, explosive night
of raw passion with this sensitive guy,
they are lying there together in
the afterglow.

The woman rolls over, gently
strokes his chest and asks coyly,
'Well,how was it?'
The guy gently smiles at her,
strokes her cheek,
looks deeply into her eyes,

and says:

'Help yourself to any prize
from the middle shelf'

best Valentine's Day gift ever

2008-02-14T15:14:00.001-08:00

I really nailed it this morning.
What with the recession and all, I thought it was best to get creative w/r/t the gift I would get my wife this Valentine's day.
She likes antiques (after all, she's married to one) and is a top notch homemaker.
I found this great combination of antique and utility on eBay.
It's a heavy duty iron for the real professional ironing person. You've got COMPLETE control over the steam output with a full set of dials that can be tweaked to produce the perfectly ironed business shirt and/or cotton y-fronts.

What a surprise she got this morning when she opened up the package. It brought her to tears! She said "I CAN'T believe this!" and that I was "incredible".
And she's been on the phone all morning telling her friends about the unbelievable present I got for her.

So, there you are, men. Keep your eyes open for next year's special gift for your loved one!
Show her that you care with something from eBay. They have everything.

Teenagers - while you still can...

2008-02-14T13:48:00.001-08:00

Dear Rich Bastard

2008-02-07T15:45:00.001-08:00

The National Westminster Bank admitted last month that it keeps
personal information about its customers-such as their political
affiliation-on computer. But now Computer Weekly reveals that a
financial institution, sadly unnamed, has gone one better and moved
into the realm of personal abuse.
 The institution decided to mailshot 2000 of its richest customers,
inviting them to buy extra services. One of its computer programmers
wrote a program to search through its databases and select its
customers automatically. He tested the program with an imaginary
customer called Rich Bastard.
Unfortunately, an error resulted in all 2000 letters being addressed
"Dear Rich Bastard". The luckless programmer was subsequently sacked.

Cow ends up in car after accident. No bull.

2008-02-01T16:00:00.000-08:00

You have to look closely at this picture to see the cow, but the bovine beauty ended up inside the car after a lady in Massachusetts hit a pair of cows while driving through the countryside.

The CORRECT way to use a weighing scales

2008-01-30T11:58:00.000-08:00

Ladies, Gents-
All this time, we have been using weighing scales incorrectly, and as a result, getting disappointing results.

This is the correct way to use them:

From Liam

A week at the gym. Letter from a 60 year-old

2008-01-30T07:51:00.000-08:00

Week at the Gym

If you can read this through without laughing out loud.... well perhaps you should go yourself. This is dedicated to everyone who ever attempted to get into a regular workout routine.

Dear Diary,

For my 60th birthday this year, my daughter Rachel (the dear) purchased a week of personal training at the local health club for me. Although I am still in great shape since being a high school football cheerleader 43 years ago, I decided it would be a good idea to go ahead and give it a try.

I called the club and made my reservations with a personal trainer named Belinda, who identified herself as a 26-year-old aerobics instructor and model for athletic clothing and swim wear. My daughter seemed pleased with my enthusiasm to get started! The club encouraged me to keep a diary to chart my progress.

MONDAY :
Started my day at 6:00 a.m. Tough to get out of bed, but found it was well worth it when I arrived at the health club to find Belinda waiting for me. She is something of a Greek goddess - with blond hair, dancing eyes and a dazzling white smile. Woo Hoo!! Belinda gave me a tour and showed me the machines. I enjoyed watching the skillful way in which she conducted her aerobics class after my workout today. Very inspiring! Belinda was encouraging as I did my sit-ups, although my gut was already aching from holding it in the whole time she was around. This is going to be a FANTASTIC week-!!

TUESDAY :
I drank a whole pot of coffee, but I finally made it out the door. Belinda made me lie on my back and push a heavy iron bar into the air - then she put weights on it! My legs were a little wobbly on the treadmill, but I made the full mile. Belinda's rewarding smile made it all worthwhile. I feel GREAT-!! It's a whole new life for me.

WEDNESDAY :
The only way I can brush my teeth is by laying the toothbrush on the counter and moving my mouth back and forth over it. I believe I have a hernia in both pectorals. Driving was OK as long as I didn't try to steer or stop. I parked on top of a GEO in the club parking lot. Belinda was impatient with me, insisting that my screams bothered other club members. Her voice is a little too perky for early in the morning and when she scolds, she gets this nasally whine that is VERY annoying. My chest hurt when I got on the treadmill, so Belinda put me on the stair 'monster'. Why the hell would anyone invent a machine to simulate an activity rendered obsolete by elevators? Belinda told me it would help me get in shape and enjoy life. She said some other shit too.

THURSDAY :
Belinda was waiting for me with her vampire-like teeth exposed as her thin, cruel lips were pulled back in a full snarl. I couldn't help being a half an hour late - it took me that long to tie my shoes. Belinda took me to work out with dumbbells. When she was not looking, I ran and hid in the restroom. She sent another skinny bitch to find me. Then, as punishment, she put me on the rowing machine - which I sank.

FRIDAY :
I hate that bitch Belinda more than any human being has ever hated any other human being in the history of the world. Stupid, skinny, anemic, anorexic little cheerleader! If there was a part of my body I could move without unbearable pain, I would beat her with it. Belinda wanted me to work on my triceps. I don't have any triceps! And if you don't want dents in the floor, don't hand me the damn barbells or anything that weighs more than a sandwich. The treadmill flung me off and I landed on a health and nutrition teacher. Why couldn't it have been someone softer, like the drama coach or the choir director?

SATURDAY :
Belinda left a message on my answering machine in her grating, shrilly voice wondering why I did not show up today. Just hearing her made me want to smash the machine with my planner. However, I lacked the strength to even use the TV remote and ended up catching 11 straight hours of the Weather Channel.

SUNDAY :
I'm having the Church van pick me up for services today so I can go and thank GOD that this week is over. I will also pray that next year my daughter Rachel (the little snot) will choose a gift for me that is fun - like a root canal or a hysterectomy. I still say if God had wanted me to bend over, he would have sprinkled the floor with diamonds!!!

Might be time to buy Starbucks stock again

2008-01-29T15:52:00.001-08:00

Click on the images to enlarge.
It was taken by NASA's Rover craft in December 2007, on the surface of Mars.Notice the discarded Starbucks cup?

Hello?

Well, now look at this earlier image of the same spot.
Note that the Starbucks cup is not present.
Someone must have dropped it there in that time frame.

My theory is: NASA is keeping a big secret from us. That secret is, a colony is already established on Mars. The US government is keeping it a secret in order to buy time to pillage the planet's resources before the Chinese and Europeans wake up, and they have invited only the top US corporations to be involved, like Boeing, Microsoft, GE, Starbucks (for the colonists' recreation).
The war in Iraq is just a diversion to keep the world focused elsewhere.

By Liam

Government warning: Do not swallow chewing gum!

2008-01-28T13:43:00.001-08:00

Liam said it

The Years' Best Headlines of 2007

2008-01-28T11:02:00.000-08:00

Crack Found on Governor's Daughter

Something Went Wrong in Jet Crash, Expert Says

Police Begin Campaign to Run Down Jaywalkers

Is There a Ring of Debris around Uranus?

Panda Mating Fails; Veterinarian Takes Over

Miners Refuse to Work after Death

Juvenile Court to Try Shooting Defendant

War Dims Hope for Peace

If Strike Isn't Settled Quickly, It May Last Awhile

Cold Wave Linked to Temperatures

Enfield ( London ) Couple Slain; Police Suspect Homicide

Red Tape Holds Up New Bridges

Man Struck By Lightning: Faces Battery Charge

New Study of Obesity Looks for Larger Test Group

Astronaut Takes Blame for Gas
in Spacecraft

Kids Make Nutritious Snacks

Local High School Dropouts Cut in Half

Hospitals are Sued by 7 Foot Doctors

And the winner is....

Typhoon Rips Through
Cemetery; Hundreds Dead

21 points of mental Feng Shui

2008-01-27T15:27:00.000-08:00

Mental Feng Shui

ONE. Give people more than they expect and do it cheerfully.

TWO. Marry a man/woman you love to talk to. As you get older, their conversational skills will be as important as any other.

THREE. Don't believe all you hear, spend all you have or sleep all you want.

FOUR. When you say, 'I love you,' mean it.

FIVE. When you say, 'I'm sorry,' look the person in the eye.

SIX. Be engaged at least six months before you get married.

SEVEN. Believe in love at first sight.

EIGHT. Never laugh at anyone's dreams. People who don't have dreams don't have much.

NINE. Love deeply and passionately. You might get hurt but it's the only way to live life completely.

TEN.. In disagreements, fight fairly. No name calling.

ELEVEN. Don't judge people by their relatives.

TWELVE. Talk slowly but think quickly.

THIRTEEN. When someone asks you a question you don't want to answer, smile and ask, 'Why do you want to know?'

FOURTEEN. Remember that great love and great achievements involve great risk.

FIFTEEN. Say 'bless you' when you hear someone sneeze.

SIXTEEN. When you lose, don't lose the lesson.

SEVENTEEN. Remember the three R's: Respect for self; Respect for others; and Responsibility for all your actions.

EIGHTEEN. Don't let a little dispute injure a great friendship.

NINETEEN. When you realize you've made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.

TWENTY. Smile when picking up the phone. The caller will hear it in your voice.

TWENTY- ONE. Spend some time alone.

why the Frenchman stole the painting from le Louvre

2008-01-26T12:46:00.000-08:00

A thief in Paris planned to steal some paintings from the Louvre.

After careful planning, he got past security, stole the paintings and made it safely to his van.

However, he was captured only two blocks away when his van ran out of gas.

When asked how he could mastermind such a crime and then make such an obvious error, he replied,

'Monsieur that is the reason I stole the paintings:

-

I had no Monet

to buy Degas

to make the Van Gogh'

See if you have De Gaulle to send this on to someone else.

I sent it to you because I figured I had nothing Toulouse.

Another Men vs. Women list

2008-01-24T09:45:00.000-08:00

NICKNAMES

If Laura, Kate and Sarah go out for lunch, they will call each other Laura, Kate and Sarah.

If Mike, Dave and John go out, they will, affectionately, refer to each other as FatBoy, Godzilla and Four-eyes.

EATING OUT

When the bill arrives, Mike, Dave and John will each throw in €20, even though it's only for €32.50.

None of them will have anything smaller and none will actually admit they want change back.

When the girls get their bill, out come the pocket calculators.

MONEY

A man will pay €2 for a €1 item he needs.
A woman will pay €1 for a €2 item that she doesn't need but it's on sale.

BATHROOMS

A man has six items in his bathroom: toothbrush and toothpaste, shaving cream, razor, a bar of soap, and a towel from M&S.

The average number of items in the typical woman's bathroom is 337.

A man would not be able to identify more than 20 of these items.

ARGUMENTS

A woman has the last word in any argument.
Anything a man says after that is the beginning of a new argument.

CATS

Women love cats.
Men say they love cats, but when women aren't looking, men kick cats.

FUTURE

A woman worries about the future until she gets a husband.
A man never worries about the future until he gets a wife.

SUCCESS

A successful man is one who makes more money than his wife can spend.
A successful woman is one who can find such a man.

MARRIAGE

A woman marries a man expecting he will change, but he doesn't.
A man marries a woman expecting that she won't change, but she does.

DRESSING UP

A woman will dress up to go shopping, water the plants, empty the bins, answer the phone, read a book, and get the post.
A man will dress up for weddings and funerals.

NATURAL

Men wake up as good-looking as they went to bed.
Women somehow deteriorate during the night.

OFFSPRING

Ah, children. A woman knows all about her children.

She knows about dentist appointments and romances, best friends, favourite foods, secret fears and hopes and dreams.

A man is vaguely aware of some short people living in the house.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

A married man should forget his mistakes.
There's no use in two people remembering the same thing.

Life in the 1500s - with a grain of salt

2008-01-21T09:53:00.000-08:00

DID YOU KNOW............

LIFE IN THE 1500'S - with a grain of salt

The next time you are washing your hands and complain because the
water temperature isn't just how you like it, think about how things
used to be. Here are some facts about the1500s:

Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath
in May, and still smelled pretty good by June. However, they were
starting to smell, so brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the
body odor. Hence the custom today of carrying a bouquet when getting
married.

Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the
house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons
and men, then the women and finally the children. Last of all the
babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone
in it. Hence the saying, Don't throw the baby out with the Bath water..

Houses had thatched roofs-thick straw-piled high, with no wood
underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the
cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof When it
rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall
off ! the roo f. Hence the saying . It's raining cats and dogs.

There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house.. This
posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings could
mess up your nice clean bed. Hence, a bed with big posts and a sheet
hung over the top afforded some protection. That's how canopy beds came
into existence.

The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt.
Hence the saying, Dirt poor. The wealthy had slate floors that would get
slippery in the winter when wet, so they spread thresh (straw) on floor
to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they added more
thresh until, when you opened the door, it would all start slipping
outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entranceway. Hence the saying
a thresh hold.

(Getting quite an education, aren't you?)

In those old days, they cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that
always hung over the fire . Every day they lit the fire and added things
to the pot. They ate mostly vegetables and did not get much meat. They
would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold
overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes stew had food in
it that had been there for quite a while. Hence the rhyme, Peas
porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days
old..

Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them feel quite
special. When visitors came over, they would hang up their bacon to show
off. It was a sign of wealth that a man could, bring home the bacon.
They would cut off a little to share with guests and would all sit
around and chew the fat..

Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with high acid
content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food, causing lead
poisoning death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next
400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous.

Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom
of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or the
upper crust.

Lead cups were used to drink ale or whiskey. The combination would
sometimes knock the imbibers out for a couple of days. Someone walking
along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial.
They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the
family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they
would wake up. Hence the custom of holding a wake.

England is old and small and the local folks started running out of
places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and would take the
bones to a bone-house, and reuse the grave. When reopening these
coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the
inside and they realized they had been burying people alive. So they
would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the
coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would
have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the graveyard shift.) to
listen for the bell; thus, someone could be, saved by the bell or was
considered a ...dead ringer..

Whoever said History was boring ! ! !

Hold the Mayo...

2008-01-11T07:34:00.000-08:00

You may already know this but the Irish license plate acronym MO stands for County Mayo in the west of Ireland.

Here are a few shots of a Mayo driver's car in a parking lot in Dublin's fair city.

(click for larger image)

Why Big Companies Don't Create New Products

2008-01-09T07:46:00.000-08:00

(Serious business blog entry)
Risk
It is risky creating a new product. Always risky. No matter how convinced you are that it will work, statistics are against you. Established companies like predictability, not risk. From-scratch product ventures are anathema to how companies are forced by shareholders/owners to operate.

Baptism of fire
As Edison put it, success is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Bringing a product to the level where it brings real value to customers is a long arduous journey. Who in a corporation has that kind of resolve? The owners, maybe, but not the employees.
To get a product to that level of success requires incredible dedication. Being in your own little startup allows you to focus the majority of your effort on the task. In contrast, trying to achieve such results when you are applying a lot of your emotional cycles to corporate politics makes it an impossible task.

Results
Companies reward results. To innovate, you have to take substantial risks. If you are a guy in a company that sees a product opportunity, why would you put your career on the line for the company when there is only a (let's be optimistic) 30% chance of the product or innovation working? You'd be crazy to stick your neck out and pursue it inside the company. If sheer passion is driving you, then be aware that the company probably doesn't care about passion. They care about profits, and your little idea better have some.
Is it not better to play it safe and stick to what already works in the company, or leave the company and try it yourself?

Bureaucracy
The company may support your idea initially, but they still have "their ways of doing things" - the very culture borne of the successful steps that got the company this far. Unless you are working for an extraordinary company, one with a deep respect and support for such "skunkworks" projects, the organization will likely apply institutional pressure on you to conform long before you show any progress.
It is hard enough indeed, when you do not have such pressures, to bring a product to market. The added drag effect of internal bureaucracy is usually enough to doom any significant product innovation initiative.

Beg, steal or borrow
Most established companies recognize the difficulty of creating new products. It is often much easier to wait and see what other companies do in the space and simply copy that if they can get away with it. If the product category turns out to be successful, an established company can go looking for a start-up that has solved the basic product problem, or they copy it, or license it from someone.
Indeed, some companies appear to have a policy of just copying products from small, arguably defenseless companies. Then, if they do get sued, can pull out the checkbook and buy their way out of the problem.

Catch 22
Remember the old "Catch 22" rule? "You have to be insane to want to be a pilot, but insanity disqualifies you", or something like that. It's a bit like that creating a new product. Statistically the odds are against you. I know, there are books and books out there telling you of sure-fire ways of creating winning products (I know. I wrote a couple myself). As far as I can see, those most successful at creating products are the ones who are passionate about it. Being passionate about something is payment enough, if you ask me. Corporations can't buy passion. And passion beats intellect any day.

12 predictions that were wrong

2008-01-07T13:00:00.000-08:00

1. “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” — Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC), maker of big business mainframe computers, arguing against the PC in 1977.

2. “Lee DeForest has said in many newspapers and over his signature that it would be possible to transmit the human voice across the Atlantic before many years. Based on these absurd and deliberately misleading statements, the misguided public … has been persuaded to purchase stock in his company …” — a U.S. District Attorney, prosecuting American inventor Lee DeForest for selling stock fraudulently through the mail for his Radio Telephone Company in 1913.

3. “A rocket will never be able to leave the Earth’s atmosphere.” — New York Times, 1936.

4. “There will never be a bigger plane built.” — A Boeing engineer, after the first flight of the 247, a twin engine plane that holds ten people.

5. “There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.” — Albert Einstein, 1932

6. “The cinema is little more than a fad. It’s canned drama. What audiences really want to see is flesh and blood on the stage.” -– Charlie Chaplin, actor, producer, director, and studio founder, 1916.

7. “The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty - a fad.” — The president of the Michigan Savings Bank advising Henry Ford’s lawyer, Horace Rackham, not to invest in the Ford Motor Co., 1903

8. “The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.” — Sir William Preece, Chief Engineer, British Post Office, 1878.

9. “The world potential market for copying machines is 5000 at most.” — IBM, to the eventual founders of Xerox, saying the photocopier had no market large enough to justify production, 1959.

10. “X-rays will prove to be a hoax.” — Lord Kelvin, President of the Royal Society, 1883.

11. “[Television] won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.” — Darryl Zanuck, movie producer, 20th Century Fox, 1946.

12. “When the Paris Exhibition [of 1878] closes, electric light will close with it and no more will be heard of it.” - Oxford professor Erasmus Wilson.

The Four Top Things I Learned from Startup

2007-12-11T12:14:00.000-08:00

1. Always put the company's interests ahead of your own interests. "De-couple" your interests from the company's interests. When someone asks "should we do such-and-such", your First Thought should be "what is best for the company?" Make sure employees, investors, everyone, understands that your first priority is the company, not yourself. Make sure they know they are working for the company, not you. They are working for the company and you are also working for the company. The fact that you founded the company should have no bearing on your putting the company's interested first. Always.

2. Always think, plan and act for the long term. Keep a mental road map ten years into the future. There really are no good short term decisions. Every decision you make should feed into the long term. You are growing an Oak Tree that will outlive you, not a dandelion that lasts for a season.

3. Customer Value, Customer Value, Customer Value. Think "how much can I deliver to my customer for $100 and still be profitable?" not "How can I maximize my profit from this $100 transaction?". That also ties into the Long Term.

4. In the long term, all energy must come from customers.
Investors and your own personal investments into it are done only to help get you moving. Delivering repeatable, profitable customer value is the only long term energy source that is maintainable. Make a b-line for delivering repeatable, profitable customer value from the beginning.

Liam
SiteLeads.net
Quality Sales Leads Through Best Practices for the Web

interesting sign on golf course

2007-12-11T10:08:00.000-08:00

Service, Irish Style

2007-11-27T17:28:00.001-08:00

(FYI, Superquinn is a big chain of supermarkets in Ireland.)

READ THE STORY FIRST AND THEN LOOK AT THE PIC OF THE CAKE...

Superquinn Employee: "Hello now. 'dis Superquinn, how can I help you?"

Customer: " I would like to order a cake for a going away party this
week."

Superquinn Employee: "What you want now on de cake?"

Customer: "Best Wishes Suzanne" and underneath that "We will miss you".

Superquinn Employee: "Dat all? Okay, Bye now."

Pierre Corneille quotes

2007-11-27T13:46:00.000-08:00

Few people have heard of Pierre Corneille. He lived in the 1600s and much of his wisdom is as applicable today was when he wrote it.
Here are some of my favorites:

A first impulse was never a crime.

A good memory is needed after one has lied.

A liar is always lavish of oaths.

A true king is neither husband nor father; he considers his throne and nothing else.

A Victory without danger is a triumph without glory.

After having won a scepter, few are so generous as to disdain the pleasures of ruling.

Alas, I emerge from one disaster to fall into a worse.

Ambition aspires to descend.

An example is often a deceptive mirror, and the order of destiny, so troubling to our thoughts, is not always found written in things past.

As great as kings may be, they are what we are: they can err like other men.

Brave men are brave from the very first.

Clemency is the noblest trait which can reveal a true monarch to the world.

Danger breeds best on too much confidence.

Deceit is the game of petty spirits, and that is by nature a woman's quality.

Desire increases when fulfillment is postponed.

Do your duty and leave the rest to heaven.

Do your duty, and leave the outcome to the Gods.

Do your duty, and let the gods do the rest.

Each instant of life is a step toward death.

Every man of courage is a man of his word.

Flee an enemy who knows your weakness.

Force is legitimate where gentleness avails not.

Guess, if you can, and choose, if you dare.

Happiness seems made to be shared.

He who allows himself to be insulted deserves to be so; and insolence, if unpunished, increases.

He who allows himself to be insulted deserves to be.

He who allows me to rule is in fact my master.

He who can live in infamy is unworthy of life.

He who does not fear death cares naught for threats.

He who fears not death fears not a threat.

He who forgives readily only invites offense.

He who is hated by all can not expect to live long.

He who pardons easily invites offense.

He who plays advisor is no longer ambassador.

How delicious is pleasure after torment!

I agree to, or rather aspire to, my doom.

I can be forced to live without happiness, but I will never consent to live without honor.

I don't know how to defend myself: surprised innocence cannot imagine being under suspicion.

I have deserved neither so much honor or so much disgrace.

I see, I know, I believe, I am undeceived.

I would not like a king who could obey.

In recounting our woes, we often soothe them.

In the service of Caesar, everything is legitimate.

It is a crime against the State to be powerful enough to commit one.

It is the crime not the scaffold which is the disgrace.

It matters more how one gives than what one gives.

It takes good memory to keep up a lie.

Just vengeance does not call for punishment.

Love is a tyrant sparing none.

Master of the universe but not of myself, I am the only rebel against my absolute power.

My reason, it's true, controls my feelings, but whatever its authority, it doesn't rule them so much as tyrannize them.

My sweetest hope is to lose hope.

Oh rage! Oh despair! Oh age, my enemy!

Oh, how sweet it is to pity the fate of an enemy who can no longer threaten us!

One half of my life has put the other half in the grave.

One is often guilty by being too just.

One often calms one's grief by recounting it.

One ought to have a good memory when he has told a lie.

Peace is produced by war.

Reason and love are sworn enemies.

Self-love is the source of all our other loves.

Severity is allowable where gentleness has no effect.

The crime and not the scaffold makes the shame.

The greater the effort, the greater the glory.

The manner of giving is worth more than the gift.

The subject of a good tragedy must not be realistic.

They who overcome their desires once can overcome them always.

This dark brightness that falls from the stars.

Those who easily forgive invite offenses.

To conquer without danger is to conquer without glory.

To die for one's country is such a worthy fate that all compete for so beautiful a death.

To he who avenges a father, nothing is impossible.

To take revenge halfheartedly is to court disaster; either condemn or crown your hatred.

To vanquish without peril is to triumph without glory.

To win without risk is to triumph without glory.

Treachery is noble when aimed at tyranny.

True, I am young, but for souls nobly born valor doesn't await the passing of years.

We never taste a perfect joy; our happiest successes are mixed with sadness.

We never taste happiness in perfection, our most fortunate successes are mixed with sadness.

We triumph without glory when we conquer without danger.

When the patient loves his disease, how unwilling he is to allow a remedy to be applied.

When there is no peril in the fight there is no glory in the triumph.

When we conquer without danger our triumph is without glory.

Why God made moms

2007-11-27T12:19:00.000-08:00

WHY GOD MADE MOMS
Answers given by 2nd grade school children to the following questions:

Why did God make mothers?
1. She's the only one who knows where the scotch tape is.
2. Mostly to clean the house.
3. To help us out of there when we were getting born.

How did God make mothers?
1. He used dirt, just like for the rest of us.
2. Magic plus super powers and a lot of stirring.
3. God made my Mom just the same like he made me. He just used bigger parts.

What ingredients are mothers made of ?
1. God makes mothers out of clouds and angel hair and everything nice in the world and one dab of mean.
2. They had to get their start from men's bones. Then they mostly use string, I think.

Why did God give you your mother and not some other mom?
1. We're related.
2. God knew she likes me a lot more than other people's moms like me.

What kind of little girl was your mom?
1. My Mom has always been my mom and none of that other stuff.
2. I don't know because I wasn't there, but my guess would be pretty bossy.
3. They say she used to be nice.

What did mom need to know about dad before she married him?
1. His last name.
2. She had to know his background. Like is he a crook? Does he get drunk on beer?
3. Does he make at least $800 a year? Did he say NO to drugs and YES to chores?

Why did your mom marry your dad?
1. My dad makes the best spaghetti in the world. And my Mom eats a lot.
2. She got too old to do anything else with him.
3. My grandma says that Mom didn't have her thinking cap on.

Who's the boss at your house?
1. Mom doesn't want to be boss, but she has to because dad's such a goof ball.
2. Mom. You can tell by room inspection. She sees the stuff under the bed.
3. I guess Mom is, but only because she has a lot more to do than dad.

What's the difference between moms & dads?
1. Moms work at work and work at home and dads just go to work at work.
2. Moms know how to talk to teachers without scaring them.
3. Dads are taller & stronger, but moms have all the real power 'cause that's who you got to ask if you want to sleep over at your friend's.
4. Moms have magic, they make you feel better without medicine.

What does your mom do in her spare time?
1. Mothers don't do spare time.
2. To hear her tell it, she pays bills all day long.

What would it take to make your mom perfect?
1. On the inside she's already perfect. Outside, I think some kind of plastic surgery.
2. Diet. You know, her hair. I'd diet, maybe blue.

If you could change one thing about your mom, what would it be?
1. She has this weird thing about me keeping my room clean. I'd get rid of that.
2. I'd make my mom smarter. Then she would know it was my sister who did it and not me.
3. I would like for her to get rid of those invisible eyes on the back of her head.

Application for a night out with the boys

2007-11-19T12:10:00.001-08:00

APPLICATION FOR A NIGHT OUT WITH THE BOYS

Name of Boyfriend/Fiancé/Husband:

I request permission for a leave of absence from the highest authority in my life for the following period:

Time of return

Date: Time of departure: NOT to exceed:

Should permission be granted, I do solemnly swear to only visit the locations stated below, at the stated times. I agree to refrain from hitting on or flirting with other women. I shall not even speak to another female, except as expressly permitted in writing below. I will not turn off my mobile after two pints, nor shall I consume above the allowed volume of alcohol without first phoning for a taxi AND calling you for a verbal waiver of said alcohol allowance. I understand that even if permission is granted to go out, my girlfriend/fiancé/wife retains the right to be pissed off with me the following week for no valid reason whatsoever.

Amount of alcohol allowed (units) Beer Wine Liquor Total

Location: From: To:

Locations to be visited

Females with whom conversation

is permitted

IMPORTANT – STRIPPER CLAUSE: Not withstanding the female contact permitted above, I promise to refrain from coming within one hundred (100) feet of a stripper or exotic dancer. Violation of this Stripper Clause shall be grounds for immediate termination of the relationship.

I acknowledge my position in life. I know who wears the trousers in our relationship, and I agree it’s not me. I promise to abide by your rules & regulations. I understand that this is going to cost me a fortune in chocolates & flowers. You reserve the right to obtain and use my credit cards whenever you wish to do so. I hereby promise to take you on an unlimited shopping spree, should I not return home by the approved time. On my way home, I will not pick a fight with any stranger, nor shall I conduct in depth discussions with the said entity. Upon my return home, I promise not to urinate anywhere other than in the toilet. In addition, I will refrain from waking you up, breathing my vile breath in your face, and attempting to breed like a (drunken) rabbit.

I declare that to the best of my knowledge (of which I have none compared to my BETTER half), the above information is correct.

Signed - Boyfriend/Fiancé/Husband:

Request is: APPROVED DENIED

This decision is not negotiable. If approved, cut permission slip below and carry at all times.

"……………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Permission for my boyfriend/fiancé/husband to be away for the following period of time:

Date: Time of departure: Time of return:

Signed – Girlfriend/Fiancé/Wife:

Application for a night out with the girls

2007-11-19T12:08:00.000-08:00

APPLICATION FOR A NIGHT OUT WITH THE GIRLS

Name of Girlfriend/Fiancé/Partner/Wife:

I’m going out.

Signed: (me) _____________________________

The Beauty of Mathematics

2007-09-03T08:51:00.000-07:00

Beauty of Math:

1 x 8 + 1 = 9
12 x 8 + 2 = 98
123 x 8 + 3 = 987
1234 x 8 + 4 = 9876
12345 x 8 + 5 = 98765
123456 x 8 + 6 = 987654
1234567 x 8 + 7 = 9876543
12345678 x 8 + 8 = 98765432
123456789 x 8 + 9 = 987654321

1 x 9 + 2 = 11
12 x 9 + 3 = 111
123 x 9 + 4 = 1111
1234 x 9 + 5 = 11111
12345 x 9 + 6 = 111111
123456 x 9 + 7 = 1111111
1234567 x 9 + 8 = 11111111
12345678 x 9 + 9 = 111111111
123456789 x 9 +10= 1111111111

9 x 9 + 7 = 88
98 x 9 + 6 = 888
987 x 9 + 5 = 8888
9876 x 9 + 4 = 88888
98765 x 9 + 3 = 888888
987654 x 9 + 2 = 8888888
9876543 x 9 + 1 = 88888888
98765432 x 9 + 0 = 888888888

Brilliant, isn't it?

And look at this symmetry:

1 x 1 = 1
11 x 11 = 121
111 x 111 = 12321
1111 x 1111 = 1234321
11111 x 11111 = 123454321
111111 x 111111 = 12345654321
1111111 x 1111111 = 1234567654321
11111111 x 11111111 = 123456787654321
111111111 x 111111111=12345678987654321

Now, take a look at this...

101%

From a strictly mathematical viewpoint:

What Equals 100%? What does it mean to give MORE than 100%?

Ever wonder about those people who say they are giving more than 100%?

We have all been in situations where someone wants you to GIVE OVER 100%.

How about ACHIEVING 101%?

What equals 100% in life?

Here's a little mathematical formula that might help answer these questions:

If:

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Is represented as:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26.

If:

H-A-R-D-W-O-R- K

8+1+18+4+23+15+18+11 = 98%

And:

K-N-O-W-L-E-D-G-E

11+14+15+23+12+5+4+7+5 = 96%

But:

A-T-T-I-T-U-D-E

1+20+20+9+20+21+4+5 = 100%

THEN, look how far the love of God will take you:

L-O-V-E-O-F-G-O-D

12+15+22+5+15+6+7+15+4 = 101%

Therefore, one can conclude with mathematical certainty that:

While Hard Work and Knowledge will get you close, and Attitude will
get you there, It's the Love of God that will put you over the top!

It's up to you if you share this with your friends & loved ones just
the way I did.

How to tell if your feet stink

2007-07-25T08:56:00.000-07:00

Limerick Creche

2007-07-25T08:50:00.001-07:00

Size matters. How big are you?

2007-07-16T09:51:00.001-07:00

Notice Arcturus in that last image.

It'd make you wonder.

Irish road workers show how effective they can be

2007-06-27T10:33:00.000-07:00

ah sure, ya can click the image to enlarge it, now.

A Life Lesson from Itzhak Perlman

2007-06-21T13:40:00.000-07:00

On Nov. 18, 1995, Itzhak Perlman, the violinist, came on stage to
give a concert at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center in New York City. If
you have ever been to a Perlman concert, you know that getting on stage is
no small achievement for him. He was stricken with polio as a child, and so
he has braces on both legs and walks with the aid of two crutches. To see
him walk across the stage one step at a time, painfully and slowly, is an
awesome sight.
He walks painfully, yet majestically, until he reaches his chair.
Then he sits down, slowly, puts his crutches on the floor, undoes the
clasps on his legs, tucks one foot back and extends the other foot
forward. Then he bends down and picks up the violin, puts it under
his chin, nods to the conductor and proceeds to play.

By now, the audience is used to this ritual. They sit quietly
while he makes his way across the stage to his chair. They remain
reverently silent while he undoes the clasps on his legs. They wait until
he is ready to play.

But this time, something went wrong. Just as he finished the first
few bars, one of the strings on his violin broke. You could hear it snap -
it went off like gunfire across the room. There was no mistaking what that
sound meant. There was no mistaking what he had to do. We figured that he
would have to get up, put on the clasps again, pick up the crutches and
limp his way off stage - to either find another violin or else find another
string for this one. But he didn't. Instead, he waited a moment, closed his
eyes and then signaled the conductor to begin again.

The orchestra began, and he played from where he had left off. And
he played with such passion and such power and such purity as they had
never heard before.

Of course, anyone knows that it is impossible to play a symphonic
work with just three strings. I know that, and you know that, but that
night Itzhak Perlman refused to know that.

You could see him modulating, changing, re-composing the piece in
his head. At one point, it sounded like he was de-tuning the strings to get
new sounds from them that they had never made before. When he finished,
there was an awesome silence in the room. And then people rose and cheered.
There was an extraordinary outburst of applause from every corner of the
auditorium. We were all on our feet, screaming and cheering, doing
everything we could to show how much we appreciated what he had done.

He smiled, wiped the sweat from this brow, raised his bow to quiet
us, and then he said - not boastfully, but in a quiet, pensive, reverent
tone - "You know, sometimes it is the artist's task to find out how much
music you can still make with what you have left."

What a powerful line that is. It has stayed in my mind ever since
I heard it. And who knows? Perhaps that is the definition of life - not
just for artists but for all of us. Here is a man who has prepared all his
life to make music on a violin of four strings, who, all of a sudden, in
the middle of a concert, finds himself with only three strings; so he makes
music with three strings, and the music he made that night with just three
strings was more beautiful, more sacred, more memorable, than any that he
had ever made before, when he had four strings.

So, perhaps our task in this shaky, fast-changing, bewildering
world in which we live is to make music, at first with all that we have,
and then, when that is no longer possible, to make music with what we have
left.

Getting funding for your startup, and alternatives

2007-06-17T12:13:00.000-07:00

Summary:
First-timers in starting up worry about things like (1) competitive products, (2) competition stealing their ideas and (3) VCs divulging their precious secrets, (4) how much of the company they can retain, etc..

Those experienced at starting up focus on (1) how to deliver ever-increasing value to customers and (2) internal execution to achieve that while staying liquid.

A second point:
When it comes to a bacon-and-egg breakfast, the chicken is involved but the pig is committed. With VC investments, the VC investor is involved but you, the entrepreneur, are committed. This means the typical VC investor has a portfolio of maybe 10, 20 or 30 companies. You have, most likely, only one. If it fails, it takes your single five to ten year investment in time and effort down the drain with it. You lose your whole portfolio.

The Details:
I'm well into my third real startup. I started a software company in 1994 which ran for three years, and another software company in 1999 which is still in good business, and in 2005 I started a hardware product company.

The first company, I started with two partners, the second with one partner and the third one I started alone.

We never managed to get financing for the first company, mostly because we didn't have a clue how to go about it.
I was the product guy and one of my partners was a well-rounded business development and marketing guy. Happily, he is a close friend of mine to this day.
The third partner fell apart early on in the startup, so we were quickly down to two.
With two versions of two software products, we secured some several hundred customers over the 3-year life of the company. We didn't make a lot of money out of it, but got some badly needed startup experience.

It is no surprise to me that the vast majority of new companies fail pretty quickly.

After Startup #1 eventually sputtered to a halt, I went back to the workforce with a little hard-earned but valuable humility regarding making a business successful.
Within 18 months, I was smitten with the possibility of starting another software company. That eighteen months gave me the time and space to think hard about the lessons I learned and I religiously applied my newly learned principles to Startup #2.

For almost two years, my co-founder and I buried ourselves in his basement, cutting as much code as we could before cash or motivation ran out. We were fortunate to stumble upon a very sharp fund-raiser to whom we offered the position of CEO and significant partner. Over the course of 4 or 5 years, our new CEO deftly secured three rounds of financing at a good price every time.
I learned a few things during those 4 or 5 years.

I'll talk about startup #3 a bit later.

What are the ramifications of getting funding for your startup? Getting funding for your startup has a number of implications that founders typically don't understand.

#1: Liquidation Preference
In addition to how much stock you retain in your own startup, Liquidation Preference affects how cash is divvied up in the event of your startup being acquired.
Typically, the people who put cash into your startup have a "2x Liquidation Preference". This means that they are entitled to get twice their investment back before you get paid anything, in the event of an acquisition. That's just the theory, of course, and a lot of it is still open for negotiation, depending on how the company is doing, and other factors.

Let's look at a theoretical example.
You have an equal partnership with your co-founder. Investors want to invest $10m into your startup, and for that, you agree to give them 40% of the company. This means the company is "valued at $25m" in terms of what is called "pre-money". (If 40% = $10m, then the company should be worth 40% + 60%, you'd think. "Pre-money" means 'before the investment is made').
So now you and your co-founder have 30% each of a company that is worth $25m (on paper) and has $10m in the bank.

Yippee!

Not quite Yippee.

Your investors have what is called Preferred Stock. You and your co-founder have Common Stock. Preferred Stock has typically a Liquidation Preference associated with it and Common Stock typically does not.

Aside from money speaking louder than words, Liquidation Preference is there for a number of reasons. (1) it discourages founders from forcing a sale at a price at which Investors would lose money (imagine a week after the investment, you got an offer to sell the company for $10m) (2) it forces the Common Stock holders to increase the value of the company to a number where it makes investment sense for the Investors. There are other reasons too, but I'll get back to that.

It's great to get all that cash injected into your startup. Overnight, you go from scrimping and scraping to make ends meet, to getting paid a salary and still being able to pursue your brilliant idea. You are, as my friend Randy put it, betting with house money.

Pigs get Fat; Hogs get Slaughtered
A risk with this model is, with every round of financing, you significantly raise the acquisition price required for the Common Stock holders to make any money. After the first round, you have to sell the company for $50m in order to satisfy the Investors with their 2x Liquidation Preference. Mind you, if you do sell the company for $50m, and you still have 30% of it, you're in good shape.
The problem is, it will take a long time and a lot of effort to double the value of your startup to reach that $50m. And the journey to get there is fraught with danger.

Rule of thumb: a 2x Liquidation Preference = 2x the company price must be.

You'll have to bring out newer, better versions of your product or products, reel in more customers, get process in place and generally prove to the world that your company is growing. A lot of things can go wrong in that time. And when they do, you can't just make a few phone calls and secure another $10m to take another swing at it. Or rather, if you do, you'll have to give away another big piece of the company, perhaps even more than 40% if your company is having troubles. Having company troubles means that you might need a "down round". A down round is where you give stock away at a price that is less that the previous investment price. If you have to give away another 60%, everyone loses 60% of their share of course, investors included, but your Common Stock, now at maybe 10% of the company, needs a significant acquisition purchase price before you make a dime.
The biggest problem with Common Stock is, your share of the company is "diluted" with every round, so you have to continue to be successful every year of the startup. One bad round and you're what they call washed out.

Question: What makes a company work?
Answer: Creating customer value.

In the long run, you must create customer value in order to stay in business. You must deliver something to your customer that they feel good about paying for...something they get a multiple of the value for. Profit will eventually come if you continue to increase customer value, but customer value will not necessarily come as a result of profitability.

#2: A Conflict of Interests - Investors versus Founders:

The typical VC investor invests in many different companies at roughly the same time. They might have investments in twenty different startups chugging along and as long as two or three of them turn out to deliver bumper returns, most of the others may evaporate, yet still the VC is in excellent shape overall.

Not so for the lowly entrepreneur who is strapped to a single company.

The typical entrepreneur has his or her retirement buried in the startup. Or at the very least, has bet a lot on a successful return from the startup. Yes, the VC might have poured $10m into it, but as soon as it looks like it is, as they say in the vernacular, going south, the VC tends to shift focus towards the prosperous companies in his portfolio and away from the troubled one. The mathematics of the VC's investment portfolio makes him or her unmotivated to deal with hard issues in the startup.

This inherent unwillingness to make hard choices, coupled with the fact that their Liquidation Preference protects them from an entrepreneur selling the company at a fire sale price, puts the entrepreneur into a vulnerable position, one that is not obvious before problems arise.

How can an entrepreneur protect himself/herself?

To be fair, when an investor sticks millions of dollars into your idea, he/she is making a huge commitment. You will probably draw a salary and pay into your retirement fund while you work your idea at their expense. That is a significant commitment they are making to your dream.

Still, you should understand the mathematics that make you vulnerable in ways the investor is not vulnerable.

Taking investment into your startup does not decrease risk. It delays risk.

The pros of taking investment:

You get to draw a salary.
You get to apply extra resources into your startup.

The cons of taking investment:

You need to sell the company for a much higher $ figure for you to make anything.
You introduce a lot of complexity into your startup.
You lose significant control over the direction of the company and everything in it.

The Illusion of Almost Acquired
A lot more companies get sold for $3m than get sold for $10m, or $30m, or more. The higher the number, the fewer companies get sold for that amount, the less likely you can strike a sale, statistically speaking.
What's more, many companies get the opportunity to get sold as a technology play early on, before the startup really becomes a company. After that, there can be a long, parched road before another opportunity to get sold appears.
This means, whilst you may have had an opportunity to sell the company for $5 - 10m, you may not get another chance to sell it before it passes well beyond the $100m company value range. There is a big difference between having a product and having a company. There is very little in between that a potential acquirer will be interested in taking on.

If you are a Product Builder, which many entrepreneurs are, and you are not a Company Builder, which many entrepreneurs are not, then you might be successful at building your initial product, at which time your startup will be worth something, and selling it to the first suitor.
After that, during the steep learning curve of you learning how to build a business, you may fritter away lots of the hard-earned company value you accrued early on, and end up diluting your value by effectively investing your hard-earned value (you built a product) into something which is not your specialty (building a company).

Moral #1: Always be selling your stock.

Moral #2: Start a business that does not require significant investment, but does exploit your specific skill set.

For all the assumed goodness that millions of dollars brings to your startup, the fact is, things quickly get more complicated with all that money involved. Suddenly, there is serious time pressure to deliver. Sure, everyone wants to be successful quickly, but now that your company has taken the VC money, your investors are anxious for you to burn the midnight oil and give them a return quickly.

In many cases, another 40 engineer bodies on the problem will only make a marginal improvement to your chances. Often, VC investment in a software company is a exercise in posturing. With software in particular, you might actually be better off limited to the original two or three engineers working the problem. Sometimes just a few hours work every night, while you keep your day job, is enough to keep the startup progressing enough, but takes a lot of other pressures off. For instance: (1) you can keep the price of the software at whatever you think is right, even free, if that gives some advantage (2) you can mull over some decisions for a long time before making them, (3) only perform the key improvements that you know will add value. But most of all, when you get an offer from someone to buy out the technology, a few million will probably be very attractive to you. There are MANY big technology players out there who will fork out a few million just for the chance to try out your fledgling product in terms of an acquisition.

You see, people think, just because they suddenly have this $5 or 10m in the company coffers, their chances of success are suddenly improved.
They're not really.
The risk of failure is simply postponed, or exchanged for a different kind of risk down the road.

So, when you take a big investment from a VC company, understand that it brings with it significant risks that are not obvious when your company deposits that check into its bank account. Think long and hard before you strap yourself to that Big VC Rocket.
Once you do, there is no turning back.

I wish you good luck, no matter what.
Liam
Further Ramblings from Liam can be read here...

Golf. An endless series of tragedies

2007-06-08T14:31:00.000-07:00

Golf can best be defined as an endless
series of tragedies obscured by the
occasional miracle, followed by a good
bottle of Pepsi .

Golf! You hit down to make the ball go up.
You swing left and the ball goes right.
The lowest score wins.
And on top of that, the winner buys.

"Golf is harder than baseball.
In golf, you have to play your foul balls.

If you find you do not mind playing golf
in the rain, the snow, even during a hurricane,
here's a valuable tip: your life is in trouble.

Golfers who try to make everything
perfect before taking the shot
rarely make a perfect shot.

The term "mulligan" is really a
contraction of the phrase "maul it again."

A "gimme" can best be defined as an
agreement between two golfers ...
Neither of whom can putt very well.

An interesting thing about golf is that
no matter how badly you play;
it is always possible to get worse.

Golf's a hard game to figure.
One day you'll go out and slice it and
shank it, hit into all the traps and miss
every green. The next day you go out
and for no reason at all you really stink.

If your best shots are the practice swing
and the "gimme putt", you might wish
to reconsider this game.

Golf is the only sport where the
most feared opponent is you.

Golf is like marriage:
If you take yourself too seriously it
won't work , and both are expensive.

More cute things school children say

2007-06-07T12:29:00.000-07:00

Q: Name the four seasons.
A: Salt, pepper, mustard and vinegar.

Q: Explain one of the processes by which water can be made safe to drink.
A: Flirtation makes water safe to drink because it removes large pollutants like grit, sand, dead sheep and canoeists.

Q: How is dew formed?
A: The sun shines down on the leaves and makes them perspire.

Q: How can you delay milk turning sour?
A: Keep it in the cow.

Q: What causes the tides in the oceans?
A: The tides are a fight between the Earth and
the Moon. All water tends to flow towards the moon, because there is no water on the moon, and nature hates a vacuum. I forget where the sun joins in this fight.

Q: What are steroids?
A: Things for keeping carpets still on the stairs.

Q: What happens to your body as you age?
A: When you get old, so do your bowels and you get intercontinental.

Q: What happens to a boy when he reaches puberty?
A: He says good-bye to his boyhood and looks forward to his adultery.

Q: Name a major disease associated with cigarettes
A: Premature death.

Q: How are the main parts of the body categorized? (e.g., abdomen.)
A: The body is consisted into three parts - the brainium, the borax and the abdominal cavity. The brainium contains the brain; the borax contains the heart and lungs, and the abdominal cavity contains the five bowels, A, E, I, O, and U.

Q: What is the fibula?
A: A small lie.

Q: What does "varicose" mean?
A: Nearby.

Q: Give the meaning of the term "Cesarean Section"
A: The Cesarean Section is a district in Rome.

Q: What does the word "benign" mean?'
A: Benign is what you will be after you be eight.

There was an Indian Chief who had four sons.

2007-05-14T08:51:00.000-07:00

Lessons on Life

There was an Indian Chief who had four sons. He wanted his sons to learn not to judge things too quickly. So he sent them each on a quest, in turn, to go and look at a pear tree that was a great distance away.
The first son went in the winter, the second in the spring, the third in summer, and the youngest son in the fall.

A year later, after each and every son had returned to the tribe, he called them together to describe what they had seen.

The first son said that the tree was ugly, bent, and twisted.

The second son was surprised and said no, it was covered with green buds and full of promise.

The third son disagreed; he said it was laden with white blossoms that smelled so sweet and looked so beautiful, it was the most graceful thing he had ever seen.

The last son disagreed with all of them; he said it was ripe and laden heavy with fruit, full of life and fulfillment.

The man then explained to his sons that they were all right, because they had each seen but only one season in the tree's life.

He told them that you cannot judge a tree, or a person, by only one season, and that the essence of who they are and the pleasure, joy, and love that come from that life can only be measured at the end, when all the seasons are up.

If you give up when it's winter, you will miss the promise of your spring, the beauty of your summer, and the fulfillment of your fall.

A recent study of octogenarians showed their favorite decade in life was their 60's, 2nd- 50's and third was their 40's, then childhood. The best is yet to come.

Moral:
Don't let the pain of one season destroy the joy of all the rest.
Don't judge life by one difficult season.
Persevere through the difficult patches and better times will come when it is their time.
Live Simply.
Love Generously.
Care Deeply.
Speak Kindly.
Leave the Rest to God.
Happiness keeps You Sweet,
Trials keep You Strong,
Sorrows keep You Human,
Failures keep You Humble,
Success keeps You Glowing,
Each of God's Seasons prepares you for the next.

19 reasons it's good to be over 50

2007-05-02T10:52:00.000-07:00

1. Kidnappers are not very interested in you.

2. In a hostage situation you are likely to be released first.

3. No one expects you to run--anywhere.

4. People call at 9 pm and ask, Did I wake you?

5. People no longer view you as a hypochondriac.

6. There is nothing left to learn the hard way.

7. Things you buy now won't wear out.

8. You can eat supper at 4 pm.

9. You can live without sex but not your glasses.

10. You get into heated arguments about pension plans.

11. You no longer think of speed limits as a challenge.

12. You quit trying to hold your stomach in no matter who walks into the
room.

13. You sing along with elevator music.

14. Your eyes won't get much worse.

15. Your investment in health insurance is finally beginning to pay off.

16. Your joints are more accurate meteorologists than the national weather
service.

17. Your secrets are safe with your friends because they can't remember
them either.

18. Your supply of brain cells is finally down to manageable size.

19. You can't remember who sent you this list .

You notice these are all in Big Print for your convenience.

Eleven Things Your Child Must Know

2007-04-28T16:16:00.000-07:00

This is my list. If you have any suggestions, make a post.

(page down for full description of each)
11. Beware advice to stand up for your rights
10. Avoid exotic partners, houses and cars
9. Always turn up on time
8. Never mistake what a woman says she wants for what she wants (advice for your son, mostly)
7. Follow your passion ... and keep your day job
6. Pick a life partner who takes responsibility
5. Pick a partner who is not a control freak
4. Always know how to stand on your own feet even if someone is carrying you
3. Never be a ship's doctor
2. Little of any worth takes less than ten years
1. Get the best education you can, as early as you can

11. Beware advice to stand up for your rights

People can be relied upon to act mostly in their self-interests.
Some people are masters at getting others to fight their fights for them or to "take a bullet" for them. Sometimes they will even send another person into battle because they are jealous of them.

Misery loves company. A divorcee might try to "recruit" you with great stories of how good life is being divorced from a subconscious jealousy.

No one knows better than you how good or bad a deal is for you. Don't let anyone talk you into making irreversible decisions in your life. Be suspicious of anyone who is suggesting you put your boss, your spouse or anyone else in his place. Decide for yourself what is best.

10. Avoid exotic partners, houses and cars

Partners, houses and cars are hard to get rid of when you need to move on.

Houses: If you buy a funky house, built by an eccentric professor at the end of a cul-de-sac, you may like it for a while but come time to sell it, your available market is limited because of the unusualness of the house.
Secondly, there are reasons a particular type of house is built in a given area at a certain time. the neighborhood is largely designed to accommodate elderly residents, but your house has three narrow flights of stairs.
Don't be the guy on the street with the exotic house.

Cars: there's nothing easier to shed than a four-door basic model automatic compact car in reasonable condition. Average or "normal" is best when it comes to cars.
Try not to be the guy trying to sell the four year-old Jaguar XK8.

Partners: My wife and I grew up two counties away from one another and twenty years on, but we still puzzle at the challenges our different cultural values present us with. Sometimes it's like we speak different languages.
I don't know what the statistics are, but a betting person's money is on the notion that, all else being equal, cultural differences present challenges to a marriage.

Again, all else being equal, pick a life partner that has had a similar background to yours. Or better said, pick someone that has similar values.
If your husband-to-be believes that universal health care is not a good idea, and you believe that it should be ever citizen's right, then you and your husband-to-be have different values.

If you really must go exotic, food, clothes and travel destinations are a good option.

9. Always turn up on time

As my daughter's music instructor says "Early is on time; on time is late; late is unacceptable".
When your child makes a promise to meet someone at 4pm, the person they are meeting is reasonable in expecting your child to be there at 4pm. They may turn up before 4pm which is fine, but at 4pm on the nose, each of them should be there.
Why is this so important?

If I were to borrow $20 from you today and promise that next Saturday I would repay to you the $20, you would be reasonable in expecting to have the $20 returned next Saturday, right?
Most people understand and accept that.
If I turned up next Saturday, handed you $19.50 (instead of the full $20 I owed you) and said "there's your money back. Thanks for the loan", you might laugh and draw my attention to it, especially if you sensed I thought it was normal behavior.

Almost everyone understands that money owed should be repaid in full, so why are some folks so loose with your time? They're careful to hand you back the $20 in full, but think nothing of leaving you standing on a street corner or waiting alone somewhere for 5 or 10 minutes. What is five minutes of your time worth? Nothing?
(By the way, I'm not talking about arriving at a cocktail party, but those times where someone is actually waiting for you to turn up when you said you would before they continue.)

Your child should know that it is better to arrive thirty minutes early than ten minutes late. Other people's time is more valuable than other people's money. If you wouldn't stiff a friend for the money you owe them, your values suggest you wouldn't want to stiff them for their time either.
Punctuality with other people's time is a mark of respect. Your child will serve her own interests well by turning up on time, every time.

8. Never mistake what a woman says she wants for what she wants (advice for your son, mostly)

I often get in trouble when I mention this rule. My mother (a woman, obviously) first told me this when I was about twenty years of age. The axiom is terribly politically incorrect of course, but what she meant was that, for men, who typically hear a voiced problem as a "call to action to fix something", a communication from their partner might just mean that: a communication. It can also mean something quite different.

In terms of inter-relational communication at least, women are more complex than men are when it comes to verbal communication. As my brother pointed out, (by the way, see how I can blame my family members for all the politically incorrect stuff) two women and a man can be sitting at a table, and the two women can be having a fight without the man even noticing.

Generally speaking, any communication between two people is either a cry for help or an act of love.

A woman can be performing an act of love and the man can pick it up as a cry for help. Or the other way round.

A man just has to know that he might have it the wrong way round.

7. Follow your passion ... and keep your day job

Negative Motivation Versus Positive Motivation:

If you are motivated to do something because of the pain of not doing it, once you have done it enough to alleviate the pain, your commitment is likely to wane. That's the big drawback with Negative Motivation.

If you are motivated to do something because you like doing it, you are far more likely to continue doing it, with a great deal more enthusiasm, for a lot longer, and a lot better. That's the GREAT THING about Positive Motivation.

So, make sure you have a passion in your life.
As Barbara Sher said, you don't have to give up your full time job and live in a garret (a place where artists work) just because you'd love to try your hand at oil pastels.

Look at your day job as a way to feed your passion. You do it during the day to earn enough money to pay the bills and put food on the table. That will give you the time and space in the evening to invest in your passion.

6. Pick a life partner who takes responsibility

When things go wrong in life, a given person tends to either take responsibility for what has gone wrong or look for someone to blame. It's not black or white of course; few people are either totally responsible or totally irresponsible. And a person may, for example, take responsibility quickly for an accident they caused, but might be unwilling to take responsibility for being 100 lbs overweight.
Still, people tend to reside on the same general part of the Responsibility Spectrum.

Picture yourself as a passenger in a car with your new boy/girlfriend, traveling in moderate city traffic. The traffic ahead of you stops suddenly while your friend had taken his/her eyes off the road. The car you are riding in rear-ends the car in front. By any traffic regulations I have ever known, it is clearly the fault of the car in the rear (your car in this instance).
How does your friend react?
If they explode into a "look what that stupid driver did!" reaction, they might tend to reside towards the "left end" of the Responsibility Spectrum (above).
If they immediately express remorse for the accident and concern for you and the strangers in the car in front, they may tend to reside towards the right of the Responsibility Spectrum.

Put another way, people whose behavior tends to fall on the right side of the Responsibility Spectrum tend also to look for ways in which they personally contributed to any problem that surfaces, be it in your relationship with them or in any other aspect of their lives. Such an approach allows them to grow and mature in a more constructive and loving way.

Pick a life partner who tends to live on the right side of the spectrum.

5. Pick a partner who is not a control freak

It is often said that life is a long series of letting go of things.

Addiction is not just about when you take something away, you feel pain. Addiction is when the object of your addiction is making the decisions. When you are addicted to heroine, for example, you will do things to get the next fix that a normal, sane person would never do. You might share a hypodermic needle with a stranger in an alleyway because you won't wait another thirty minutes to get home to where you have a clean needle.
Addiction makes you do really stupid things because, well, the addiction is making the decisions to satisfy its own needs, not yours.

Human beings get addicted to alcohol, heroine, nicotine, money, adrenaline, fame and countless other things.

For the purposes of this perhaps simplistic point of view, the next level down from addiction is the thing called attachment. Attachment is a kind of "decaffeinated" addiction. Whereas in the case of addiction, the subject controls the person, with attachment, it's a case of the person having a tough time giving up the thing they are attached to, but still remaining essentially in control.

People get attached to lots of things, and because attachment is not the out-of-control mess that addiction is, it can go quite unnoticed for what it is until one day, the object of one's affections is lost. You might have been attached to your immaculate collector's 1970 Pontiac GTO that you kept in storage, then one day, it got stolen. You were fond of, and very attached to, the GTO, but you didn't beat your wife up when it was lost.

How a person responds to the loss tells you a lot. One of the attachments that many of us are loathe to relinquish is the notions we have about ourselves. For example, you might believe that you are an excellent driver. Then one day you rear-end another car at a traffic light, and suddenly, your self image, that of being a careful driver, is shattered. The car damage is nothing compared to the devastating feeling that you might not actually be that "very good driver" after all. Suddenly, that notion you had of yourself was ripped from your hands.

How quickly do you let go of that notion?

When you realize you do not have control over something, do you deal with it gracefully?

Imagine again your future life partner and you are traveling into town to a classy restaurant, with plenty of time for the 8pm reservation you made six weeks earlier. You turn a corner and lo and behold, you are stuck in traffic caused by a major accident ahead. Clearly, you will lose your table reservation for this must-book-weeks-in-advance restaurant. What does your future partner do in this situation? Do they freak out, swearing and shouting in frustration, or do they quickly come to terms with the fact that there is no point in getting so upset?

The more gracefully your life partner deals with such loss of control, the easier your life is going to be. Look out for that situation when you are dating. In the long life you are planning together, you'll be faced with many, many such situations.

It is much easier to build a life with someone who does not sweat the small stuff.

4. Always know how to stand on your own feet even if someone is carrying you

During the probable half-century you might be in the workforce, you may once or twice have the benefit of a "secure job". Beware! There is no such thing as a secure job. It might look like it, but in the long term, it is unlikely that any employer can offer you lifetime employment. There are exceptions of course but you won't be sure it is a secure job until you are walking out the door of retirement with a pension book in your hand, but you can't plan on the assumption that it will happen.

A pilot instruction friend of mine said that wherever he flies, a thought is always at the back of his mind: "where could I land right now if my engine failed?"
It's not an obsession with him, but it is a "rule of thumb" he uses to test his immediate security.

I assert to you that in your own career, where you can, have an answer to the question Where would I get a job today if I had to?
There will be exceptions to the rule of always having a "landing strip" close by. You might be on an exciting two-year company-sponsored business trip to Asia, where you are largely removed from easy access to jobs in your home town or country, but which will offer significant career opportunity. Such gambles are always worth considering.

3. Never be a ship's doctor

Whatever career you pick, make sure your line of work is also the core competency of the organization you are working for.

How do you know what an organization's core competency is?
Follow the money. A quick way to know is to see what their customers pay the most money for.

If you are a doctor, work in a hospital, not in the army, a cruise ship or a corporation. If you are a doctor and a brain surgeon, work for a hospital that specializes in brain surgery.
If you are a car mechanic, work for a garage whose business is servicing cars. If their specialty is selling cars and not servicing cars, go find yourself a place that specializes in servicing cars.
If you are working for yourself, make sure you do something that plays to your strengths.

Peter, a very bright software engineer I worked with in the 1990s told me of a job he had as a software engineer with a copper mining company in Utah in a former life. He consistently got high performance reviews year over year and he felt his job was safe, especially when he measured up against the general crowd of mining expertise he observed in the company.
Then one day, the company had to cut costs and needed to let a bunch of employees go. Shocked and surprised, Peter and most of the software engineers were the first to be shown the door.

Why?
Because they were not central to the company's core competency - the skill set that their customers paid for - they were easy to cut from the payroll.

When your specialty is your employer's specialty, you will be among the best paid, most up-to-date and secure-jobbed people in the company.

2. Little of any worth takes less than ten years

Once you have mastered time, you will understand how true it is that most people overestimate what they can accomplish in a year - and underestimate what they can achieve in a decade!
- Tony Robbins

In my almost five decades on the planet, I have noticed a pattern. The magic number of 10 keeps coming up as an indicator of value creation. Whether you are creating a company, a child, learning a language or building a marriage, things seem to only begin to reach critical mass around the ten year mark.

Great if you can make a go of something and sell it or get rewarded in some significant way in the shorter term, but my recommendation is:

Aim for the long term unless you have specific reasons to think in the short term.

Pick projects, jobs, careers and partners that you see a long term value in.

Forget about one-night-stands and date those you can imagine holding hands with when you are old. Good character and kind personality stay with a person until the day you die. Nice legs and six-pack abs will all be gone before you know it and your life partner's character will be all that is left. Pick a life partner with good character, and don't focus on their appearance, unless their appearance represents some kind of self-abuse or relationship-challenging issue.

1. Get the best education you can, as early as you can

Not surprisingly, there is a strong correlation between education early in life and quality of life later in life. Yes, there are people with PhDs living in destitution, and the richest man in the world never completed college, but they are the exceptions, and the exceptions are few.

A friend of mine has a master's degree in nuclear physics. I do not. In fact, I've never been to college. We often banter about the value of a degree. He says it really doesn't matter that much. "You've got incredible experience in the software industry", he tells me, "which eclipses any requirement for a university degree".
I can't tell you, though, how many jobs I've applied for over the years where, before I've ever been given a chance to meet for an interview, my application was filtered out because of my lack of formal third level education. It might not make a big difference in your day-to-day job twenty years from now, but it sure helps getting the job in the first place. And all the jobs before it.

For the decades I've been in the workplace, because of my lack of a degree, I've felt the need to "look over my shoulder" on many occasion. In a small way, it might have helped me stay on my toes, and I might have even developed a skill to preempt a coming change, because I could never rest on the strength of a degree I never had. But in the long run, a degree is an all but necessary investment.

Even if you have to work weekends and holidays, get yourself through college. If you can't go to a fancy one, go to the best one that'll have you. Stay focused on your studies while you are there. If you skipped college, and you are now working in a dead-end career as a result of it, research how you can study for a degree in your spare time. It's only too late if you don't start now.

There'll be plenty of years ahead where you can party. Once you have your degree in your pocket, you'll have access to better jobs, you'll be more attractive and better educated, you'll know more stuff, you'll have higher self-esteem, and a degree is one of very few things in life that can't easily be taken away from you.

2007: The Big Squeeze on the Middle Class

2007-04-27T13:35:00.000-07:00

My grand-uncle Michael emigrated to Boston about the 1920s. He made a good life for himself and lived into his own 80s before he passed away.
I remember some time in the 1960s, he paid us all in Ireland a visit and his gift to seemingly every child he passed by was an Irish ten-shilling note.

He used to say that in America, money "grows on trees". Pressed on the assertion, he would make a gesture of plucking an apple from a tree, and say, "yes, I picked these notes from my very own money tree".
I was young enough to half-believe the story, which was true in a mythological sense: Money was a whole lot easier to come by in the US than it was in the Mother Country. In contrast to just how hard it was to make a living in Ireland, yes, money did grow on trees in the United States.
In the 1960s, it was quite an economical vacation to take, coming from the US to Ireland. Bus-loads of American tourists poured in and out of Dublin airport, and they could be seen throughout the land taking photos and buying souvenirs, dressed in bright green pants and tartan golf cardigans.

Decades ago in the US, a family could prosper on the salary or wages of a solitary bread-winner.

Today, it has become a lot rarer to see a sole bread-winner supporting a whole family like that, certainly on an ordinary wage. No, today it is the exceptional professional that can provide the "American Dream" for his (or her) whole family.

Where did all the money go?

Many things happened, but foremost in my mind is what Ronald Reagan set in motion. Under his administration the American system was changed to favor the rich more than was already the case.

It was always the case that capital had a lot of power. If you had millions, you were in a position to live well and still hold on to your money. Beyond a few million, a person could live lavishly, yet still hold on to all of their wealth.

That's the way capitalism is supposed to work, but in the early 80s, the challenge for a penniless yet motivated person to climb out of their class and into the next one up the food chain began to change. It was always difficult, and I would expect that, but now it was getting even harder. That challenge has continued to increase in difficulty to today (2007).

In about half of all families in the United States, both parents work full time jobs today. About 65 million Americans have no health insurance, up from about half that number six years ago, and one in three women who have given birth have not been to a single doctor visit while they were pregnant. That might explain, by the way, why the United States has the almost-highest infant mortality rate among dozens of industrialized nations of the world.

For those with little or no capital, the choice today is either to work yourself to death or cut back on all those familiar extras. It is easier today to go from being rich to filthy rich and it is harder than ever to pull yourself out of poverty. The squeeze is on the middle. While many white-collar jobs are being exported to countries with very low wages, the middle class workers are increasingly asked to take the same work for less pay, or even take a lower-paying, less-skilled job to replace the exported job. Meanwhile, corporate executives, particularly CEOs, are rewarding themselves for the increased profits by pocketing offensively large paychecks, bonuses, golden parachutes and severance packages.

A worker earning $20,000 a year watches in horror as their yearly gas bill goes from $1,500 to $3,000 while the 2006 profit for Exxon broke the record for the most profit of all companies of all time in recorded history. That squeeze pushes the $20k worker closer and closer to the financial edge. They can't live without a car because they need it to go to work. They skimp on retirement planning and other longer term needs just to keep current expenditures covered.
By the time they reach retirement, they'll be flipping burgers to supplement their social security, if there is any social security. That is where America is heading.

To exacerbate the problem, the United States is spending money on the Iraq War that, had half if it been spent on public education and health, would have catapulted the United States to being the top country in the world for education and health. The cost of the Iraq War is that big, folks.
In addition, all that money has been borrowed. Our children and our grandchildren will have to pay it back.

So, not only have we mis-spent our treasury on a lost cause, we have denied ourselves the opportunity to fix the damage that the Iraq War is causing.

While Germany, Sweden, The Netherlands, Canada, New Zealand, Denmark and other countries are feverishly building the needed alternate energy sources of the future, Americans are driving around in gas-guzzlers and stuffing their faces with too much food. Most of us couldn't find Iraq, Afghanistan or Iran on a map without country names, even though Iran is twice the size of France.

In the 1930s, Argentina sent financial aid to Sweden. Look at how far Sweden has risen, and how far Argentina has fallen, in that time.

Where is it written that the United States has to offer a good standard of living to most of its citizens? Right now, it looks like the so-called middle class is evaporating and we will have a country of a tiny number of obnoxiously rich people and a vast majority of working folks struggling to make ends meet. And few in between.

Just watch.

It's going to end in tears.

When your son moves out of the house

2007-04-27T07:53:00.000-07:00

A father passing by his son's bedroom was astonished to see that his bed was nicely made and everything was picked up and neatly put away. Then he saw an envelope, propped up prominently on the pillow that was addressed to "Dad."
With the worst premonition he opened the envelope with trembling hands and read the letter:

(click to enlarge)

Customers, and the angle of approach

2007-04-25T09:19:00.000-07:00

Why is it that new products have a difficult time getting established, yet seemingly poor quality products often thrive in the marketplace?

If you have the time to read them, there are great books on the market about this. I've read scores of them, but I've never read much that helped me get those first few satisfied customers, then the next hundred, then the next thousand and then on to a thriving business.

I created a product and I brought it to market this year. It solves a real problem and many people continue to show an interest. I have very happy customers who paid full price for the product and I've got some disinterested customers who got it for free. The clue, of course, is right there. Paid for it vs. got it for free. Still, when a customer hasn't paid for it, it doesn't automatically mean they don't value it. Take Google or this BLOG software for instance. I got both for free, and I love them. So, there's more to it than just the purchase price.

Sales prospects can sometimes all look the same, except for one thing; the happy customers were convinced they had a problem before I ever showed up. Sure, the disinterested customers did understand and accept the problem as I explained it to them, but that was only after I showed up to 'splain everythin'.

You've launched a new product. Your first, real, paying customer is the toughest one to get. Most companies never make it this far, by the way. Securing and satisfying your first customer means that many, many good things are in place and your chances of success increase, with that one first customer, by an order of magnitude. You have entered Stage 1 and you're on your way.

The next few customers are still very difficult to secure of course, but each one gets easier (or less hard you might say).
Depending on your product -- you could be selling your first Airbus A380, or you could be AcmeSoft selling your first $29 software product -- it might take you a couple of customers before you move to Stage 2 or it might take you 200 customers or more to get there.

Entering into Stage 2, the value of your product has been proven. You can finally explain to the world what your product does, and you've perhaps ironed out a few product issues.
Stage 2 customers give you the benefit of the doubt because they see that you have a credible set of satisfied customers.

Stage 3 is like free-wheeling down a mountain. Stage 3 customers come along when there is absolutely no doubt about your product acceptance in the marketplace. Even when it does go wrong, Stage 3 customers blame themselves, not your product. (Remember the last time your copy of Microsoft Windows gave you an error, you said "I must have done something wrong"?)

So how can you use this stupid theory to get your business moving?

To build a successful company, you have to enter Stage 1 and progress through it, pass into Stage 2 and go all the way through it, before getting to Stage 3. To wit:

When you are in Stage 1, don't waste your time trying to impress Stage 2 or Stage 3 type prospects. Actually, they're not prospects. They will be prospects sometime, but not yet. Trying to sell to them will give you the impression your product does not have value. It's not your product. It's them. You're talking to the wrong people and the more you do it the more depressed you're going to become.
Focus on those people who know they have suffered with the problem your product solves. Ask them the specific question about whether they have the problem your product solves, for example: Are you bothered by moss on your lawn that you cannot get rid of? If they're not, move on. When you get a phone call from a prospect, don't try to sell him your product unless he meets this criterion. Otherwise the product will be returned or worse, you'll have an unhappy customer.
Use each new happy customer's experience to add to your "Library of Satisfied Customers". It might be case studies or customer quotes or illustrations, but you must capitalize on those Stage 1 customers. This Library of Satisfied Customers will in time open the door for you to enter into Stage 2.
You are in Stage 1 as long as prospects are asking you what your product does.
You are in at least Stage 2 when you get calls from prospects asking non- product value questions, for example, about pricing and delivery. You have enough truthful and illustrative customer experiences to convince them of your value.
You are in Stage 3 when people buy your product because they simply feel they have to because everyone else is buying your product.

Even if your product is the cure for cancer, you can't skip Stage 1.

Stage 1 is a scrappy, uncertain and frightful journey requiring faith, persistence and lots of patience. Keep your cool. Especially on the bad days, make sure you keep adding value.

I walked around Mount Rainier three times in the past two decades. The trek is about 100 miles and it takes about 6 or seven days if you are a strong hiker.
I remember looking up at the mountain to see if it looked different as I progressed. It took a day and a half of hard hiking before the mountain looked even slightly different, but by the end of the hike, obviously, its appearance had changed 100% and back again.

The trick to making progress at writing, as the writer Jerry Pournelle said, is...you've guessed it...writing!

The trick to hiking around Mount Rainier (which, by the way, is not for everyone) is ...yes... you've guessed it again you devil you...taking one step after another lots of times.

The trick to getting your first customer and your next customer -- getting into and through Stage 1 -- is adding value every chance you get.
And like the hike around Rainier, you should pace yourself. You don't have to even break a sweat. Just keep taking comfortable steps one after another. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong...but time and chance happeneth to them all.

The image to the right/above is a page from a Dunn and Bradstreet magazine I read in 1993. I think it is meant to inspire people to persevere in times of adversity. I found it strangely motivational, so I framed it and hung it on the wall of my walk-in closet at home.
Not sure even what it means, but heck, you take inspiration wherever you can get it.

Every stage of growing a business is challenging of course, but statistically, the first stage is by far where most businesses fail. In fact, most companies never get that first happy, paying customer. They never enter Stage 1.

Worth repeating:
What is the best thing you can do to enter and prevail in Stage 1?
Focus all your efforts on prospects who know they have the problem your product solves.

On your arduous climb through Stage 1, you want to get the attention of prospects who are "looking down the hill towards you". They are the folks that will take on board a new idea because it solves their problem and they've been "looking in your direction".

To the undisciplined eye, most prospects look the same, but you must be disciplined in identifying and focusing only on the Stage 1 type people when you are in, or want to be in, Stage 1.

I like to think of Stage 1 prospects as "looking down", Stage 2 prospects as "looking across" and Stage 3 prospects as "looking up".

You need to sell to the folks who are looking down, because that is where you are. At the bottom.

As you approach Stage 2, you can shift your focus towards the people who are "looking across". They are the ones who balance their focus between what your customers say and what your product does.

I'm a Stage 1 kind of guy.
When it moves beyond Stage 1, I'll be askin' for your help.

When you get your first customer, you might learn 20% of everything you will ever need to learn about your product from that one customer. When you get your second customer, you might learn 20% 0f the remaining 80% and so on. With this math, by the time you've got 10 customers, you'll know about 90% of what you need to know about your product.

Liam
SiteLeads.net
Quality Sales Leads Through Best Practices for the Web

My remarkable color-blind daughter. Everyone's remarkable child

2007-04-24T11:21:00.000-07:00

My daughter is quite good at math. When she was nine years of age, she could explain to you why, despite the fact that Pluto passed inside the orbital plane of Neptune once every "Pluto year", the celestial bodies would never actually collide.

What was striking about that was that she also still believed in Santa Claus. The juxtaposition of her understanding of solar system physics and the myth that reindeer could fly was remarkable, not to mention the 800 year-old Santa, the billion presents, the squeezing down the chimney thing, and so on.
It was the pairing of adult intellect and child-like judgment.

She's pretty good with electronics too. Handy with a camera, she got hold of a six-hour tape for our video camera and announced she was going to capture Santa Claus coming down the chimney with the presents to finally, finally, put proof to the story that Santa exists.

So, I hurried out and secretly rented a Santa Clause outfit.

Late Christmas Eve, my daughter placed the camera on a high shelf, taking in the entire chimney breast end of the room.
The -record- button was pressed.

When the kids had all gone to bed and I knew they were asleep, I put on the Santa suit, complete with boots, beard, glasses and gloves. To disguise my familiar countenance, I wore a few layers of extra clothes under it. Creeping in from the deck, I walked into full view of the camera, but never did I face the camera or give away any angle that would betray who I really was. Carefully, and with the faked walk of an older person, I brought in the presents from the deck one by one, each time being very careful about what the camera could see, sometimes walking sideways or slowly backwards to keep my cover. With the job done, I left the living room by the same door out to the deck and re-entered the house by the front door. I deliberately left a white glove behind and headed off to bed.

All three kids had forgotten about the camera until perhaps an hour after they had opened up their presents. With low expectations, my daughter fast-forwarded from the beginning through the tape to see if any secrets lay within. Sure enough, the sped-up movements of a big fellow dressed in red and white raced back and forth across the screen.

The excitement was palpable as her two younger brothers came to watch.
Santa, captured on tape!
They played it over and over until their eyes got tired of it. It was the biggest thing that happened that day.

That's some background. Here is the story I really wanted to tell:
(names and venues changed to protect the innocent)

About the same time, my daughter asked me one day if I could, in addition to picking her up to bring her home, drop one of her ballet friends, Sarah, back to her own house after Friday night ballet.
I agreed of course, and asked her to remind me who Sarah was. My daughter replied "you know, the girl who was also in my French class last year".

"Hmmmnnnn..." I puzzled. "I can't remember a Sarah in your French class".

"Dad, she's the girl who played the violin at that concert last year".

"Sorry, I still don't know who you are talking about" I said.

"Her father is a pilot. You talked with him at the school BBQ".

And so on. I could not, for the life of me, work out who this young girl was. I couldn't put a face to the name.

To clarify her point, my daughter ran upstairs to get her class photo from the previous school year. She came downstairs again, put the photo on the kitchen table and pointed to one of the girls in the photos.
"THAT's Sarah", she said.

She pointed to the only African American -- of of 22 -- child in the photograph. To me, born way back in 1960, a black person is...well...obvious among a class of white people.
But it never occurred to my daughter, while trying to explain to me who Sarah was, to say she was black. My daughter thought of Sarah as a violinist, a French speaker, a ballerina, a daughter of an airline pilot, but she somehow forgot the color of her friend's skin.
That is what people mean when they say we need a color-blind society.

Here's a test.

Write down a list of five random people in the office. In a second column, write the color of their skin, and in a third column, write the color of their eyes, and in the last column, write "left" for left-handed or "right" for right-handed.

I'll bet you get the name and the skin color down without a second thought, and you struggle to remember eye color whether they are left or right handed, even though you've seen it all.

When we all get to the stage where you have to think hard to remember the color of someone's skin, then we'll have equality.
The fact that you and I are saying to ourselves "that just isn't possible" shows how far we have to go to get there.

A great quote to inspire you on a tough day

2007-04-23T20:15:00.000-07:00

I'm not a big military guy, but a good inspirational quote brings its own welcome.
See the quote in the right of this image. (click to enlarge)

What use Empathy?

2007-04-22T18:47:00.000-07:00

What is Empathy? How does it differ from sympathy? Why are some of us more empathic and others less so?

Rather than rush to the dictionary, and simply repeat here how it describes the word empathy, I will tell you what I think empathy is.

Empathy is a process whereby one person feels an emotion very like that which another person is feeling (or has felt) as if they were somehow absorbing that emotion, even though the person feeling the empathy may have no direct reason to be affected by what is effecting the person they are empathizing with.
Sorry if that is a bit confusing. Simply put, empathizing is like absorbing someone else's emotion. Sometimes it's a "positive" emotion; sometimes it's a "negative" emotion. I uses quotes because I don't really consider any given emotion to be positive or negative in any real sense other than to state whether they are of the joyful kind or the painful kind. Emotions are what they are; each serves a purpose. Even depression, that "D" word that Tony Soprano could not admit to, mostly happens for a reason: to tell us something needs to be attended to.

Empathy is different to Sympathy. It is not necessary to be empathic to care about someone, whereas caring for another person, persons or animal (even a plant, in some cases) is the signature of a sympathetic person.

Why is Empathy Useful?
A few weeks ago, I was looking at an advertisement I was putting together for a product. In order to create an effective advertisement, I needed to reach into the heart of an imaginary person and "feel" what they felt; "see" what they saw. I would then "read my feelings", make adjustments to the ad with what I read, and repeat the process.

At least, that's how I do it. I don't know how professional advertisers do it, but my way works for me. I use empathy skills to develop the advertisement.

In the past, I have used this skill to develop my own set of product requirements, and designed successful products around them. It's gotten me into trouble on occasion too, because people see this process as a kind of lame alternative to actually going out and asking lots of customers what they want.

Empathy allows you to be a better waiter, salesperson, spouse, parent, politician, masseuse, teacher, doctor, manager, sibling, aunt, or any one of thousands of professions or relations. Being able to feel what another person feels is a singularly valuable way to receive communication from another human being. And most people are very poor at articulating how they feel. I've long given up believing what most people tell me they feel.

If no one had empathy skills, society would not survive. We need empathy to share, communicate, predict and care for others when they are down on their luck. Sometimes someone else is down, sometimes you are down. Empathy is the cement that keeps families, relationships, communities and societies together.

Most of the time, I can switch the empathy spigot on and off when it comes to people I am not close to, but once I am close to them, it becomes more difficult to switch it off. Not being able to "switch it off" is something people with strong empathy skills have a problem with when someone they are close to is going through a bad time. You might not "care" as much as a sympathetic person might care, but you sure are picking up all the grief.

I never knew that I had empathy skills until my friend Ross pointed it out to me. I thought everyone was like that.
They''re not.

Once I knew what it was, I understood why so many things in my life had happened and continued to happen in my life.

[more later]

Irish Computer Upgrade

2007-04-20T11:31:00.000-07:00

The single biggest thing you can do to make your startup work

2007-04-18T08:27:00.000-07:00

I touch on this subject many times in my blog, but it's worth mentioning again.

Question:
What is the single biggest thing you can do to make your startup work?

Answer:
The single biggest thing you can do is to give it time. Let me repeat that just in case you missed it: Give it Time.
By that I mean, keep chipping away at it every day for many years. You could say the formula is "Time+Chipping" where Chipping is Constant and Time is Indefinite. Just like a bank savings account into which you put one dollar every day, when it is done every day, you can amass a small fortune.
I am assuming there is enough of a market for your product or service. If there isn't, then you do have a greater challenge, but still, it just means you have to chip away at it for longer - long enough to adjust your product or service to meet a market that does exist.

Once you have mastered time, you will understand how true it is that most people overestimate what they can accomplish in a year - and underestimate what they can achieve in a decade!
- Tony Robbins

If you were to invest one dollar into a 30% interest-bearing account every day for a year, you'd have about $450 after a year. That's assuming the account returns interest daily, which many do. Investing good time and effort into a business, assuming you're adding value, is like adding money into an account that gives you 30% yearly interest. (Of course, you won't find a bank that gives you 30% these days, but that might be a good number to use for the return you get from investing in your own business.)

So, that's $450 at the end if the year.
If you continue to invest one dollar into the same account for ten years, you'd think, heck I'd have at least ten times that figure at the end of the decade. Actually, and forgive me if this is obvious to you, you'd have over $54,000 dollars in your account. That's about 120x what you'd have if you stopped after only one year.

The key here is time. Ten years is, by an order of magnitude, far more rewarding than one year. That is, if you are investing daily and you are investing the right thing.
I suppose many money managers and stock investors will tell you that, but it seems like very few folks who start a business know it.

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.
-Henry David Thoreau

It is hard to achieve anything of value in a year. There are exceptions of course, but I would not build a business plan upon it.

So, plan for the long term. Think ten years ahead, not one, three or even five.

This is not a trick question.

2007-04-11T10:27:00.000-07:00

Chilling!!
Read this question, come up with an answer and then scroll down to the bottom for the result. This is not a trick question. It is as it reads. No one I know has got it right.

A woman, while at the funeral of her own mother, met a guy whom she did not know. She thought this guy was amazing. She believed him to be her dream guy so much, that she fell in love with him right there, but never asked for his number and could not find him.

A few days later she killed her sister.

Question: What is her motive for killing her sister?

[Give this some thought before you answer, see answer below]

Answer:

She was hoping the guy would appear at the funeral again. If you answered this correctly, you think like a psychopath. This was a test by a famous American Psychologist used to test if one has the same mentality as a killer.
Many arrested serial killers took part in the test and answered the question correctly.

If you didn't answer the question correctly, good for you.

If you got the answer correct, please let me know so I can take you off my email list...

bad dog, bad dog! Poor Easter Bunny

2007-04-06T15:52:00.000-07:00

Click image to enlarge

Have you ever seen a WATER bridge over a river?

2007-04-06T14:46:00.000-07:00

Even after you see it, it is still hard to believe. WaterBridge in Germany.... What a feat!
Six years, 500 million euro, 918 meters long. This is a channel-bridge over the River Elbe and joins the former East and West Germany, as part of the unification project. It is located in the city of Magdeburg, near Berlin. The photo was taken on the day of inauguration.

To those who appreciate engineering projects, here's a puzzle for you armchair engineers and physicists.
Did that bridge have to be designed to withstand the additional weight of ship and barge traffic, or just the weight of the water?

Answer:
It only needs to be designed to withstand the weight of the water!
Why? A ship always displaces an amount of water that weighs the same as the ship, regardless of how heavily a ship may be loaded.

Oh the things kids do!!!

2007-04-05T13:32:00.000-07:00

Witty children's exam answers

2007-04-05T13:19:00.000-07:00

These are a few of my favorite dogs

2007-04-02T19:56:00.000-07:00

Hurricane Rescue Story

2007-04-02T07:41:00.000-07:00

(Page down to see all images. Click to enlarge)

The story begins with the rescuers finding this poor little guy they named Ralphie that someone had already taken under their wing but weren't equipped to adopt.

.
Ralphie, scared and starved, joined his rescuers...

I wouldn't think anything could live through this, but we were wrong.

This little lady survived that wreckage.

Here she is just placed in the car - scared, but safe.

and then... no longer alone!

Instant friends, they comforted each other while in the car.

Add two more beagles found after that...
the more, the merrier!

Oh boy, a new traveler to add to the mix...
(note: the cat coming over the seat needing shelter...)
now just how is this going to work???

It's going to work just fine, thank you very much!
Wow! The things we learn from our animal friends...
If only all of mankind could learn such valuable lessons as this. Lessons of instant friendship. Of peace and harmony by way of respect for one another -- no matter one's color or creed.

How to get the police to your house when you need them

2007-03-23T09:12:00.000-07:00

George Phillips of Meridian, Mississippi was going up to bed when his wife told him that he'd left the light on in the garden shed, which she could see from the bedroom window.

George opened the back door to go turn off the light but saw that there were people in the shed stealing things.

He phoned the police, who asked "Is someone in your house?" and he said "no". Then they said that all patrols were busy, and that he should simply lock his door and an officer would be along when available.

George said, "Okay," hung up, counted to 30, and phoned the police again.

"Hello, I just called you a few seconds ago because there were people in my shed. Well, you don't have to worry about them now cause I've just shot them all." Then he hung up.

Within five minute s three police cars, an Armed Response unit, and an ambulance showed up at the Phillips' residence and caught the burglars red-handed.

One of the Policemen said to George: "I thought you said that you'd shot them!"

George said, "I thought you said there was nobody available!"

Birds, Worms, Mice and Cheese

2007-03-22T09:32:00.000-07:00

My friend got a piece of marketing material email from the CEO of a company whose product he had just bought. The email was an attempt to sell the stock of his company to my friend, who forwarded the email to me. One sentence in it struck a chord. Here is the sentence in the context of the paragraph that contained it: (Emphasis added).

"History proves that innovative companies that establish new categories invariably dominate them. In the category of [such-and-such], [our product] stands tall above the crowd. We may be a small company, but we have some very Big Plans. Plans that include You."

The fact is, history proves the opposite of what this CEO claimed. History proves that innovative companies that establish new categories rarely dominate them. You can ask any marketing professional worth his or her salt and they will tell you that.

The Early Bird might get the worm, but it's the Second Mouse that gets the cheese.

A little fun with Google Translator

2007-03-20T19:43:00.000-07:00

You're on vacation. Jet-lagged and ready for bed, you make a call to the hotel ahead of arrival with a simple request: Please make sure the bed is made before I arrive.

I put that simple sentence into the Google Translator, asking it to translate it from one language to another a few times:

Original request: Please make sure the bed is made before I arrive.

Translated into Portuguese:
Certificar-se por favor que a cama está feita antes que eu chegue.

And back into English:
To certify itself please that the bed is made before I arrive.

and then into German:
Um sich zu bestätigen bitte daß das Bett gebildet wird bevor ich ankomme.

From there into French:
Pour se vérifier s'il vous plaît que le lit est formé avant que je n'arrive.

From French then back into English:
To check itself please that the bed is formed before I do not arrive.

19 facts you never wanted to know

2007-03-20T17:28:00.000-07:00

If you yelled for 8 years, 7 months and 6 days you would have produced enough sound energy to heat one cup of coffee. (Hardly seems worth it.)

If you farted consistently for 6 years and 9 months, enough gas is produced to create the energy of an atomic bomb. (Now that's more like it!)

The human heart creates enough pressure when it pumps out to the bodyto squirt blood 30 feet.

A pig's orgasm lasts 30 minutes. (In my next life, I want to be a pig.)

A cockroach will live nine days without its head before it starves to death.

(I'm still not over the pig.)

Banging your head against a wall uses 150 calories an hour.

The male praying mantis cannot copulate while its head is attached to its body. (Many women say that's just like humans).

The female praying mantis initiates sex by ripping the male's head off. (Honey,I'm home. What the...?!)

The flea can jump 350 times its body length. It's like a human jumping the length of a football field. (30 minutes... Lucky pig! Can you imagine?)

The catfish has over 27,000 taste buds (What could be so tasty on the bottom of a pond?)

Some lions mate over 50 times a day.
(I still want to be a pig in my next life...quality over quantity)

Butterflies taste with their feet. (Something I always wanted to know.)

The strongest muscle in the body is the tongue. (Hmmmmmm......)

Right-handed people live, on average, nine years longer than left-handed people. (If you're ambidextrous, do you split the difference?)

Elephants are the only animals that cannot jump. (Okay, so that would be a good thing)

A cat's urine glows under a black light. (I wonder who was paid to figure that out?)

An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain. ( I know some people like that.)Starfish have no brains (I know some people like that too.)

Polar bears are left-handed. (If they switch, they'll live a lot longer)

Humans and dolphins are the only species that have sex for pleasure. (What about that pig??)

I suppose the pig thing more than makes up for the denigrating phrase "lipstick on a pig".

Are there more people alive than dead?

2007-03-20T17:12:00.000-07:00

Looking at the populations over the millennia:

Year	Population	Births per 1,000	Births Between Benchmarks
50,000 B.C.	2	-	-
8000 B.C.	5,000,000	80	1,137,789,769
1 A.D.	300,000,000	80	46,025,332,354
1200	450,000,000	60	26,591,343,000
1650	500,000,000	60	12,782,002,453
1750	795,000,000	50	3,171,931,513
1850	1,265,000,000	40	4,046,240,009
1900	1,656,000,000	40	2,900,237,856
1950	2,516,000,000	31-38	3,390,198,215
1995	5,760,000,000	31	5,427,305,000
2002	6,215,000,000	23	983,987,500

Number who have ever been born	106,456,367,669
World population in mid-2002	6,215,000,000
Percent of those ever born who are living in 2007	approx. 6%

Source: Population Reference Bureau estimates. To see the full article go to this website.

Annoying buzzwords and what they really mean...

2007-03-20T08:40:00.000-07:00

"Open the kimono"
A sexist and racist term meaning to reveal a significant secret. Probably originated during the time when western colonial powers visited the Far East and wished to examine the physical aspects of other human beings before availing of their services.
It also has deep implications for relative position of power. Since kimonos are generally worn in Asian countries, and by women more than men, there is an implied undercurrent of western male domination over eastern "ladies of the evening" or perhaps ladies in general.

"Eat your own dog food"
Coined by the now CEO of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, this refers to the notion of a creator of a product forcing himself or herself to use that product himself/herself. Microsoft is actually quite good at that. In a corporate-mandated effort to evolve empathy for its customers, Microsoft's IT department and other internal groups are well known for putting new products through their paces in an effort to get that same experience as Microsoft expects its customers to endure.
Since no one in industry makes dog food for other people, one could infer Ballmer regarded his customers as dogs, or that his products are of the dog food variety.
He could have come up with a phrase such as "eat your own porridge", but I suppose it wouldn't have had the same punch.
The image of the dog is from the Mad Max II movie where, after Max had had his fill of the dog food, he discarded the can. When the gyrocopter pilot tried to eat what little remained in the tin, the Australian Cattle dog (Max's pet) snarled at him and took the can away. Later in the evening, the gyrocopter pilot scraped out and ate what was left in the tin. An excellent indicator of just how badly society had broken down in this to-date fictitious post-apocalyptic world.

"Lipstick on a pig"
This phrase been around for a long time in the Midwest as an expression for an ugly woman getting dolled up; just coming into common parlance in high tech for sprucing up a product or company. Also reminds me of the expression about Mrs. Aster’s Horse…

"Bleeding edge"
Comes from "leading edge", but with an attention-getting new twist. Yuck.

"That said..." or "Having said that..."
Used when someone wants to say something, take credit for saying it, but does not want to pay for saying it. For example: "I think she is an excellent worker. That said, I don't like the way she does her work." A classic way of avoiding responsibility. A psychologist or life coach might describe it as emotional theft.

"I apologize, but..." or "I'm sorry, but..."
Yet another way of saying something, taking credit for it, then taking back what you said. For example, "Honey, I apologize for hitting you...but you were getting hysterical." Again, another way of taking something without paying for it.

"Guesstimate"
Just like the phrase "huge big" my mother to this day scolds me for using, the term "guesstimate" is equally annoying. Either it's a guess or it is an estimate.

----------------------------------------------------------
Post a comment if you know of one, or email me at liam.scanlan@gmail.com if you'd prefer me to make the addition.

What makes a startup succeed that you have control over?

2007-03-19T12:49:00.000-07:00

Among entrepreneur wannabes and MBA students alike, the question is perhaps the one that is most mulled over. What makes a startup succeed that you have control over?

First of all, let me define success in this context.

Question: What is success?

Answer: Success, for a startup, is when you are giving honest value to customers profitably.
You might be channeling profit back into building your company, resulting in a loss on paper, but if the net transaction is profitable, your business is successful.
I'd like to put this in concrete terms, so that it is clear what I mean by profitable.
Imagine you are making paving blocks. Here is a rather simplistic, imaginary Profit & Loss statement for one week in your business:

Cost of making 1,000 blocks: $2,000
Cost of Ads to sell 1,000 blocks: $1,000
All other costs during that time: $1,800
You sell 1,000 blocks for: $5,000
Profit: $200

The profit is slim, but you do have your costs covered and the value of your business is growing. Likely, you will continue to reduce costs by tweaking processes, materials, wastage, improved advertising from experience, etc., all of which will help increase your profit and grow your business over time.

Until you get to this unit-profitable stage, you are not yet successful.

Question: What makes a startup succeed that you have control over?

Answer: A solid set of principles every employee lives by every day in your company.

A solid set of principles is a list of rules directly relating to your core business that you and your employees abide by every moment of every day.

These principles must be shared and reinforced every day by those running the company.

Sure, there are lots of other influences on the outcome of a business, not the least of which is the existence of a market for your product, the economy, location and many other things. You can't effect the economy, and you better be making something people want to buy.

Why does the consistent application of principles have such a profound effect on a business?

Let me answer by giving you an analogy.
The year is 100 BC. A hundred soldiers, all tied loosely together, are tasked with walking from Rome to Paris, a journey of about 700 miles.

Without principles:
Everyone is given the freedom to make up the journey as they go along. As different soldiers pull on the crowd from potentially different directions, the net effect might be that a fraction of the ground is covered that could have been covered had no one been working against the crowd.

With Principles:
General Octavius lays down a set of principles that everyone is to abide by:
1. Only the Caesar Europe Guide is used to determine the route to be taken.
2. Walking begins every day at sunrise.
3. After 10 miles of walking in a day, everyone rests for the remainder of that day.

In the "Without principles" scenario, some progress is made, but a lot of energy is wasted by random individuals pulling in the wrong direction. Some might even pull in the opposite direction. At other times, the direction might be correct, but some soldiers might be being "carried" because they are not even walking. And so on. With all that conflicting energy investment, the "Without Principles" army gets two miles closer to Paris every day.

In the "With Principles" scenario, a lot of friction is taken out of the mission. The army may not arrive on the ideal street in Paris, but it will cover ten miles every day, and will arrive in less time and better shape.

You can argue with the reason for going to Paris. Perhaps Geneva would have been a better destination, but the team is tied together, so wherever they decide to travel to, it is best that everyone on the team is heading in the same direction at the same time.

It is the same in business.

Nailing down principles, and getting everyone to march in step to them, significantly increases the business' chances of success because the least amount of energy is wasted on any one team member's energy conflicting with any other team member's energy. Everyone's energy is applied in the same direction. Everyone might be going in the wrong direction, but at least they will all get there quickly.

When we started Bocada in 1999, we laid down a number of principles. Two of the bigger ones were (a) All data extraction must be agent-less, and (2) All functionality must be available ultimately to every vendor we support.

On any given day, you would not see the direct benefit of these principles being applied, and sometimes you might even be alarmed at what was being done, but the long term effect of these applied principles on the value and quality delivered to customers was profound.

The key to success with this Law of Applied Principles is not that they are "perfect" or the "best anyone can come up with"; they just have to be reasonably good and must be applied consistently and thoroughly every day by everyone in the company.

What principles are you applying to your business?
By the way, "becoming very rich" is not a principle. Neither is "always delivering great value to customers". The former is a destination and the latter is too vague a measure to be of use on a moment by moment basis.

In my Aqualocks Corporation, I began with several principles:

Product must pack into a box densely (>80%).
Customer cannot be required to use tools for installation.
Customer must be able to be un-install it leaving environment in original condition.

The Starbucks Corporation, if I were to guess, has a number of principles. They might be (a) toss drip coffee out after 60 minutes if not sold, (b) clean tables every 20 minutes, (c) remake a drink if a customer has a problem with it, (d) provide the exact same service in every store.
Starbucks may not have the best coffee or tea in town, but you know exactly what you are going to get when you order it.
The value of information might be in its unusualness, but the value of a brand lies in its predictability. That is why, by the way, I believe Democrats have a greater tendency towards right-brained thinking and Republicans have a greater tendency to left-brain thinking. Republicans want everyone to get in line. Democrats want ... well ... go ask them and report back.

The benefits of having such principles in your business:

You don't have to be smart every day
Your staff doesn't have to be smart every day
You will save money every day by reducing wasted resources
Your product or service will have a consistency and integrity that will appeal on many levels to customers and everyone else.

If you come up with some principles for your business, send them to me, would you please?
Liam

Information wants to be free

2007-03-15T10:15:00.000-07:00

This morning when I was on Google, I noticed an ad for a product called Google SketchUp. I thought, what the heck, I'll go have a look at it.
If you were to believe what they said was an existing army of SketchUp users out there already addicted to the product, you'd get another attack of that familiar feeling that you'd missed yet another train with all the important people were on it.

So, I downloaded the Google SketchUp setup program, installed it and started playing with it.

I read through all of the "tips" it provided before I sketched anything. (The older I get, the more I read instructions before starting something new, quite unlike when I was, say 20, when I would destroy something trying to put it together before I would take the stupid instructions out of the box).

Using Google SketchUp, I sketched the walls of a simple structure and specified which material they were made of. I did struggle with it a bit, though. The icons didn't make a whole lot of sense to me, and it wasn't as easy as it claimed it would be, for me at least.

Then the thought struck me. There I go again, investing my personal time into someone else's software product in the hope that some joy will come of it down the line. And then I remembered, well it is free, after all and I felt OK again about making that small investment.

In a way, Google did get paid from my using their software product. Small as it might be, that tiny investment in time I made to learn perhaps one half of one percent of the product functionality is a "Value Seed" that may grow into something for Google years from now.

So, here I go again.
I offer to the world the entire contents of my two books, free as a newborn is naked. Maybe I won't make a dime out of doing it, but it might make the world a tiny bit better a place.

Product Trajectory (an executive primer of product management)
From Paper to Plastic (how to take an idea on a napkin and turn it into a plastic product)

Have a read and don't forget to post a comment, anonymously if you like.

A Thanksgiving story

2007-03-14T09:13:00.000-07:00

This story is about a year-and-a-half old. It was sent to me by a friend
who suggested it would make a good blog entry. So here it is...
(names and places changes to protect the innocent)

A week ago, my 9-year old son Christopher bought a hamster and a cage with
the pocketmoney he had saved for months. Well planned and executed,
this was what he described as the "happiest day in his life so far".
He named this new family addition "Pouches".

Last night, my wife Miriam was at evening yoga class, my 12-yr-old
daughter Jane was doing homework in her room and I was about to put
Christopher and Dennis (6) to bed. Christopher decided to check in with his
new, young hamster. He hadn't looked in on him for a whole day. To his
dismay, Pouches had escaped from his cage. I thought, most likely he
was hiding somewhere in the toy room, so we started searching for him
there, tidying up the place in the process.
No joy.
Christopher was now moving from the "Initial Excitement" stage to the
"Vague Worry" stage. We then began searching in the home office room,
the only other same-level room downstairs. After a while, we detected
noise coming from the heating vent in the floor. I wasn't even sure I
was hearing the hamster. It did seem like a lot of noise for such a
small animal, but it seemed most likely that it was the little
critter. What else could it be, I thought.
I removed the vent and looked inside. My confidence dropped as I
observed the heating duct curve away downwards. How on earth could I
get a hamster out of this labyrinth? How far away is he, and has he
slid down some other down-pipe under the house, never to be rescued?
The heating pump kicked in and I could feel a breeze of forced warm,
dry air in my face. How long could a hamster remain hydrated and alive
in there?
I switched off the heating.
We fashioned a make-shift ladder from a long paper roll cardboard
center, and dropped it into the vent. This would at least allow the
little fellow to climb up the inside of the roll. Hamsters are good at
that sort of thing, we thought. We placed some micro-waved raspberries
up near the top of it in the hope that the smell would encourage the
hamster to climb up and out of the vent.
I asked the boys to go to bed. Christopher was going to read a book to Dennis.

Time passed. No joy. And no sign of the hamster, but I could still
hear the scratching noise. Christopher appeared downstairs again, saying
that he had been praying upstairs.
No luck so far, I said to him, but I would keep trying. He thanked me
for trying so hard, and gave me a big hug. He went off to bed again.
I detached the vacuum cleaner hose, which has a natural "ladder" of
ribs inside of it, and dropped that down the vent. Same food-smell
bait, same waiting game. I went upstairs to check on the boys. They
were both out of bed again and playing with their box of lego. I could
see Christopher had been crying, although he was not making a fuss. He
hugged me again and thanked me for trying to rescue his hamster. I
tucked them both into bed again, promised to keep trying, and went
downstairs one more time. No joy with the vacuum cleaner hose.
Time was marching on.

There was a net-bag in the bathroom used for bath toys. I removed it
from the wall thinking this must be the easiest thing for a hamster to
climb up. I smeared the slightest amount of mushy raspberries towards
the top of it and hung it down the vent, securing it at the top. I
also hung a small flashlight into the vent so that perhaps the extra
light would spark the hamster's curiosity.
A few minutes later, I could hear the scratcing noise get a bit louder
until, lo and behold, a little hamster face appeared right under the
flashlight. He toyed with the weight on the end of the net for a bit
and began climbing the net itself. He stopped half way up, and I
thought, I'll try to scoop him up from there. Spooked by the movement,
he dived right back into the vent.
At least I knew he was alive and well. And probably hungry.
I ran up to Christopher to give him the news. Pouches chances went from
10% to 90%, I told him. It was father/son hug time again, and I went
back downstairs. I placed more strong-smelling food about a foot away
from the vent. He had to be pretty hungry, butstill strong enough to
climb out. Sure enough, some time later, the little fella climbed up
the net again and right out of the vent and scurried towards the food.
I blocked the vent with a pillow there and then, and shouted upstairs
to tell Christopher, who jumped out of bed and raced downstairs.
Father/son hugging time again, followed by a high-five.

A few minutes later we had Pouches back in his cage. Another
father/son hug, and Christopher climbed back into bed. I cleaned up
downstairs and went to check on the boys. Dennis was fast asleep and
Christopher was almost asleep, his eyes half closed, but awake enough to
mutter "thanks for rescuing Pouches, dad. You're the best dad, dad".

I was so happy that I was home last night, just like my father was
home every night of my childhood. Being a father is like receiving a
thousand gifts, I thought.
What a great reason to give thanks.

Why I believe in reincarnation

2007-03-13T13:10:00.000-07:00

I can't say with absolute certainty that reincarnation happens, but a few things lately have strengthened my belief that it does.

"It's no more remarkable to turn up twice than it is to turn up once".
- Eleanor Roosevelt (paraphrased)

I was listening to Deepak Chopra on the Bill Maher show the other night. Guests on the show don't have a lot of time to dig too deep, so Deepak delivered an uncharacteristically simplistic analogy to illustrate how he understood this life versus the afterlife.

He said a television set shows realistic images and sounds of people, but if you were to open up the television set, you would not find anyone inside it. The television is just a concrete medium for the representation of (during that TV show) several people.
Likewise, he said, our bodies are just a temporary medium for the representation of our eternal souls.

This got me thinking.

As Mr. Spock of Star Trek fame would say, "all we have here is a theory that fits the facts". It doesn't prove anything. I could have a theory that the car keys I lost in 1984 are now in a small wooden box lying on the surface of Mars. My theory, it could be argued, fits the facts, but it is an outrageous claim.

I like Chopra's theory, though.

Your spirit arrives in this body, the way Bill Maher arrived in my TV set. Bill inhabits the pixels for about an hour, then the picture of him disappears and the pixels transform to host another image entirely. The flat, highly limited medium that is a TV screen does little justice to the complex entity that a human being is. Likewise, the human body does little to illustrate the depth of the eternal soul. The soul arrives to inhabit a body for a lifetime, however short or long it might be. It then moves on, abandoning the body to be host for a different purpose, perhaps as organic material to be absorbed by the apple trees growing above a graveyard. When the apples in turn are consumed, some molecules provide again a host for another human spirit.

So, what does all this mean?
It means, don't eat apples growing near a graveyard. Unless you'd like a bit of Great Aunt Gertrude in you.

Keeping slackers off the payroll

2007-03-12T21:02:00.001-07:00

A large company, feeling it was time for a shakeup, hired a new CEO. This new boss was determined to rid the company of all slackers. On a tour of the facilities, the CEO noticed a guy leaning on a wall.

The room was full of workers and he wanted to let them know that he meant business.

He walked up to the guy leaning against the wall and asked, "How much money do you make a week?"

Surprised and a little nervous, the young fellow looked at him and replied, "I make $300 a week. Why?"

The CEO then handed the guy $1,200 in cash and screamed, "Here's four weeks' pay, now GET OUT and don't come back!"

Feeling pretty good about himself, the CEO looked around the room and asked, "Does anyone want to tell me what that goof-off did here?"

From across the room came a voice, "Pizza delivery guy from Domino's"

It's already too late to stop global warming

2007-03-11T14:15:00.000-07:00

I don't think it takes a genius to work out that we have a global weather problem. We might be able to explain away a hurricane here, an extraordinary snow-fall there, or perhaps a series of droughts around the world, but taken together, it sure looks worrisome.

Most scary of all, though, is the bit about the melting North Pole. The further north you go, according to Al Gore in his documentary An Inconvenient Truth, the greater the increase in temperature. Soon, all the ice will be gone from the North Pole. Not only will the ice be gone, but because the reflective power of liquid sea water is a fraction of the reflective power of ice, the liquid water will heat up faster than the ice did before it melted. It's a kind of spiraling vicious cycle. No pun intended, but what we have here is a classic example of the Snowball Effect.

So, even if you set aside the notion that rising sea levels will send hundreds of millions of people in developing countries scurrying for higher ground, and some countries might disappear (like Bangladesh), the ever-warming of the planet might kill all of us some time after that.

Every prediction about climate change that I have listened to over the past decade or two turned out to be pretty optimistic. The poles are melting faster than predicted; the temperature is rising faster than predicted. Take your pick. Everything is more dire than the most seasoned experts predicted it would be. The "rate of getting worse" is getting worse.

My only hope is that planet earth will make a correction. It might be accompanied with massive human "die back", perhaps in the form of some highly contagious and deadly virus, but I suspect that we are on the verge of triggering some kind of global Ice Age. And I believe it is only ten or twenty years away.

Since life began, the earth has responded to catastrophic events, on a number of occasions, by sending the planet into a deep freeze. Pretty effective, when you think about it. Earth gets hit by an asteroid? The planet goes into a deep freeze. A spike in volcanic activity? The planet goes into a deep freeze.

Let's face it. We're rats. We don't have it in us to turn this thing around. As long as we can drive our cars back and forth to the mall, who really cares that soldiers and civilians alike are paying the price eight thousand miles away. The sewer will be up to our armpits before we do anything about it. In any case, it is probably already too late. The dye is cast. The genie has been released from the bottle. The cat is out of the bag. The horse has bolted.

Someone once told me that "God made alcohol to stop the Irish from ruling the world". Let me give you a global variation of that axiom: "God made fossil fuels so that humans would self-destruct before they destroy all life on earth".

Mother Nature has been taking care of this planet for four and a half billion years. We've only been here for a million years or so. We've been playing with matches and we've made her very angry.

And when Mother Nature takes her gloves off, just make sure you have a pair of your own handy. Because it's going to get damn cold.

It's always safer in the middle of the herd

2007-03-09T14:29:00.000-08:00

Conformity, generally speaking, will keep you safer than non-conformity will.

A lioness cannot hurt the wildebeest that stays in the inside of the herd. She can only attack one that is on the edge if it. Any Discovery Channel episode about the jungle will show you that.

On the other hand, the sweetest grass is probably somewhat removed from the beaten track of the mass of hoofed creatures. In addition, the animals at the edge of the herd will discover new opportunities for the benefit of the whole herd. The ones at the center of the herd might save their own skin, but the ones at the edges will decide the long term future of them all.
Unfortunately, that contribution to the greater good comes at significant risk to those on the edge.

And so it is with humans.

Where would we be without the efforts of everyone from Copernicus to Thomas Edison, the latter of whom once said, "I have not failed; I found a thousand ways it won't work."
Well, someone has to find the thousand ways that won't work.

Managers of big business know that a business, in terms of creative ability, quickly atrophies as it grows. It gets exceedingly hard for a business to find, empower and reward those individuals who add innovative and valuable products and services to the company's portfolio.
Why is this?
My view is that, even in a small startup where you might have the creative control over how a product is created, it is still a monumental task to bring a product or service to profitability, but add to that even a smidgen of corporate bureaucracy and it simply gets too difficult to make the product or service what it ought to be. Also, and this is the cynical side of me talking, once people get their secure paycheck every week, that "creative urgency" usually evaporates.

For every little corporate success story you read about in the business section (e.g. "Acme Corp gets acquired for $100m"), there are hundreds if not thousands of business and product ventures that were started that amounted to nothing. Some never even left the basement; others took years. People throughout time and space have poured their hearts into their new idea, but only a handful ever survive. It's not because people are lazy. It's because it is exceedingly difficult.

It is better to be criticized for who you are, than praised for who you are not. If you are made to venture away from the herd, then sooner or later you will have to honor that reality.

As they say on the Red-Green show, "If my wife is watching, I'll be right home after the meetin'."

The best place in the solar system to begin

2007-03-09T08:27:00.000-08:00

When the Apollo program was in full swing, my brothers and I assumed by the time we were grown up, any grown up boy or girl could become an astronaut if he or she wished to.

I was nine years of age when 38 year-old Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. The only question for me and my brothers was, will there be enough space on the moon for all of us astronauts? My brothers and I even had a plan to build our own spaceship out of wood in the back yard, estimating it would cost three thousand Pounds and was modeled upon the spaceship in the TV series Lost in Space (remember, "danger, danger, Will Robinson"?). We'd get the money by working weekends and summers peeling potatoes in the local Italian chipper called Angelo's. What a dreamy time in our lives that was!

Growing up in Ireland made no difference it seemed to one's prospects of eventually becoming an astronaut. It didn't matter if you were a half-blind, wheelchair-bound dropout from middle school. Space was the new leveler and dammit, you could go into space if you darn well wanted to. Armstrong proved that when he took that "one small step for [one] man", national borders crumbled away as if they were made of the same lunar dust in which he made that first impression with his space boot.

Then the 1970s came.
We kids had no clue why our lives changed so quickly, but the shock waves from Nixon, Vietnam, the oil crisis and the termination of the Apollo program reverberated around the world, at least from my early teenage point of view. Suburban Dublin was very much downstream to the US economy, and all dreams were canceled until further notice. It seemed the Cold War, nuclear Armageddon, viral epidemics and general misery had taken the job as the new next leap for all mankind.

In the middle of this cheery time, the BBC brought out a series called "Survivors" detailing the travails of the small band of the 1-in-5,000 who survived exposure to the global epidemic that became of a man-made virus. The same intro scene every week showed a white-coated Asian (yes, blame the Asians) technician in a lab, in slow motion to dramatic music, dropping a laboratory flask of some liquid. You could see the transparent flask fall through the air, and as it smashed at a replayed one-quarter speed, the music followed suit. I watched that program every Wednesday evening and it was so bleak, it seemed like the best thing anyone could do to save themselves was to move to the Falkland Islands or climb into their nuclear bunker. I even recorded the sound from several episodes on my state-of-the-art reel-to-reel tape recorder. I could rhyme off entire episodes of depressing banter between doomed adults in a post-apocalyptic Britain. Uplifting material indeed for a teenage boy growing up in Ireland during the 1970s.

Time passed. NASA came up with the Space Shuttle and sent a variety of other, unmanned spaceships around the solar system. The Berlin Wall came down, and it looked like happy times were here again.

Then September 11, 2001 arrived, and with it the news that all dreams were again canceled until further notice. All spare cash, and then some, would be needed to make bombs to blow up terrorists and millions of invisible bad guys of one type or another. Last time it was the Russians. This time it's the Terrorists. To me, that fateful day meant that I would never see, in my lifetime, any more steps toward the colonization of space.

Just like the Iron Curtain fell, this paranoid obsession with terrorists and world domination will pass. (Of course, nobody really cares about terrorists, they just gave the military-industrial complex an excuse to expand their pillage of planet earth, but don't let me get started on that one please).

The arrival of China, and the re-arrival of Russia, on the world competitive stage might offer the opportunity of a new Space Race. I only hope that China decides to spend some of the cash they earned for manufacturing all those cheap plastic toys on the exploration and colonization of space.

Here's my message to the leader of China: Forget about the Moon and Mars. Set your sights on Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter. Yes, it is pretty far away as the proverbial crow flies, but Europa has several significant advantages over our Moon and Mars.

The advantages of going to Europa first:
1. Europa gravity is less than half that of Mars. According to Sir Isaac Newton, "the acceleration due to gravity at the surface of a planet varies directly with the mass and inversely with the square of the radius". Without going into that in tedious detail, this just means that as planet gets heavier, gravity increases, and the less dense it is, the less gravity. Europa is small and light.

Remember all that talk about burning up fuel on the Landing Module when Neil Armstrong was negotiating the final leg of the journey from the Command Module to the surface of the moon? Well, 3/4 of the Landing Module's weight was fuel.

Landing on Europa would require a little less fuel that Armstrong needed, but more importantly, it would be necessary to bring only a few gallons of water to the surface. The rest of the water could be taken directly from Europa's surface itself. Having an abundant water supply significantly lengthens the amount of time the crew could stay on the surface.

2. The surface of Europa is mostly water ice. Every drop of water required on a lunar visit has to be hauled into space and taken all the way to the surface of your destination planet. If you go to Europa, however, all you need is enough water to wash your feet and drink on your outbound journey. Mind you, the frozen ice water on the surface of Europa is probably as hard as granite, but you can break it off in chunks and simply take it back inside your spacecraft. It'll melt fast enough. It might need to be filtered or cleaned in some way, but that's easy.

3. Eighty per cent of the cost of going to Mars is just getting into Earth's orbit. And 80% of the rest of it is going from Mars orbit to the Martian surface. Let's imagine that the entire one-way trip to Mars cost $1,000. Breaking out the journey to the Martian surface, it has three distinct stages:
(a) From Earth's surface into Earth orbit.
(b) From Earth orbit to Mars orbit.
(c) From Mars orbit to Martian surface.
The biggest two factors affecting overall project cost are (1) the weight of fuel required for the return journey and (2) the water we have to take for the entire journey. The extra fuel required to carry the water for the return journey in addition to the water for the outbound journey is significant. And then there's the extra fuel required to cater for that extra fuel. And so on. Every ounce counts.

In the Apollo days, every time you added one ounce of equipment to the Landing Module, you had to add three ounces (3x) of fuel you took with you on the Landing Module to carry that extra ounce of equipment. And for every ounce of fuel you took on the Landing Module, you had to take something like twenty-five times (25x) the fuel in the Saturn V rocket that took you and your three spaceships (the Command Module, the Landing Module and the Return Vehicle) from the Earth's surface.

On a return trip to Mars, the costs pile on with every ounce you add. Because you have to bring your water all the way from Earth, the water to be consumed on the Martian surface alone is probably a million dollars a pint or thereabouts, not to mention the challenge of negotiating a water-laden Landing Module to the Martian surface!

It takes almost 5x the amount of fuel to take off from Mars than it does from Europa. This is because the fuel requirement is a function of the square of the gravity. (In other words, if you double the gravity, you quadruple the fuel needs, or thereabouts).

Let's say you planned on using 100 gallons of water per day per person while on the surface of your destination planet. Likely, mission control would send at least two astronauts at a time, so you'd need to take $200m worth of water with you for every day you plan to stay on the moon. Europa, having its own water supply, would allow you to save that $200m every day. At $200m/day, assuming you could even land the bulky spacecraft on the Moon or Martian surface, it would not take long to reach the costs of a trip to Europa instead.

If the lunar Landing Module of the Apollo program weighed about 33,000 lbs on Earth, it would weigh about 5,500 lbs on our Moon, and would weigh about 4,900 lbs on Europa. If you omit the carrying of tons of water on the trip from Europa orbit to Europa surface, you might be able to halve the weight of the vehicle. Better, you might use that extra capacity to bring equipment to extend your stay on the surface indefinitely.

We (Earth scientists) are pretty confident there are great oceans below the surface of Europa, heated by the planet core to remain liquid, perhaps even warm liquid. If that is the case, we can transplant an entire ecosystem from the depths of our own oceans to those of Europa - those not requiring ultraviolet light, but have evolved to live entirely within an environment heated by geothermal radiation: everything from lowly bacteria and vegetation to blind crabs and mammoth fish would grow and live out their days in this new world. We humans could live off that and be the first permanent, extra-planetary colony of humans in history.

Compare that to a dusty and unwelcoming visit to Mars and the choice is obvious.

Continuous Propulsion System (CPS) for space travel

2007-03-08T10:44:00.000-08:00

We look up into the heavens and see the Moon. With the naked eye on a clear night, the keen amateur astronomer can even pick out the planet Mars if it's in the right place. And if you have a good amateur telescope, you can get a shot of the planet Saturn.

The following images are of the Moon and Saturn, taken with a relatively expensive amateur telescope. The Moon is about 1/4 million miles away from earth. If there were a motorway between the Earth and the Moon, it would take you about 100 days at a constant 100 mph to get there.
Jupiter, on the other hand, at its closest to Earth would take you about 700 years to reach.

Saturn at its closest would take you more than 1,400 years.

(photos courtesy of Aidan Rowsome) click image to enlarge.

To give you an idea of the relative distance each planet is from the Sun, take a look at the charts in the image below, which you can click to see a larger view:
In terms of relative challenge getting to one planet versus another, space travel, though, is not linear. For a well designed deep space vehicle, one billion miles away is not the same as ten 100 million mile journeys.

The best way to get from one planet in the solar system to another is not always a question of going in a straight line. The gravity of a third, and sometimes even a fourth, planet along the way may be used to "sling shot" a space craft on its journey in a way that adds significant velocity to it. The addition of this "free" velocity equates to a lower requirement for rocket fuel, which means that you can carry more stuff, keep the spacecraft small, travel greater distances or get there sooner. Every ounce counts.

How does a spacecraft take advantage of the gravity of planets to increase its velocity?
The "slingshot" effect used by spacecraft is similar to the slipstream behind a truck that cyclists often use to their advantage. Reverse air currents pull things towards the rear of trucks. Gravity pulls objects towards a planet. Getting your spacecraft in behind a planet can speed it up. (It can also be used to slow it down, if you going the opposite direction).

Spacecraft technology has advanced considerably since the days of the Apollo program. Soon, we will see Continuous Propulsion Systems (CPS) coming out of the lab and into use in deep space. A spacecraft that uses CPS will have its engines firing for virtually the entirety of its journey in space. If a spacecraft were to travel to Jupiter using CPS, for example, it would accelerate for the first half of the journey and decelerate for the second half of the journey.

CPS brings everything much closer. Invent it, and humans can go almost anywhere in space.

The payback for CPS is best when the distances traveled are the greatest. Because greater distances are covered by the greater speeds, if a spaceship can accelerate indefinitely, long distances offer the time and space needed to reach very high speeds.

With CPS, the longer the distance, the more "bang for your buck". All else being equal, when you double the time in space, you quadruple the number of miles you can cover. This is illustrated by the following chart. (Click the image to increase its size).

The yellow triangle in the illustration to the right represents the distance covered by a spacecraft traveling for one year. Because it is accelerating for every moment of the first six months, the distance it covers in an hour is always increasing for those six months, hence the steepness of the left side of the triangle. (By the way, the area inside the triangle represents the distance covered. More on that further down).

The red triangle (on the center of the image) is for the same spacecraft, accelerating and decelerating at the same rate, but traveling for twice the amount of time. (It accelerates for one whole year, then decelerates for another whole year).

I made the red triangle with four units of the yellow triangle to illustrate a point: When acceleration and deceleration are constant, the distance covered is proportional to time squared.

In plain English, with CPS when you double the time you take to travel, you quadruple the number of miles you cover. So, when you travel for two years (red) instead of one year (yellow), the whole colored area is multiplied by four, the square of two (years). When you travel for three years (green) instead of one year (yellow), the colored area is multiplied by nine, the square of three (years).

When the distances get truly large, as they would if you were to travel to Saturn, a planet some 800 million miles from earth, CPS is the only way to go.

CPS will come into vogue when atomic power becomes an acceptable form of propellant for interplanetary travel. Challenges relating to how controlled explosions are managed in that context will keep scientists and engineers busy for a long time. But it will happen.

Another real advantage of CPS is the "gravity" it provides for the occupants of the space vehicle. Appropriately constructed, the 1g environment delivered to the occupants as a result of the constant acceleration eliminates the known health risks associated with prolonged micro-gravity living. A spacecraft operating in 1g would feel to its occupants like it were sitting stationary on the ground back on planet earth.

When the kinks are ironed out of CPS, it will probably involve steeper acceleration at the earlier stages, and perhaps minimal acceleration towards the middle of the journey. This is because "investment" in velocity at the beginning has a greater reward in terms of time savings that it does later in the journey. Probably, 3 or 4g, if the technology allows for it and the occupants are up to it, might be more common at the beginning, and close to .2g (or the minimum required to keep micro-gravity health risks at bay) towards the middle of the journey. To that end, the acceleration curve might look more like a circus tent.

I'll talk more about CPS in a future post regarding the colonization of our solar system.
Look out for it.

Why child spanking is always wrong

2007-03-07T08:18:00.000-08:00

I was listening to a talk show radio, actually on Am1050 in Seattle (I think it's called Sacred Heart Radio) last night and the subject of child spanking came up. The host was pro-spanking and caller after caller supported her view. Funny how that works.
Here are my comments on spanking.

I've heard quite a few arguments people put forward to justify spanking, but here is an example of one of the most common I have heard over the years:
"You can't reason with a 3-year-old, so a spank to their behind helps teach them not to run across the street".

My wife and I are about half way through raising three children: two boys (7 and 11) and a girl (13). My wife and I are both opposed to spanking and neither of us has ever spanked any one of them.

My younger boy is spirited. He is high-energy and athletic and he is often referred to affectionately by others as the "Energizer Bunny".

How did we deal with situations where we needed to keep him or our other two kids under control in a potentially dangerous situation? We held his hand. We strapped him into his car seat. We held him in our arms. We took him indoors. We took him outdoors. We went back to the car and sat in it while he settled down enough so we could do one of the above. Even if it meant missing an appointment, that is how we handled all such situations from the beginning. (I might point out that my wife did 90% of all that work.)

The result: Like each of his two siblings, our younger son is not afraid of us. He has learned a lot about taking the appropriate level of responsibility for himself; very little at four years of age, more at seven years of age. Lots more to learn as he grows.

Spanking teaches people to behave because if you don't, another human will hurt you. It does not teach people to behave because it is the right thing to do. Later in life, that means that if you know there is no cop present, you may drive how you please.

The Early Childhood Lab at the University of California in Davis has been
studying infant and toddler development since 1963. Their research shows
young kids do imitate their parents and that spanking only works to stop
bad behavior at that moment.
from Zee News, March 2007

Even if you thought spanking was "OK in small doses", what I have observed is that sooner or later, the spanker will use this method of discipline inappropriately. For example, your children are all put to bed and you have friends over for cocktails. You're loosened up after several Martinis, deep in a heated discussion with your friends about why Myanmar should be invaded, and you discover your four year-old is in fact awake and is upstairs trying to stick a spoon into an electrical outlet.
Without a second thought, you give him a right walloping on his rear end, and because you've had a few stiff ones, you strike your child harder than what you often articulate your spanking style to be: "a gentle shock to get their attention".

Children are very smart. They can work out the most amazing things about what's going on in the family around them. The human child's survival depended on it. At least, throughout most of our human evolution, a keen sense of impending danger would have been rewarded with better survival chances.

Your child might have learned a few lessons from that cocktail evening. Accurate or not, he might have learned that when you have guests over, he (your child) is in danger of getting hurt. He might have learned to associate the smell of alcohol on his father's breath with being hurt. Or he might have learned that raised voices among adults might be followed by him getting hurt.

You must admit, if the partying or the drinking had not taken place, the extra hard spanking would probably not have taken place.

Spanking teaches children that using violence is a valid way of getting someone to do what you want.
When you leave the door open to any level of spanking, you leave the door open to every level of spanking. Certainly in adults, the escalation from the first incident of spousal abuse to, well, murder, is well documented. Any family therapist will tell you that "minor" physical abuse must be stopped in its tracks the moment it begins. In the case of spanking, sooner or later, it becomes a conduit for expressing the adult's pain. You've had a hard day at work, an argument with your spouse, the stock market is down, you've had a bad night's sleep, or you're drunk. And then the little kid pushes your buttons, giving you an excellent opportunity to vent your feelings using the "I'm only doing this to you for your own good" excuse.

I've never heard a pediatrician argue that spanking worked in the long term, let alone did not harm the child. I've heard it from talk show hosts, religious people, politicians, drinkers, smokers and others. But I've never heard it from a pediatrician.

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
(from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam)

Even if you accept the notion that there is a small chance spanking damages a child, it must make you pause. If you ever in the future learn that spanking might, in fact, do some damage, you cannot then return and "unspank" your child in an attempt to make good.

When you spank a child, you invade their personal space. You use your personal, human existence to visit violence upon their personal, human existence. And you are maybe five times their size.

When a child stings itself by grabbing a nettle, it has not been violated by another human being. It feels pain and learns something about nettles: They sting.

If you need to protect your child from a hot open oven, put them in a high chair while the oven is open, or hold them with your left arm while you work with your right. If you need both hands while you cook, confine your child (or children) behind a section in the kitchen. If need be, place chairs on their sides to make an enclosed space while you get the dangerous work out of the way. Or buy a "Parents’ Super-Wide Custom-Fit Gate" from Amazon.com like this one:
When a child gets spanked, it learns something about humans - they sting. Spanking does not teach a child that putting spoons into electrical outlets stings.

When you are a child, the lesson spanking teaches you is about the rights other humans may have to inflict pain upon you. The child learns that they are owned by you, and that they are ultimately powerless over their own destiny.

Not so long ago, citizens pushed to criminalize the act of a husband hitting his wife. The main argument against criminalizing it was "family discipline and security would fall apart if women were not kept under control".

I'm wondering if those who support child spanking would like to re-introduce wife spanking. (I'm referring to the non-consensual variety of course).
Or what about the need to keep employees in place? Where's the harm in giving a wayward employee a little smack upside the head? Sometimes they just get so out of hand, don't ya know, they need to be brought back to their senses. To make the streets safer for everyone, perhaps we should allow cops to give a speeder a punch on the nose as a warning of what an airbag feels like.

After all, it would be for their own good.

Liam

The "I-only-work-here" award 2006

2007-03-05T15:23:00.000-08:00

Cause of power failure

2007-03-05T14:46:00.000-08:00

This is the scene that presented itself
to a public utility worker who arrived at the
suspected source of a neighborhood power failure.
(click for larger image)

So you want to start your own business

2007-03-05T08:00:00.000-08:00

Because I have started several companies over the years, I was given the opportunity to talk to a class of post-grad MBA students at the University of Washington some months ago. A question that came up was (I paraphrase) "What can I do to prepare myself for starting my own business?"

Not expecting this simple question, for which I really should have been prepared, I trotted out a predictable answer: Write a good business plan, research the market well, keep your day job, be persistent, etc... Any student in the class could have probably answered the question, so my answer had little value.

The question has rolled around in my head like a tumbleweed looking for a way out of a fenced field ever since. How would I answer the question now?

Question: What can I do to prepare myself for starting my own business?

Answer: Live as a homeless person for a whole week. Get yourself a cardboard box from some furniture store - one that's big enough to sleep in (even if your legs are sticking out) - but light enough to carry a few hundred yards if you need to. Only take with you the clothes you are wearing, plus an old coat, and stuff five dollars into your pocket. Find some spot in town to park your cardboard box.

You'll probably have to panhandle to make it through the week. I believe there are such things as soup kitchens around, but I've never seen one. Your fellow homeless people will probably help you locate one.

Doing that for a week will give you a sense of what it feels like when you hit a trough in your business start-up. My guess is, most folks wouldn't last two hours on the street, let alone a week.

My cheery, Monday morning 2 cents' worth.
Liam

The Missing Mothers of the 1960s

2007-03-04T11:30:00.000-08:00

What have all these movies/tv shows got in common:

The Wizard of Oz
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
The Sound of Music
Mary Poppins
Thunderbirds

Answer: the mother is missing.

Take Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. There's nary a picture on the wall of the two youngsters' biological mother. No talk of how they missed her, how they grieved for her or how they honored her. Perhaps she died during childbirth delivering the younger of the perfectly adjusted Jeremy and Jemima. Perhaps she was buried in the backyard, or suffered from post-partum insanity and fell off the Cliffs of Dover during a crazed walkabout one dark night during the Boer War.

Then there's The Sound of Music.
Some woman was pregnant at least seven times to bring those darlings into the world. Again, no mention of her, either. Nobody, not even the over chirpy, virginal nanny expresses a shred of curiosity about the Missing Mother. You'd think she'd be a bit worried: the first time I burn the toast, the Big Fella will be feeding me to the pigs just like he did his first wife.
The youngest of the seven children was I'd guess about five or six years old. So, even if her mother died in childbirth, the memory of her would have been still fresh in the older children.
Perhaps she ran off with the butler. Or like that Hillbilly of the movie Deliverance, perhaps her body is wrapped in chains in the bottom of the Big Lake in front of the Big House.
It's also a bit odd, don't you think, that Georg (pronounced Gay Org) von Trapp was a captain in the Navy of a land-locked country!

And Thunderbirds?
Military men don't need wives it seems. It's not clear whose grandmother it is, but grandma stumbles around the set only to show the virile young men in stark contrast. No sign of their own mother though. I can only guess she was accidentally blown to pieces by one of Brain's ill-fated inventions. Perhaps it was Thunderbird Zero that exploded on the launchpad, taking out mother as she was hanging out all those polyester space suits to dry.

So, if you think Hollywood movies of today are mind-numbing for the current batch of youngsters, think about the "Message of the Missing Mothers" that was sent to the generation that went before them.

"Floating sand" from volcanic eruption

2007-03-04T11:16:00.000-08:00

This is a short PowerPoint slide show of a rarely seen phenomenon. At first I thought it was fake, but as it progressed, it became more convincing. Decide for yourself.

Click image to view PowerPoint

These sausages were sold in Ireland until the mistake was noticed

2007-03-02T10:11:00.000-08:00

Hard to believe, but these were on supermarket shelves all over Ireland before the mistake was noticed.

Why Rudy will beat Hillary...

2007-03-01T10:15:00.000-08:00

Click to enlarge

Should you have a child, or get a dog?

2007-03-01T09:02:00.000-08:00

Before you decide on whether to have a child (or several for that matter), or get a dog, take a look at these two pictures.
I really like the guilty look on the little dog's face.

Click either image for larger view.

The Fourteen Strokes of the Human Face

2007-02-28T09:30:00.000-08:00

Almost a decade ago, I took an art class in portraiture.
The teacher was Cecilia Cooney-Wickett and the model was Cecilia's mother, Dorothy Cooney.
The medium was charcoal on what they call "newsprint". Newsprint is a rough, cheap paper ideal for practising or demonstrating.

Perhaps 20 seconds into the demonstration, Cecilia's mother popped out of the page. What I mean by that is, I recognized her mother from the drawing because Cecilia captured her mother's likeness.
Granted, she had probably done thousands of drawings of her mother over the decades, but what surprised me was just how few strokes of the charcoal it took for Dorothy's likeness to appear on the newsprint.
I immediately remarked on it, and Cecilia stopped. We counted the charcoal strokes on the paper and there were no more than 14.

The class continued, and by the end of it some three hours later, we all had renditions of Dorothy's face on our own sketch pads, none of which looked remotely like Dorothy. (Some weeks later, most of us got the hang of it to some degree). Each of us had probably scratched thousands of strokes on the paper that first evening, but no one had captured the model's likeness.

So, I got to thinking.
Perhaps fourteen strokes, or thereabouts, is the minimum number of strokes it takes to capture a person's likeness. For years, Cecilia had practised on her mother and from experience, had learned which strokes were required, at least as far as her mother was concerned, to capture a likeness on paper.
The drawing would have been enough to identify her mother in a line-up of thousands of people.

That class was an education for me. It suggested that lots of messages can be delivered in remarkably few strokes.

I don't have the original of course, but Cecilia might sketch up a new one and post it along side a photo of her mother here.

Let's see.

My friend Cecilia's leprechaun is for sale

2007-02-28T07:48:00.000-08:00

My friend Cecilia asked for my opinion about a leprechaun statue she made years ago. She is considering selling it, presumably now because St. Patrick's Day is coming up. She asked me if I thought it was realistic looking.

I replied "very realistic...especially the way it bends over like that". I didn't realize it was her husband on the left.

The Fat Cats will decide who becomes president

2007-02-27T17:28:00.000-08:00

The Fat Cats will decide who gets the presidential nomination for Democratic party. John Edwards and Barack Obama won't get it with all that scary talk about poverty and ending the Iraq war.

Hillary will be the nomination because she won't do anything to disturb the status quo. She won't apologize for voting for the Iraq War five years ago because she is still for it. She is still for it because she wouldn't get the hundreds of millions of election support dollars if she were against it.

The war is a cash cow for the Fat Cats.

Even if they had to pay a billion dollars to get an acquiescent Democratic president into the White House, it'd be worth it to the Fat Cats.

Just think about the tens of billions of dollars that Exxon made in pure profit last year. A paltry billion is but a sliver of that. And that's just one company.

The Fat Cats don't want to hear about alleviating poverty or health care or any other scary, profit-reducing initiative. They want a president that will allow them to continue making grotesque profits while the super poor of America go to bed hungry every night.