Author Archives: Jon Lowder

Tivo is cool, but 2.5 GB files aren’t

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I’ve had Tivo for a while, but only in the last day or so have I added it to my home network.  By adding my Tivo DVR to the network I’ve opened up a couple of features.  One is that I can add any photos or music from any of the home computers to a shared folder and we (the family) can view/hear them on the TV that our Tivo is hooked up to.  Since the Tivo is hooked up to our big-screen that should be pretty cool.

The other major feature that we can use is that we can go to Tivo’s web site and download a desktop viewer to any computer on the network and then transfer any of the recorded shows currently on the DVR to the computer(s) for viewing.  That’s a really cool feature, especially for a household that regularly hosts arguments about what we’re going to watch at any given time.  What’s not so cool is that when I installed the software on my laptop (no problems with that) and then went to transfer a one-hour show I realized that the file was 2.5 GB and it would take me about three hours to transfer to my computer.  Yikes!

But, I can see some uses even with the large file sizes and excruciating transfer times.  One, I could download a couple of shows to my laptop and watch them on a flight, or during a really boring meeting.  Two, I could burn the show to a DVD if I wanted although it would make more sense to hook a DVD burner directly to the Tivo, which is what I’ll probably do in the future.

Realistically, though, I can’t see chewing up so my disk space for a one or two hour show when I could just rent a few DVDs for a trip.  Now when Tivo and Netflix launch their combined service that might make things more interesting.  I can definitely see downloading a couple of movies from Netflix via Tivo and saving them to my laptop before a road trip.  In the meantime I think the main utility will be looking at family pics on the big screen.  Hopefully you won’t be able to see any of my increasingly common nose hairs.

Damnit, Another Idea I Should Have Had

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What is wrong with me?  Why can’t I ever come up with the great ideas?  I found this site called Woot! today through a blog I read called "The Post Money Value."  Here’s what Woot! does:

  • Offers one item per day on its online store. It puts the item up on the store at 12:00 a.m. central time and it keeps that item on its store until it is sold out or until 11:59 p.m. central time.
  • If a product runs out it will not be replaced until the next release time.  Unless of course they run a "Woot-Off" which is an unannounced, frenzied sale of an item after that day’s original item has sold out.  These are indicated by flashing orange thingys.
  • If you miss a day’s item you cannot get one, period, unless they run it again at a later date.
  • You can not talk to a live person at their company.
  • They provide no customer service.  From their website: "No. Well, not really. If you buy something you don’t end up liking or
    you have what marketing people call "buyer’s remorse," sell it on eBay.
    It’s likely you’ll make money doing this and save everyone a hassle. If
    the item doesn’t work, find out what you’re doing wrong. Yes, we know
    you think the item is bad, but it’s probably your fault. Google your
    problem, or come back to that product discussion in our community and
    ask other people if they know. Try to call the manufacturer and ask if
    they know. If you give up and must return it to us, then follow on to
    the next FAQ entry."
  • Here’s what they tell you to do if the product is defective: "Unless we specifically tell you not to, call the manufacturer of the
    product you bought. You will likely get a replacement of a new model or
    better item from them. If we still haven’t dissuaded you, email
    rma@woot.com with your woot order number, the name of the product you
    are returning, and the detailed problem with the item. We will respond
    with return authorization by the next business day. Because we aren’t
    likely to have a replacement in stock, you should be prepared for a
    refund-only option if that’s all we can do. Know that return freight
    will be at your expense. Again, you will probably get a better deal
    from the manufacturer, or whoever else handling customer service for
    that product."

What’s not to love: a business where you consistently sell out in hours, you can be short with your customers if not downright rude, and you don’t even have to pay for phone lines! To give you an idea of how successful Woot! is here’s the report for the item that went on sale at 12:00 a.m. central time on October 20, 2005:

Item: George Foreman Stainless Jumbo Grill with Timer
Price: $39.99 + $5 shipping
Quantity: 900
Last order time: 3:07 a.m. central time
Woot member to blame it on: ojeff17
Order Pace: 28.139 seconds
Woot wage: $11,511.56 an hour

Oh, the varying levels of marketing genius that these numbers reveal.  Creating a membership/club? Pretty darn smart.  Identifying the schmo that bought the last item?  Brilliant!  Showing how fast things sell, i.e. creating a sense of urgency? Double-brilliant!  Telling everyone how much you made?  Ballsy and triple-brilliant!

This leaves me to wonder where I was when they passed out the business-acumen gene.  Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to keep toiling away as I wallow in my mediocrity.

How Much is Enough?

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Via Ed Cone I just read a piece by Dave Winer called Transcendental Money that he wrote five years ago.  This excerpt will give you the gist:

Now I can define my term. Transcendental money is the amount of
money required to transcend time. It makes just enough money to satisfy
all your reasonable needs, wants and desires, but no more. You can do
the math yourself, factor in the cost of living where you live, or want
to live, it’s just arithmetic to determine what your transcendental
money number is.

Once you have your real number, the true nature of money reveals
itself. No matter how much you have, you never feel secure. Sorry, I
didn’t make the rules, have a talk with your god, or your dog, or
whoever you turn to for spiritual guidance. The unhappy ending for all
of us is death, we all lose this game, there’s no winning strategy, and
no matter how much money you attain, you can never feel secure, unless
you trust nothingness, because that’s where we’re all headed.

So money offers a chance, in its absence, to find a happier purpose to
life. I believe that no matter how much money you have it can’t bring
you that secure "I Will Exist Forever" feeling that our hearts all feel
we deserve.

Now, having no money certainly offers a chance to postpone living until
you get the money. I’ve been there, done that, got the prize. But I’ve
seen people with huge piles of money-sweating money who believe that if
they just double their fortune they will feel truly secure. I can’t
help these people, but I can help people who are truly poor.

I read this at an opportune time.  I’m getting ready to head to D.C. to join with some of my fraternity brothers (Iota Xi chapter of Sigma Chi) to help out a brother who’s hit some hard times.  I also know someone going through a divorce and navigating some rough economic waters, literally having a hard time paying the bills and putting food on the table.  So money, or the lack there of, is definitely on my mind.

Part of me feels guilty.  Why, I wonder, am I so caught up in the day-to-day of my own existence, worried about things that are so petty in comparison to the problems that some friends are facing?  I know, I know, it’s human nature, but that knowledge does not alleviate the guilt and quite honestly I don’t think the guilt is misplaced.

Far too much of life is spent in pursuit of more; more money and the supposed security that more money brings.  Mind you I’m not arguing that money is not important. It most definitely is critical to our every day existence just as healthy crops and ample game were critical to our ancestors.  What I’m saying is that even when we have enough money we don’t perceive it as being enough so we spend an inordinate amount of time seeking more. 

Reading Winer’s piece it occured to me that he was on to something.  Money, or at least having it, truly is transcendent.  Most of us have experienced cycles in our life when we have less or more money.  When we are in a down cycle money is our means for survival and when we are in an up cycle it is merely the means through which we get ourselves more stuff, more vacations, etc.  Of course if we don’t control ourselves during the up cycle then we can quickly spend our way into a down cycle, rinse and repeat.

And then there’s the unknown that the future holds.  We’ve all known people who fall on hard times, sometimes by their own hand and sometimes by fate (failing health, natural disaster, etc.).  The uncertainty of the future causes us to feel the need to stockpile money "just in case."  Of course that’s prudent, but only to a point.  Figuring out what that point is, when enough is enough, is critical to being able to take the focus away from day-to-day economic gain and placing it where it belongs, on day-to-day giving.

Reading List October 18, 2005

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  • Quote of the Day (Blog on the Run) – "… by refusing to ridicule the ridiculous, by watering down every
    criticism into a mannered circumlocution, we have created an
    environment where idiots thrive unchallenged." — PZ Myers
  • The Times Speaks, Kinda, Sorta (Blog on the Run) – Lex Alexander, a fine journalist in his own right, takes the New York Times to task for their handling of their own story – the journalist who was held in contempt in the Plame case.  Basically he says they screwed the pooch.
  • Thinking of Joining a Startup? (A VC) – Fred Wilson points to a checklist of questions you should answer to determine if joining a startup is right for you.
  • Rethinking Reed’s Law (A VC) – Some really smart business people talk some serious math re. network effects and make my brain hurt.
  • While Boomers Were Busy Watching Their Retirement Accounts (Matt McAlister) – An interesting look at the differences between the Boomers’ form of rebelliousness and Gen X’s form of rebelliousness.  Actually it’s more a comparison of what they rebelled against.

Dorks Got Jealous, Pay-Per-View Event Ensued

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It seems that some grown up dorks got jealous of the jocks getting all the pay-per-view moolah, so someone put together a debate between Wayne LaPierre of the NRA and Andrew Butler of PETA and decided to charge $9.95 for anyone to watch it via pay-per-view.  You may think I’m being unfair by calling them dorks, but I would have to disagree.  They’re dorks because they’re debating;  they’d be cool if they actually fought it out and spilled a little blood.

If they did fight it out I’d have to put my money on the PETA dude, because the NRA guy is like the average hunter; take the gun out of his hands and he’s just another fat, cholesterol-ridden puss who’s never met a fair fight he wouldn’t run away from.  Of course PETA-boy’s probably another granola-eating tree hugger who’d blow away in a stiff wind, but he’d just dance around the NRA dude and jab him to death with little girly punches until the NRA dude croaked from a coronary as he struggled to cover up while simultaneously holding up his holster-less Wranglers.

Now that I’d pay good money to see.

Reading List October 17, 2005

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  • All the News That You Can Use. And More. (New York Times) – A new service called Inform aims to be a better Google News.
  • ADPrentice (Feld Thoughts) – A venture capitalist spends a little time giving back to his fraternity at MIT, and it was a lot more than beer.  I think it’s a useful template for how any of us can create ways to give back to the groups that helped form us.

Reading List October 14, 2005

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  • CNN Seeks Blog Guru to Work with Blitzer (Micro Persuasion) – Everything about this potential gig sounds interesting, and I was seriously considering it until I read the part that says the blog guru will be working out of the DC bureau.  I just escaped D.C. and there’s no way I’m going back, even if it was working with a short guy named Wolf.
  • Grassroots Journalism: Actual Content vs. Shining Ideal (Online Journalism Review) – A review of "10 citizen journalism sites" including Greensboro101.com.
  • Why Google Wants AOL (Business 2.0) – It’s all about IM, installed user-base, protecting search territory, and…oh hell, just go read it.
  • Getting Flat, Part 1 (Linux Journal) – Doc Searls looks at Tom Friedman’s "The World is Flat" from the open-source software point of view.
  • Getting Flat, Part 2 (Linux Journal) – A must read.  Doc continues what he started in Part 1, and here’s just one of many good excerpts I could pull: "I can save Microsoft a pile of time and money by reporting a fact no school wants to admit, one that will
    flatten the world far more than any other factor: pretty much everybody is smart. What’s more, they’re all
    smart in their own ways."
  • For Future Journalists, It’s Cash, Not Causes (Cleveland Plains Dealer) – An opinion piece on the shocking news that today’s journalism want to make real money.
  • "Journalists Have to Get Smarter About Business" (Manship School of Mass Communication) – In a speech Peter Copeland, Editor and GM of Scripps Howard News Service, says that journalists have to get better at business in order to survive and thrive.
  • The Open Source Business Model (Moore’s Lore) – Dana posits that it isn’t enough to provide relevant space to advertisers, you also have to show them how to communicate with your audience. He says a lot more than that, but you get the gist.

It Gets Worser and Worser

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I’m on record as thinking that the vast majority of the members of the US Congress and the current administration are a bunch of sniveling, self-absorbed bastards and bastardettes.  The Vice President isn’t doing anything to change my mind.  Some highlights:

  • Vice President Cheney continues to hold 433,333 Halliburton stock options
  • 100,000 shares at $54.5000 (vested), expire 12-03-07
    33,333 shares at $28.1250 (vested), expire 12-02-08
    300,000 shares at $39.5000 (vested), expire 12-02-09
  • Halliburton shares are currently trading at $61.27
  • Halliburton shares were trading at $17.93 in January ’03
  • Deferred salary paid by Halliburton to Vice President Cheney in 2001: $205,298
  • Deferred salary paid by Halliburton to Vice President Cheney in 2002: $162,392
  • Deferred salary paid by Halliburton to Vice President Cheney in 2003: $178,437
  • Deferred salary paid by Halliburton to Vice President Cheney in 2004: $194,852
  • The Vice President has attempted to fend off criticism by signing an
    agreement to donate the after-tax profits from these stock options to
    charities of his choice, and his lawyer has said he will not take any
    tax deduction for the donations. Valued at over $9 million, the Vice
    President could exercise his stock options for a substantial windfall,
    benefiting not only his designated charities, but also providing
    Halliburton with a tax deduction.
  • In September 2003, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) issued a
    memorandum to Senator Lautenberg concluding that holding stock options
    while in elective office does constitute a "financial interest"
    regardless of whether the holder of the options will donate proceeds to
    charities. CRS also found that receiving deferred compensation is a
    financial interest.

Of course the source of alot of this is Senator Lautenburg who is a member of the same dishonorable fraternity as the Vice President (that would be the Senate), so you have to make sure that the information is correct.  All of the numbers are all public record, as is the Congressional Research Service memo, so I’d say the data is right.  The context might be a different story…nah.

I’m not saying the Vice President talked the President into going to war for the purpose of Halliburton’s profits.  I am saying that it’s unseemly for the Vice President to retain any ties to his old company when the US government is one of its key customers, and was when the Vice President was elected. I am also saying that all the money he’s received from Halliburton since the start of the war is blood money. Like I said, unseemly.