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fireplace_castironLast Christmas (aka National Retailers Holiday) I received this lovely Charbroil Cast Iron Fireplace as a gift. I’ve never used it because, well, because I had to build a patio for it first – you can’t set something like that just anywhere. I had to make a suitably safe spot for it. But this year I did that and as the weather is cooling off I decided to set it up Monday night.

I don’t have a wood-burning fireplace in my house, nor any need for firewood, so last night I stopped at the local grocery and picked up a couple of bundles of firewood to test it out – supposedly only the finest hardwoods, seasoned for even burning. Two bundles for $8. Such a deal. How hard could it be, right?

I mean, I’ve watched Bear Grylls start a fire in the middle of freakin’ nowhere, using nothing more than two stones and a tiny handful of dead grass. But not me, no sir. I bought asbestos firewood. I bought the only two bundles of flame-proof hardwood on the planet. I used newspapers, dried twigs and straw, chipped off small bits for kindling. It all burned and then died.

I got a pint of lighter fluid ($3.49 and another trip to the corner market) and soaked everything good and tried again. The fluid flamed up, burned off and died. I used the entire pint of fluid to keep everything burning. I fanned the flames, I readjusted the logs, I turned them and blew on them and squirted more lighter fluid. It was like some scene from “Jackass, The Movie” with me about to be blown up. But nothing.

I finally went to the shop and got a blow torch. I used an entire can of MAPP gas. You can weld metal with this stuff, but it wouldn’t set those goddamn logs on fire. By this time I’d spent more than an hour and a half trying to light this fire. I had a firepit full of ash, carbonized twigs, newspaper, and soot – and four sooty, impervious, defiant logs staring at me.

I finally broke down and went, again, to the store. I bought a case of those ready-made, artificial, fireplace logs – the kind made from sawdust and some sort of slow-burning organic glue that holds it all together. All you do is set the wrapper on fire on walk away and it burns merrily for 3-4 hours.

I put two of them in the firepit and arranged the satanic logs over, under and around them. Then I set the wrappers on fire. In short order I had a blazing little bonfire in my fireplace. It was 11:30pm. I now had to stay up another four hours, until it burned itself out, before I could safely go to bed. I wasn’t about to douse this damn fire.

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An interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the November issue of Reason magazine. My favorite quote is her closing statement:

But I don’t even think that the trouble is Islam. The trouble is the West, because in the West there’s this notion that we are invincible and that everyone will modernize anyway, and that what we are seeing now in Muslim countries is a craving for respect. Or it’s poverty, or it’s caused by colonization.

The Western mind-set — that if we respect them, they’re going to respect us, that if we indulge and appease and condone and so on, the problem will go away — is delusional. The problem is not going to go away. Confront it, or it’s only going to get bigger.

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My friend Matt Mower recently pointed me to the Blueprint CSS Framework, a very nifty set of modular CSS stylesheets and accompanying sample files that help a neophyte web builder create nice looking sites with multi-column layouts while still using CSS.

I can’t point you to my results yet, but I can say that it’s helped me immensely and allowed me to actually structure a multi-column web page without the use of tables.

About once a year I foolishly take on the task of designing a new website. As you can see from the HTML on this very page (assuming you’re looking at my web page and not the RSS feed) this effort has never actually resulted in a new design for b.cognosco. But never mind that.

What normally happens is that I spend days and days with high blood pressure, evolving a blue-streak vocabulary, throwing temper tantrums, and being cruel to small animals while I try to get HTML to do what I want with my limited understanding of the all too cryptic CSS.

Once I have good and well failed at that I try to hire someone to help me. I am a cheap bastard and have no interest in going out to *real* designers who will charge me $3,000 – $10,000 for a website that is basically for some hobby interest of mine or some freebie for a friend. But I am also a contrarian – so I do not wish to click over to TypePad or WordPress and grab up a template that is in use by a few hundred other people. I like to do a lot of stuff that simple templates don’t cover.

So I do various mockups of the page in something I can understand (like Adobe InDesign) until I have something I am happy with, create a PDF, and send it to some HTML slice-and-dice service or con one of the many web people I know into doing a little work for me on the side.

Sometimes this last approach works out ok except that no one creates CSS stylesheets I can really understand. So even if the site looks good I have to spend days of frustration trying to understand the nesting and tagging and inheritance and hacks and browser-specific workarounds that everyone uses.

But Blueprint has made it a lot easier, and more understandable, to use CSS by providing a discrete grid for layout and a well-documented set of stylesheets that explain what things do. I’m told the grid is even quite useful for experienced web designers to speed their basic development. I’ll put some links to the new site(s) here when they’re ready. In the meantime, try out Blueprint. It’s nice.

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This is old news by now and my source is not impeccable, but I asked the question a few days ago, “Who sold the rights for commercial use of Led Zeppelin’s music to Cadillac?”

Apparently, Robert Plant and Led Zeppelin did. Scroll down this Led Zep tribute site and you’ll see news photos of Plant at Cadillac’s 100th Anniversary celebration.

I’m shocked. Shocked, I say.

Guess all that money from the ’70s ran out. But it says something interesting that they still control their music, unlike the Beatles and lots of other musicians. Good for them.

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For anyone who’s managed to miss the news for the past 6 months, the southeast US is in a 100-year drought. As we are wont to do in such cases, we have ignored this for the past several years until now all our lakes and reservoirs are nearly empty. Suddenly, we have a crisis.

Imagine that.

So what do our vaunted civil servants do in this precarious situation? They implement outdoor watering bans. They argue with other states. They complain to the Army Corps of Engineers. They shutdown car washes and landscape companies. They go on TV and tell us how dreadful it is, and how sorry they are that people must lose jobs, and that they just can’t help this awful, awful situation.

All the while they completely ignore the blindingly obvious, brain-dead simple, straightforward, and guaranteed 100% foolproof solution to the problem. Any 3rd-grader could suggest this.

Raise the price of water!!!

Oh, I know we can’t raise the price. After all, it’s completely unfair to the poor.

Bullshit.

The average person can live comfortably on 1,000 gallons/month. They don’t even need to be particularly conservative to do that. We could probably survive well on 750, but let’s say 1,000 to be compassionate. So for a family of four you need 4,000 gallons.

Let’s be really, really compassionate for the poor. Set the price for the first 5,000 gallons at $10. Set the price for the next 1,000 at $10. That’s $20 for up to 6,000 gallons – enough to serve a family of 7.

Set the price for the next 1,000 at $20. The next 1,000 at $30 and so on. At 10,000 gallons you’re paying $150. By the time you get to 15,000 gallons (a typical amount of water used in one month watering a yard) the cost is now $550. Nobody gets a pass. Everybody pays.

You think people won’t stop using excess water once they get a $550 bill? I sure will. If they won’t (or don’t), raise the incremental price to $20 per thousand. I don’t know anyone who would spend $1,100/mo on water. If you have that kind of money more power to you – there aren’t going to be enough of you to significantly raise total usage and we can all get on with our lives without these self-serving, jackass politicians grandstanding on TV with all their new emergency regulations.

Car wash owners would have to run out and change their coin-ops from $2 to $10. Or $20. That will hurt business, but people who want to spend $10 or $20 can still wash their car now and then. And maybe the owners will figure out they need to recycle. Ditto for industrial users and the power company. Office building managers will have to figure out how to actually operate their sprinkler systems, or turn them off. And landscapers will have to stop guaranteeing their plants. But we’ll get over it.

It’s absurd to try and reduce the use of limited resources in every way imaginable except the one way that is best designed for managing limited resources – economics.

But this is the government. I wish I could be surprised.

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Don’t be alarmed now.
It’s just a spring clean for the May Queen.”

Just what the hell does that mean? I’ve wondered for more than 30 years.

But my real questions is, if Zep really still owns the rights to their music who sold Cadillac the rights to use it in their commercials?

From Rock Gods to Ringtones

Posted by Alan Wexelblat

As you’ve no doubt seen by now, the remaining members of Led Zeppelin have finally agreed to release their complete collection on iTunes, along with a special purchase item that bundles all 141 tunes. Verizon Wireless will also be offering Zep ringtones.

The band has famously refused most prior commercial uses of their music, with one amusing exception: Jack Black begged them for the rights to use “Immigrant Song”.

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Tuesday night I rode my motorcycle down to Fayetteville, just south of Atlanta, to attend Lisa Haneberg’s “2 Weeks 2 a Breakthrough” talk And talk about your breakthrough ideas – Lisa is riding her motorcycle across the country to promote her new book. I feel safe in saying this is the first time a business book has been promoted in such a way. And I’m certain it’s the first time ever by a woman. Pretty cool.

So what did I think about the talk? Lisa’s premise for this talk (and the book) is that little things matter. She relates in terms of chaos theory and the Butterfly Effect — which is a little new-agey — but the analogies are for inspiration more than analysis. The main idea is that continual forward progress, even in tiny increments, builds velocity and forward velocity leads to breakthroughs. To illustrate Lisa uses the consulting mainstay — the 2×2 matrix:

haneberg-graph

I think many of us spend our lives either in Dreamer or Stuck modes. Those with adult ADD tend to be in the Victim quadrant — confusing motion with progress and paddling furiously but getting nowhere. But where we all want to be is in the Peak Performer quadrant.

Lisa offered two points that stood out for me:

  • Breakthroughs happen in a social context: If you aren’t out actively promoting your goal or idea — discussing it regularly with friends, colleagues, and strangers and sharing your challenges, achievements, and objectives — you aren’t going to make any breakthroughs.
  • Introverts, no matter how smart, rarely make breakthroughs: Breakthroughs do not happen in front of your face. They happen in the connections and gaps and networks that emerge from constant forward action and focus. [Editor’s note: Following a comment from Lisa the above bullet point should read “Introverts, no matter how smart, rarely make breakthroughs until they break out of introverted behavior patterns …”]

I am a natural introvert. I’m more comfortable sitting alone in my office than I am in a crowd. Over the years I’ve worked hard at developing my extrovert capacity and done a lot of public speaking and presentations. But at my core I’m always more comfortable alone. That makes it easy for me to slip into the Stuck or Dreamer states.

And that’s a dangerous thing. It’s like exercise, or eating habits, or any other behavior you want to modify. What’s required is constant forward progress, even in small steps. If you stop, even for a little bit, getting started again is difficult. The inertia that builds is deadly. This is really the underlying principle behind all behavior modification, from Alcoholics Anonymous to Weight Watchers.

And so it is with Lisa’s program — simple, proven principles packaged in an easy-to-read program and supplemented with specific plans to help you move forward. More important, Lisa is building her own network and cult following. She asked each attendee to contact her by the end of the week and let her know how it was going, and if she could help, she would. Her goal for this tour is to help as many people reach a breakthrough as possible. Lisa has quite a few cities still to visit as she heads back west. Check her travel itinerary and go see her if you get the chance.

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The cover story for the May 3 issue of BusinessWeek was “World’s Most Innovative Companies” The big point was that the idea of running around as a multi-millionaire CEO chanting the word innovation as if it would magically alter your organization has now been recognized as another in the long line of stupid management fads.

[…] At the behest of an “ideation” consultant, he donned a blue superhero costume — cape, tights, and all — to put a little extra oomph behind the company’s innovation-boosting campaign. “I guess the thinking was that if you free people from the norm, you’ll unleash a torrent of creativity,” says Scott Anthony, president of Innosight, a consulting firm co-founded by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen. Anthony refused to name the company because it was a client. “Innovation Man led to a lot of laughs,” he quips, “but it didn’t lead to a lot of innovation.”

The same might be said for many gimmicks that companies have tried over the past few years in their attempts to boost growth. Suddenly trendy, innovation took on the flavor of an elixir, as companies raced to hire “chief innovation officers” and build innovation centers complete with purple-painted walls and conference rooms with funny names. Ford Motor Co. (F) boasted in a press release about its new Innovation Acceleration Center in Dearborn, Mich.: “It’s amazing what a room filled with radio-controlled cars, a 3-ft. Statue of Liberty made of Legos, and some comfy couches can do to stir the imagination.” […]

According to the article many CEOs, having failed at turning their billion-dollar behemoths into innovation engines, are experiencing “innovation fatigue.” I am shocked! Shocked, I say. Shocked to learn that innovation is not a commodity that can be ordered up like Papa John’s Pizza. Shocked to learn that innovation doesn’t exist on its own like, say, cotton.

It turns out that innovation is actually a result – something that happens after you change every aspect of your stodgy, corrupt, inefficient, overbearing, outsourced, badly managed global corporation where everyone spends 80 percent of their time in meetings, 20 percent of their time doing reports, 10 percent of their time fixing stuff someone else did wrong, and 5 percent of their time doing something valuable that a customer will actually pay for. (I know, that’s 115%. That’s called increasing productivity. Guess which 15% gets dropped when your average, everyday human realizes they can only give 100% today.)

And this turns out to be very, very hard.

But there are a few innovative companies. And they’re innovative because, well, because they just are. Because they actually do the hard things most companies can’t, or won’t, do. Because they focus on things far more tangible than “being innovative.”  Things like finding and hiring talented employees and then not stomping on them or burning them out. Things like actually listening to employees with good ideas. And things like not letting the accountants and lawyers decide about what does and does not get done.

Mostly, innovators just seem to understand that innovation is a fundamental result, that comes from getting the fundamentals of running a business right. What a shocker.