For the next few months, Wednesday are my Hell Days; I leave the house about 8 AM and don’t get home until after 10PM. Since it’s Bad Form to blog from work or in-class, expect little to no blogging on Wednesdays.
Gah
Ok, today is officially the “Day of One-Word Post Titles”.
Heading up to school for the first day of classes soon. You’d think, this being my third semester and all, that I would not be so nervous at the start of the semester anymore. You’d be wrong.
Whoa …
Nice catch by Political Wire … but in what alternate reality do they really think the votes for impeachment exist?
“The Bush administration is bracing for impeachment hearings in Congress,” Insight magazine reports.
Could be a trial balloon, I suppose…
Heh
Insomniacs unite!
However, being awake at 5:00AM at least gives me the time to blog this bit of New York weirdness:
more than 160 riders participated in the fifth annual No Pants Subway Ride before police halted their No. 6 train about 5 p.m.
I don’t think riding the subway in your boxer shorts qualifies as illegal activity, although going commando and then offing your pants probably would. Apparently this lot were all underpants-clad, so hey, go for it. Whatever floats your boat.
Ford on TV this AM
So I caught a few minutes of the Ford press conference this moring as I was getting ready for work. Job cuts, plant closings, big changes, new ways of designing and building cars, fewer SUVs, yadda yadda. What caught my ear, though was Bill Ford on the TV saying (more or less) “Why didn’t we make these changes sooner? We didn’t have to.”
One of the more memorable things my Systems prof told us last semester was, “Don’t boil the ocean.” If Ford really thinks they’re capable of making sweeping companywide changes in a smooth, adroit manner, they’re kidding themselves. A company that sat on its butt doing little more than raking in the profits on oversized low MPG SUVs when their competition was taking them to the cleaners is not going to be able to pull that kind of a move off. Toyota or Honda might, but the whole reason Ford is in this mess is because they are not Toyota or Honda.
One of the CNBC commentators noted that the scope of the plant cuts announced implied that Ford was cutting production capacity by about 1 million automobiles. I wonder what that’s going to do to the dealership network. Job losses due to dealership closings will not be counted in the press releases, but surely Ford will not need the same number of dealers if they’re producing so many fewer cars.
Whither Apple and the iPod?
One of the (few) benefits of working in an office that runs the Mac OS is that I’ve started paying attention to the Apple world beyond that of my iPod. So this morning, I ran across the site Apple Matters via a link from CNet. I read an interesting article about why Microsoft won’t be able to successfully take down the iPod (an argument I tend to agree with). It’s worth reading, both for the article itself and the thoughtful commentary.
For what it’s worth, it seems to me that Apple has decided they are not going to be able to unseat Microsoft in the office, so have decided to focus on ‘lifestyle’ computing instead. The iPod, building real photo and video manipulation tools into the OS, and a host of other details, all say to me that personal users are the target. And all things considered, that’s a smart move.
Whether it’s working remains to be seen. My mother told me about two weeks ago that she was thinking about buying an Apple laptop to replace her recently-deceased Windows laptop. When I asked her why, she mentioned the digital camera that she’d recently acquired and said, “Apple is suppsed to be better at that sort of thing.”
She ended up buying a Sony Vaio, though.