Category Archives: Uncategorized

05/26/20

Fear V Danger — Perspective

Fear is an emotion. Scary things create fear. How we deal with fear and scary things is within our control. Sometimes, it takes real will power to control fear and to  deal with scary things.

Dealing with scary things is part of adulting. Not everybody is good at adulting. Not everybody wants to be good at adulting. Life is a swirl of choices. One of those choices is to be an adult about scary things.

Danger is a measure of risk. What is dangerous to one person — jumping out of an airplane, as an example — is not dangerous to another person. It is an acquired sense. You can mitigate danger through prudent action.

If you are a startup CEO/founder on your first company, everything is dangerous, risky, scary, and fills you with dread — fear. Sorry, that is normal.

If you are a startup CEO/founder on your sixth company, you are perfectly comfortable with the danger — yawn, been there, done that, hold my beer, on second thought go get me another beer — whilst it is not nearly as risky on No 6 as No 1, and it is not scary and you have no sense of fear.

You have learned how to deal with these two impostors — hat tip to Rudyard Kipling and that beauty of a poem, IF. Well played, Rudyard.

Glad I could be of service, Big Red Car, you lyrical bastard.

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05/12/20

Trusting the Federal Bureau of Investigation

Far away and long ago, my company was the landlord to the FBI’s Austin By God Texas office. This brought me into close contact with the men who worked there. I judged them to be good men.

There are a lot of peculiarities when you build an office for the FBI — wouldn’t be smart for me to discuss them.  You get to know them very well and the way the offices, the conference rooms, the reception area is built teaches you something about how they conduct their business. Amigos, they use a lot of technology. A lot.

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05/7/20

Cheat From Home — Online Learning

Higher education has a new problem — how to administer and proctor tests in an online learning environment. How does online learning deal with cheat from home?

How does a professor ensure that her students are not cheating as they take those tests and final exams?

All of you engineers with your open book problem solving exams can just STFU with your superior attitudes and admonitions about how engineering is taught and tested. Yes, I’m an engineer and most of my exams were completely open book.

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03/8/20

Oil War

If you slept in on Daylight Savings Time, then you may have missed that we have another war erupting in the Middle East — Saudi Arabia (through the newly public Aramco which it controls) has lowered the price of its crude, while threatening to increase crude oil production by more than 2,300,000 barrels daily to a total of 12MM barrels per day.

This is a hissy fit on the heels of an unsuccessful OPEC + meeting (the plus being the addition of Russia) attempt to reduce production by 1.5MM barrels.

As always when this group meets, there was a lot of discussion, but no consensus.

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02/14/20

Positive Images

I was working with an entrepreneur on a pitch deck. It was a damn good deck, but it had a stock photo that was not the best selection. I mentioned it to him several times, but he didn’t change it.

Please note it is always perfectly fine not to follow my advice. It doesn’t bother me in the least.

We got to talking about the kinds of images one should use — I favor original, fresh, light, pleasant. I like images of people who you would want to meet, or who you think might be like you.

The chap asked me, “How bad could it really be?”

That made me think of this picture of former CIA Director John Brennan.

Do you want to have a beer with this guy? Sit at the same table with him? Does he look like a friendly chap?

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01/25/20

New Job Application

This is a copy of a letter I sent to Her Royal Highness, Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth, applying for a job at Buckingham Palace. There have been some personnel changes and she is looking outside the box for some fresh blood. Maybe I am that fresh blood?

Image result for images the queen

21 January 2020

Your Majesty,

Thank you, Ma’am, for taking my call and inviting me to present my credentials for the position we discussed. I really enjoyed chatting and think we established a rapport that may come in handy. I am confident I can represent the Royal Family in a manner that will add to the luster of you royals. [Not exactly running the high hurdles with Charles, Andrew, and Harry, eh? JK]

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12/13/19

United Kingdom Election Implications

In a hotly contested, early-called election, the United Kingdom has given the Conservative Party of Boris Johnson a resounding victory providing him with a comfortable majority in their Parliament (House of Commons).

Prime Minister Johnson had taken a huge gamble calling for elections two years early as the country was bogged down in a vicious fight to follow the will of the people as demonstrated in the 2016 Brexit vote to part company with European Union. [The Brits were members of the European Union though they kept the British Pound Sterling as their currency, refusing to embrace the Euro.]

This election dissolves any idea of a Brexit do-over vote. It is now settled science that the UK is leaving the European Union.

The major opposition party, Labour, headed by Jeremy Corbyn, was handed a bruising defeat ending with 203 seats to the Conservative’s 364 (there are a total of 650 seats with 649 seats decided, one remaining to be finalized). It takes 326 seats in Parliament to govern.

Corbyn took things poorly, resigning in the wake of the keel hauling. A perfectly eloquent man, Corbyn said, “Ouch!”

The Scottish National Party took 48 seats (which will spark discussion of Scotland slipping away from the United Kingdom) and the Liberal Democrats took 11.

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