Thoughts In Grey

Brief notes

Facebook IPO day thoughts, mostly not about Facebook:

• The thing I love most about my current neighborhood? A farmer's market under my kitchen window every Friday morning. Always a nice way to start the day and the weekend, with plenty of salad stuff to last the week. When I do finally move, it'll probably be the thing I miss most.
• But this year I'm still here, the strawberries are in and the annual strawberry party is June 2nd!
• Weather's been varying between June Gloom and nice spring weather. Looks like some of the spring stuff in store for the weekend. Mountain bike is fixed up and ready to go!
• A good friend is going to Greece in a week. I fear she'll arrive just in time for the riots.
• I'm back on diet and exercise plan after a couple of weeks away from it. Already feel a little better. More on my journey to better health later.
• Speaking of which, just heard of my friend Toddo's scare this past week. Been there a year ago, though nowhere near as acute or immediately life-threatening a situation. Get well soon buddy!
• I shot some video of Emiko eating popcorn, potato chips and other non-cat items. She's weird, but I think it'll make for good viral cat videos. Maybe she can make me rich like Maru did for his feeders?
• Also have a bunch of helmet-cam video from my last ski trip that have to be edited and assembled. Coming soon to a blog near you.
• I'm not much of an Instagram fan, as I find most of the photos and the effects to be rather cheap and predictable. But I've enjoyed the stuff Black Diamond has been doing with their Spring Instagram contest that ended this week. Might have to play with it a bit and join in next time they do one. It's a really cool use of the medium and not bad marketing.
• Instagram though isn't high on my priority list as I've been back with my Nikon after about six months of doing virtually nothing more complex than some cat photos on my iPhone. It feels good to be working with a familiar piece of equipment. I may lust for that Leica, but been working with Nikons since I was about 14 and when I put my hands on one it just feels right. Sometimes that matters more than anything else.
• I went through a period a while back during which I was doing a lot of target shooting. These days the opportunities come up infrequently and the interest has waned, despite my friend Dennis's encouragement. Probably time to sell some stuff. The gear is better off in the hands of somebody who would use it, not rusting in my garage. Besides, I'd like a cleaner garage.
• As to Facebook, it's sort of predictable. Lots of stock came to market at the high end of the range, everybody knows there's a huge amount of supply 91 days out and in the end it barely held above offering price. This one was just too big to get much of a pop and those who tried to trade for one were sorely disappointed.
• My best guess is that Facebook will break below the offer price in the near term, though I doubt it'll quickly go the way of Groupon. There's just too much stock available to be sold in the immediate future and the valuation is ridiculous (thanks Vitaliy for the always-welcome analysis).
• I've heard a lot of bitching about the troubles with order execution, threats of lawsuits, etc. Really people, loss of liquidity for a variety of reasons has always been a risk. You should have learned that one in '87, and certainly should have been aware of the possibility since the "Flash Crash" a couple of years ago. If you can't deal with that risk, you shouldn't be in the market.  Liquidity and rapid execution are not guaranteed and never have been.

Making changes, some big, some small

Posted this on Facebook earlier, and repeating here.

I guess a bunch of people made a whole bunch of resolutions for the new year. I've never been into that, but here's some stuff that's changing right now or in the immediate future.

1. I'm going to say "no" a whole lot more. I've allowed myself to get way too pissed off way too many times as I've tried to adjust preferences to suit others around me, either because I said yes when I shouldn't have, or got overly enthusiastic about something or somebody when I should have known better to begin with.
2. In that vein, decided to skip the planned trip to Steamboat Springs. It's not really one of my favorite places to ski, and spending a lot of money on transportation, tickets, etc. just because the accommodations are free makes no sense. Better to save all that money and go someplace I want to rather than someplace that somebody else thinks I'll love.
3. I've listed both my Snowbird timeshare weeks for sale. Having large units doesn't make sense for my life anymore, if it ever did. I love that mountain, but it would be better to maybe buy a week or two in a small studio that suits my needs rather than spending the annual maintenance dollars on the bigger units, then struggling to find people who want to fill it up.
4. While I'm at it, I will be giving up one of my Snowbird lockers. In the old days when you could dash to the airport with a carry-on and 20 minutes to spare, it kind of made sense to have a locker full of clothes waiting. You can't do that anymore and I'm skiing other places more often, so want stuff accessible at home. I'll keep a locker for powder-specific gear I only use in Utah and check a duffel bag for the rest.
5. Changing my workout routine completely since it wasn't working. When I ski next year, I want to feel powerful again.
6. When my term as president of the Los Angeles Chapter is up at the end of June, I'll be backing out of UCLA Anderson Alumni for a while. After a dozen years of being involved and two years as president of the chapter, it's time to take a break. The chapter needs new blood and I need a new challenge.
7. Also, for the first time since graduating, not taking an active part in running my college reunion. I just don't get that much out of my association with Columbia anymore. Might be different if I were on the east coast, but it just isn't all that relevant where I am right now.
8. Looking for a job working for somebody full-time. I'm a great project manager but I'm really not much of a salesperson. Spending so much of my time on business development just really saps my enthusiasm. Once again, gotta live the life that's right for me, and I'm just not a salesperson.
9. HBO, Showtime and a bunch of other premium channels have been gone for a while because I couldn't justify the cost for the little I watched them. The DVR has been gone for a month and I don't miss it either. Now I find myself wondering "do I really need a TV at all?" Certainly, I don't need two of them! My office TV is about to be history along with about $10 a month in TW Cable fees.
10. Part of the cable TV savings have been invested in a Kindle and a new reading lamp. Much better use of my time I think. Which is a nice way of saying: less TV, more reading.
11. Cutting back on the red wine. I still love a nice red, but those nice reds do seem to have a way of finding themselves and their calories tacked onto my waist.
12. Some people are just pure poison and need to not be part of my life anymore. They've been pissing me off endlessly lately and leaving me in a rotten mood, which has in turn been poisoning friendships with others.
13. Done with Foursquare. The supposed benefits don't seem to exist. My friends know where to find me. People who aren't my friends don't need to.
14. Leaving my cellphone home a lot more, or at least turning it off.  A time may come very soon when I again don't have a choice, but right now I do.
15. Seriously working on my photography. As I've gotten more and more proficient with PhotoShop CS5, it's become more and more fun. Maybe a gallery show sometime in the future? There's a new artists-coop gallery nearby that might just be worth being part of in the future.

I think 15 is enough for now.

-mg

Weekend notes

• The report on The Age of Denial in New Scientist is fascinating. Thanks to Barry for passing it along.
   
• One of the most common misconceptions echoed in some of the comments is that if something is false, it will be dis-proven and by extension, everything that can't be dis-proven is fact. This is the veneer that many deniers of various sorts cling to. In fact many, probably most, statements can't be proven true or false. Say I told you there is intelligent life on Venus. Prove me right OR wrong. You can't. What if I made the same statement about the U.S. Congress? You'd still be hard pressed either way.
   
• Yesterday I commented about junk mail. Today the junk phone has started in earnest, with a robocall from mostly-forgotten bloated actor and activist Ed Asner. I wonder who is really that desperate? (I didn't stay on the line long enough to find out.) Ed Asner? He's supposed to be the voice that will influence somebody in 2010?
   
• I realize that due to a quirk in law, my participation in the "no call" list run by the FTC doesn't restrict political parties, campaigns and some other "special" groups. But it doesn't prohibit them from honoring it if they choose to and it would probably behoove them to choose to. Calling people who have clearly expressed an interest in not being called is only going to piss us off. There is no more certain way of ensuring that I won't support you than hitting me with a "junk call."
  
  As Coach Wooden once said: "Consider the rights of others before your own feelings and the feelings of others before your own rights." These robocallers may have the right, but would do well to consider my feelings on the matter first.
  
  
• My brother's garbage disposal jammed on broken glass and could not be revived. We replaced it with a simple drain that also opened up lots of extra storage space under the sink. What's so difficult about just tossing stuff in the trash can anyway?
   
• My experiment with Foursquare is over. I have been still playing around a bit since my last comment on the matter and it was interesting to try, but until I see some utility to it -- either because my friends are on there or they build in new capabilities that provide capabilities that are interesting -- I'd rather spend my time and bandwidth on other things. For now I've killed the app on my iPhone and moved on.
   
• My brother's going to both Europe and Asia this summer. From a currency perspective, it's the best time in years. But somehow I'm not particularly drawn to either. Too many trails I haven't ridden and rivers I haven't run, and they're all just a few hours from home.
   
• Lazy Sunday. Cleaning up a bit.

mg

Utah Roadtrip: Images of Retrenchement

I wasn't really thinking about a photo log of the Great Utah Roadtrip of January 2010, but somewhere around Barstow, the thought came to me and it seemed like a nice way of documenting what's going on out there right now.

As I drove through, the word that most came to mind was "retrenchment." Hotels closing, housing developments being scaled back, even casinos shut down entirely.

Among "green" circles in Los Angeles I'm constantly hearing about the need to get people to break the cycle of overconsumption, waste creation, water overuse, etc. Get just an hour outside of Los Angeles and you find that the cycle is bending fast, if not completely broken. Retrenchment and doing with less is what you see everywhere. Perhaps not enough to satisfy the "green" desires, but enough to suggest that our economic problems are far from over.

Click through on any of the images to get to the full set of photos on Flickr.

 

A long time ago, a water park in Newberry Springs, halfway between LA and Las Vegas seemed like a good idea. It's been abandoned for some time, a victim of higher speeds and maybe a faster pace of life. The water rights that made it possible are most certainly more valuable elsewhere today. It probably hasn't helped that the Vegas hotels now all have their own water attractions, so a stopover at a water park just no longer makes much sense, if it ever really did.

It stands today as a reminder from the past that not every boom has a happy ending. Sometimes the ending is just abandoned structures in the desert where somebody's dreams once grew, however briefly.

 

Zzyzx Road is a mainstay along the road to Vegas. Named for a resort at nearby Soda Springs started by an eccentric real-estate scammer, radio evangelist and would-be doctor who tried to use government land as his own. Today, the only thing remaining in the area are some of the old resort buildings now owned by Cal State University.