Archive for February, 2008

February 13th, 2008

Audiobooks and iPod

I love audio books. I’ve found them to be a great way to stay awake during long drives, because it literally sounds like someone is talking to you the entire time. Music, especially music you’ve heard dozens of times, is easy to tone out but audio books aren’t. iTunes and iPods/iPhones have the ability to [...]

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February 12th, 2008

9 Tips For Coping With The Next BlackBerry Outage

RIM’s servers went down yesterday morning and were intermittent all day. Always keep a spare fiber-optic cable with tin cans attached to each end. Take a deep breath, stretch, and count to 20. When you’re relaxed, you can throw your BlackBerry much harder. Acquire an advanced degree in telecommunications engineering, so you can decipher the [...]

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February 11th, 2008

Futures Market

The orange juice futures market is a better predictor of Florida’s weather than the National Weather Service. A 1984 paper by UCLA finance professor Richard Roll.

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February 6th, 2008

Valentine 1 Hardwire – 2007 Acura TL-S

There are two electronic items I can’t recommend enough. One is a Blackberry and the other is a Valentine 1. The Valentine 1 is a holy grail of radar detectors. I’ve tried several and never felt more comfortable than when using a V1. They are quite pricy, but if it saves me from one ticket [...]

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February 6th, 2008

What Happens when Innovation Stop?

Whatever happens, the salad days for Yahoo are long gone. 2008 will be the year Yahoo ceased to be one of the big independent Internet heavyweights. They’ll almost certainly become an operating subsidiary of Microsoft, or Google’s whipping boy. And if by some chance the government puts a stop to either deal, they’ll have a [...]

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February 5th, 2008

Upsets are bad for Business

Many hotels in Phoenix, including ours, didn’t sell out for the Superbowl. The reason? The Giants beat the Packers. The Packers were favored to beat the Giants and many Packer fans had booked rooms for the superbowl anticipating a New England vs Greenbay showdown. After the Giants won the NFC championship all our hotels in [...]

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February 4th, 2008

Political Races and the Internet

Barack Obama […] announced a record-setting month in terms of donations – $32 million in January alone [...], $28 million of that was raised online. [...] Barack’s $28 million in online contributions came from more than 250,000 contributors. 90% were under $100. 40% were $25 or less, and 10,000 people gave $5 or $10 to [...]

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February 1st, 2008

Facebook Utility

Metcalfe’s law states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system. The analogy that Wikipedia uses is that “a single fax machine is useless, but the value of every fax machine increases with the total number of fax machines in the network, because [...]

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