Miscellanea

Just a few quick thoughts on a rainy afternoon in South Florida.

1. My daughter graduated from college this weekend. Nice event and the first break of the year. Commencement theme was "giving back". Compassion is a much underrated concept.
2. President Bush told the Saudi's last week that they should lower oil prices or it would lead to increased U.S. investment in alternative energies. How we ever elected this guy to a second term is beyond me. Hopefully he plans to travel abroad for the remainder of his term and thereby not have to make any important decisions.
3. U.S. blogging appears to have hit some sort of pre-summer doldrums. Every third post involves Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook and Google in some sort of combination. None of these combinations make much strategic sense to me and the posts are increasingly uninteresting. I wish people would just stop blogging on this subject.
4. North Korea has just made its first test call for its new cellular phone network. I wonder what the roaming rates will be for calls from North Korea back to the world. Should be a lucrative new source of income for the dictatorship. Expect an opening in tourism there soon in order to drive up roaming minutes (which are settled in USD).
5. If you are looking for a good, free anti-virus program, take a look at AVG. Anti-virus, anti-spyware, scanning of emails and downloads, etc.
6. A company that I worked with in Japan years ago just reported they are the fifth most visited website in Japan with 22 million visitors per month. I believe they are also the largest ISP. Company is called Nifty Corporation.
7. If anybody has contacts that may lead to a chef in training position in NYC, please email me.
8. If anybody knows of a good controller looking for a job in South Florida, please let me know.
9. My client 10Q is filed so I don't have to worry about that madness for another 90 days and my blogging productivity should pick up.

Comments

[Mac]

Wow, that's quite a wide ranging series of blurbs.

1. Giving back? Unless she went to school on public funding, I'm guessing you or she gave plenty before she warmed a single classroom seat.

2. Because Kerry is an incompetent clown. Hey, you asked.

3. Pot, kettle?

4. Huh?

5. AVG is the IT world's best-kept secret. Norton and McAfee are bloated, slow, low-quality junk. Grisoft's tech support is generally argumentative and sub-par, but the quality of the product more than makes up for it.

6. Nifty's services list is nearly as schitzoid as your blog post. :)

7. Is that "Chief, In Training", or "Chief of Training"? I had no idea training could warrant chiefdom. I'm constantly amazed at what large companies are able to justify.

8. Not being able to find an employee in South Florida is like not being able to find a prostitute in Thailand.

9. I'll take cobbling together a 10Q over a 10K any day.

[Robert H. Hacker]

Mac
Congratulations. This is the longest comment in the history of this blog that wasn't a rant against Microsoft. The reference to Thailand definitely spices things up.

Despite the business nature of this blog, the position I am trying to find for a former student is a chef training position (as in cooking at a five star restaurant).

When I drafted the strategy for Nifty it was laser focused on being the best ISP in Japan, which they achieved. Since then there has been more local input into strategy, which may explain the potpourri approach.

Bob