Inventions Management For the first time in my life I am getting a front row seat at the process of inventions management. My company is trying to innovate in the electrochemical arena which involves everything from filing patents with the U.S. Patent Office and the various international patent agencies to managing the process of commercialization of the inventions, taking them from the laboratory to the marketplace. As one would imagine, there is a lot…
Crying About Death We have some dramatic things going on that give me pause and make me think. I just watched a clip of presidential candidate Andrew Yang (a marginal candidate who has gotten some exposure lately, but who is far from a central or likely candidate who could be nominated to the Democratic ticket). He had talked with a woman whose child had watched her sibling get shot and killed in El Paso. …
Fading Glory In June of 1996 I was driving to the Tompkins County Airport on Warren Road, in Ithaca, when I spotted a For Sale sign on a house that was opposite the 17th green of the Cornell Golf Course. I noted the broker telephone number as I passed, and on a whim I called to see what the old derelict farmhouse was on the market for. This was before the era of Zillow and…
Country Life John Denver said, “Well life on the farm is kinda laid back, Ain’t much an old country boy like me can’t hack. It’s early to rise, early in the sack. Thank God I’m a country boy.” No one would ever mistake me for a country boy. But I’m no metrosexual smooth dude either. I never grew up in the suburbs. I’m worldly and global, but not very Latino or Italian (those being the…
Owning it All I was worried about having time to write my blog this weekend. We are in Ithaca staying at our house there, with my daughter and her husband and kids. Their Ithaca life is heavily dominated by the pool, the yard and fireflies at dusk (as it should be) and my weekend is dominated by seeing old acquaintances from college. These are not my usual classmate crowd that I lived with for most…
Tucker, Tucker, Tucker… White Supremacy is quickly becoming an oxymoron. And it’s the likes of the suddenly vacationing Fox commentator (who really really was planning a vacation just then, really, just like all the guys at Fox who used to be there) who is making it more moronic and more embarrassing for those of us with oxy (occidental) heritage. Hatred and fear are ever-present in the world, so that should not surprise us. What is…
Sliding On In Doormen are unusual relationships for tenants. I have a very strong relationship with Corrado (Mr. Porca Miseria) based on the need to be sympathetic to the tragedy of his wife’s ongoing cancer treatments. In our apartment in the Seaport we had a doorman that had a daughter with a woman out of wedlock, who he was raising since she was in jail. That certainly gave us something to talk about. One of…
WeWorked By now, most people in the literate world have heard of WeWork. It is the shared workspace company that caters to and further encourages the entrepreneurial culture that is blossoming across the globe. WeWork has become globally ubiquitous in the less than ten years of its existence. What Uber/Lyft are to car culture and what Airbnb is to hospitality, WeWork is to Dilbert and office cubicle culture. Adam Neumann, the Israeli kibbutz-raised kid and…
Summer Haircuts Our dog, Cecil, is pure Bichon Frise, so like the dandelion pappus that adorn the late-summer lawns of the U.S., he becomes a fuzzball as the summer rolls on. When he gets his summer haircut he is as happy as a dog can be. It could be my imagination, but he seems to hop around with his high and tight white clip. Kim thinks he struts like a little tough. He looks cooler…
A Bull in the China Shop China is fucked-up. Is this all their doing or is it because others are fucking with China? Donald Trump seems to enjoy doing that. Regardless, the question quickly becomes, does that fuck us up? Last night my lovely wife Kim surprised me by asking me if I was worried about China bringing down the world economy. I would normally assume this was a hidden question about whether Nordstroms…