Nice Computer, Nice Car

So, I’m here in Ohio and just finished my first day of talks.  On the way back to the hotel, we drove past Midwest Auto Group.  This is a dealership in Columbus that specializes in nice used exotics, think Ferrari, Lotus type exotics.  Well, Josh, my ride for the day, has an awesome Acer Ferrari laptop, complete with carbon fiber and the logo.  Thanks to the sales guys in Midwest Auto Group for indulging our fantasy a bit and letting us see the car, he let us look at the engine, but not sit in it.  Here’s a shot of Josh and the two Ferrari’s.

If you’re curious, the Ferrari is available for a cool  $167,000.  The laptop  will set you back about $2,500.

Ohio Tour

I’m in Ohio this week, speaking in Columbus, Cleveland then on to Detroit and Ann Arbor, Michigan.  Looks like I will be in Columbus for the championship game, so I need to get my trench coat ready so I can get a new tv during the looting tomorrow night (win or lose).

If you want to get in touch while I am up here, give me a ring at 206-714-6225.

Musical Eclecticism, Part 1 of ? - Josh Rouse

This is a series of posts I’m going to do on random music that I have found.  You see, I listen to almost anything.  I mean that.  I will go from Jay-Z to Garth Brooks to a little bit of blue grass and end the day with some late 1950’s Miles Davis.  I’m not a music snob, I don’t focus on the “qualities” of the music, the sophistication of the album, etc, I just like to listen to music that makes me think, makes me feel good, or sometimes, makes me remember silly times in my past (see Chumbawumba collection, the Batman Forever soundtrack, and the countless crappy 90’s electronic dance tunes). 

I love discovering new music.  I especially love finding something that’s not reallly big with anyone, but makes me smile.  I know I’m really on to something when Libby asks me to burn it to a cd for her, or to put it on her shuffle.  So, that’s what I’m going to be writing about.

Josh Rouse - Nashville

Originally appearing on Fred’s 2005 best albums list, I burned a few iTunes bucks and picked up Nashville. Why I read Fred’s blog is probably worth a blog post unto itself.  Josh’s song “Sad Eyes” did make an appearance on Grey’s Anatomy as well. Between “Carolina”, “Winter in the Hamptons” and “Saturday”, I was hooked.  The music is best described as folksy-poppy-touch of jazzy.  The thing I like about his music is the way the feeling is conveyed without a lot of effort.  The fun pieces really feel fun. The touching pieces quickly slow down and I really feel them. 

I loaded up Libby’s shuffle with a few of the songs and she was pleasently suprised to find them on our flight to Boston for Doug and Michelle’s wedding.We ended up picking up a number of other albums over the summer, and have been pleasently surprised. 

If you’re looking for a change from the pop on the radio or the classic rock in your album colllection, I can highly recommend picking up some of his stuff.  I think you’ll like it.

Kim Family Auction

You may recall the story of James Kim and his family who got lost between San Francisco and Seattle in the beginning of December.  James died after setting out to get help for his family.  The family was rescued after being spotted from a helicopter.

There’s a charity auction that has been set up to benefit the family, they’ve got some pretty neat stuff.

I especially like this and may place a bid or two on it, even if it may take a little while until Grace could fit in it!

This wooden ship would be pretty cool to hang from the ceiling.

Finally, this toy robot is super cool.

And One More Thing!

In the last post, the second article linked to an article I first read in May, and when I read it, it was one of the the few newspaper articles I have ever read that brought a tear to my eye.  It’s a really touching story, and the people who do those kind of things are just blessed:

Given a chance to be little ballerinas, and smiling right down to their toes

Raising an Amazing Grace

A friend wrote in response to my last post on politics, and I wanted to put an excerpt or two up from what was written:

Raising kids today seems to be so difficult because the world is complicated.  We want our children, not just our daughters, to grow up strong and confident, but also passionate and compassionate.

And

It’s a frustrating world and it’s no wonder girls want to dress up like princesses because the rest of us would like to escape to a fairy tale land, too, and hang out all day with our best friends at the country estate.

This was followed up with two great NYT articles:

What’s Wrong with Cinderella (times select access required)

and

Middle School Girls Gone Wild

Ahhh, the fun that awaits.  Money quote from the second article (emphasis mine):

I’m sure that many parents see these routines as healthy fun, an exercise in self-esteem harmlessly heightened by glitter makeup and teeny skirts. Our girls are bratz, not slutz, they would argue, comfortable in the existence of a distinction.

But my parental brain rebels. Suburban parents dote on and hover over their children, micromanaging their appointments and shielding them in helmets, kneepads and thick layers of S.U.V. steel. But they allow the culture of boy-toy sexuality to bore unchecked into their little ones’ ears and eyeballs, displacing their nimble and growing brains and impoverishing the sense of wider possibilities in life.

My mother was always mentioning her concern regarding the “princess-ification” of girls in American society, but I had no idea the business implications of it, and how widespread it is. There are very definite reasons for the surge in princess-ey type things present in society today.  From the first article

The first Princess items, released with no marketing plan, no focus groups, no advertising, sold as if blessed by a fairy godmother. To this day, Disney conducts little market research on the Princess line, relying instead on the power of its legacy among mothers as well as the instant-read sales barometer of the theme parks and Disney Stores. ”We simply gave girls what they wanted,” Mooney said of the line’s success, ”although I don’t think any of us grasped how much they wanted this. I wish I could sit here and take credit for having some grand scheme to develop this, but all we did was envision a little girl’s room and think about how she could live out the princess fantasy. The counsel we gave to licensees was: What type of bedding would a princess want to sleep in? What kind of alarm clock would a princess want to wake up to? What type of television would a princess like to see? It’s a rare case where you find a girl who has every aspect of her room bedecked in Princess, but if she ends up with three or four of these items, well, then you have a very healthy business.”

and

”Playing princess is not the issue,” argues Lyn Mikel Brown, an author, with Sharon Lamb, of ”Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters From Marketers’ Schemes.” ”The issue is 25,000 Princess products,” says Brown, a professor of education and human development at Colby College. ”When one thing is so dominant, then it’s no longer a choice: it’s a mandate, cannibalizing all other forms of play. There’s the illusion of more choices out there for girls, but if you look around, you’ll see their choices are steadily narrowing.”

It’s hard to imagine that girls’ options could truly be shrinking when they dominate the honor roll and outnumber boys in college. Then again, have you taken a stroll through a children’s store lately? A year ago, when we shopped for ”big girl” bedding at Pottery Barn Kids, we found the ”girls” side awash in flowers, hearts and hula dancers; not a soccer player or sailboat in sight. Across the nofly zone, the ”boys” territory was all about sports, trains, planes and automobiles. Meanwhile, Baby GAP’s boys’ onesies were emblazoned with ”Big Man on Campus” and the girls’ with ”Social Butterfly”; guess whose matching shoes were decorated on the soles with hearts and whose sported a ”No. 1” logo? And at Toys ”R” Us, aisles of pink baby dolls, kitchens, shopping carts and princesses unfurl a safe distance from the ”Star Wars” figures, GeoTrax and tool chests. The relentless resegregation of childhood appears to have sneaked up without any further discussion about sex roles, about what it now means to be a boy or to be a girl. Or maybe it has happened in lieu of such discussion because it’s easier this way.

finally, the part that really resonated with me:

Maybe Princess is the first salvo in what will become a lifelong struggle over her body image, a Hundred Years’ War of dieting, plucking, painting and perpetual dissatisfaction with the results. Or maybe it isn’t. I’ll never really know. In the end, it’s not the Princesses that really bother me anyway. They’re just a trigger for the bigger question of how, over the years, I can help my daughter with the contradictions she will inevitably face as a girl, the dissonance that is as endemic as ever to growing up female.

It’s scary knowing the pressures that Grace is going to face, no matter what we do, every time a tv is on, she’s reading a magazine, or just walking down the street.  Libby and I have talked about this for a long time, and we’ll keep talking about it.  The best we can come up with is to keep ourselves surrounded with people who are comfortable with themselves.  Because in the end, if you’re comfortable with who you are, it’s a lot easier to become what you want to be.  We count ourselves very lucky to have so many people in our circles of family and friends who we feel great knowing Grace will see them as she grows up.  Well, everyone except Spencer, who is special in his own way.

The Books of 2006

One thing I like to do at year end is reflect upon what I have read in the past year that really stands out in my memory as meaning something to me.  So, here’s the list for 06.  My regret, I did not read nearly enough this year!  I’m trying to start the year out to break that trend, so we’ll see how that goes.  Taking the bus has helped that, but most of that reading has been geek books, which for the sake of my family, I will leave out all of those details.

Business / Investing Related

The Intelligent Investor, Benjamin Graham

If Benjamin Graham wrote the book on the “value investing” that inspired Warren Buffett, this is the book that he wrote on it.  In fairly accessible language and terminology, Graham walks through identifying value opportunities.  Commentary by Jason Zweig following each chapter applies the lessons Graham was mentioning regarding utilities and railroads to the dot-com bubble and the Enron debacle.  It’s hard to walk away from this book and clearly know, “Yes, I should invest in security x” but the book gives a great framework to analyze the security of any company, and stays away from a lot of in depth balance sheet or financial statement analysis (which is a good thing from a value perspective).  A lot of the lessons of this book are easy to see in the performance of Graham’s greatest student, Warren Buffett, who has managed to be fairly successful.  My copy, currently on loan to my dad, is well dog eared with every page chock full of relevent tips and hints that still seem to apply today.  The major lesson I learned,  bet with Warren Buffett.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street, Burton Malkiel

Another “framework” investing book, but more up to date than Graham’s text, this book really walks through the case that most individuals would be best of by investing in a large index fund with low expenses that tracks one of the large markets (S&P 500 being the typical example).  If one chooses to ignore that advice, Malkiel walks through characteristics of stocks to look out for.  There is a lot of overlap I think between these two, this book gets into more technical details that is more timely, for instance, pets.com was a boneheaded idea from the get-go and everyone who lost money on it should have seen what was coming.  This one also has it’s “system” which it goes into great details describing, but I have not looked at in too much depth.

The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, Edward Tufte

If you hate powerpoint presentations, or work at a company that has meetings to prep for the meeting where the powerpoint deck for the meeting will be created, this booklet is a great little read.  It makes some basic points about the lack of information density present in a powerpoint deck, especially contrasted with Tufte’s favored medium, high resolution print.  The booklet is gorgeously printed, and is much cheaper than Tufte’s other texts which expand upon the themes touched on in relation to powerpoint.

Readings For Pleasure

The Last Templar, Raymond Khoury

Catholic Conspiricy, check

Ridiculous Treasure, check

Random hero thrown into the mix, unaware of the enormity of what’s going on, check

This was a good read.  Not as drawn out as the Da Vinci code which had a good plot but was too long in the wrong places, this book reminded me of the fun ride which was Angels and Demons.  It’s a pretty quick read,so if you’re looking for something on your next plane ride and back, this would be a good one to pick up.  It has some of “there’s a deep hidden lie behind all of Christianity” that the Da Vinci code has, but that doesn’t override what is a fun story.  Foucault’s Pendulum is next on my reading list in this genre, but I’ve been warned it’s a bit trickier of a read (and that was coming from a guy who is Italian and could read all of those parts!)

Those are the ones that really stand out to me, in looking back.  This year I’m going to a.) keep better track of what I’m reading, and b.) READ MORE!