Category: Happygood Funny Blog

Sailing and business: #3

If you stare hard enough, you’ll see whatever you want to see.
Sailing at night is disorienting. You lose sense of direction, depth perception and perspective. A white light on the dark horizon might be a high-powered navigational beam on a tower 20 miles distant – or it could be an 8-watt bulb on the transom of a boat 100 yards away.
Navigational charts do what they can to remove such quandaries. For example, if you’re sailing toward an area of rocky, shallow waters, the chart will tell you how it’s marked – by a buoy, perhaps, with a red light that flashes every four seconds.
That’s simple enough; just look for the red flasher and steer clear of it.
But if you’re sailing near shore, there will be lots of lights, of varying intensity and color. There may be other boats in the vicinty – each with its own set of red, green and white running lights. And there may be dozens of lighted buoys marking a variety of other nearby hazards and inlets. Plus there are lights on shore.
Talk with sailors from any large city and they’ll be able to tell you about some unfortunate soul who ran aground after mistaking a 4-way stoplight for a navigational aid.
So if you’re looking for that red 4-second flasher to steer around, you’ll put the whole crew to the task of identifying it. And they’ll stare at it until every light starts to look red and seems to be flashing at roughly 4-second intervals.
At that point, if you’re lucky, someone will pop their head up from below deck and see things more clearly. This is the person who will usually point and say, “There it is,” while everyone else blinks three times and echoes, “Oh yeah.”
What’s the lesson in business? You need to be aware of your surroundings. You need to look for problems when they’re still on the horizon and identify solutions as early as possible. But sometimes, the longer and harder you look, the tougher it is to identify the real solution among all the ideas and possibilities that exist.
Sometimes, it takes a fresh-eyed third-party to bring clarity to the situation. Or a brief respite from your search. Or failing that, simply turning the boat in a new direction to avoid the hazard altogether.

Privacy: It grows fainter and quainter

In a recent workshop on social media for small business, one owner remarked that she didn’t want to start using Facebook for her business because she doesn’t want information about her personal life to be available to strangers online.

After an explanation that it’s now possible to keep business and personal lives separate on Facebook, I flippantly suggested that the era of privacy is over anyway.

Many people under the age of, say, 25, seem comfortable sharing every moment – for better or worse –  with their extended network (often numbering in the thousands) of “friends.” And as that generation ages, our notion of privacy will become ever fainter and quainter. It will become a nostalgic memory, like retirement and puppet shows.

For example, I’ve just learned from CNET.com that the U.S. Department of Justice insists that e-mail messages should not enjoy the same protection as written correspondence or information about phone calls. The difference? Warrants are required when law enforcement officials want corporations to turn over your phone records or letters – but not necessarily e-mail. And DOJ wants to keep it that way.

Why? To make it easier to conduct fast criminal investigations of events that have either transpired our are about to transpire. I can see their point. I can also see why the main law covering such issues needs to be revisited; it was last updated in 1986, about 10 years before most people received their first e-mail.

But I hope the Justice Department softens its stance before privacy really is a thing of the past.

Buy good equipment; take good care of it

Call this Rule #1 for life. Maybe it’s not the most important rule; it’s not the Golden Rule or even the Rule of 72.

Let’s call it the Hard Goods Rule: Buy good equipment and take good care of it.

Nothing provides better affirmation and aids in a better outloook than moving through the details of the day with equipment that works easily, well and with the rarest of failure.

If you need to buy a printer for your office, don’t settle for the $25 model that comes along as a premium with your computer. I’ve learned that lesson too many times. Go out and spend what you it takes to buy a durable, solid printer that runs and runs. Buy the features you need and just pay the price. If you find yourself leaning toward a cheap compromise, imagine yourself being late out the door and suddenly remembering a document you forgot to bring along. You’re in your winter coat and boots, leaning over the computer, the dog is barking because he thinks you’re going to take him for a walk, and you get a paper jam, or a message that the printer is out of magenta. With a cheap printer, this seems to happen 1 out of 2 times (thought it’s probably more like 1-in-5).

Visualize this and you’ll spend the good money.

A corollary to this rule is the Hard Goods Corollary: More power/fewer features.

Here are some tools and equipment to which the Rule of Hard Goods and Corollary apply:

  • Computer printer
  • Power tools (A drill shouldn’t drill just some stuff. For an extra $60 you can get a drill to drill any stuff. That’ll amortize to about $1.50 anytime you need to drill something really hard over the next 10 years).
  • Lawnmower
  • Computer (The reason people pay more for a Mac.)
  • Camera
  • Snowblower (If you want to wrestle with a piece of equipment, you’ll spend less and fare better against a snow shovel.)
  • Winter coat
  • Washer/Dryer (It’s all about power. Features break over time; a powerful machine runs forever.)
  • Stapler (Unless you never plan to staple more than 4 sheets at a time.)
  • Sporting goods (Whatever your passion – golf, tennis, baseball, sailing, jai alai – equipment that doesn’t go all the way just saps the fun. You may as well stay home to figure out what’s wrong with that g-d- Scanner/Copyer/Fax/Printer/Stickintheeye.)

There’s a place in the world for cheap stuff. If you’ve never been camping, never want to go camping, but you absolutely have to go camping just this once for one night with your son and the Cub Scouts, then go to Wal-Mart and buy the $39 two-man tent. You can buy a good tent for the next time you go.

Microsoft Internet Explorer: Power to the Peeps

According to a report in B2B Magazine, the next edition of Microsoft Internet Explorer – IE9, to be released during 2011 – will include a feature that enables users to block 0nline tracking of their internet browsing by marketers.

Thank you Microsoft, for taking our privacy out of the hands of the calcified Congress, and putting it back where it belongs: with each of us. If you’re not careful, people might start to like you again.

The royal engagement and authenticity in the media

Why do the breathless reports of Prince William’s engagement to Kate Middleton have such a negative impact on me?

I have no ill will toward the couple; they are charming, attractive and – considering the circumstances – appear humble and likeable. In England, where the royal family is some kind of national treasure, I might understand such over-the-top, second-to-second pursuit of each detail as they proceed toward a royal wedding.

But here in America, Will and Kate are not our own; interest in their nuptials strikes me as being borne of respect for our longstanding relationship with England as a friend and ally. Does it require sending squads of journalists to stand outside the gates of Buckingham Palace to get weepy and about the storybook nature of their love?

Simply: No. It doesn’t have the same meaning in England and America. There it’s a fairy tale; here it’s a pleasant news item. The mass media’s effort to transport the fairy tale aspect of it across the ocean and across cultures is not reporting; it’s editorializing.

It’s not journalism; it’s distortion. And it’s part of that problematic blurring between news and entertainment that seems to have infected all for-profit media.