Author Archives: Jon Lowder

Recession Tools: Knit Caps and Ear Warmers 60% Off at Kohls

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I hate shopping. I really do.  But when I'm facing a Saturday morning that will find me on a soccer field coaching my daughter's team in 20 degree weather and I can't seem to find a single winter hat in my house then I'm kind of forced to bite the bullet.  So today I headed on over to Kohl's on Hanes Mall Boulevard and found that they had their knit hats and ear warmers on sale for 60% off.  The hats are normally $10 and were selling for $4 and the ear warmers are normally $6 and were selling for $2.40.

Lots of other good sales going on, but I didn't stick around long enough to look them over.  I've one of those guys that goes in, finds what I'm looking for and then gets out of Dodge.

Recession Tools – PayPal’s Pay Later Service and Better Places Than the Mattress

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I've added a new category to the blog called "Recession Tools" and hopefully won't have to update it to "Depression Tools".  Here you'll find little tid-bits of info I stumble across that might be helpful in surviving these tough economic times.  Today I have two items for you:

PayPal Introduces a Pay Later Service:  Saw this item in the Wall Street Journal this morning. Starting this Friday PayPal is going to test a service that offers an online line of credit that will allow online shoppers to delay payment.  It works like a store that offers you 0% financing for six months, and if you pay it off before the deadline then you've basically had six months of interest free financing.  Of course if you're not paid off by the deadline you'll pay interest on the entire amount.  PayPal members who are approved for the credit will have until April 1, 2009 to pay their bill.  Obviously PayPal wants to juice online purchases for the holidays, but as long as you pay your bill why not do your shopping from the comfort of your home?

Good Places to Stash Cash in Your House: The Consumer Reports blog has some tips on the best places to stash cash in your house.  Of course this assumes you have cash and that you think there's gonna be an apocalyptic sequence of events involving bank runs and the failure of the FDIC, but stranger things have happened right?  BTW, my personal favorite is in a plastic bag taped to the inside of the toilet tank.

Lenslinger Hits the Bigs

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In the online world "hitting the bigs" happens when you're linked to by one of the mega sites like Fark or Boing Boing and the number of visitors to your site explodes.  Greensboro photog and blogger Lenslinger spun off a new blog based on his regular feature called Schmuck Alert and he won a link from Boing Boing.  Luckily his blog is on Blogger; if it had been hosted on a local shared server I can almost guarantee the thing would have crashed.  Congrats 'Slinger.

Wassup Redux

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Not sure how I missed this until now, but it's still funny. The video below is a riff on the old Budweiser Wassup ad campaigns.  Pretty funny even if you don't like the end. Spoiler alert, it's a "vote for change/Obama" thing.

WTF Six Apart?

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I've hosted this blog (and a few others) on Six Apart's Typepad service for four years.  In general I've been very happy with the service, I've received responses to all customer service inquiries, the downtime has been relatively minor and I've been very happy with the fact that it's enabled me to focus on the creative side of blogging without having to learn too much about the technical side. Heck, I even got to meet one of the co-founders, Anil Dash, at ConvergeSouth and I found him to be one of the sharpest, if not the sharpest person there.  So why do I find myself irked with them today?

Because of this announcement that they're giving recently laid off journalists the service for free, and calling it the Journalist Bailout Program.  Now you might think it's cold of me to begrudge someone who's been laid off a helping hand, and maybe it is, but I've been paying for the service for four years and I've helped the folks at Six Apart get where they are.  Why should I be happy that some newcomer is getting appreciation and I'm not?  Really I have no problem with them helping out the journalists, but where's the love for me and my fellow paying TypePad-ers?

This reminds me of a conversation I had with a rep at Register.com a while back.  Before I knew any better I registered my domain names with them and paid some crazy rate like $30 a year, and they sent me renewal notices for that same amount.  I shopped around and got a much better deal at GoDaddy.  Unfortunately I had to call Register.com to finalize the transfer of the domain and that's when the rep offered to best the GoDaddy price.  I told him no thanks and when he asked why I said, "If you really appreciated my business you'd have offered me the better price before I called you.  The fact that you treat me better when I threaten to leave simply tells me that I'm a number, not a valued customer." To put it simply I get irked at any company that offers better deals for new customers than for existing customers.

The reality in this case is that Six Apart is gaining much more than they're giving up.  They're getting the journalists' audiences which means that their ad network will get more views which means more revenue for them.  That's fine for Six Apart, but what kind of appreciation are they showing to me and all the other customers who've been with them as they've grown?

I also find this ironic because a few years ago I tried to contact Six Apart to see if they had a program that would allow someone like me to re-sell their platform.  I knew several small businesses, local politicians and, yes, journalists who would benefit from blogging but needed hand holding.  I had no interest in setting up a platform, finding a host and providing tech support, so I thought if I could re-sell Typepad as the platform and then act as the "rep" who held the clients' hands through the process then it would be a win-win for me and for Six Apart.  I never heard back from them and I moved on to other things.  I guess now I have their answer.

The Bigot Belt

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An interesting piece at the Freakonomics blog looks into the "bigot belt" which is the swath of counties from Texas to West Virginia that actually went more Republican from 2004 to 2008 in the presidential elections.  The question, simply put, was whether or not the reason was Obama's race.  The answer ended up being yes, but the details of the research offered some enlightening conclusions.

The author, Eric Oliver, looked at whether it was really just race or perhaps the fact that these counties tended to be in heavy coal mining and oil drilling areas had something to do with it.  Or maybe it was that these counties had a different racial breakdown than other areas.  His conclusion was very interesting: these counties tended to have large white populations in states that were otherwise racially diverse.  From the article:

The answer comes in looking at both the county and the state together.
One of the biggest demographic differences between “scarlet” and
“azure” counties is the racial composition of the state population: 72
percent of the “scarlet” counties are in states that are over 10
percent black compared to only 49 percent of the “azure” counties. In a
multivariate regression analysis using all the variables listed above,
the best predictor of a county’s Republican vote margin is its white
racial percentage relative to its state’s black population size. In
other words, the counties where Republican margins grew the largest
tended to be predominantly white places in otherwise racially mixed
states.

These patterns are consistent with research on individual racial
attitudes. Historically, the greatest levels of racial violence
occurred within white enclaves near larger black populations,
particularly when these enclaves are poor and uneducated. Even today,
whites who live in poor, racially segregated neighborhoods within more
diverse metropolitan areas tend to be more racially hostile than whites
who live in either integrated neighborhoods or within largely white
regions. In more diverse settings, locally segregated whites have less
contact with nearby minorities yet also feel greater competition for
jobs and public goods. The combination of both increased racial
competition and racial isolation seems to be a recipe for generating
racial animosity.

As the author concludes we should not be fooled into thinking that this election has somehow catapulted us into an era of racially harmony.  The fear of "other" has been with us since we crawled out of the primordial ooze, and I fear it will be ever thus.

Rumor Update

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A couple of days ago I posted about some rumors I'd heard,
namely that the Winston-Salem downtown stadium project had come to a
halt and that Mike Mulhern, the Journal's NASCAR columnist had been let
go.  I heard directly from Mike that he had indeed been let go, which
is a bummer but it sounds like he's already working on his next act.

As for the stadium, I got an email yesterday from Jake at the Chamber
of Commerce and he'd checked it out and been told that the project was
still going to meet its deadline of being ready for the first pitch of
the 2009 season.  Then I saw in this morning's Journal that reporter Laura Graff had asked the mayor about it after the city's economic forum last night.  From the article:

Construction on the $22.6 million baseball stadium in downtown
Winston-Salem is being slowed but that should not affect the scheduled
April 2009 opening, officials said yesterday.

Mayor Allen Joines said in an interview after the city's economic
forum last night that the delay was caused by negotiations between two
of the Winston-Salem baseball team's owners, Billy Prim and Andrew
"Flip" Filipowski.

Joines said that Prim, who is also the chairman and chief executive
of Primo Water Corp., could buy out Filipowski, who is also the
chairman and chief executive of SilkRoad Technologies Inc. Earlier this
month, Filipowski's company laid off at least 12 employees…

"There have been some delays in the stadium's construction while we
work on restructuring of ownership of the team and stadium," said the
spokesman, Kevin Mortesen. "We anticipate finalizing that in the near
future and that everything will proceed to enable the team to play in
the new stadium for the '09 season."

Mortesen said in an e-mail that construction would continue during
the delay. He said that crews were at the stadium yesterday and will be
there today.

Now that the thing is started I really hope they get it done, but with
the ongoing financial mess and its unexpected, long reach into all
kinds of business sectors it's not a stretch to believe that this
project could eventually become a victim too.  I'm not implying that
the Prim folks are misleading us, rather I'm hoping that they don't get
blindsided like so many other institutions have been over the last few
months.  After all I seriously doubt the folks at Lehman Brothers saw their demise coming either.

If a Picture’s Worth a Thousand Words Then…

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Since Google's hosting the archives of Life Magazine's photos they must be worth, uh, a googol of words.

Here are all the pictures that turned up for a search of Winston-Salem, the vast majority of which seem to have something to do with a clocks project by the Winston-Salem Evening Sentinel in 1951.  Kind of weird in a good way. Below is a picture of the paper with info about the clock premium (can anyone tell me if that's a newspaper box or microfiche reader?), I think, and a completely unrelated picture from Hanes Hosiery Mills.  Click on them to view the full size image:
EveningSentinelBig
 

HanesHosiery
 

Now THAT is a Subject Line

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I get enough email on any given day that it really takes a special subject line to grab my attention.  My Dad managed it today with one word: Pricks.

Now my Dad's not a cusser so when he uses salty language it really sticks out.  His email was in response to this post about how I'd like our next leader of the financial sector to be described. I really like what he wrote:

Most of the high net worth people I see in my marketing efforts work
with people they like. Many times this is a tragedy because the client
seldom does the due diligence they should when following the advice of
someone they like. Neither party wants to offend the other. The prick
(he may or may not really be a prick) doesn't care since he is more
concerned with communicating or doing what he perceives to be right. We
just hope that that person(s) is principled and competent. May our
public officials take principled positions and may we as members of our
society accept what we don't want to hear. How do you like that shift
from the Micro to the Macro.

Put another way, I'll take a competent jerk over an incompetent clown any day, especially when it comes to my money.

Now I'm just waiting for an email from my Mom with the subject "A-holes" and I'll have seen everything.

When You Want to Leave Your Wife a Message but Not Actually Talk to Her

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Admit it, there are times you want to call someone and be guaranteed you don't actually talk to them but are still able to leave them a message.  You know the scenario: your wife calls and leaves you a message but you're getting ready for a meeting and don't have time to talk so you don't call her back and while you're in your meeting you get another message, left in that "I'm pissed that you're ignoring me" voice, asking where the blankety-blank you are and why you're being such a wank.  You can't very well say to her, "Honey I wanted to let you know I got your message but I didn't want to talk to you, because if I had you'd have kept me on the phone for 10 minutes about something totally trivial and out of my control and I really had to go into my meeting."**  Well, you could say that but then you'd be on the couch for a week.

**Please note that I've never, ever thought these things myself.  I swear.

My friends, technology has once again come to the rescue.  My friend Dan emailed me a link to a great service called SlyDial that allows you to dial a number and it automatically bypasses the ring and takes you directly to voice mail.  I downloaded the version for Blackberry and it works like a charm.  To be honest I have no idea how it works behind the scenes, but it's cool and it's free so I recommend it for any of you who love voice mail but don't like actually talking to anyone.

Can you think of scenarios where this could come in really handy?  Feel free to share.