Farmer’s Market with Odessa Piper

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I made my weekly Harmony Valley Farm stop at this morning’s Dane County Farmer’s Market. There was, as always, lots of action, despite the rain. L’etoile’s Odessa Piper was doing some shopping and visiting with Richard. A photographer was also quite busy taking digital images of them for an upcoming article on fall foods in Vermont’s Art of Eating quarterly magazine, the “must have foodie quarterly”. I snapped a few photos. Click on a photo to view this morning’s pictures.


I asked the photographer and a writer if the article would be online. They said, “no – you have to INVEST”. Interesting. It is a challenge to make money on the internet, but it clearly can be done. Creativity and value are the key.

Kudos to the Post Office

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Stopped into a west side post office this morning, expecting to stand in line….. Much to my pleasant surprise, they now have a slick self service kiosk where one can weigh a package, enter the destination zip code, pay with a debit/credit card and generate a label. Very slick and fast. (There was still a line, as most people opted for traditional service).

Google’s Eric Schmidt on the Internet’s 35th anniversary

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Eric Schmidt:

We allocate about 70% of our resources to our core business and 30% to “other” because we never know what that other will become. We also ask our employees to spend 20% of their time on exploration, and those tend to be complementary to our core.
Our agenda tends to be driven by a bottoms-up process not so much traditional strategic planning. Google is trying to solve the next problem not the last problem.
[ Question: Was it serendipity that made google what it became? ] I think the word is luck. The principles from which Google was built do exist in other indstries. Ours is a reproducable model, and others may end up reproducing it and solving other problems. We’re just seeing the beginning of this.
Good management is not that complicated, it’s about leadership. Some managers need to micromanage everything, but that doesn’t produce creativity. If you can figure out a way to tell a story, that’s how people learn. they have a beginning middle and an end. if you have the right kind of people and the right kind of values, that can work. The great thing about high tech is that labor is very mobile, and if you want to deal with other people, you are forced to deal with them as peers and equals.
There are many uses of the net that are not touched by Google. Peer to peer, and the majority of email traffic. It’s very important that people work on internet monitoring, internet scaling, all of the next generation projects — I don’t think any single one is of dominant importance.

Via Xeni

Bear Creek’s Bill Lorge on Campaign & Media Reform

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Bill Lorge (LorgeforSenate@aol.com) email his list of Political & Media Reforms (a very useful list it is):

  • Campaign Reforms
    • $100 Limit
    • Eliminate $1 Check-Off
    • Matching Grant Money
    • State Contractors Cannot Donate
    • Eliminate PAC’s
    • Ballots mailed out with Tax Forms (timing challenge, I think)
    • Online Voting (more challenges)
    • Term Limits
    • High School Seniors can vote
    • Eliminate the State Elections Board
  • Media Reform
    • Balanced Print Media Reporting (! – I like this: “A better solution would be to have the State put legal ads on the Internet and avoid putting them in the papers altogether. This would save a ton of taxpayer money and lower our local property taxes; As one Town Board Chair once told me his biggest expense is paying the local weekly paper for legal ads.)”
    • We (the public) own the airwaves and should be free to use it.

I’m not sure my synopsis did justice to Lorge’s document. Print and read it yourself here: 155K PDF. Or read it by clicking below…

(more…)

The Great Circle: Wisconsin Manufacturing Jobs, Leadership (or not) and Competition

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Yesterday’s news that GM would temporarily idle five SUV and pickup plants in early 2005, including Janesville amplifies the importance of:

  • People that run large organizations thinking and planning ahead. The era of large pickup truck based SUV sales & profits is apparently drawing to a close (not a big surprise with high gas prices and a recent change in the absurd large vehicle tax deduction).
  • The Japanese have a years ahead leadership position in the emerging hybrid vehicle market (gas/electric powered vehicles such as the Prius, Accord and the Toyota based Ford Escape (!) Hybrid components will likely not be coming from Wisconsin companies….
  • Peter DeLorenzo reports that Porsche has approached Toyota to purchase/license hybrid components for their 5,000lb SUV.

    From the “Hell Freezes Over” File, Automotive News Europe reported that Porsche is considering building a hybrid version of the Cayenne – using a Toyota powertrain. Readers of this site know exactly what we think about the Cayenne, but it’s clear that this is a new low in Porsche history. The company that was founded on building lithe little sports cars that bristled with innovation and the visionary thinking of its founder has now openly admitted that they have given up on the innovation game altogether.

  • Wisconsin subsidizing some of these large businesses may not pay off at all…. Jim Doyle supported $5M in state training dollars for GM Janesville recently.

Once again, the big three are behind the curve, with broad implications for Wisconsin jobs….. (it should be noted that the big three have all invested in hydrogen power, which still seems to be a long way away).

Phone spamming at the Kerry Rally…..

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Sources tell me that Kerry Rally attendees (West Washington; from the Capitol to Bassett) have been given phone numbers to call and a script to read with their personal cell phones.
In addition, the rally is evidently made up of two classes, those with “blue” tickets are next to the stage while those with “white” tickets (internet registrations) are farther away. Inside sources tell me that several “white” ticket guests have attempted to jump the barrier – and were immediately dealt with by campaign volunteers…..
In any event, I hope the music is good!
www.cnn.com has the best video stream (300kbps). Locally CBS affiliate channel 3 is also trying to stream the event, but doesn’t appear to have the servers or bandwidth that cnn does.