Listed here, all on Youtube.

I’m spending the week on a business trip to San Jose. The company put me up at the very tony Valencia Hotel which is located in Santana Row. Wikipedia says that “Santana Row was intended to be Northern California’s answer to Rodeo Drive featuring the one of the highest concentration of luxury retailers in the Western United States.” Oh. My. God. I have never seen such conspicuous consumption, especially the cars. The hotel offers valet parking, but in the evenings, they park a few cars in front of the hotel, not in the garage. I’m not sure what it takes to get your car parked conspicuously on Santana Row, but tonight there was a blinged-out Rolls Royce and several other extremely expensive cars in the hotel’s valet spaces. It’s obscene, really.
UPDATE: A fellow hotel guest told me this morning that one of the other cars in front of the hotel last night was a sports car (I don’t remember which brand) that sells for $1.2MM.

The press release is titled: “Kroger Introduces ‘Disney’s Old Yeller’ Chunk Style Dog Food.” What’s next? ‘Song of the South’ fried chicken bucket at KFC?

This little gem of wisdom struck me this morning: Life is like a Taco Cabana drive-through: you rarely get exactly what you ordered.

The Episcopal Church USA has elected a woman, Katharine Jefferts Schori, as presiding bishop, sending a great big fuck-you to ‘traditionalists’ in the US and around the world.

The NY Times reported yesterday that the former Bell Labs headquarters in Holmdel, NJ, will be demolished (here is the building on Google maps/satellite). It’s too bad that it’ll be destroyed; it’s an amazing–and amazingly large–building.
I worked at that building for a few months in 1996/7. My first official job in Internet technologies was contracting for AT&T. This was just after the AT&T/Lucent split, and the though the Holmdel building had gone to Lucent, the AT&T that group I worked with was still located there. Due to a strange convergence of facts (I was a contractor who was hired from a non-personnel budget, the building belonged to Lucent, space was tight), I did not have an office until the AT&T group that I worked for moved to an AT&T building. I spent my few months in Holmdel in a testing lab. The lab was located in the corner of a HUGE server room: 65 degrees, roaring computers. The lab was only marginally quieter and warmer. It was quite an experience.

I seem to be experiencing another blogging lull. Mostly, it’s caused by being more engaged in other areas of my life, especially my new job. Stay tuned; I’m sure I’ll be posting more again soon.

According to this no-duh article, shoppers have reported the following problems:

• 50 per cent have had a retail problem.
• The main problems are time it takes to find parking or the product the consumer wants, and unknowledgeable or rude staff
• The bigger the store, the higher the chance there will be a problem
• Men are less loyal than women.*

After analyzing the results of the survey, Wharton School marketing professor Stephen Hoch made the following recommendations:

If businesses want to stop the bleeding from negative word-of-mouth, it’s clear that they need to invest in ensuring that each customer experience is first rate – from adequate parking, to trained front-line staff, to the right product mix, both in stock and on the shelves.

Boy, the sponsors of the survey got their money’s worth with that astounding act of analysis.
* That’s a shocker!

Apparently, this list of reasons why America actually sucks is making the rounds on the internet. I’m the first to question unbridled ‘America is Number One!’ jingoism, but I’m highly suspicious of this list for several reasons:

1. It was created to prove a point, so the data is necessarily selective
2. The sort of short bullet points that the list employs is subject to gross oversimplification
3. Many of the points in the list are not given comparative to other countries (e.g., “Our workers are so ignorant and lack so many basic skills that American businesses spend $30 billion a year on remedial training” So, how does that compare globally?)
4. I frankly question the veracity or quality of some of the data (e.g., “Yet Americans work longer hours per year than any other industrialized country, and get less vacation time.” I recall seeing a chart of average work hours, and South Korea led every other country by several hundred hours. Apparently, the South Koreans have some really bizarre ideas about the average work week)

I would really like to see someone pick apart the list. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time or inclination.

This morning, I happened to catch Alex Chadwick’s Radio Expeditions report from the Ecuadorean rain forest with entomologist Rex Cocroft. Dr. Cocroft’s musings at the end of the piece struck me, so I transcribed them:

It can seem very strange to people, I think, and very ludicrous, to see some grown person who’s spending his time chasing around tiny, strange bugs in the woods, but I think of it like somebody who’s a musician. You’re not just a pure musician in the abstract. You play something, and once you pick up an instrument, all the principles of music are there. And if you’re studying biology, then any individual living thing that you can study has all the principles of biology wrapped up in it, and it has a long evolutionary history that has solved a very impressive set of problems and challenges and has a beautiful set of adaptations.
[The tree hoppers] are just very different from us, but they have just as many challenges in their lives, and fabulous, very finely tuned adaptations for dealing with them. So they’re not at all primitive or simple. They’re actually very complex and advanced, if you will.

I don’t know whether Dr. Cocroft bellieves in any dieties, but I am much more impressed with a God who can devise evolution and let it run its course than one who just spits out creation fully formed. The more I learn about the complexities of creation via science, the greater my reverence for it.