Monthly Archives: January 2010

The Wal-Mart Effect

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I was recently at a BBQ and stood by the grill for a while watching a football game on a flat panel TV.  It was tucked under the roof of a sort of gazebo which also housed the grill, a counter, and a sink.  I asked the owner of the house if he was concerned about the elements getting to the TV.  He said, “It’s like  $200 and it’s been there for a few months already.  Maybe I only get one season out of it.  An outdoor TV costs like 3 grand.”

This is classic Wal-Mart Effect.

If you know nothing about maintaining a mower, Wal-Mart has helped make that ignorance irrelevant: At $99.96, $122.00, or even $138.00, the lawn mowers at Wal-Mart are cheap enough to be disposable. Use one for a season, store it, and if you can’t start it the next spring (Wal-Mart won’t help you out with that), put it at the curb and go buy another one.  That kind of pricing changes not he just the economics at the low end of the lawn-mower market, it changes expectations of customers throughout the market.  Why would you buy a walk-behind mower from Snapper that costs $519.00?

Firefox Plugins

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I often hear that the success of the Firefox web browser is largely due to its open plug in architecture.  I also hear that you should limit the number of plug ins you use, since they slow down FF and cause it to crash.  I’m currently using 4 plug ins – AdBlock Plus, AVG Safe Search, Firebug, and Xmarks.

I don’t really know what AdBlock does, other than what I can gather from the name.

I’ll probably be removing AVG soon because I’m thinking of switching to Microsoft Security Essentials on my Windows machines.

I used Firebug once.

I like the Xmarks password syncing, but I’m not a big bookmarker.  I don’t think anyone really uses bookmarks.

I don’t seem to need plug ins at all.

The Italian Diet Problem

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I’m pretty sure the genetic cards have been stacked against me when it comes to diet.   Okay, maybe not genetic, exactly, but close enough.

Any real, useful, lasting diet I’ve ever heard of requires a certain amount of boredom. Dr. John Berardi says if you examine the diets of the world’s top performing athletes you’ll find over and over that they eat the same thing all the time.  They keep just a few boring, but balanced and nutritional, meals in rotation.  And they eat to live, they don’t live to eat.

Well that would just be a smack in the face to my heritage. In an Italian family when you’re sad, you eat. Happy? Eat. Birthday? Eat. Football game on TV? EAT! Columbus Day? Parade, then eat.  Death in the family? Pray, then eat. New Baby? Feed it!  It’s Tuesday? How ’bout a nice lasagna?

This is a losing battle.  And I have chocolate.