Alex Dunne

Freaky coincidence. Last week I was talking with Linda about the increasing cost of gas and the eventual toll hike on the Golden Gate Bridge, and how it might prompt me to think about trying to work one day per week from home to offset the cost. Then, today, this article comes out about employees who are requesting exactly that. What’s more, some progressive companies are proactively offering this option to employees. It’s sounding more and more attractive.

On a related note, I bet within two years a scandal will emerge involving the price of oil futures, and we’ll find out that the people on the inside of the oil market manipulated prices, just like Enron manipulated the electricity market years back.

So sad to hear that Harvey Korman died today. In tribute, here’s a most excellent scene of him from Blazing Saddles, one of the funniest movies of all time.

One of my least favorite buildings in San Francisco is the Transbay Terminal.  It’s dark, dirty, old, and a virtual bum magnet that is a bit scary to walk past, especially after sunset.  What’s more, the scope of this horrible landmark is huge - a couple of square blocks, at least.  But at last, it’s all going bye-bye - it’s going to be torn down and a stunning new highrise and multilevel public space will be constructed. The winning design was just announced. Building the new structure will take years, but once they tear down the old one, even the construction zone will be an improvement to the neighborhood.

I’ve been watching a show called The Alaska Experiment, about 4 groups of people dropped off in the Alaskan wilderness and left to survive on their own for three months.  In a recent episode, one group decided to visit another group, about 20 miles away.  It took them 7 days to hike the distance, over glaciers, rivers, and brutal terrain. It got me thinking about some tough stuff I’ve been through. Here’s my top 5, in no particular order:

• backpacking about 20 miles one day in the Sierras (up and down peaks at high altitude with a heavy pack)
• rowing a ten mile race in a double (ass so numb afterwards that I had to be lifted out of the shell)
• running the Dipsea race (limped for a month afterwards and ended my running days)
• days of sleep deprivation during crazy college hazing rituals (amazing what you hallucinate without sleep)
• countless seat races (rowing races to determine who makes it into a boat) in 110+ degree weather in Sacramento (hello nausea, dehydration)

It’s kind of fun to remind yourself about times you’ve pushed yourself physically - kind of puts any tough times you’re going through at the moment in perspective.

An article in the WSJ yesterday discusses the effects of high gasoline prices on microeconomics - individual behavioral decisions. It’s something everyone with an automobile considers - when should I opt out of using my car for everyday driving? The Journal noted that at $4/gallon, people are already scaling back demand.

Consumers have already taken note, with U.S. gasoline demand down 0.6% this year compared with the same period in 2007, according to the Department of Energy.

The erosion in demand is likely to accelerate if gasoline prices shoot above $6, but a radical cutback in consumption will occur only if high prices weaken the U.S. economy further and contribute to increased unemployment.

So, what happens when gas hits $6/gallon? (IMO, we’re just a couple of years from that price.)  I think at that price, telecommuting and teleconferencing will hit hockeystick growth.  At a corporate level, businesses will probably be more selective when it comes to corporate travel, and will hopefully encourage virtual meetings and teleconferencing. I wonder if they’ll allow their employees more more latitude in telecommuting, too.

I don’t see why not - the technology is here today. For example, yesterday while up here in Tahoe, I took part in a three-way conference call between co-workers in San Francisco and a partner in Oregon. From my perspective, there was no drawback to being here in the mountains, nor for our partner to be in Oregon. All of us used Adobe Connect for screen sharing. It’s a no-brainer to use this technology, and in some ways, it’s faster to set up a screen sharing session between remote meeting participants than to gather a bunch of people in the same office into a meeting room and get a projector set up.

Our company recently moved from Lotus Notes over to Outlook 2007. While Outlook is better than Notes 5 (my God, Notes 5 came out in 1999, what took the company so long?), there are a number of things that stink about Outlook 2007. First and foremost is that it hangs when checking mail on the Exchange Server. I use a dual-core Lenovo T60 — a fast machine. But when Outlook polls the server, it hangs my computer for anywhere from seconds to minutes. I’m looking into what could be causing this lag, but according to Computerworld, I’m not the only one frustrated by Outlook’s performance. I uninstalled Xobni (which, despite my initial enthusiasm, turned out to be not much more than Outlook eye candy), but the problems persist. I don’t have Instant Search enabled in Outlook, so the hanging isn’t being caused by Outlook indexing my email. It’s just slow to check and syncronize with the server. Interestingly the lightweight Outlook web client I use (under Firefox) is snappy. But I shouldn’t be forced to use a web client from my desk at work. I long for Thunderbird, or even Microsoft without Exchange - that worked fine.

On a sidenote, I recently discovered how to fix something that has been bugging me for about a month in Outlook 2007: the prompt at the top of my inbox that asks me to install Instant Search. It got so irritating that I finally gave in and installed it, only to uninstall it about a day later. (Google Desktop search is so much better.) But then Outlook continued to prompt me to install Instant Search again.

Here’s how to remove that annoying prompt.

In Outlook 2007, go to Tools>Options, and click on the “Other” tab. Under “General”, click on the “Advanced Options” button. On the subsequent pop-up window, about halfway down, there’s a checkbox that says “Show prompts to enable instant search”. Uncheck it.

Whew, doesn’t that feel better?

This is why you will never get me near a subway in Japan. Or is it China? Either way, nuh-uh.

Congrats to my brother-in-law, Josh, and his wife Rebecca on their first baby. We went to Marin General yesterday to say hi to the newest addition to the clan, Ilona. She is a really cute baby, and slept the whole time we were there. (Hopefully she’ll be a good sleeper just like her parents, but methinks their days of sleeping in are behind them, at least for a little while!) Our kids were born at MGH too, so the trip brought back a flood of memories. What’s more, like Linda, Bec delivered by c-section, so both families get the deluxe, extended, five-day stay in the joint! I imagine they’ll be plotting their jailbreak by about day four, just like us…

I salute the CA Supreme Court for overturning the ban on gay marriage. Frankly, I really don’t see why some people are so opposed to the idea.

The argument that I keep hearing against allowing gay marriage is that permitting gays to marry a) tramples on the sanctity of marriage, and b) goes against the tradition of marriage. On the first point, I think marriage is only as sacred as the married couple makes it. Remember years ago when Britney Spears got loaded in Vegas and married an old friend of hers, only to annul it a day later? Where was the uproar against the sanctity of marriage back then? Where’s the sanctity in a drive-thru chapels? Etc, etc.

On the second point, let’s not kid ourselves and pretend the institution has not evolved over thousands of years. If marriage had never evolved with the times, here’s what we would still be stuck with:

• Wives would be the legal property of husbands.
• Dowries would be required by the bride’s family.
• If a woman’s father died without male heirs, that woman could be forced to marry her nearest male relative—even if she that meant divorcing her current husband. (That chestnut was around in Ancient Greece.)
• Polygamy would be no big deal.

So let’s be thankful that our concept of, and traditions around, marriage have evolved with our society. I’m sure people in ancient Greece similarly freaked out when women couldn’t be forced to marry a male relative. So let’s all take a deep breath and try to get some perspective.

Loved this article from the Post today, conveying the feeling that Clinton’s campaign is merely a deathwatch for all involved. Particularly entertaining was this scene, where apparently Hillary pretends to greet a crowd as she’s getting off her plane, when it’s really just a small cadre of reporters under the wing:

2:57 p.m., Yeager Airport, Charleston, W.Va.: A steep descent brings Clinton’s plane to Charleston’s hilltop airport. After an appropriate wait, she steps from the plane and pretends to wave to a crowd of supporters; in fact, she is waving to 10 photographers underneath the airplane’s wing. She pretends to spot an old friend in the crowd, points and gives another wave; in fact, she is waving at an aide she had been talking with on the plane minutes earlier.

The article goes on to compare her campaign to a dead parrot in a Monty Python skit. It’s all over, folks. There’s nothing to see here, go back about your business.