The Daily Funk
To those of you who heard my radio show tonight, you must've heard some considerable technical difficulties afoot. Indeed, it wasn't up to the usual quality of perfection in terms of cueing and other things - my apologies. I do hope you liked the music, and that is what it's really about, isn't it. That 1944-1946 Woody Herman band is astounding in my humble opinion.
To be honest I was a little tired - I'm getting up at 6:30 am now, as the daughter's bus arrives at our front door; a little convenience that was added to my daily mix as a result of them skirting away from us when we were only about 20 seconds away from the curb to meet them on Monday. That makes it easier for me to take an earlier bus to work, but now I gotta get readjusted again.
Pissed down rain all day long today. My bus was 26 minutes late getting me home, so I pretty much had to wolf down my meal, get in the car and roll out to the station in the soaking wet. Driving back was quite an adventure. People "are damn nice" (in the words of Ted Turner) until they get behind the wheel of a car - then they turn into demons. Tonight I held at 65-70 mph all the way home on the freeway - it had rained all day, and the roads were terrible. People were tailgaiting me through tight turns, making abrupt lane changes and trying to speed like they usually do. Only this time it's dark, visibility is poor, and the road is like glass. The rain is coming down in thick sheets. I'm saying to myself - perhaps you all want to die, but I do not - not tonight! I stayed my course.
Bill Gates: Pigeon Droppigns from the Think Tank
A couple of excerpts from "Business @ the Speed of Thought"
"Companies should spend less time protecting financial data from employees and more time teaching them to analyze and act on it. At McDonald's, until recently, sales data had to be manually "touched" several times before making its way to the people who needed it. Today McDonald's is well on the way to installing a new information system that uses PCs and Web technologies to tally sales at all its restaurants in real time. As soon as you order two Happy Meals, a McDonald's marketing manager will know. Rather than superficial or anecdotal data, the marketer will have hard, factual data for tracking trends."
"The Internet doesn't replace people. It makes them more efficient. By moving routine interactions to the Web and enabling customers to do some things for themselves, we've freed up our salespeople to do more meaningful things with customers. Smart companies will combine Internet services and personal contact in programs that give their customers the benefits of both kinds of interaction. You want to move pure transactions to the Internet, use online communication for information sharing and routine communication, and reserve face-to-face interaction for the activities that add the most value."
The leftist composer Cornelius Cardew (1936-1981) once summarized that the reason Marxists don't like Capitalism is that it always puts things before people. It seems to me that is what our society today is all about: things rule, people suck. While his tone is gregarious and perhaps falsely optimistic (this was written in 1999) in these passages he seems to be using computerization as means to divide the things from the people, although he justifies it under a thinly disguised illusory notion of improving efficiency.
People steal, people fudge data to serve their own ends through "manually touching" it, people cheat, people lie. Computers and the web are both the truth and the way. "Reserve face-to-face interaction for the activities that add the most value", that activity being litigation.