Four Random Things

A Friday Hodgepodge

1. Fans of the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile will be delighted to know that they can track the current and future whereabouts of the fleet via WhereMyDogs@.

2. Alison Green has begun posting lists of past Ask a Manager posts on Fridays. Recently, the title, "Toll Collectors, Fear of Being Set on Fire, and Other Things We Believed About Work When We Were Kids" caught my eye. My favorite from the post was the first, on what someone thought firing was as a toddler:

When I was 4 or 5, I tended to take most things literally. So I thought getting fired meant that if you were bad at your job, you were taken out of the building and set on fire as a punishment.

This one is good from top to bottom, and the stories are short and sweet.

3. If you like the tech news aggregator site, Hacker News, you might also like the Bubbles site, which does a similar ranking of personal blogs.

A couple of short posts I bumped into recently illustrate that there's no telling what you'll find there on a given day: "Gulf of America. Lake America" and "This Guy Made an ASCII Cyberpunk City Using HTML and JavaScript."

I was tempted to embed the video of the city, but I'll recommend you stop by Kai Gulliksen's blog, instead.

4. If you've ever wondered What do insanely wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about?, someone who "attract[s] these people into my life" has a somewhat lengthy, but very interesting answer.

The answer considers four levels of personal wealth and looks at each, with one example of a thing billionaires buy (in an indirect sense) being access:

You now can just ask your staff to contact anyone and you will get a call back. I have seen this first hand and it is mind-blowing the level of access and respect $1 billion+ gets you. In this case, I wanted to speak with a very well-known billionaire businessman (call him billionaire #1 for a project that interested billionaire #2. I mentioned that it would be good to talk to billionaire #1 and B2 told me that he didn't know him. But he called his assistant in. "Get me the xxxgolf club directory. Call B1 at home and tell him I want to talk to him." Within 60 minutes, we had a call back. I was in B1's home talking to him the next day. B2's opinion commanded that kind of respect from a peer...

The end of the answer was sad, but very good in the sense of providing a reminder, much needed in today's culture of envy, that billonaires are human beings, and face adversity just like the rest of us.

-- CAV