Steve Fischer's Random Blog

Author: fish1964

  • Sheboygan

    I enjoy crossword puzzles but I’m not great at them (I recall my grandmother doing them in ink). I tried some free apps that were largely lame, so a couple months ago I started paying for the NY Times crossword app. You do get what you pay for.

    I was doing today’s puzzle (Monday is super easy, it then gets harder all week). After whipping through the across clues, it really seemed like a down answer was Sheboygan. Really? Who knows Sheboygan? Great brats, but in the NY Times?

    Sure enough, the clue was Wisconsin city on Lake Michigan.

    I think the clue should have referenced bratwurst…

  • Boring Follow-Up

    In an attempt to move things along (see previous post), Elon Musk tweeted this:

    https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/888136631672340480

    Our local prosecutor, Preet Bharara (you may have heard of him – US Attorney, prosecuted public officials on both sides, fired by Trump) tweeted this:

    https://twitter.com/PreetBharara/status/888142667250630657

    Classic.

  • Boring Tunnel to DC

    Elon Musk is claiming that he has “verbal approval” to build a hyperloop from NYC to DC (with stops in Philly and Baltimore). That would be super cool and I totally hope they try. His new “Boring Company” designed to bore tunnels would do the tunneling part.

    https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/888053175155949572

    Just call me a tiny bit skeptical on the “verbal approval” part.

    I’m a big Elon Musk fan and I’d love to get to DC in 29 minutes (I don’t even like DC that much, but damn).  I just suspect he’s underestimating the challenges of digging a tunnel across several states.

     

     

  • SpaceX is Taking Over, well, Space

    From PBS, the percentage of commercial space launches by County/Company.

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    Zero percent in 2012 to over 60% next year. This is for the entire planet.

    And Elon Musk snarks a bit towards Boeing/Lockheed:

    https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/885631423306006528

  • An Article for Font Nerds Everywhere

    “Fontgate” is an amazing story if you are a font nerd, threatening to bring down the daughter of the Pakistani Prime Minister (of course now a hashtag, #fontgate).

    Documents claiming that Mariam Nawaz Sharif was only a trustee of the companies that bought the London flats, are dated February 2006, and appear to be typed in Microsoft Calibri.

    But the font was only made commercially available in 2007, leading to suspicions that the documents are forged.

    At least it wasn’t Comic Sans…

  • Friends With Houses on Lakes

    I highly recommend them. Here’s where we spent the 4th of July weekend…

    Candlewood Lake

  • Amazon Echo Show – Thumbs Up

    I pre-ordered the original Echo (Alexa) before it came out in 2014 (put it under the Christmas tree as a surprise), so of course I pre-ordered the new version with a touch screen, the Echo Show. It arrived two days ago.

    All the video call and drop-in stuff is dependent on people close to you also owning one, so while cool (and creepy) I’m not sure we’ll use that. I debated buying one for my wife’s sister who we often FaceTime with. We’ll see.

    But who cares? It’s Alexa with a better speaker, YouTube search, music lyrics on screen (I like that a lot more than I thought) and your calendar right on screen.

    I’m quite happy with it.

  • We’re Here, We’re Queer, Shop Walmart

    Here’s a surprising sponsorship fact. Despite having no actual stores in New York City, Walmart was a leading sponsor of last weekend’s NYC Gay Pride Parade. For those that want to support (or boycott) such corporate sponsors, T-Mobile leads the list. Facebook, Netflix and Lyft are the leading tech companies. And apparently the LBGT crowd drinks bad beer like everyone else because Bud Light is right up there.

    x

  • Extra Toasty

    Today SpaceX took a rocket booster they’ve used previously and used it again to launch a Bulgarian satellite. Despite being an extra fast re-entry, they stick the landing (though commentators do note that it was tilting a tiny bit and a few feet off center).

    https://twitter.com/StarTalkRadio/status/878331803949449216

    This is becoming routine, but it’s important to note that not only can no one else on the planet do this, no one else even attempts it. Elon Musk does use a highly technical term to describe the booster after landing…

    https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/878334920141135872

  • First and Best Customer

    This is an excellent article discussing Amazon’s strategy with the Whole Foods purchase and why most people aren’t looking at it the right way.

    The Amazon fulfillment centers for product distribution and AWS for cloud computing are large scale projects. They have huge initial costs but benefit tremendously from scale. One reason they succeeded is that Amazon itself was the “first and best customer” of those services, guaranteeing large scale.

    Amazon is building out a delivery network with itself as the first-and-best customer; in the long run it seems obvious said logistics services will be exposed as a platform.

    This, though, is what was missing from Amazon’s grocery efforts: there was no first-and-best customer. Absent that, and given all the limitations of groceries, AmazonFresh was doomed to be eternally sub-scale.

    That’s where Whole Foods makes sense. If Amazon wants to build Amazon Grocery Services, they need a first and best customer. You don’t normally think of an acquisition in terms of buying your customer, but that’s what just happened.

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