One of the daily stops on my highly exclusive internet routine.

In 2006 I returned from an internet/media hiatus of two years I came to discover there were new words like "blog", "myspace" and "facebook." Huh?

A friend of mine explained that facebook was an exclusive networking communication site for college students only. It sounded cool so I joined up and started reconnecting and looking up old friends, some of whom I would never have thought about again.

A very uncomfortable phenomenon that I had to come to terms with was that my nicely partitioned world of relationships were smashing together as I saw how friends of mine in different groups were interconnected. "How could he know her!?" This uncomfortable phenomenon resurfaced when my friend's mom joined facebook, then my dad, and so on. Again, I learned to accept it and be alright.

Still uncomfortable is the fact that what I put on facebook will be looked up by future potential employers. Also uncomfortable is the fact that the marketing engines in facebook know the musical artists I like, the region in which I live, my age, gender, etc. and all are geared to target me. I really do not like to be categorized and that is what it tries to do. Let me also mention that I hate ads that try to appeal to 24 year old single males.

Another uncomfortable scenario:

"Hey buddy, I have been on a few dates with this girl. I think she likes me but I am not sure. I really like her though." I may want to tell a friend.

"Oh yeah, do you have a picture?" He would respond.

"No...oh wait, yeah check her facebook page. Log in as me and you can see her pictures." Really, who has not done that? Creeps. :)

Lastly, it is so uncomfortable to read when someone has a status update that is personal. Whether happy or sad, introspective or depressed; there has got to be a better place to share the emotionally sensitive and personal things in my life. Where can I go to get good relationship advice from people I know and trust without letting the whole world know? Facebook is great for somethings, but what about everything else?

Well, there is a better place. http://Spokt.com. It is group communication, where the content is only visible to those invited. You can share pictures, videos, stories, quetions, comments or polls with only the people you want to. For the free hubs (groups) the ads are small and non-intrusive and the paid hubs have no ads at all.

The designers of the site always work to keep it simple, streamlined and easy to use. Simple, comfortable, private, secure communication with those you really want to stay in touch with. Check it out:

Visit Spokt.com to to keep in touch with your family or friends privately online.

If you want to win an iPod touch, check this out after you look at the first link!

Contest details here: Spokt.com iPod Touch Give-Away!

Daylight Savings

Happy daylight savings, or non-daylight savings day!

Despite the potential this topic has for cost/benefit analysis, this is not the subject matter of this post. This post is about relative directional references.

"Spring forward, fall back." This phrase is supposed to help me remember which way (earlier or later) to move the clock. For some reason, it just confuses me because time is frequently referred to with contradicting relative directions.

For example, if you want to go back in time, you are referring to the past. However, if you want to push a meeting back, you are likely postponing it to some time in the future. So which does "fall back" refer to? Do I set the clock to be one hour less, or one hour more (numerically speaking)? When I figure it out, what trite saying can help me remember how to decode the first saying?

In the fall, I was reminded, you set the clock one hour later. This means you get to sleep an extra hour. How about, "Fall asleep again, you changed your clock" and "Spring out of bed sleepy head."

I think this could work for me or I could move to Arizona and avoid the problem altogether.

Tennis Courts

I played tennis the other night with three friends. The courts at which we chose to play charge money if the man with the clipboard comes by. I had heard the rate was $5 and I assumed that was $5 per court. He came around and we found out that it was $5 per person. I question the incentives that this pricing structure creates.

The scarce resource marked for allocation is the courts, or court time. Consumers are assumed to maximize utility. When I consider my personal utility derived from tennis, things like number of hits, running around, games played, serves hit, etc. All of these metrics are reduced by playing doubles instead of singles. When we play doubles, we pay $20 per court, but singles is $10 per court. Either way I am paying $5, so whats the big deal? I get more utility from playing singles (keeping competition constant) so doubles gives me less bang for buck individually, and we are paying collectively more for the court.

My incentive structure is to have the same four people and use two courts to play singles. So due to the pricing structure, the incentive is to use more courts with fewer people which makes the resource more scarce per person. Stinking public operated tennis courts with their poor pricing decisions.

Unless for some reason they want to encourage singles over doubles play, or bank on first-timers or non-utility maximizing consumers, I think they need to evaluate their system.

Pirates Loot

I saw a headline for this article:

http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=4515811&campaign=rss&source=ESPNHeadlines

I realize that the loser in this case is the fan and the player. I am neither of these, so perhaps this is where my opinion differs from those that are.

What is so bad about trying to make a profit? I mean, a baseball franchise is a business. Businesses is most cases have the objective to maximize profit. It is funny how the commissioner has to go and tell people that they are not trying to make a profit. Well, let me correct myself, he has to say the owners are not pocketing the profit. Still, if they were, that is a business decision. Right?

If I start a business and want to pay myself more, if there are profits I can put them back into the business toward growth or I can take it as my salary and do what I want. One way the business will grow and make me profit later, one way is for short run gain.

I cede that the accounting model above is simple. I understand that baseball has unions and rules and regulations and image and on and on and many people are not concerned with the profitability of the team, but with wins and bragging rights. But still, if you do not like the management and the way they run the business, perhaps it is time to find a team that you do like the management for - or stop enabling the management to make decisions you do not like by funding the team.

Clothes

For the first time since sophomore year in high school, I had to purchase pants with a waist size less than 34 inches. I have consistently selected 34 waist for about 10 years.

Sometimes the 34s were loose or tight depending on the label. My current jeans may still just be manufacturer variance so I am not celebrating about a thinning waist just yet. My purchase of loose 33 inch jeans did cause me to wonder about the economics behind why some 34s are bigger and some are smaller. With such an objective measure, the idea of longer and shorter 34 inches seems absurd, but for some reason it is most definitely the case. Why else are there fitting rooms? If you knew a 34 X 30 would fit you perfectly, you would not need to try it on.

My original thought was that in order to gain customer satisfaction and loyalty, they may add some fabric and call 34 inches 33. Who would not want to shop at the place where they fit into 33 inch jeans? However, my friend reminded me of the marginal cost of fabric and if you are adding an extra inch to each pair of jeans, that is going to cost a lot of money.

Later we went to a relatively cheap clothing store where I barely fit into an adult large shirt. I typically wear medium. She said that cheap clothes are often made smaller and with thinner fabric. Apparently the cost saving method is to overstate the size of the clothes.

I just see this whole game theory, inter-temporal model that predicts the equilibrium between cost of fabric and customer loyalty benefit. It is hard to measure the profitability of appealing to customer psychology or how long that would last. It is also hard to know how many cheaters there would be in the game. All the while the social benefits of having a standardized system are dwindling.

Perhaps more experienced shoppers can enlighten me. What would be some other costs or benefits to understating or overstating clothing sizes?

Circumference of an Ellipse

I was thinking about the integral of a balls flight and wondered if it was equivalent of force. I do not think it is, but the distance travel path would be. Then I thought about it and I do not know how to measure that.

This led me to look into measuring the circumference of an ellipse and divide by two. The circumference of a circle is diameter * pi but an ellipse does not have a diameter. So I looked online for a simple formula and found there is not. But this website is quite thorough in the different options.

Here

Cheating Excel

Sometimes I feel like I am cheating excel. I feel sneaky about it and even a little bad. You see, the pivot table is a useful tool for creating charts from table data and formatting the information into quite a lovely little box.

The problem is, pivot tables make the spreadsheet heavy and bulky in terms of memory. I copy and past special the values and formats from the pivot table onto blank cells, then delete the pivot table. So I make the tool do all the grunt work, then skip out on the bulkiness and take all the credit for myself.