I inspected an industrial property the other day, one location in dozens (maybe hundreds?) of locations owned by this company. The company has got to be one of the most vertically integrated businesses in the world. They design, the manufacture, they distribute, they print point of service signs. They print one million labels a day. On [...]
I am not old enough to remember party lines (I am not sure they were ever used in the densely populated New York Metropolitan area) but I do remember phone books. Now a relic ignored by all and probably threat to the environment, phone books were at one time revolutionary. Before the invention of the telegraph [...]
Our Word of the Day is autodidact. It means, "a self-taught person." We are all autodidacts. Everything we learned in school, and even in classes directly related to our careers, was general and theoretical in nature. No class I ever took taught me how build a spreadsheet in Excel or format a Word document. Or [...]
Where is the modern Algonquin Round Table where artists and thinkers from a variety of disciplines come together to discuss big ideas? Where are the coffeehouses of Vienna where the likes of Jung, Freud, Zweig, Klimt, Loos and Adler would get together and toss about some bon mots? Where are the non-fiction Central Perk, Cheers or [...]
The age of the internet has spawned a new way of thinking. No longer do you have to wait to be cast, signed, published or discovered. You can publish your own e-book, shoot and edit a comedy video, or perform, mix and release a bluegrass song. Probably the first person to express this sentiment was [...]
I recently learned of an online dating site called Bumble. Bumble bills itself as a feminist dating site, because only women can initiate a conversation. Huh, I thought, Bumble nothing new. It is an electronic Sadie Hawkins Dance.* A prize to anyone under 30 who knew what a Sadie Hawkins Dance was without clicking on [...]
Several websites including Google, PayPal, GoDaddy, Uber, OKCupid and Spotify have banned white supremacist groups from using their services. Clearly, no sane person supports these morons, but trying to censor them out of existence is a bad idea: It encourages their sense of martyrdom and provides a common enemy (in this case, the entire world), [...]
According to an article on the website Futurism, an incinerator in Switzerland was recently fitted with a carbon capture plant that is reportedly 1,000 times more efficient than plant photosynthesis. Filters capture the CO2 over several hours. The filters are then heated to 212 degrees Fahrenheit (no great feat, your teakettle does the same thing and [...]
You may not be familiar with the initials ACC. ACC is Anthropogenic Climate Change, more commonly called Man-Made Global Warming. There are a lot of people who are deeply and sincerely concerned about the effects of ACC, and rightfully so. The stakes are high. Without taking a side, however, it is clear that ACC supporters [...]
Here are some software and web-based services that I find really helpful: ToDoIst This web-based To Do list software runs beautifully on all platforms: Windows, Apple, Android, even Google Chrome. You can set up an infinite number of To Do lists for your business and personal life, and your ToDoIst lists can be shared with [...]
Wind and solar power are getting more efficient and cheaper all the time. Which is great, as long as the wind blows and the sun shines. The Holy Grail of research in Clean Energy field has been storage. We need bigger, more efficient and cheaper batteries. Well, this is about to happen. According to a [...]
We purchased a new washer and a new dryer several months ago. The washer has a setting called Fan Fresh. When the wash cycle finishes, the machine breathes in fresh air and occasionally tumbles the clothes to keep wrinkles at bay. The Fan Fresh cycle lasts up to 12 hours. When we wash a load [...]
