Frazzled On Wednesday I think I pushed Handy Brad too far. He had worked through the weekend to get necessary things done in the garage. This included painting the walls now that the epoxy floor was in and, as a last-minute, but logical, addition to the to do list, the laying of industrial rubber baseboards to finish off the intersection of new floor and newly painted walls. I must admit, what started as a practical…
August Doldrums I just sat at my desk and realized that my New Yorker calendar was still showing June. How did that happen? Well, I guess that means I’ve had a busy summer and while it has involved a lot of work of many types, it has mostly just sort of slid by without me formally sitting at my desk and keeping things refreshed, like my calendar. Today is Thursday and that means trash…
Teaching the Unteachable I am getting that prickly feeling after six months of planning to teach a course in late September. I am six weeks away from the first lecture, but I have been through this drill and I know how many hours of preparation is required for each scheduled hour of lecture. Experienced professors will tell you they can get it down to 4-5 hours of preparation. When I started teaching in 2007 at…
The Work Day I find myself in full-on, task-oriented, deadline and goal-oriented mode. All it takes is a specific project like my latest expert assignment and a tight timeframe and I am at my desk first thing in the morning, working until my iPad runs low on juice (~4 hours), taking a break to check in on my other responsibilities ranging from my scientific R&D company to my teaching gig to the various projects I…
On Your Mark We are lying in a comfortable king-size bed in the Edgewood Lodge on Lake Tahoe in Stateline, Nevada. It is a full-service resort, which has all the trappings of a Four-Star resort. The gatehouse with guard, the valet parking only, the vaulted yet modern lobby that screams Lake Tahoe and the magnificent views from its lakeside perch. When we check in we get a cute silk gauze bag with hand sanitizer and…
Amazon on My Mind It is said that when Jeff Bezos was taking his now-famous cross-country trip to move to Seattle, he wrote the business plan for his new business idea. That idea was to build the world’s biggest bookstore using this new concept that was gaining traction in 1994, the Worldwide Web. The internet and its packetization of information across large and remote data networks had been building in the defense and academic worlds…
A Good Day Fridays are most often good days. I believe that gets a bit blurred by both my partial-retirement status and the Coronavirus situation that has one day flowing into another with much less differentiation between weekdays and weekends. To be honest, this year it is hard for me to even realize this is summer versus any other time of the year since the weather out here in San Diego is nice all year…
What Comes Around The year 2008 is often referred to by many in the markets as the ultimate ”annus horribilis”. That is a bit hard for me to reconcile because where my personal “annus horribilis” was rightfully 2007 based on the the disastrous episode with the Bear Stearns Asset Management hedge funds that hit the wall of the CDO (collateralized debt obligations) and sub-prime mortgage crisis, that was also the joyous year (earlier in the…
The Dinner Table In the world of banking, it shouldn’t surprise you to learn that most big firms manage somehow to insure that their top two people are not so fervently politically aligned that when (notice I did not say “if”) the opposing party takes office, the firm is not left without sympathetic inroads into the halls of power, perhaps when they need it the most. I have never figured out exactly how that process…
Secrets of the Digital Universe I feel I owe you all some resolution on several unanswered mysteries that have been plaguing me for the past few months. I have found over the past fifty years that the old medical school adage to “think horses, not zebras” is more true than not and and serves us well when trying to solve mysteries. The complicated conspiracy theory of the dead neighbor having set up a ruse to…