So what makes a person rich today?

My Mom and I got into an interesting discussion about when people are rich. We were driving through town and I noticed that 4 high class day spa's opened up in town, all of them in facilities larger than most day spa's that I have seen. I commented that there must be plenty of rich folks around to keep that many day spas' running or at least to convince someone to open them in this area. Mom did not care for this comment, rich people do not live around here. Well of course what I meant was people with disposable income available to spend on luxuries like day spa's, not millionaires.

I think my Mom is one of those that truly fails to understand that most households in America have much less income than she realizes. I know that several years ago if your household income was above $75,000 that you were in the top 5% of all wage earners households in America. I work with a gentleman that tends to whine a bit about money and I assure you his household is in the top 10% at least if not the top 5% even today.

For me being rich is about choices once you start to earn in the top 30% of the country. You choose a big house, lots of vacations, boat, fancy cars, home theatre mega rooms, etc. then you have arrived at rich, wealthy, etc and when you don't have money for the 52nd luxury item you want then it is not because you are not rich, it is because of the choices you made.

I do not have all the luxuries I would like but I know that I am among the privileged in this country and would never dare to whine I do not have enough money or suggest that I am to poor to afford something like a day spa for my wife.

Is moving off of IE really the solution?

An article in informationweek discusses the move by Penn State to encouage all students and faculty to move off of Microsoft Internet Explorer

Here is a small piece of what the article says:
A public university with an enrollment of over 80,000 put the kibosh this week on Microsoft's Internet Explorer, and urged its students to switch to alternative browsers such as Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, or Safari.
Penn State University on Wednesday issued an alert to students and staff recommending that they dump IE and use a different browser.

"The University computing community [should] use standards-based Web browsers other than Internet Explorer to help minimize exposure to attacks that occur through browser vulnerabilities," added ITS.

Some of the problems from IE are caused by programming bugs and other vulnerabilities are features designed to make a users life easier. Unfortunately there are people that exploit these things in malicious ways and cause users trouble.

Do these "naughty hackers" take advantage of IE because the flaws are there or do they target IE because it controls a huge percentage of the browser market. If Firefox controlled 50% of the browser market how long would it be before these folks find flaws to take advantage of in Firefox. I suspect it would not be to long.

There was a time when the phone was used maliciously on a regular basis to make crank calls. The implmentation of caller-id technology and call blocking was put in to prevent a significant amount of these problems and it worked for awhile. It wasn't long before "caller-id spoofing" was available and the problems have resurfaced. I think the same is true in browser switching, the trouble will be back sooner then Penn State realizes.

I will stick with IE and rely on my virus protection and spyware protection to keep me safe, for now :)

The death of TV as we know it will probably empty our wallets as well

Frank Rose wrote a very interesting article about the plans that cable companies have to move to next generation network infrastructure so that true on demand TV becomes a reality and delivers more then you might think. The cable companies see this as the satellite service killer since TV on demand will literally provide every person with a TV experience customized to them. Something the satellite providers can not match, at least not right now.

Unfortunately I suspect this whiz bang very cool stuff with no competition will come at a very stiff price. One of the reasons satellite TV is continuing to kick cables butt is because the price point for the quality is better. Cable operators do not want competition they want to be a monopoly so that they can charge ever higher prices. We can only hope that competition emerges as a result of both baby bells and cable operators in a local market offering essentially equal whiz bang stuff. For now I am EXTREMELY happy with my DishNetwork service and will stick with it.

It all comes down to funding...

Businesses approach funding (setting aside cash to pay for a project) in a very logical way. They view the return on an investment as what they are owed for making the investment. And businesses are certainly in business to earn a return, after all if they can get 4% from a cd why would they invest in a project that only returns 3%.

The sticky ground I run into is when the return is hard to measure and quantify. Take a place like amazon.com, they rely on their web portal for their existence and they make changes that please customers because if they do not please the customers sales will drop. There is a direct connection between sales and quality of their web site and the projects they fund to make the site more productive. This all seems pretty reasonable, easy to connect and even pretty easy to measure.

But take a web portal that is removed from the direct sale chain and instead is in support of the customer after the sale. Customers visiting the support site are generally displeased, you know what displeases them, you know why it displeases them and you even know how to fix it to make them happy. The rub is how do you quantify in $'s returned to the company those enhancements that you need. An investment is needed to fix the issues but where is the return, and worse yet what if it will take 2 years to fix everything and the company wants a return in the next 9 months.

There must be a structured approach to connecting disatisfaction with a company after the sale with lost revenue or lost sales, I just can't seem to find it.

Laptop cooling

I have been considering purchasing a laptop cooling device to try and keep my laptop cool and performing at top speed. I contribute to a distributed computing effort with my laptop so the processor runs pretty hot most of the time. Post a comment if you have a laptop cooler that works for you.

On the lighter side of this topic it seems I may be worrying about cooling the wrong lap

Laptops a Hot Fertility Issue :)

The truth is out there....or is it?

While I have not personally seen the movie Fahrenheit 9/11 there does seem to be quiet a few that believe this is just another example of journalism with a goal and that goal is not to communicate the full complete truthful circumstances. Dave Kopel has published a file discussing 59 deceits in the movie while Michael Moore and others continue to defend the movie as factual.

Add to this the false documents that Dan Rather used during the election and we very quickly realize that the news media is no longer about the news. It is, and some will tell me has been for a long time, about political agenda's. (There is some great discussion about the Rather thing at Hugh Hewitt's blog.)

I could go on but the examples are endless on both sides of the fence and bloggers have certainly been no pool of purity when it comes to facts and the complete truth. Perhaps the truth really is not out there on many topics because all of us have blind spots to things we do not wish to acknowledge, confront or believe. In the final end most of what we believe may be our choice to believe those things that reinforce our previous beliefs or positions on a topic. Believing may truly be seeing.....

People's Choice - your vote can count again

CBS is getting ready for the next People's Choice Awards and is taking votes now. Everyone who is interested in an award earned from the Regular Folks of our country should vote for these. The diversity of candidates in each category was pretty impressive and I was able to vote easily for my favorites in each one. And just maybe the people that lost the last peoples choice election can win this one....

There were a great number of good movies released this year so the movie categories were a little tough for me to choose from. My top pic is for Elastic Girl in the cartoon character category, the character voiced by Holly Hunter was great!

Into the Blog we go, watch out for the bumps...

After having been a reader of blogs for some time I decided it was time I put more than a toe into this pool. I like the human connections that blogging facilitates and the people involved are generally my kind of folks. Blogs from Cat Schwartz to Steven Vore have captured my interest and provided a wide variety of topics for thought and discussion. I am lucky enough to be friends with Steven which allows us to continue our bloggin interactions in person as well, something I would like to do with Cat but I will not hold my breath.

This is just the first step in my blogging adventure and I know that I will stumble, turn back, retreat and charge forward over and over as I learn more about this unique universe and the people that live here. I can only hope that others will both knock me down and be there to pick me up as I seek to contribute in some meager way to this communications play ground.

Step one, complete.......