“When the power

 of love overcomes

 the love of power

the world will

know peace.”

Happy New Year

Simon

Simon’s Holiday eCard

(like a Christmas letter except modern)

Okay people of Pasadena focus all of your attention on the good things that the Rose Parade does for us.  The local pride, the publicity, the history, the sense of community, the awesome beauty of this popup event focused on floats covered with flowers.  And don’t forget the schadenfreude we feel when people in Chicago see our weather on January 1.  Stop all complaining about the Rose Parade.  Don’t complain about the congestion, the parking, the noise, the inconvenience or the cost.

Don’t complain because we don’t want the Rose Parade to become the the Barnes Foundation.  The Barnes Foundation was a quirky Museum built in Merion an ordinary suburb of Philadelphia.  It was in an awkward spot and the neighbors complained about parking, congestion, noise etc.  The complaints started a movement to move the museum to downtown Philadelphia.  And now that the bulk of the Barnes Foundation is gone the neighborhood where it was is no longer special and I suspect that the neighbors are complaining about the loss.

Walking to the parade

Complaints are negative.  Negative comments are ten times more powerful than positive comments.  So if you complain about the Rose Parade I will have to say ten positive things about it just to offset your negativity. Fortunately this is not difficult.  Because the Rose Parade is a nearly perfect civic event.

International

The Rose Parade is the Wonder of Pasadena.  Don’t complain or we could lose it like just like Merion lost The Barnes Foundation. Politicians think that if people complain they have to do something.  The something they do may solve your complaint but it may not make thing better in aggregate.  Beware of what you wish for.

My annual Rose Parade Blog Posts

Pets

Bands

My Post about the Israeli Marching Band

Friends

Charlotte Carpenter

Merry Christmas

Simon

On a very recently discovered and translated Mayan carving it said something like: “build a Stonehenge replica out of citrus and the 2012 apocalypse will be averted.”

So we did and it was. Saved that is.

Our little row of citrus trees had a bountiful harvest this year.

And while I was harvesting my henge gene kicked in and I couldn’t resist the urge to give CitrusHenge a try.

A little experimenting and viola:

The world was saved from the Mayan apocalypse.

Well done Simon if I may say so myself.  Kudos to Nancy Wisser and the CloneHenge Blog for a henge making contest that end today.   I am hoping to get honorable mention for CitrusHenge.  Nancy shot down my claim to the world first CitrusHenge with this reminder of a Henge at a Spanish citrus festival.  Which is bigger, better and earlier.  Drat.

But I am undeterred in my desire for henging glory.  Next I’m going to make the extravagant claim that I have created a record number of Henge-like installations.  I’m going for the Guinness Book of World Records.

And finally a bad visual pun:

A group of citrus hanging around contemplating their Navel Orange.

Beer is proof that God loves us

and wants us to be happy.

~Benjamin Franklin

Courtesy of Raen Brewery’s Facebook page, the saying not the Beer Matt, Beer Matt is another story send me some beer mat stories and I’ll tell it.  Or you can tell it and I’ll post it.

We are on the road to Salem to see Rebecca and drink some of the delicious local beers at Raen Brewery and at Santiam where they pour the amazing Sangre di Christo Beer made from Cabernet grape.

Happy Christmas!

Do you have an eReader of some kind?  A Kindle, an iPad or a Nook?  Then you will probably know what I’m talking about in this post.

EBooks don’t have real pages so the intuitive feel you used to have about how far you are through a book is lost.  Don’t get me wrong I love my old Kindle and now I almost exclusively read books on my iPad but I need more data than “location 3 of 11,415″

Here is the opportunity.  Build an app that is better than eyeballing a bookmark in a print book and far better than the percentage they give you on an eReader.  This new app will actually calculate how many hours it will take you to finish the book you are reading.  It will take into account your historic reading speed and the degree of difficulty of this particular book based on other peoples speeds through the book and give you good data.  I would buy it for a few dollars and so would many others.  But the real opportunity is that Amazon or Apple would buy it for a lot of money.

Merry Christmas

my eCard for the Holidays

I’m giving you this idea.

What do you have for me?

Mexico Tourism

Bahia de Los Angeles
(my new favorite spot in Baja)

I saw last week that Nelson Mandela had been admitted to the hospital and in a separate news article that there was political and social unrest in South Africa.

I was reminded of what my brother Matt B, who does a lot of business throughout Africa, said about politics in South Africa last Autumn.  He thought that the only thing keeping South Africa from sinking into the chaos of Zimbabwe or Congo was loyalty to Nelson Mandela.  He expected that when Mandela died that South Africa would fall into the same sort of tribal violence that overtook Zimbabwe in the 1990′s and caused the whites who could to flee, the collapse of the economy and the total debasement of the currency.

There is a huge difference of scale however.  Zimbabwe has 13 million people and South Africa has 50 million.  About 10% of South Africa’s population is white and we can expect that, if what is predicted above happens, many of them will become international refuges.  Will the UK accept them?  How about Holland?  How about the USA?  Stay tuned.

There is already a diaspora happening from South Africa and a blog titled of course South African Diaspora.  But from the numbers I could gather there are less than a million white South Africans living in other countries.  Where will five million people go in a world that is increasingly xenophobic?  This will be a big test of the right to migrate.  Who will make room for them or will we allow a genocide?

“The losers remember the war long after the winners have moved on.”

Gene Brogdon

examples:  the US Civil War, The Crusades

I wrote last week about the Electronic wallet and said in passing that keys were next and Ravi K sent me a link to a company that is trying to build a smartphone activated add-on to a standard deadbolt.  Lockitron has a very clever solution to the technical problem of this product and they illustrate it very well on their web site.  But they have an even better solution to raising the money to build it.  Take a look at their web site they have pre-sold more than 14,000 of the systems.    I assume they used these commitments to borrow money to finish the design, tool up and begin production.  Brilliant!  Crowd sourcing through pre-selling.

There is still time for enterprising companies and people to get into this field.  It will be huge.  How big?  Based on the price that Lockitron is getting for a promised product if they install a million locks, only about one percent of homes in the USA, it will be a two hundred million dollar sales company.  It is reasonable to expect that the convenience of eLocks will be so compelling that this will be a five billion dollar market in five years.

Why aren’t Schlage and Quickset the big names in locks going after this market.  They probably are but they have legacy distribution that doesn’t want product sold on the internet or through Best Buy.  Unfortunately these are the channels where people on the smart phone cutting edge will buy.  This is exactly what happened to Kodak at the digital divide and to Xerox when copiers became reliable and inexpensive.

It will be exciting to watch this one develop.  There are opportunities for local start-up who will do the installation and set-up of these systems as well as for the manufacturers.

Yes I have ordered one.  I don’t want to have to fumble for keys when I come up to the back door with grocery bags.

https://lockitron.com//