Nuggets o’ wisdom for Mouseketeers
Still recovering from a lovely trip to Disneyland last week. Here are a few things I seem to forget for long road trips.
Ain’t no pillow like your pillow. If you’re going by car, take it.
If you’re going to be walking much, take something your feet will feel good in. I had a pair of old sandals and ran in them on the first day. My feet were bruised and achy the rest of the trip.
If you’re staying in a nearby hotel, take the shuttle to the attractions, even if self-parking costs less. Unless you get there on your Magic Morning day way ahead of everybody else, self-parking takes at least half an hour and often up to an hour to get into the park. Your hotel/ART shuttle will drop you off as close to the front gate as you can get with less waiting.
Smallish meals for a child cost $8. Get over it. We brought in food with us most days, but beef jerkey and fruit don’t give you the calories you need. We tried PB&J and had success with that one day, but most other days the sandwiches were smashed and unappetizing. Just budget extra money for meals and pack lighter.
There are some sweet beaches off Moss Cove and Pearl Street in Laguna Beach.
Fast passes can save over an hour in line, especially on popular rides on hot days like Splash Mountain. We rode this twice (and had tickets for a third go-round, but the ride was closed for maintenance) and walked past at least an hour long line both times. It felt great to pass group after group and hear them say “How are they doing that? Fast passes. Oh, we should have done that.” A little planning can help you beat the lines when it counts.
Big Thunder Mountain Railroad was a quick fix for our roller-coaster needs. The line was never more than 5 minutes for some reason.
posted on Thu, 14 May 2009 at 09:39 | permanent link | view comments
Old Sesame Street had some class. I miss those guys…
(20 s.)
This is the version I’m teaching my kids, set to Bach’s Fugue No. 2, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II.
194 South 400 West (The Gateway) Salt Lake City, Utah 84101
Last night I had a great meal in a quiet restaruant. I’m pretty hard to please (though at the same time, I’m not picky about what I eat), but Biaggi’s did a good job, especially for a large chain. I’m giving this review mainly because of our server, Albert.
If you go to Biaggi’s, ask for Albert. If I were giving service reviews, Albert gets my highest rating. I’ve never had a better waiter. Ever. He was perfectly attentive, never troublesome, never disdainful (I’m astounded at how many servers harbor some kind of pent-up resentment toward their patrons and mask it poorly). He made me feel like I was in the presence of a good friend (and he called us “my friends” several times—nice trick) whose chief concern was my pleasure at this meal.
Albert offered several recommendations, which we took. He was dead-on. If you have Albert as your server, yield to his judgement! It may also help if you bring him some Bundaberg Ginger Beer. He seemed to like what we brought. Mention my name.
Here’s what we ordered:
Butter Squash Ravioli: This was a sweet dish, but savory enough to keep interest.
Chilean Sea Bass: Served over a bed of sautéed spinach, over garlic potatoes, over a roasted pepper cream sauce, this was my favorite dish of the night. Highly recommended if you like fish.
Chicken Piemontese: a little strongly flavored for my taste, but that’s the definition of this dish. The potatoes were beautiful.
Would I eat here again? Yes.
How eagerly am I looking forward to doing that? I’d give it a month. I’d go back next week if Albert were my server.
This is my first attempt at imitating Jessica Hagy’s work. Well, I liked it, anyway…
On having one’s performance managed
Stefan Stern posted an article in response to Bob Sutton’s piece entitled “Why Mangement is Not a Profession”. Both articles have important insights into management-as-a-profession (of which I’ve been a constant critic). Sutton writes:
There is remarkably little conversation about whether [MBA school] teaches people to do a better job of helping and serving clients, employees, or anyone else. Yet sociologists will tell you that a defining feature of a profession is that members are trained and socialized to put their client’s interests AHEAD of their own. That is what lawyers and doctors promise to do before they start to practice, for example.
In contrast, the societal message — and it is often quite explicit — is that the most effective managers take as much money as possible for themselves from their clients. There isn’t even the pretense of putting other’s needs ahead of your own in most talk about management education. Look at your cell phone or credit card contract if you don’t believe me, or think about what it means to succeed in a hedge fund or private equity firm — it is all about managers taking as much for themselves as possible, and leaving clients (and in some cases employees) with as little as possible. The people who run these firms will protest, but look at the financial structure.
Ouch. Stern’s article examines the issue from the side of the professional who is being “managed”:
Richard Sennett, a professor at the London School of Economics, argues that many professional people have lost “a sense of craft” in their day-to-day work. They are being judged according to their position in an occupational hierarchy, not by what it is about their work that makes them feel professional: their dedication to their craft.
“We have misunderstood the idea of quality, and how people go about doing quality work,” he says. “A most important motivator for professionals is being able to do a good job for its own sake, rather than just to meet a target. If you take that ability away from professionals they get very unhappy.”
You haven’t heard enough about the AIG bailout
Why are AIG’s counterparties getting paid back in full, to the tune of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars?
For the answer to this question, we need to go back to the very first decision to bail out AIG, made, we are told, by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, then-New York Fed official Timothy Geithner, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke last fall. Post-Lehman’s collapse, they feared a systemic failure could be triggered by AIG’s inability to pay the counterparties to all the sophisticated instruments AIG had sold. And who were AIG’s trading partners? No shock here: Goldman, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, UBS, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Barclays, and on it goes. So now we know for sure what we already surmised: The AIG bailout has been a way to hide an enormous second round of cash to the same group that had received TARP money already.
posted on Tue, 17 Mar 2009 at 22:06 | permanent link | view comments
Hauser’s Law: raising taxes doesn’t help
The five dollar question being kicked around (and already decided upon) is this: “Will raising tax rates on the rich increase revenues, as Barack Obama hopes?”
[W. Kurt] Hauser uncovered the means to answer these questions definitively. In a Wall Street Journal article in 1993, he stated that “no matter what the tax rates have been, in postwar America tax revenues have remained at about 19.5 percent of GDP.”
This article is updated with recent data through 2007 (alternate link). Politically, of course, you can’t just let those dang rich people off that easily, but if you care about results more than political points, you have to find ways to raise the GDP.
posted on Sun, 15 Mar 2009 at 22:07 | permanent link | view comments
Amid the daily reports of bank failure, there is a little bright spot: the FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) is doing its job quietly and effectively. Smaller banks that have failed because they took on too much risky debt (as so many banks did in the past several years—shame on them), are being repossessed by the FDIC, cleaned up and sold to new owners at a bargain who will hopefully run them with better sense than the previous owners did.
posted on Sun, 15 Mar 2009 at 21:44 | permanent link | view comments
This is how Mark and I spent Presidents Day this year, and how we should spend it every year.
Here’s an alternative link for those of you who’ve had trouble viewing it:
posted on Wed, 18 Feb 2009 at 16:12 | permanent link | view comments
…unless you think about it:
posted on Thu, 22 Jan 2009 at 22:52 | permanent link | view comments