Weeknotes August 30

This week I will:



1.- Update posts for the Ticinowedding blog through the end of September.

2.- Contact Ticino Turismo (again) re: setting up a Ticino Wedding collaboration.

3.- Update posts for Dumbagent through the end of September.

4.- Respond to (yet another) Jury summons. They always seem to want me when I'm out of the country.

A Banking Service for Everything Else

So you have to travel pretty often for your work. You've found that you tend to go to the same cities quite regularly. So, say you end up going to Atlanta, where your company headquarters/big client/main warehouse is located. Do you look forward to these trips? Is the baggage fee an extra hassle? Do worry about getting overhead space for your carry-on? Do you dread having to stand there waiting for your luggage to turn up at the carousel? Do you worry what state the luggage will be in, or if it will show up at all?

Now consider this: how much more would you look forward to these trips if you didn't have to worry about luggage at all? What if, when you arrived at your hotel, your suit, shoes, shirts, ties, jogging suit, bathing suit, informal wear, toiletries, electronics chargers, etc. were all waiting for you?

ObjectBank can make this happen. After your first visit, we will offer to store whatever clothes, objects, electronics you may need. We can even have your clothes dry-cleaned. We will then deliver them to you upon your next arrival. From now on you don't have to worry about checking in luggage. In fact, you barely need carry-ons! Just leave what you need with us and don't worry about it again until your next visit to the Peach State!

As we expand you will even be able to have the clothes and objects you dropped off in Atlanta be available for you when you travel to San Francisco (or whichever other city we operate in). ObjectBank aims to be a veritable bank for your objects, where you can deposit in one city and withdraw in another.

If you would like to contribute to this new project you can donate using the link below. Those who donate more than $250 will have free services for one year. If you would like a form of convertible debt option you can let us know at info@ObjectBank.com.

Questions? Comments? Feel free to contact us at info@ObjectBank.com.


In order to contribute click here:
donations@Luganotranslations.com

Nashville

I need a name for this business venture

So you have to travel pretty often for your work. You've found that you tend to go to the same cities quite regularly. So, say you end up going to Atlanta, where your company headquarters/big client/main warehouse is located. Do you look forward to these trips? Is the check-in fee an extra hassle? Do worry about getting overhead space for your carry-on? Do you dread having to stand there waiting for your luggage to turn up at the carousel? Do you worry what state the luggage will be in, or if it will show up at all?

Now consider this: how much more would you look forward to these trips if you didn't have to worry about luggage at all? What if, when you arrived at your hotel, your suit, shoes, shirts, ties, jogging suit, bathing suit, informal wear, toiletries, electronics chargers, etc. were all waiting for you?

We can make this happen. We will offer to store whatever clothes, objects, electronics you may need. We can even have your clothes dry-cleaned. We will then deliver them to you upon your arrival.

From now on you don't have to worry about checking in luggage. In fact, you barely need carry-ons! Just leave what you need with us and don't worry about it again until your next visit to the Peach State!


Update
I've settled on the name ObjectBank.com for now. You can click on the link below to donate to this idea. I'm looking for $6,000 to get it started. If you donate $200 and up you will get free services for a year. If you want to set up some form of convertible debt option just contact me.

Weeknotes June 28

This week I will:



1.- Set up the meeting with a possible local collaborator for Ticino Wedding, who can hopefully attend my meetings with the event managers as well.

2.- Order 4 Dumbagent books to be sent to predetermined list of people.

3.- Meet with a prospective for handling local consulting in Atlanta.

4.- Reply to a Jury Summons I received (and request a postponement since I'll be out of the country).

Weeknotes June 21

This week I will:



1.- Create a detailed plan and timeline for the rest of the year for Ticinowedding: in terms of partnerships and clientele back in Switzerland, to marketing and promotions.

2.- Contact the event planners and the catering company for Ticinowedding to set up meetings.

3.- Write up a "Contributions" page for Dumbagent, as well as an article promoting it, and choose a release date.

4.- Finish Chapters 16 and 17 in my HTML, XHTML & CSS book.

The Origin of Breakdance

Breakdance comes from the dances the early colonists in the United States used to do in the morning to get their wives and mothers to cook them breakfast. The "breakfast dance" got shortened to "break-dance". It involved headspins and the robot.

Bringing Sexy Back to Economics

Drum roll please....

In case you read this and don't know yet, I'm Bringing Sexy Back to Economics, one Demand Curve at a time...

Yup, my new book is available for Download, at an introductory price of $11.99.

Yes, this is a discount and no, it is not permanent, so check it out now!


If you want more details about just how I'm bringing sexy back, check out the Dumbagent.com information page right here.


And also check out Dumbagent.com regularly for bi-weekly economics updates.



Ok.. you can stop the drum roll now actually.

Throw out Your Old Maps

The San Andreas Fault is a line which marks the border between two tectonic plates: The Pacific and the North American. It runs 800 miles through the length of California. Californians, especially Southern Californians, will talk of "The next big one", meaning the next big earthquake. This is because Central California had a big one in the 1850's, while San Francisco (in the North) had one in 1906, but Southern California is long overdue for a big earthquake, due to rising tension along the fault line.

The general worry is that, when this occurs, California will break off from the rest of the continent, looking somewhat like this:




This map was made in 1650, by a Dutch Cartographer named Joan Vinckeboons. Was he a brilliant geologist or a prescient cartographer?

It turns out he was neither. The San Andreas Fault, unlike most fault-lines, moves in a horizontal motion, not a vertical one. Therefore, while Los Angeles will probably move North of San Francisco at some point in the next 20 million years, a part of California will never break off to form an American Madagascar (Vinckeboons thought it already had). We should tell the Library of Congress they might as well throw this map away during their next spring cleaning session.

Spring Break

Wednesday night, in New York city, after spending an intense night making love to one of my numerous paramours, I bludgeoned her to death with a cupid statuette I own. I know from my strict upbringing that women of loose morals should be shown no mercy. George Bernard Shaw once said 'Women upset everything', and who am I to contradict him? So I was satisfied in having done the correct thing. I read some more of my Derrida book while I waited for her body to congeal, so as to minimize the amount of blood spilled. I then proceeded to saw her body into more easily manageable pieces. As testimony to what higher education can teach people, I took into account the anatomy of her limbs and organs so as to facilitate the cutting. Once I was done I was able to fit the pieces of her body into my Vuitton Keepall overnight bag and my new Samsonite suitcase. I then set off for Washington D.C.

I had decided not to take the plane because I hate to eat even small snacks when there is the risk of turbulence. People with decent upbringings prefer order and tidiness over raw speed. Utility can only be truly maximized when indifference curves are at their highest. I decided that the train would be much better. I arrived at the station by limousine, where a porter offered to carry my luggage to the platform. New York can be such a civilized city. I noticed a police officer ask a homeless man what he was doing there, to which the homeless man stood up and shouted about the Rights of Man and Thomas Paine. The policeman smiled and wandered off.

The train from New York to D.C., despite not having a smoking carriage, has become more pleasant in recent years. On the train I read in the paper how the Dubai Ports deal had been rejected by Congress because foreigners should not be controlling our ports. This made sense. After all, no one would want to trust our precarious points of entry to foreign entities. Once arrived in Washington D.C. I took the metro from Union Station to Anacostia, where I walked two blocks south and left my luggage in a storefront. I walked around the corner and waited all of ten minutes for both pieces of luggage to be stolen. They were someone else's affair now.

I then took the metro to East Falls Church, to my friend's house, for a well-deserved beer.

New Year's Resolutions

One of my New Year's Resolutions was to write more. So I figured a good way to start was to write out my New Year's resolutions and, in the process, keep this here blog more up to date. So here they are, in no particular order:

1- Write more
Put more of my thoughts onto documents and blogs, for no other purpose than to seek attention. Deal with it.

2- Learn HTML, XHTML & CSS

I deal with websites way too much not to know what the hell is going on. I bought a "For Dummies" book on it, which I figured is a good start.

3- Publish a book
Ok, or an article, a novel, a novella, a word. The important word here is publish, as in, have someone else decide to put something I wrote somewhere public.

4- Learn to cook at least 5 dishes well
It's about time I did.

5- Have a business be profitable and self-sustaining
I'm looking at Ticino Wedding or Dumbagent. By profitable and self- sustaining I mean that I can step back from the day-to-day process.

6- Enter at least 1 contest per month
Any contest or competition that gives a prize I like or offers recognition.

7- Multi-task less
I need to. I think everyone should. As Tony Hsieh put it: Multi-tasking is Multi-Stupid.

8- Take more pictures
I gots me a nifty new camera, I need to learn to use it well.

The Life of Languages

To be where you are today means that you are very lucky. For hundreds of millions of years your forebears were able to stay alive and healthy and attractive long enough to mate with another of their species and carry on doing so throughout many different species and generations. They were also able to adapt to different climates, environments, habitats, predators, prey, weather, natural disasters, unnatural calamities, wars, pestilences, violence, accidents, among many other obstacles, in order to bear you, who have survived long enough to read this post.

How has life been able to do this? By holding fast and showing unbending strength through adversity? Possibly some of that went on, but most of the time it involved bending and mutating to adapt to many different circumstances with uncanny prescient abilities. An ex post-facto game theory analysis could not have come up with a better solution in keeping life going. So while many people bemoan the loss of species (which is regrettable, although over 95% of all species that ever roamed this earth are extinct), we should celebrate the survival of ours, even though our species today bears almost no resemblance to what our ancestors looked like in the primordial soup. In fact, nothing much has persevered, save the fact that both we and they are and were living.

France is a famous example of a country wishing to regulate and promote its language. The Académie française acts as official authority of the language, coming up with new french words for new objects and phenomena, such as computers and e-mail. And the Toubon Law of 1994 decreed that all communication that had to do with any form of commerce had to be in French. This meant basically everything you saw or heard on TV (Apart from music and "original language" movies) had to be in the original French or translated into French. These are two of the reasons why French will enter a slow decline and be one day obsolete, despite France's efforts at promoting it as an international language.

English was born with the Angles and Saxons and Jutes in what is now Friesland. They traveled to the British Isles around 500 AD, where people spoke Celtic, infused with Latin from the Romans, who had left several hundred years earlier. During the ensuing centuries, Norsemen came from the North during the Viking conquests, and Normans came from the South with William the conqueror. English then became more and more standardized throughout the island. It then spread to other countries and continents during the days of the British Empire. Nowadays it is spoken from Canada to New Zealand to South Africa to Singapore, with many other places in between. Of course, at each one of these junctures, the language absorbed and mutated and grew in order to accommodate the new circumstances and situations. The result is a language considered the most expressive in the world that is thriving.

This entry may seems somewhat schizophrenic, but our species does bear a certain resemblance to the English language. While another offshoot, the Neandertals, were not able to adapt and died out, Homo Sapiens Sapiens built clothes and shelter in the winter, and hunted and gathered and traded and specialized and spoke and organized its way through existence. I am not saying the French language is like the Neandertals, but languages could be viewed as living organisms, struggling and adapting to survive. Organizations such as the Académie française will only muzzle a language without letting it grow naturally, much like insisting a native tribe not use modern technology can drive it into obsolescence.

Languages, like life, seem to find ways to adapt in order to stay alive whenever they can. So while some people scoff at the "illiterate" for ending sentences with prepositions or using modern slang, we should realize that much of that is the natural adaptation of the language. While we might bemoan the good old days, we cannot survive to see the future until we adapt to the present.

Questions to ask

What to ask a prospective personal trainer

1 - Do I actually need a PT?
Answer: If you want to learn, not follow - yes
2 - What qualifications do you have?
Answer: certified courses longer than six months
3 - Are you going to to an assessment?
Answer: Yes. If they're not assessing, they're guessing.
4 - Can you tell me about nutrition and psychology?
Answer: Of course. Fitness is about lifestyle, nutrition and mentality- not just muscles
5 - Are you insured?
Answer: Gym-based PTs are covered, but get proof of private PTs' personal and equipment liability.




Top 5 questions you should ask a nutritionist

1 - What is the easiest way to get the antioxidants I need throughout the day?
Answer: Frozen peas. Easy to add to any mail and really cheap
2 - How can I limit my risk of Heart attack?
Answer: More olive oil. Extra virgin or normal
3 - How can I bring my cholesterol Level down?
Answer: Eat more seafood and eggs.
4 - How much meat should I be eating?
Answer: Think quality, not quantity. Go for the best you can afford.
5 - What the hell are trans-fats anyway?
Answer: Chemically altered vegetable oils even worse than saturated animal fats.




Both courtesy Men's Health. Once again this serves as my notepad.

Secret Tips

Go directly to Voicemail
If you want to leave someone a message directly on voicemail you can call 267-SLY-DIAL, then dial your friend's number, and leave a message explaining that it's just not working out.
Probably only works in the US.

Secret Starbucks drinks
Red eye: Drip coffee with a shot of espresso
Black eye: Drop coffee with 2 shots of espresso.

In-out-Burger
The Flying Dutchman: Two beef patties, two cheese slices, no bun
The Neapolitan: A three-layer milkshake
Animal-Style fries: Topped with cheese, grilled onions and special sauce.
This'll only work in the west coast I guess.

I'm curious as to whether the Starbucks one works in the UK.


Both courtesy of Wired Magazine, and this is the best place I had to jot them down.

Lettera a CdT

Letter mail to Peter Keller and Francesco Vitale of Corriere del Ticino on December 20th, 2008:

Mi permetto di scriverLe con una proposta intesa ad amplificare I Vostri servizi informativi.

Ho notato che il Corriere del Ticino non ha una sezione in inglese. Con la crescita di importanza del cantone non solo nella Svizzera, ma in tutto il mondo, e con l'arrivo di
ditte internazionali e l'aumento di studenti internazionali, credo sarebbe importante poter offrire una sezione, anche settimanale, che parli del nostro cantone in inglese.

Vorrei offrire le mie prestazioni per quanto riguarda tradurre articoli del vostro giornale per gente di madre lingua inglese, o per offrire una rubrica o una sezione in
inglese. Potrei inoltre presentare articoli originali di interesse particolare agli stranieri residenti in Ticino.

Io sono cresciuto bilingue (italiano/inglese) qui a Lugano, dopodiché ho studiato e lavorato negli Stati uniti. Ho sei anni d'esperienza professionale nei settori di finanze, di
marketing, e dell'immobiliare. Ho una laurea in commercio internazionale dall'Università Americana di Washington DC, ed un Master in Amministrazione Pubblica da Cornell
University, dove ero un articolista regolare su temi di economia e attualità.

Come editore del sitio www.Dumbagent.com scrivo spesso su temi di economia e dei mercati internazionale.

Qualora ci fossero domande sono a Vs. disposizione via e-mail or al numero 079-485-0978.



Robert Gebhardt

Pablo Picasso on art

EDIT: Apparently this quote is apocryphal. Thanks to Harriet coleman for her correction, in the comment section.


"In art the mass of people no longer seeks consolation and exaltation, but those who are refined, rich, unoccupied, who are distillers of quintessence’s, seek what is new, strange, original, extravagant, scandalous. I myself, since Cubism and before, have satisfied these masters and critics with all the changing oddities which passed through my head, and the less they understand me, the more they admired me. By amusing myself with all these games, with all these absurdities, puzzles, rebuses, arabesques, I became famous and that very quickly. And fame for a painter means sales, gains, fortunes, riches. And today, as you know, I am celebrated, I am rich. But when I am alone with myself, I have not the courage to think of myself as an artist in the great and ancient sense of the term. Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt were great painters. I am only a public entertainer who has understood his times and exploited as best he could the imbecility, the vanity, the cupidity of his contemporaries. Mine is a bitter confession, more painful than it may appear, but it has the merit of being sincere."

Pablo Picasso (Interview with Giovanni Papini in Libro Nero, 1952)

For food and for fun

There are 10'000 edible dormice in the UK, and the all live within about 200 square miles between Beaconsfield, Aylesbury and Luton.

Nowadays we are most likely to hear the name "dormouse" in what is known as the "dormouse test"; as explained by The Guardian's Tom Holland: "the principle that the longer it takes for the delicacy to be mentioned in a drama set in ancient Rome, the more authentic the reconstruction is likely to be".
The juicy meat of the dormouse was considered good food in ancient Rome.

The animal was introduced to England in 1902, through the second Baron Rothschild's collection. Apparently some or all of his dormice escaped, and established themselves in farm houses in the surrounding areas.

Although they can cause great damage to woodwork, wires, and water vats, I imagine that seeing one run up a glass window and slide down - just for fun - would almost make us forgive them.

-

London 2012...?

Chinese Olympics Official, as quoted on BBC News:

"London will nevery be able to put on a show like ours, because they only work 4 and a half days a week, with one hour lunch breaks, you can not expect hard endeavour because of human rights and you can not criticise anyone because of their unions"

Il vecchio e il bambino (Francesco Guccini)

Un vecchio e un bambino si preser per mano
E andarono insieme incontro alla sera.
La polvere rossa si alzava lontano
E tutto brillava di luce non vera.
L'immensa pianura sembrava arrivare
Fin dove l'occhio di un uomo poteva guardare,
E tutto d'intorno non c'era nessuno
Solo il tetro contorno di torri di fumo.


I due camminavano, il giorno cadeva
Il vecchio parlava e piano piangeva.
Con l'anima assente, con gli occhi bagnati
Seguiva il ricordo di miti passati.
I vecchi subiscon le ingiurie degli anni
Non sanno distinguere il vero dai sogni,
I vecchi non sanno, nel loro pensiero
Distinguer nei sogni il falso dal vero.
E il vecchio diceva, guardando lontano,
``Immagina questo coperto di grano,
Immagina i frutti, immagina i fiori
E pensa alle voci e pensa ai colori.
E in questa pianura fin dove si perde
Crescevano gli alberi e tutto era verde,
Cadeva la pioggia, segnavano i soli
Il ritmo dell'uomo e delle stagioni.''


Il bimbo ristette, lo sguardo era triste,
E gli occhi guardavano cose mai viste,
E poi disse al vecchio con voce sognante
``Mi piaccion le fiabe, raccontane altre.''

Robert's Skateboarding Law

When skateboarding, before performing a trick, if your board is pointing in a certain direction and you have a certain foot forward (initial stance), you can perform the same trick two times in a row, and after landing the second trick (final stance), your board will be pointing in the same direction and you will have the same foot forward as before you started the first trick.

This law holds true whether the second trick is performed exactly the same as the first, in switchstance or in fakie.

Therefore: Assuming Trick 1 = Trick 2, given an initial stance, an intermediate stance and a final stance:
Initial stance = Final stance


Further Assumptions:
- A wheelie (tail or nose) does not constitute a landed trick
- This must be performed while street skating (continuously going in the same direction). If this is performed on a halfpipe it still holds true if each trick is performed at each end of the halfpipe with no tricks in between.


Example A:
Initial Stance: Nose pointed forward, left foot forward (regular stance)
Trick 1: ~360 varial kickflip is performed~
Intermediate stance: Nose pointed forward, left foot forward (regular stance)
Trick 2: ~360 varial kickflip is performed~
Final stance: Nose pointed forward, left foot forward (regular stance)


Example B:
Initial Stance: Nose pointed forward, right foot forward (goofy stance)
Trick 1: ~Backside kickflip 180 is performed~
Intermediate stance: Tail pointed forward, left foot forward
Trick 2: ~Backside kickflip 180 is performed~ (fakie or switchstance)
Final stance: Nose pointed forward, right foot forward (goofy stance)


Example C:
Initial Stance: Tail pointed forward, right foot forward
Trick 1: ~Backside 180 varial heelflip 360 is performed~ (The body moves 180 degrees, while the board 360)
Intermediate stance: Tail pointed forward, left foot forward
Trick 2: ~Backside 180 varial heelflip 360 is performed~ (fakie or switchstance)
Final stance: Tail pointed forward, right foot forward