Lenovo registration fail

Why, oh, why does Lenovo require a salutation for their products?

It's none of their frickin' business my gender, marital status, or profession.
Further, they get it wrong. In standard English usage, Miss is not an abbreviation.

More on kid safety

Victor Infante's wrote poignantly in his Friday Pop Culture Notebook<^[1] about Jeff Barnard. Jeff, as many of you remember, died a year-and-a-half ago, leaving not only silence where his voice had been, but also a drought of energy from the rest of us. Jeff worked hard and, in the process, got the rest of us to work hard.

It wasn't about competition, but about conversation. You know how it is: a gathering of friends brings out the best of everyone. One good idea sparks a half-dozen more. Further, if someone provides an insight, you cannot not see it afterwards. The world has a lot of great people who can fill our lives with magic and a lot of others who seek to fill our lives with fear.

Among marketing types, there's a hot trend with QR codes. These squared ink blots, Quick Response codes, provide your smartphone with detailed information about a website, contact information, or other something else of questionable utility. I have one on my business card, mostly as a conversation starter. It contains my contact information.

It was inevitable that someone would combine this marketing device with our fears. Toward that end, we now have SafetyTat. As we learn, if we turn our backs for even a moment, we can lose our kid, but a tattooed QR code can

These folks have not only registered their trademark with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, but they have a patent on it, too.

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n.b. Update: Victor send me a link to the article.  Here's a clip of it from the Telegram's Friday e-Edition.

[caption id="attachment_3431" align="aligncenter" width="225" caption="Click to enbiggen"][/caption]

Bankruptcy as a competitive strategy

Let me see if I understand this. AMR, the parent company of American Airlines, is declaring bankruptcy because it's the right time. All of its competitors have already done so. In the process, they shed expensive debt and pesky labor contracts, resulting in lower operating costs.

The Wall Street Journal reports that [t]he company decided a filing now would be from a relative position of strength by avoiding a tangled relationship with creditors who might want to control how the company restructures itself. Unlike many other companies that have sought bankruptcy protection in recent years, AMR didn't file for Chapter 11 with a reorganization plan in place supported by creditors. Instead, AMR must develop its plan during bankruptcy proceedings.

Filing for Chapter 11 reorganization will cost AMR millions of dollars in legal fees. The corporation, however, has $4B in cash.

Meanwhile, the company's employees are still bitter about the millions in stock bonuses paid to the executives who made lead the company to $10B in losses in the past decade. Granted, AMR stock plummeted 84% today. It may take a while for new AMR CEO Thomas Horton's 300,000 shares to be worth his effort to trim $1B from the the employees' pension fund.

[Update 11/30/11: upon further reflection, I realized that AMR shares will become worthless as the result of the bankruptcy and reorganization. As a result, the executives who received stock grants that vested after this filing will be out of luck.

[Update 12/1/11: The New York Times editorializes that  Mr. Arpey may be the only airline C.E.O. who regarded bankruptcy not simply as a financial tool, but more important, as a moral failing. Arpey held out against bankruptcy. When AMR's board overruled him, he left, with no severance and his stock holdings nearly worthless.

“Our bankrupt colleagues all made net profits, good net profits last year, and we didn’t,” Mr. Arpey told me a few months ago. “And you can mathematically pinpoint that to termination of pensions, termination of retiree medical benefits, changes of work rules, changes in the labor contracts. That puts a lot of pressure on our company, not to be ignored.”

Why we love the web

You wouldn't be surprised that someone who invents this:

via bookofjoe: Nose Stylus

would have more to say about it, along with a video of a guy in a tub with the thing.

Finger-nose stylus for touchscreen technology from Dominic Wilcox on Vimeo.

While you have the image stuck in your head all day tomorrow, I know that you'll be thanking me.

New example for the definition of ambiguity

"There is now a new way to tuck into Scotland's national dish, after a firm launched haggis-flavoured chocolates." -- BBC via bookofjoe: Haggis-flavored chocolates

After

Before

So, now, Facebook is telling me what I can't post.

I tried to put a link to the Rolling Stone top 100 albums of the decade on my Facebook wall:

I get this:

So, now I have to know what might be bothersome to someone someplace for some reason?

Afraid to invest in the stock market. Have we got a deal for you?

OK, so the Dow and other indices have had a pretty good stretch lately. Nevertheless, we're still jittery, wondering where we can invest and hope to get the kinds of returns that we were seeing just a couple of years ago.
Well, ingenuity to the rescue. Why invest in risky ventures such as invention, development, manufacturing, or sales? Go to where the big money is: lawsuits.
You can invest in funds that back lawsuits. The New York Times article: reports on Juris Capital, a Chicago firm backed by two hedge funds:

Juris typically invests $500,000 to $3 million in a case, Mr. Desser said. He would not identify the company’s backers, but said that “on the portfolio as a whole, our returns are well in excess of 20 percent per year.” He added, “We’re certainly beating the market.”

These aren't your Lionel Hutz ambulance-chasing cases, but well-financed ventures doing God's work. As Anthony J. Sebok, a professor at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York, noted:

If the claims are valid, then they may benefit from being litigated more effectively because the lawyers have more resources. “Having funding available for cases that are good cases, cases that from a God’s-eye point of view, so to speak, should’ve been brought, is a good thing,” Mr. Sebok said.

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via ./.