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”.