09/25/19

Inspiration — It’s Everywhere

In life, we require inspiration to awaken us to the possibilities of the world. As a young man, I worked in construction during high school and college. I garnered some inspiration on the end of a shovel handle digging ditches.

I worked for a general contractor at the Jersey Shore that built anything, but they also used to install the ocean intakes into the Atlantic Ocean for the seawater pools at beach clubs in tony places like Deal. Deal is an incredibly affluent shore town with enormous mansions and the most wonderful collection of shingle beach monstrosities. [Today, this little jewel could be yours for $12MM.]

When we would put in these ocean intakes, it required digging a ditch to install a pipe, sometimes for a long, long, long distance from the pump house to the point at which the pipe would enter the ocean.

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09/24/19

The Cult of Personality and Adam Neumann of We (We Work)

Since time immemorial, American business has always revered the iconic startup leader whether it was John Davison Rockefeller, Sr — American business icon, considered the wealthiest American of all time, and a generous philanthropist; or, the Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates stories. Sam Walton was an iconic, successful businessman.

All have a “larger than life” nature to them. They fall into the category of the iconic American business billionaire. These folks, however, come with a full bag of positive and negative traits.

In the modern startup world, we have folks like Travis Kalanik, formerly of Uber, and, now Adam Neumann, of We (We Work).

What we are confronted with is the “cult of personality” wherein the business becomes synonymous with the leader or founder.

This can be good or bad.

In the case of Sam Walton, it is generally perceived as a positive thing. Folksy Old Sam was a gimme-cap-wearing, pickup-driving, Easy-Rider-rifle-rack-shotgun-owner, bird-hunting, bird-dog-loving man of the people from the heartland.

Walmart HQ never left Bentonville, Arkansas, and Bentonville never left Sam.

Sam Walton and his pickup truck at the beginning:

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09/22/19

BRC — The Website Troubles

About a month ago, the BRC website was hacked. I first noticed it because my Amazon Web Services “instance” (the hosting arrangement) kept cutting out for excess CPU usage. At the time, I knew nothing about it and hadn’t put any analytics on the site.

To fix this, I had to dig into AWS, close down the instance, and restart the instance. When the hack was in play, load times on my site were measured in weeks. Still, I had great traffic for most of the day.

The AWS solution was to buy more CPU capacity, but something didn’t look right. I wiggled into the analytics and found out it was happening between 1-4 AM and that the CPU usage was rocketing right up. Still, AWS said, “Uhh, buy more CPU and it will handle the problem.”

I hired a guru through UpWork to look at it and he said, “Every night between 1-4 AM, bad actors are snatching your website and using it to host nefarious things.”

We made some changes and it got better by pieces. Still, AWS said, “Buy some more CPU, you rusty bucket of bolts.”

It took about three weeks and the consultant re-worked a bunch of things — server side things. Then, he noted that my site was SLOW.

I used GTMetrix to monitor my site and agreed. If you know GTMetrix, you will gag when I tell you that my PageSpeed Score was F- and my YSlow Score was also F-. My site was taking about 16 seconds to load.

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09/20/19

Living Large

Imagine if you were this beautiful sleeping baby. [Hey, I said imagine. Try it.] Full disclosure this is My Perfect Granddaughter Tempe — faith, hope, charity, temperance, it’s a Southern thing.

Her Mimi is a Tempe and there are a lot of Tempes on the various branches of that family tree. This particular Tempe is what is called a “spirited” child with a lovely bubbly personality. She is perfect.

You are allergic to eggs (Momma carries the EpiPen with her) and thus you have never tasted pancakes, French toast, a hot dog bun (though you are strong on hot dogs), a blueberry muffin, pizza, spaghetti, or a croissant. You may let the list go where it feels like it needs to go.

Now, imagine that you just found out you are still allergic to scrambled eggs, but you can now eat cooked eggs — see the list above.

In the next few days, this baby will come face to face with her first pizza. She will eat pancakes and French toast. Spaghetti with croissants.

Isn’t life grand? Just imagine the moment at which you discovered the grandeur of pizza! The nobility, the deliciousness, its intelligence expanding quality. Wow!

Is this a great country or what?

 

 

09/20/19

The American Presidency

No man, with the possible exception of General of the Army Dwight David Eisenhower, has ever been ready to become President of the United States on day one.

The job is bigger than any man, more complex than any man’s experience, throws him into a malestrom of competing voices and opinions while uniquely challenging its holder to make life-and-death decisions beginning day one. Looking at that sentence, I believe that Ike was ready to go right after the Inauguration.

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09/19/19

Amazon Hiring

Big Red Car here on a rainy day along the Houston coast. They are saying Houston might get TWO FEET of rain. Wow!

So, Amazon has been holding a hiring extravaganza. They held a multi-city job fair on 17 September 2019 in Arlington, Boston, Nashville, Dallas, Chicago, and Seattle. This is where the job fair is being held, but the jobs are all over the country.

Young lady pointed out to me that the “a” and the “z” on the logo are connected by the arrow ’cause Amazon will sell you whatever the heck you want from A >>>> Z. OK?

You will note that they did not hold a job fair in Long Island City because the local Dem politicians ran Amazon and its proposed HQ2 off. That ended up with places like Austin By God Texas and the places noted above getting more of the hiring tasking.

You may credit the savant Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for that move. Well played, AOC. Who needs those stinking jobs, eh?

Yeah, I did that. Ran off those 25,000 Long Island City Amazon jobs. Me. Green New Deal rules! (Notice I have my “smart girl” glasses on.)

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