Ponderings 9/17/14

A few weeks ago I received a few signs to blog about sauce. At every DSO annual retreat (www.dsoglobal.org) we eat at least one meal at Taco Bell. This year I grabbed the pictured sauce packet. Then my buddy Mark told me that he was excited for some actual sauce-related ponderings. So that got me thinking about sauce and what makes a sauce like Sriracha great. (cartoon on Sriracha sauce)

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1A. What makes a sauce have the potential to be great?

A. It adds moisture – We have a lot of dry foods and sauces add moisture to make things easier to eat.

B. Its taste immediately complements most foods – Sriracha, Cholula hot sauce, and other favorites can be placed on many food dishes. Sauces must contain ingredients that people can put on more than one type of cuisine.

C. It has a personality – You can find similar versions of all sauces. But the ones that become popular have personality and urban myths behind them.

D. It is marketed to college students and willing early adopters – You need to cater to undergrad students by getting your sauce in restaurants that target them.  Once students like a particular sauce they get hooked and start trying the sauce on various foods. Sauces allow students to be lazier while cooking.  

E.  It has excessive sodium – Americans love salt. Sauces that contain a lot of sodium are addictive and can be preserved well.

1B. If you want to extend past the sauce market and win the condiment market you need a fatty hook with low fat options. Today Mayonnaise is still the best selling condiment in the US.  

1C. Putting sauces on food can be taken as an insult in some countries. Would you feel insulted if someone put sauce on your food before tasting your food? Would you feel insulted if someone put sauce on your food after tasting your food?

2. When is the last time you went to the movie theater?

3. This week I was a juror on a short civic trial. Here are some thoughts on the process:

A. Peremptory challenges (Read this link for a basic overview) allow each lawyer to excuse jurors without stating a cause. They are not supposed to be used to discriminate for sex or race but without needing a cause what stops them from being used to discriminate?  

B. Counties should let you schedule your Jury duty each year in addition to the random selection process.  

C. Lawyers make enough money. They should have a fixed fee payable to the court that is used to provide jurors with bagels and coffee. If you choose to represent yourself you don’t have to pay the bagel fee.

D. Even if jurors try to take their role seriously there are major incentives to deliberate as quickly as possible so that jurors can return to their daily commitments. This creates an environment that reinforces group think and makes it hard to dissent.   

4. Ebola is spreading at an uncontrollable rate and needs more attention from the entire global community. Here’s a good paper that shows the scary reality.

5. I often avoid saying hi to someone that I think I know or someone that I know but haven’t seen for a long time. But those "Hi's" go a long way and let you take a nice stroll on memory lane. 

Note to self: Always say hi.    

6. People always debate which coast is the best to watch sports. Here’s how the debate looks across the major sports:

Some arguments for each coast:

• The West Coast lets you see the end of most weekday games.
• The East Coast lets you see the start of more games and it is likely easier to stay up late vs. leave work early.
• It is really hard to catch EPL games especially the early games on the west coast.  
• Long or late lunch breaks on the west coast are great for Champions league games.
• Everybody can watch all weekend NFL Games but it is harder to make Sunday brunch plans on the west coast.
• No one is watching the MLB early weekday games in stadiums or on TV.

7. This week’s throwback pondering: The last time I blogged about Taco Bell was on 3/13/11.  

In that post, I created a rule that I would always try to live in areas where the ratio of Taco Bells to Farmer Markets is >1.

Unfortunately my last 2 homes have failed to meet the criteria so it may be time to move away from health conscious people or change the rule.  

• Seattle, WA: 10 Taco Bells & ~12 farmer markets – 0.83 Ratio fails to meet criteria.  

• Cambridge, MA: 1 Taco Bell & ~5 farmer markets – 0.2 Ratio fails to meet criteria.

Ponderings 9/11/14

1. Apple’s announced its new smart watch this week. As the smart watch market grows I hope companies have thought about these issues:

A. Not showing unread e-mails. I am already obsessive when I see the unread number on my phone. I definitely don’t need another reminder.

B. Single vibration/notification – Making sure I am not getting vibrations from my watch and phone for every notification I get. Especially worried about this in meeting rooms.

C. Being fairly waterproof.

D. Being smooth – So that folks who insist on tracking their basketball/soccer movement data don’t cut me with their watch.

2. “What if?” by Randall Munroe, the creator of the xkcd comic, is a collection of “serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions”. He turned a blog into a book and its fantastic. Unfortunately a book will never be made about this blog since this is “unscientific rambling to questions you don’t have” and none of my ponderings have stick figure illustrations. (Send me a note if you would like to volunteer to illustrate these)

3. Serena Williams is the greatest tennis player of our generation not Roger Federer.

4. We need to stop over reacting to NFL games.  I know it is hard to maintain perspective when there are only 16 games in a season and an entire week in between games to overreact. But here’s the truth: If you are 1-0 you likely won’t win the Super bowl and if you are 0-1 you still can win the Super Bowl.

5. Many of us have been hypocritical about how the NFL handled the Ray Rice situation.  Without getting into whether the NFL should or should not punish players outside of the US legal system, we should make sure we are not being hypocrites like I was. I picked Ray Rice late in one of my fantasy football drafts thinking that he is a good football player and he only has a 2 week suspension. Just for a chance to win ~$200 (much smaller than the stakes for the league and the Ravens), I picked him.  I am embarrassed at how narrow-minded I was. If we don’t want to boycott (I love watching football but the league has some serious issues), we should at least make sure our fantasy rosters only include the players we are proud to root for.

6. Olive Garden’s overall sales have been dropping for some time but all I see them doing is offering more free pasta.

Here are 2 of their recent promotions:

A. “Buy one , Take one” – When you buy an entrée at Olive Garden you can take an additional one home.

B. Giving out 1000 passes to eat 7 weeks of unlimited pasta for $100. (Olive Garden already offers a 9.99 all you can eat pasta deal each year so you would need to go to Olive Garden 10 times in 7 weeks to beat that deal)

The 2nd promotion definitely built buzz. But I don’t think any of these are going to help sales when the best thing about an Olive Garden meal are the bread sticks and the mint. You can get 240 of those delicious Andes mints for $11 at Costco (Only 7*7*3=147 mints if you do 3 meals at Olive Garden every day for the 7 week promotion).  

7. When did attending a weekday NBA basketball game become so expensive?   

8. On #TBT I decided to take a look at some of my old ponderings..

A. From the first pondering post: Why does February have 28 days? We have 7 months with 31 days, 4 with 30 and 1 with 28. It could have been 7 months with 30 and 5 months with 31. With leap year making 6 months of 30 and 6 months of 31.

B. In December 2010, I ranted about emoticons. Its 2014 and its probably time to control f emoticon and replace all with emoji and repost it. (Good idea Maja)

C. Finally, I haven’t talked about Apple since May 2012. In that post I wanted and still want Apple to let you change Siri’s voice to Samuel L Jackson, Lil John, Morgan Freeman, and Dick Vitale’s voice. Lil John would be the default so that no one would get upset when Siri didn’t understand what you were requesting and responded with” “What”.

Ponderings 9/4/14

1. In the past few weeks there have been several fights about seat reclining. The recent surge in fights has been caused by a new product called Mr. Knee defender. The product allows you to prevent the seat in front of you from reclining.  

Recent fight: http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/aug/26/plane-diverted-as-passengers-fight-over-seat-reclining

Just like sharing arm rests on a flight there are no clear rules for seat reclining. Here’s my stance:

A.    Knee defenders shouldn't be allowed on airlines. (That said major kudos to the person who invented them)
B.    When you purchase a seat you purchase the right to recline.
C.    Just because you have a right doesn't mean you have to use it. Look at the situation and make a call on whether you recline or not.
D.    In general only recline when cabin lights are dimmed and if you want to recline at other points be respectful to the person behind you.
E.     Airlines suck and keep squeezing customer service for higher margins. We need to find ways to channel our anger at them and be willing to pay premiums for airlines that actually emphasize customer service. 

2. Every global basketball competition reminds me that Pau Gasol is an amazing player. Bulls fans should be excited for a healthy Pau.

3. It is really difficult to make a group decision on where to eat. Apps like Yelp provide too many suggestions and most urban places have multiple high rated options for almost all cuisines. Here are a few features I would like to have to improve these apps:

A.  Poll the group. When you do a yelp search you select a few restaurants that sound interesting and directly from the app send a poll to your friends you are eating with to vote on the top option.

B.  Poll an expert. Same as above but you can send the poll to friends who have lived in the area you are currently nearby.

C.  Easy vetoing. When you are searching for restaurants you can easily remove categories of restaurants someone has recently eaten at or doesn’t like. I believe more people tend to say no Pizza today vs. lets do Chinese today. People keep vetoing until a decision is made.

D.  Personal secretary option. I provide the time I want to eat, the size of my party, and any group dietary restrictions.  With that information the service makes the decision and the reservation if applicable.

E.  Decision Roulette. You provide the names and the app selects a person to make the decision for the group. The person has a minute to decide otherwise the app switches back to personal secretary option mode.

4. Brainstorming with post-its and white boards is really effective. But I am still waiting for an easy and instant way to capture the essence and visual structure of the discussions in a digital and easily editable format.

5. Debate Cookie Jar: There should be an app that lets you admit you were wrong about some fact or argument. In a discussion you may overstate a fact or make another false claim. Most of us never own up to this. The app would let you apologize for something you did wrong and make you pay a dime to the person/people you were talking with. Over time I would choose to debate with the people who had paid the most dimes because it shows they are willing to debate and willing to admit they are wrong time to time.

6. Cooking without measuring cups and precise instructions is much more fun. It lets you be more creative and when you fail miserably there is always Sriracha and Cholula.

Image sourced from: www.gadgetduck.com