Seen here outside Foyles, the largest book shop in London. The sad thing is, that was THREE YEARS AGO! Come on people now, let's sign together: We want fuel efficient cars NOW.
Nothing will cool the tension in the Middle East like a big fat drop in U.S. fuel consumption. Wise old Sheik Yamani figured that out back in the seventies: Jack the price of crude too high too fast and Americans will switch from Caddies and Lincolns to Toyotas and Hondas, cutting demand. Sure enough, gas consumption dropped off at the end of the seventies and didn't rebound until the late eighties.
Believe a former petroleum accountant when I say, there is a nightmare scenario for oil producers: Crude left in the ground. This can happen if price per barrel falls below the per barrel cost of extraction, which rises as an oil field ages. Here is an interesting snippet from Yamani back in early 2005. Note the correctness of his prognostications: oil has fallen off its highs.
And Americans can now buy the 40 mpg Toyota Yaris, the 38 mpg Honda FIT, and 36 mpg Nissan Versa, all introduced in recent months to round out high mileage offerings. Add a bunch of 60 mpg SartCars to the mix and average mpg could drop enough to scare producers into being more amenable to diplomatic negotiation (not to mention the reprise from pollution).
Smartcar for Work: Commercial delivery in Amsterdam
Binder Clips to the Rescue: Travel tip for a good night's sleep
I am a big believer in getting a good night's sleep when traveling. This has been made easier by the move to upgrade bedding, led by Marriott if I am not mistaken. But even on a "plush" bed I will have trouble sleeping if the room is not dark. This is especially important when you have shifted time zones and want to acclimate to the new zone.
Of course, most decent hotels provide light-blocking drapes/curtains, but for some reason I have yet to fathom, these often fail to close all the way. The result: the lights from the parking lot keep you awake; or a shaft of blinding sunlight strikes your face at 6:30AM when you really needed to sleep until 8. The answer: binder clips (medium). These are the metal spring clips you get for just pennies a piece at the office supply store. I have had great luck in keeping drapes from drifting apart with just one or two of these clips applied to the inter-folded edges of the fabric. Slip a few into your bag before you head out.
Another room darkening trick is to roll up a surplus part of the bedding (one of those foo-foo decorative cover bits for which I don't even have a vocabulary) and put it across the bottom of the hotel room door, you know, across that yawning gap which doesn't seem too bad when you first turn out the lights, but slowly expands to admit enough light to read by.
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Of course, most decent hotels provide light-blocking drapes/curtains, but for some reason I have yet to fathom, these often fail to close all the way. The result: the lights from the parking lot keep you awake; or a shaft of blinding sunlight strikes your face at 6:30AM when you really needed to sleep until 8. The answer: binder clips (medium). These are the metal spring clips you get for just pennies a piece at the office supply store. I have had great luck in keeping drapes from drifting apart with just one or two of these clips applied to the inter-folded edges of the fabric. Slip a few into your bag before you head out.
Another room darkening trick is to roll up a surplus part of the bedding (one of those foo-foo decorative cover bits for which I don't even have a vocabulary) and put it across the bottom of the hotel room door, you know, across that yawning gap which doesn't seem too bad when you first turn out the lights, but slowly expands to admit enough light to read by.
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Traveling Light: A good idea gets better
Here's an old travel tip made newly useful by the increase in lost airline luggage, due to the increase in checked luggage, due to the reduced-liquid-in-carry-on rule: travel light. Easier said than done maybe, but think about the last time you flew. Did you wear all of the clothes you took with you? A lot of people will admit that they did not. Next time, take two items out just before you leave. I bet you won't miss them. Repeat each trip until you are down to the bare essentials.
And what about the essentials? Could you have packed fewer items if you had a chance to wash your clothes during the trip? Well you do. Here's what I do when traveling on business in North America, i.e. staying in hotels at night and wearing a shirt and tie during the day. I take just two shirts and wash one every night in the sink in the hotel bathroom. Tepid water and a touch of hotel hand soap. Then I wring them out in a hotel towel (I will post some pictures if this is hard to visualize). Then I hang the towel and the shirt to dry, smoothing out the main wrinkles in the shirt and putting it on a hotel coat hanger in the bathroom (for hotel hanger's that don't have proper hooks just hang the shirt on the rack or use a twist tie--I carry several with me, plus a few rubber bands and binder clips--more on those later).
The typical American hotel is so dry that the shirt is bound to be ready by morning, plus the shirt and towel will have eased, slightly, the humidity in the room, which is good for you. Use the hotel iron to remove any remaining wrinkles (I've noticed a lot of budget hotel chains are now providing irons). To make life easier, chose a good no-wrinkle shirt to start with. I find JCPenney Stafford shirts work great and look great after dozens of washings, but still have the feel of 100% cotton.
Wash-as-you-go helps reduce the amount of stuff you carry on with you, and the impact of misplaced bags. Since I travel in a good shirt, lost luggage won't stop me looking good the next day. I became a believer in this strategy about 20 years ago when I took a day trip down from the home office in San Francisco to a client site in LA for 8 hours of consulting that stretched into two days. The client was delighted that I could stay the extra day and didn't even notice that I had not brought a change of clothes with me. I just washed the essentials overnight.
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And what about the essentials? Could you have packed fewer items if you had a chance to wash your clothes during the trip? Well you do. Here's what I do when traveling on business in North America, i.e. staying in hotels at night and wearing a shirt and tie during the day. I take just two shirts and wash one every night in the sink in the hotel bathroom. Tepid water and a touch of hotel hand soap. Then I wring them out in a hotel towel (I will post some pictures if this is hard to visualize). Then I hang the towel and the shirt to dry, smoothing out the main wrinkles in the shirt and putting it on a hotel coat hanger in the bathroom (for hotel hanger's that don't have proper hooks just hang the shirt on the rack or use a twist tie--I carry several with me, plus a few rubber bands and binder clips--more on those later).
The typical American hotel is so dry that the shirt is bound to be ready by morning, plus the shirt and towel will have eased, slightly, the humidity in the room, which is good for you. Use the hotel iron to remove any remaining wrinkles (I've noticed a lot of budget hotel chains are now providing irons). To make life easier, chose a good no-wrinkle shirt to start with. I find JCPenney Stafford shirts work great and look great after dozens of washings, but still have the feel of 100% cotton.
Wash-as-you-go helps reduce the amount of stuff you carry on with you, and the impact of misplaced bags. Since I travel in a good shirt, lost luggage won't stop me looking good the next day. I became a believer in this strategy about 20 years ago when I took a day trip down from the home office in San Francisco to a client site in LA for 8 hours of consulting that stretched into two days. The client was delighted that I could stay the extra day and didn't even notice that I had not brought a change of clothes with me. I just washed the essentials overnight.
.
Images Abound: Goosing a blogspot blog template
Just a quick word about the images on this page (all Cobb originals). They are, clockwise starting at the top left:
Oh, and the blogspot template that formed the basis of this page? It is called Lighthouse, but it looks a lot different from this when you first install it.
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- The nose of the DaimlerChrysler Smartcar, photographed in London. There are over 750,000 on the streets of the world, but they are still not sold in America. How backward is that?
- Aeroflot Tupolev Ty-154M passenger plane, taking off from Moscow airport.
- Maserati Quattroporte, the most elegant four door passenger car design ever (IMHO), photographed outside a showroom in Moscow, then turned into a pencil sketch with PaintShop Pro. See the real thing below.
- TGV high speed train, photographed in the Gard du Nord, Paris, after I arrived there from Amsterdam on the Thalys, another high speed train. The lack of high speed trains in America is testament to the continuing power of oil companies and the trucking/road building lobby (favored by a certain governor turned president).
A train, a plane, and two automobiles. A taste of things to come.
Oh, and the blogspot template that formed the basis of this page? It is called Lighthouse, but it looks a lot different from this when you first install it.
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Catalogue Craziness: 13 per day is just too much
Right now we are getting an average of 13 catalogues in the mail every day. What a waste! We hardly look at them. We usually just toss them in the trash.
Yesterday we got back from a Thanksgiving vacation and found the accumulated mail from 10 delivery days included 131 catalogues, that's over 35 pounds of paper. Harder to delete than spam.
Is there no way to stop these from coming, other than writing to each and every one of the 131 senders (okay, some senders sent more than one, but it is still about 80 different entities that are doing this).
Yesterday we got back from a Thanksgiving vacation and found the accumulated mail from 10 delivery days included 131 catalogues, that's over 35 pounds of paper. Harder to delete than spam.
Is there no way to stop these from coming, other than writing to each and every one of the 131 senders (okay, some senders sent more than one, but it is still about 80 different entities that are doing this).
On the Road Again: Cobb blogs travel
Looks like I'm going to be doing some more traveling and so I figured I would start a blog to share some of my experiences and maybe help people get more out of their travel. Will also post some photos from along the way.
Hope you enjoy...Stephen
p.s. When someone says "On the road again" do you think of Canned Heat or Willie Nelson?
Hope you enjoy...Stephen
p.s. When someone says "On the road again" do you think of Canned Heat or Willie Nelson?
Iraq Solution = A Lot More Troops, A Lot More Diplomacy
Okay, so the long-awaited Baker/Hamilton report is out. Hands up who thinks Bush will listen to their suggestions. And what are those suggestions? Basically, more diplomacy and less troops (via phased withdrawal). Personally, I would back more troops if it meant a LOT more troops, like twice as many as we have there now. Anything less is unlikely to work. Of course, some people say we haven't got that many troops to send (we could get them if we re-instated the draft, but that would take time and man would it get Gen Next off its butt and into the streets).
I'm with Colin Powell and former U.S. army chief of staff Gen Eric Shinseki (and others) in thinking that you would need something like 500,000 boots on the ground to stabilize a country the size of Iraq (I am also mindful that we couldn't stabilize Vietnam with that number). And for Iraq that 500,000 number is probably good for a time before people living in Iraq suffered a couple of years of daily double digit body counts to make them really unhappy about American presence in the region.
And sending any more troops without a serious new diplomatic effort to engage Iran and Syria in meaningful talks, well that would be a complete waste.
I'm with Colin Powell and former U.S. army chief of staff Gen Eric Shinseki (and others) in thinking that you would need something like 500,000 boots on the ground to stabilize a country the size of Iraq (I am also mindful that we couldn't stabilize Vietnam with that number). And for Iraq that 500,000 number is probably good for a time before people living in Iraq suffered a couple of years of daily double digit body counts to make them really unhappy about American presence in the region.
And sending any more troops without a serious new diplomatic effort to engage Iran and Syria in meaningful talks, well that would be a complete waste.
Turntide Still Working Away: Not perfect but pretty close
"Not perfect but pretty close" is what this Computerworld article concluded about the anti-spam technology I helped create a few years ago.
It was maybe early 2001 when I was sitting around a table in a basement in Pennsylvania with a couple of friends discussing ways of fighting spam. Back then there were not many people who believed spam would become a huge problem. Many dismissed it as a mere nuisance. Boy, were they wrong.
Anyway, we had been focusing on a way of certifying email as legitimate, so only legitimate email would be allowed to get through to your inbox. This was the inverse of attempts to stop spam by allowing all email in unless it came from a known bad source. Early anti-spam products were emerging that followed the allow-all-but-known-bad model, including some attempts to filter messages on a case-by-case basis according to their content. But a couple of us were skeptical about this approach. It seemed to be based on an anti-virus scanning model (and we all knew how well that was working--not!). Furthermore, when these filter systems produced false-positives that meant valuable messages might be delayed or lost.
So we analyzed spam from the spammers perspective. What was the motive? What would be a dis-incentive? Virus writers were not being deterred by legal penalties and so we doubted that approach would dissuade spammers. But we realized spammers are different from your classic virus writers: spammers are in it for the money.
So we followed the money. What we found was a fairly simple formula. If a spammer can't get X number of messages into network N within Y period of time, the spammer will move on to the next network, N1, and so on. This is because the spammer makes money off such a tiny percentage of responses. To be cost-effective there have to be huge numbers of messages delivered on target within the relatively short period of time that exists before a particular spam site is shut down.
Aha! we said. If only there was a way to slow down messages from spammers. One of us, David Brussin, realized that there was a TCP/IP mechanism for slowing down network response, and we figured out how we could couple that to a spam detector mechanism. The result was a device that sat on the edge of a network, or at an ISP, and slowed down network connections if they appeared to be delivering spam. The first test results were amazing. The device, dubbed "SpamSquelcher" after those knobs on ship radios which tune out noise, literally saved a regional ISP from being overwhelmed by spam.
Selling this idea to end-users was a tough one. The device worked best on larger networks. This was not something you could give away to end-users for free and hope that big companies would pay for licenses. Eventually the product was re-launched as TurnTide and acquired by Symantec which incoporated it into their product line. Today there are a lot of corporate and academic networks using this technology to save bandwidth and protect their networks. If a lot more of them would do the same, particularly ISPs, then the net voume of spam might actually go down.
It was maybe early 2001 when I was sitting around a table in a basement in Pennsylvania with a couple of friends discussing ways of fighting spam. Back then there were not many people who believed spam would become a huge problem. Many dismissed it as a mere nuisance. Boy, were they wrong.
Anyway, we had been focusing on a way of certifying email as legitimate, so only legitimate email would be allowed to get through to your inbox. This was the inverse of attempts to stop spam by allowing all email in unless it came from a known bad source. Early anti-spam products were emerging that followed the allow-all-but-known-bad model, including some attempts to filter messages on a case-by-case basis according to their content. But a couple of us were skeptical about this approach. It seemed to be based on an anti-virus scanning model (and we all knew how well that was working--not!). Furthermore, when these filter systems produced false-positives that meant valuable messages might be delayed or lost.
So we analyzed spam from the spammers perspective. What was the motive? What would be a dis-incentive? Virus writers were not being deterred by legal penalties and so we doubted that approach would dissuade spammers. But we realized spammers are different from your classic virus writers: spammers are in it for the money.
So we followed the money. What we found was a fairly simple formula. If a spammer can't get X number of messages into network N within Y period of time, the spammer will move on to the next network, N1, and so on. This is because the spammer makes money off such a tiny percentage of responses. To be cost-effective there have to be huge numbers of messages delivered on target within the relatively short period of time that exists before a particular spam site is shut down.
Aha! we said. If only there was a way to slow down messages from spammers. One of us, David Brussin, realized that there was a TCP/IP mechanism for slowing down network response, and we figured out how we could couple that to a spam detector mechanism. The result was a device that sat on the edge of a network, or at an ISP, and slowed down network connections if they appeared to be delivering spam. The first test results were amazing. The device, dubbed "SpamSquelcher" after those knobs on ship radios which tune out noise, literally saved a regional ISP from being overwhelmed by spam.
Selling this idea to end-users was a tough one. The device worked best on larger networks. This was not something you could give away to end-users for free and hope that big companies would pay for licenses. Eventually the product was re-launched as TurnTide and acquired by Symantec which incoporated it into their product line. Today there are a lot of corporate and academic networks using this technology to save bandwidth and protect their networks. If a lot more of them would do the same, particularly ISPs, then the net voume of spam might actually go down.
Vacations: The good news and the bad news
With holidays in full swing I was struck by this eWeek headline: The Vanishing Veg-out Vacation. Seems that less and less employees are taking time off and, when time off is taken, less and less relaxing is being done.
Is this bad? Well, all of us have probably encountered employees whose attitude could use some improvement, and a vacation--a proper vacation--might bring about that improvement. And burn out is definitely a risk if you don't take time to clear your head. Furthermore, I have bemoaned America's stingy approach to vacation days ever since I emigrated here over 30 years ago. I think of my sister-in-law and her seven weeks of annual vacation working for Surrey County. Or my cousin who works for the BBC and has just completed a year's career break (unpaid time off to clear your head and grow your self, with full benefits and position reinstated upon your return).
But there may be good news hidden here. Many office jobs are transitioning to a more fluid, organic structure. Less emphasis on time in the office, more emphasis on results, regardless of where you put in your time, at home or at Starbucks. If picking up groceries is something you can do when you feel like it and not something to be jammed into lunch hour or rush hour, then maybe you will feel less need to leave the job behind for weeks at a time. Jobs are becoming more a way of life for some people, whether in a startup where you live the job because you have to, or in an enlightened enterprise where you live the job because you enjoy it. If you do enjoy your job then setting it aside to spend time on a beach might not be a good idea, unless you are feeling burned out (which, just FYI, can happen at jobs you enjoy as well as at jobs you don't).
And here is another thing about vacations: They cost money, particularly the ones you spend somewhere outside your own back yard. Sounds like a statement of the obvious, and it is, but it's an obvious fact that is often overlooked in financial planning. Money spent on traveling leaves little residual evidence except in your heart and soul and your memories. There have been several times in my life when I have found myself asking "Where did all my money go?" And I have always been surprised by how much of the answer is made up of travel, air fares, hotels, restaurants, stuff that leaves few tangible assets behind as evidence (aside from the souvenirs and snapshots you bring home).
I'm not saying don't travel. I think it is a wonderful thing to do and I have reaped huge inner rewards from my journeying. But bear in mind it narrows the gap between outflow and inflow, the gap that is the wealth you create.
...
Is this bad? Well, all of us have probably encountered employees whose attitude could use some improvement, and a vacation--a proper vacation--might bring about that improvement. And burn out is definitely a risk if you don't take time to clear your head. Furthermore, I have bemoaned America's stingy approach to vacation days ever since I emigrated here over 30 years ago. I think of my sister-in-law and her seven weeks of annual vacation working for Surrey County. Or my cousin who works for the BBC and has just completed a year's career break (unpaid time off to clear your head and grow your self, with full benefits and position reinstated upon your return).
But there may be good news hidden here. Many office jobs are transitioning to a more fluid, organic structure. Less emphasis on time in the office, more emphasis on results, regardless of where you put in your time, at home or at Starbucks. If picking up groceries is something you can do when you feel like it and not something to be jammed into lunch hour or rush hour, then maybe you will feel less need to leave the job behind for weeks at a time. Jobs are becoming more a way of life for some people, whether in a startup where you live the job because you have to, or in an enlightened enterprise where you live the job because you enjoy it. If you do enjoy your job then setting it aside to spend time on a beach might not be a good idea, unless you are feeling burned out (which, just FYI, can happen at jobs you enjoy as well as at jobs you don't).
And here is another thing about vacations: They cost money, particularly the ones you spend somewhere outside your own back yard. Sounds like a statement of the obvious, and it is, but it's an obvious fact that is often overlooked in financial planning. Money spent on traveling leaves little residual evidence except in your heart and soul and your memories. There have been several times in my life when I have found myself asking "Where did all my money go?" And I have always been surprised by how much of the answer is made up of travel, air fares, hotels, restaurants, stuff that leaves few tangible assets behind as evidence (aside from the souvenirs and snapshots you bring home).
I'm not saying don't travel. I think it is a wonderful thing to do and I have reaped huge inner rewards from my journeying. But bear in mind it narrows the gap between outflow and inflow, the gap that is the wealth you create.
...
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