Category Archive

Please check me out at my new favorite site.

Unfortunately, a typo relegates him to inanimate status:

Former Lane executive plans $150M in projects
Atlanta Business Chronicle - February 2, 2007
by Lisa R. Schoolcraft
Staff writer

A former top Lane Co. executive has struck out on his own with a pair of multi-family projects worth more than $150 million.
Marc Pollack, former president of the investment and development affiliates of Atlanta-based Lane Co., is now chairman and CEO of Pollack Partners LLC, formed in late 2006, about six months after he left Lane.

Pollack has brought on as a partner David Golden, formerly an attorney for Arnall Golden Gregory LLP and a founding partner in CGR Advisors LLC, where he oversaw the Dutch firm Rodamco N.V.’s U.S. operations.

Other members of Pollack Partners are Steven Shores, former partner and senior development office (sic) at Urban Realty Partners LLC, and Michael Blair, former partner and senior development manager at Southeast Capital Partners LLC.

(Emphasis mine.) The story is here (subscription to one of the Business Journals required).

If you don’t know Seth Godin, you don’t know my marketing hero. He’s big time. (For example, if you search for “Seth” on Google, his blog comes up.)

Anyway, I e-mail with him pretty regularly - gotta love the internet - and now he’s published one of my e-mails. Very cool!

UPDATE:  You’ll notice, maybe, that I think I figured out how to trackback.

‘Designer’ babies with made-to-order defects?

Creating made-to-order babies with genetic defects would seem to be an ethical minefield, but to some parents with disabilities — say, deafness or dwarfism — it just means making babies like them.

Cara Reynolds of Collingswood, N.J., who considered embryo screening but now plans to adopt a dwarf baby, is outraged by the criticism.

“You cannot tell me that I cannot have a child who’s going to look like me,” Reynolds said. “It’s just unbelievably presumptuous and they’re playing God.”

Slate Magazine has a review of the new (or soon to be new) Tesla Motors roadster, a picture of which you see here in this post. It’s an electric car and, evidently, a blast to drive. I don’t really understand how a car works, but evidently electric engines have a real advantage over internal combustion engines when you’re trying to go fast. There’s a technical-sounding description in the article and it has something to do with torque curves, but, the essence of the whole thing is this: while a professional driver can make a car go zero to 60 in five seconds if he knows exactly when to change gears, most people cannot do that. In an electric car, that kind of skill is unnecessary. All you have to do is floor it. Pretty sweet. Even sweeter? The company is coming out with a sedan soon, too.

East West Partners and Continuum Partners were chosen to “enter exclusive negotiations” to be the mast redeveloper of Denver’s Union Station. Big deal! Here’s a rendering of our plan (that you guys are seeing first, by the way). Pretty damn cool.

Charlotte had her first Halloween experience this weekend. A couple of suggestions: don’t walk through the inflatable haunted house. Only one reaction can be expected. Shockingly enough, it’s a very similar reaction to the fly-over that announces the start of the Broncos’ games: a complete and total lock down. Bury head in nearest relative’s chest for about 20 minutes. (And, yes, Charlie watched the Peyton Manning dismantling of the Broncos’ defense live and in person this past weekend.) Secondly, realize that if your kid really doesn’t eat candy, it’ll take a minute for her to get into it, but once she gets the idea down - walk up to door, hold pumpkin in front of you, get thing - she’ll get into it.

One note: the candy haul is AWESOME!

Yvette Pita Frampton ‘94, visited Davidson for this past fall’s reunion, her class’s 10th. While their, she had a chance to speak with Eleanor Hatcher ‘94, who asked her to serve as class secretary. Yvette, not knowing exactly what Eleanor meant, quickly and energetically agreed. You can see what Eleanor meant here.

Gibson, Foley, Ney….this is getting fun. I think every Republican who ever had lunch with Abramoff should just go ahead and enter rehab. In fact, let’s just have a show of hands. Please, everyone wishing to abscond from personal responsibility for their actions, form a line. We’ll get you in and out of AA in no time. Bet Nixon wished he’d thought of this one back in the day.

In separate news, a USA Today/Gallup poll shows that Democrats have a 23% lead among likely voters. This is double the lead the Republicans had prior to the 1994 election–back before they started hitting the bottle en masse, of course–and the most the Dems have had since 1978. Getting nervous, GOP? Better have a drink. Make it two.

Oh, and, really, this is indefensible. Nice to see that the Heritage Foundation is involved….

A couple of days ago, Matt linked to his version of Taranto gold. Peter King quoted him in a Sports Illustrated article. Here’s part of King’s quote of Matt’s e-mail:

“So you asked Mets fans how do we like Pedro’s $51 million contract now? We still love it. Pedro has brought legitimacy to a team that desperately needed it, respect to a franchise that looked beaten from top to bottom. Remember Cliff Floyd’s quote at the end of the 2004 season, that it was hard to see any light at the end of the tunnel? Pedro not only brought wins and excitement, he made the Mets a legitimate destination for elite free agents, helping attract Carlos Beltran, Carlos Delgado, Paul Lo Duca and Billy Wagner.”

Matt wrote that. Here’s Ian O’Connor in a USA Today column he wrote a couple of days ago:

Minaya stepped in and ended all that dog-ate-my-budget bunk. The $53 million he spent on Pedro Martinez amounted to a wise investment, even though Pedro’s mummified remains find no place on the NLCS roster. Martinez gave the Mets something they had forever lacked: credibility. It only allowed them to land Carlos Beltran, Carlos Delgado, Billy Wagner and the rest.

That’s not plagiarism, but I think I know where he got the idea.

This guy has a great meme about how newspapers should live online. A couple of quotes:

As Tim Rutten reports (and I pointed to yesterday), the LA Times has a monetary value of $2.5 billion and “a balance-sheet-engorging 20% margin”. So why does Wall Street hate it? Simple: Because newspapers are a rusty industry. They have tail fins. They print lists of readers every day on the obituary page. Worse, as a class they are resolutely clueless about how to adapt to a world that is increasingly networked and self-informing. And Wall Street knows that

[. . .]

I can’t find a single newspaper that doesn’t have a slow-loading, hard-to-navigate, crapped-up home page. These things are aversive, confusing and often useless beyond endurance. Simplify the damn things. Quit trying to “drive traffic” into a maze where every link leads to another route through of the same mess. You have readers trying to learn something, not cars looking for places to park.

The Denver Post drives me crazy. Unlike better.shorter, their articles don’t have permalinked pages when they are on the front page - new content. So, when an article comes out Monday and you look for it on Tuesday on google, it’s listed, but the link is dead. Until the crawlers can figure out where it’s actually located, you can’t find the story.

Furthermore, their search is dead broken. Here’s a link to a search for “Union Station.” Notice the top article. I don’t know how they are figuring this out, but the “F for Funding Article” is months old. Notice I can’t filter this AT ALL. What if I want it by date? Here’s a google news search for the same thing [adding the word Denver to make it smarter]. Notice I can sort by date AND relevance.

Notice another thing on that google link - the ads. Oh, wait, there aren’t any. That’s an amazing thing about google - they don’t always run ads. But think more about the Denver Post ads. They are always trying to sell us advertising in their paper. We only do in extrememly rare circumstances. Not because I don’t like the paper, but because advertising in that old format doesn’t work for us. But, I’d like to advertise online. The problem is, they run their online advertising just like their offline - they cram it all together. In the paper, real estate ads are all bundled together. It’s impossible to stand out. But, I’d gladly pay for contextual ads on the site (or in the paper!): our company name appears in an article? Run our ad. Downtown condos are discussed? Run our ad. A review of a restaurant in our neighborhood? Run our ad. Instead, I’ve got to advertise on this site. Animated GIFs? When was this site programmed, 1995? No way. Never. (Well, once, but I still feel dirty about it.)

And then, finally, there’s this: I wrote this post because Seth sent me to Eric who sent me to Doc. That’s four places it shows up. Newspapers can’t do that because they first have to know my fake e-mail address. For some reason, newspapers are still trying to get my e-mail address so they can sell it to some other idiot. Stop flippin’ registering me. It’s worthless information and it gets in the way.

Anyway, the modern online newspaper is dumb and sucks. Someone’s going to change it and that someone is going to make GooTube money

The Times had an article Sunday about the ongoing risk of in-flight collissions between aircraft. Ironically, they suggested that the more accurate in-flight positioning equipment becomes, the more risk. I started thinking about it, and I’ve got a simple question: why not just install cameras that can see in every direction out of the plane? Seriously, add the detection equipment, add the positioning equipment, and add the cameras, and you’ve got some pretty good safety.

Read this line, though, and know the Times‘ article is a little bit of a mountain out of a molehill:

The Brazilian crash was a milestone, Mr. Cox and other safety experts said. After tens of millions of flights, it was only the second midair crash involving two aircraft equipped with anti-collision systems.

On the other hand, I admire the aviation industry’s obsession with safety. Their goals seems to be perfection. If only others felt the same way.

Hey, everyone. When you post, it seems better to me if you use the option to open a new page when linking out. I know I personally prefer as much.

ADDED: Also, please include a title for posts even if they are going into the shorter category. Those titles are used elsewhere.

ADDED AGAIN: Please remember on shorter posts that they should be further categorized. For example, Matt’s post on Georgia’s acceptance policies for football players is both “shorter” and “football.”

Here’s another good test.  I want to see how a blockquote works.  So, here goes:

The durability of a cease-fire in Uganda’s Acholi war may depend on whether a rebel commander and his top deputies are given amnesty. Above, two children who were born in a refugee camp.

And then, I’m taking a look at the idea behind use the “code” tag:

We’ll see what we see.

So it continues from here.

In essence, does a photo show up? We’ll see, no?

This is the first post in the new life of b.s. We had a great run at blogger, but, to be completely honest, your author is tired of waiting on them to catch up. With the new launch of blogger, which requires that you host at blog.spot if you want any of the new functionality and has really lame templates (not to mention still doesn’t have categories), I thought we’d switch. So, I’m working on two things:

1. Porting b.s over to Wordpress (not really knowing what “porting” means).
2. Creating a nice, new, pretty design. Fun, no?

So, watch this space, as they say, cause it’s going to change a lot over the next few days. (That sounded like more than five people may even read this page.)