If you use Gmail as your primary email provider, you had a problem yesterday. Gmail went down for a lot of the day. From the thunder reverberating around the web, Twitter, and elsewhere, one would have thought the digital world had ended. Strangely, I use a Gmail account for my personal mail and never noticed a thing since I was accessing that mail via Blackberry yesterday. Aside from yet another example of how these machines are evil, sentient beings, the outage raises a bigger point in my mind. Continue reading
Tag Archives: advice
The Blue Grotto
There was a report last week that The Blue Grotto, one of Italy‘s most-visited tourist locations had been fouled by raw sewage. The suspicion was that some local mafiosi had dumped the waste they’d been paid to haul away in the water rather than pay the dumping fees to increase their profits. Fortunately, in the few intervening days, the smell has gone away and the early reports may have been wrong. But the entire incident got me thinking anyway about how many business people do the same sort of dumb things. Continue reading
Filed under Helpful Hints, Reality checks
The Best Ingredients
Why does food taste so much better in a restaurant? I’m not talking about really complicated dishes prepared with weird components. Even plain, grilled fish or a simple plate of spaghetti and clams can taste way better than what you or I can prepare even though no complicated cooking techniques are involved. Heck, make a fire, throw on a steak, season it a bit, pay attention – dinner, right? And what does this have to do with business? Continue reading
Filed under food, Helpful Hints, Thinking Aloud


