USEDCARSALESMAN

E-Books to the Rescue

A few days ago, I recognized that I was facing an information emergency which required me to get up to speed on a topic very rapidly. I needed a book, a specific reference-book. My knee-jerk reaction was to place an order for a "physical" text from Amazon.com and have it delivered overnight, instead of in the usual "3-5 Day UPS" manner.

Now, you might've said, "no, don't do that, just call around to your local Borders or Barnes and Noble, and pick it up there the same day!" Well, unfortunately, the text that I needed was too specific for those stores (I had surveyed them on previous occasions). It was one of those "long-tail" books that only a dot-com supplier was going to have in inventory.

So, I searched for the specific text that I needed in Google and found that it was available as an "Ebook," from well, Ebooks.com. I ultimately purchased from Ebooks.com, but Amazon.com also had download-able versions of many of their physical books. And, in hindsight, I probably would have shopped Amazon for the same download-able book before making the purchase; Amazon turned out to have been substantially cheaper.

Two minutes after making payment, I had the text of my "book" right in front of me on my large, flat-screen computer monitor. My stress born from a lack of information subsided as I started to read and slowly got on top of the subject-matter in-question.

The Electronic Book turned out to be 360 pages in length. But, as I scrolled its pages upward, one after the other, I realized that I was reading it more rapidly than I would a physical book. And, I didn't have any of the psychological burden that might come from having a large, 360-page book on my lap that I needed to absorb before morning. When my eyes grew fatigued, I zoomed in on the text using the Adobe Reader; my fatigue dissipates. When I need to "highlight" something in the electronic text, I use the highlight function in the comment section of the Adobe program; no need for Highlighter-Brand markers unless I wanted to get a noxious-fume buzz. I ended up running through 200 pages like they were nothing and finished the whole 360-page text of not-particularly-appealing, non-fiction material before bed. I was resoundingly impressed with the Ebook experience.

The next day, I looked at my shelf of paperback books and realized I was looking at the written-equivalent of a large, 1980s-era CD collection. The books were taking up a lot of physical square-footage, when they, like modern music or video downloads, would more efficiently serve me as electronic files. And, the books showed wear and tear, I couldn't enlarge their text, and I needed markers to highlight the segments that were important to me, and I couldn't cut and paste their text to a word document. In sum, my physical books seemed archaic, like art-pieces that should be displayed, but hardly employed as modern resources of information.

So, I may never buy a physical book again, unless I intend to display it in a glass case.

GPS: Helps You Help People in Your Local Community

Up until about 3 months ago, I spent 1-2 hours every Sunday, for the better part of a fiscal year, delivering meals for Project Angel Food on Sunset Blvd in Los Angeles. In total, I think I devoted hours on more than 40 Sundays to this kind of hospice work. Of course, I'd deliver food to people over time and see their health decline dramatically as whatever condition they had, Kidney Disease, AIDS, took its toll. So, there was, and is, a substantial psychological "challenge" to doing this kind of charity work on a regular basis. But, you get used to it. And, now that other demands have subsided, I'm arranging to get back with Angel Food or another charity organization and participate, again, on consistent, weekly basis.

Anyway more on my background with Angel Food. Project Angel Food provides new volunteers with an orientation and then allows them to participate in a couple of different capacities with their organization -- food preparation or meal delivery. I chose to do meal delivery and found out that was probably a pretty good idea, specifically in my case. Why? Because I had that little Garmin GPS V (couple hundred bucks on Amazon.com) device that I keep talking about for my Wrangler.

Map-based GPS definitely comes in handy doing meal-delivery-type hospice work. On their respective delivery day, volunteer drivers for Angelfood would get their paperwork with addresses and directions to between 3-8 different residential delivery locations. Usedcarsalesman would pick up his meals and addresses at their Sunset Blvd. Headquarters at around 11am. Sometimes he'd deliver to places you'd been previously. But, a lot of times he'd take care of whatever neighborhoods that had not been covered by another volunteer. And, these were often 5-8 miles away and in places he'd never been before!

Doing one errand at a new place in Los Angeles County can be time-consuming. Doing 3-8 can kill a Sunday unless you have a little help. And, help is exactly what GPS did. Usedcarsalesman would enter a series of addresses in his Garmin device before he even started his Jeep; the device would then provide turn-by-turn directions to the first location and to subsequent locations. And, he could do 8 volunteer deliveries in a matter of 2 hours in parts of Los Angeles that were totally foreign to him (of course, in Angel Food's defense, the number of deliveries generally only averaged around 4 per Sunday). For Usedcarsalesman, without GPS, doing volunteer deliveries for Angel Food would have probably taken 2 to 3 times longer each Sunday than it did.

So, if you have a hand-held, map-based GPS device or a newer car with such a GPS navigation-aid installed as standard equipment, then fire it up and do some delivery-type charity work to help the poor, sick and needy. With GPS, it's a lot more efficient, now, to do such good work in your local community.

传输SHDTV需要巨大的

High Definition Television has been around for a while in Japan. In the 1980s HDTV was already commonplace in Tokyo, but its establishment in the west was still a good 15-20 years off. Now, it's 2005 and the US and other western nations are finally getting up to speed, using public policy to encourage the growth of the HDTV format. Japan, however, never one to wait around, is once again upping the technology ante with "NHK Science and Technical Research Laboratory's" development of the Super-High-Definition-Television-Format or "SHDTV."

From reports that Usedcarsalesman has read, SHDTV (aka, "Ultra High Definition Television" or "UHDTV") is not, say, a mere 50% higher resolution-version of HDTV. Instead, SHDTV provides a resolution that is 400%(!) that of the highest, existing quality TV picture -- 1080i HDTV; more specifically, an SHDTV displays over 4000 lines of resolution for all you tech-heads out there.

What is the effect of all that resolution? An interesting quote from a recent SHDTV viewer describing the sensation of watching SHDTV: "...now I think the most appropriate term to describe this (SHDTV) sensation is a "feeling of immersion" that cannot be adequately described by calling it a feeling of "being there." .

NHK wanted to show the new SHDTV format to many Japanese consumers, so they set up a special monitor in a store window on a street and played a specially-created SHDTV video of 18 minutes long. This video was created merely by fixing a SHDTV camera to the hood of a Tokyo Taxi cab and driving the streets of the city for 18 minutes. Well, crazy thing was that people on the sidewalk who stopped to watch this SHDTV video began to experience vertigo -- literally a sense of moving, though they were actually standing still. The picture was so sharp that it literally confused one's senses and caused "motion sickness."

Now, here's one of the downsides to SHDTV: video-file storage-space. To show the aforementioned 18 minute video took up something like 3.5 Tera-bytes of data-space. If you are familiar with DVD file storage, then you know that 3.5 Tera-bytes is about 750 full DVDs worth of data, and that's just for an 18 minute SHDTV feature. Create a 2 hour feature-film in SHDTV and you are looking at storage equivalent to 4500 DVDs! So, you are going to need more than a 56k modem to download something like this! :)

We are probably looking at mass-market, consumer-use of this kind of SHDTV technology in maybe 30-40 years or so. But, in the nearer term, say 10-20 years, you may see such SHDTV technology incorporated in to Movie Theaters and other venues that can manage the storage and display needs of the format. Usedcarsalesman is guessing that SHDTV or UHDTV may be another technology beyond current Digital projectors, 3D- without-glasses and IMAX that struggling movie theater chains use to juice-up ticket sales down the road.

(modifications to this post were made on 8:30am, Sept 11, 2005, to correct certain previously misstated facts)

Satellite Telephone Service A Better Idea in the Wake of Katrina

At one time in the late 1990s, Usedcarsalesman worked for a certain Wall Street investment firm that leased 6 floors worth of office space in the World Trade Center; the company generally used said space, with its accompanying auditorium for employee training purposes.

In July 1999, Usedcarsalesman was working for the company out of a Washington D.C.-area branch office and was told that he would have to go to NYC and attend a training session at The Twin Towers. Transportation and expenses would be covered and he'd basically get to meet and train with fellow employees from all over the U.S.; he and the others would get put up for a little more than a week in July at a mid-town hotel and get shuttled down to the Trade Center each day. Usedcarsalesman was generally looking forward to it and it turned out to be an enjoyable experience.

The recent events involving Hurricane Katrina have made Usedcarsalesman recall some of the specifics from his time in company training in July, 1999 at the World Trade Center. You might ask, "is this recollection caused by the terrorist attacks? The fact that, 15 months after you were there in NYC, the World Trade Center and surrounding buildings were destroyed in the events of September 11, 2001? Actually, Usedcarsalesman would say, "no, my recall actually relates to a company-sponsored "Contest" we had during this July, 1999 NYC training session."

The contest of which Usedcarsalesman is speaking was called the "Stock Presentation Contest." We had approximately 250 people in this training class and each of us was asked to present a stock of our choosing to the other members of the class. Usedcarsalesman chose Iridium, the satellite-telephone company -- a company which he had a bit of an unjustified fascination with (and, which is currently enjoying a demand explosion in the wake of Hurricane Katrina).

The large, aforementioned training class was broken in to 12 groups, based on the region of the country in which you were from. The 12 winners from those groups would then go to the auditorium, mid-level in the South Tower of the World Trade Center and pitch their stocks to a large room full of classmates. The managers running the class would rate each presentation and an overall winner would be chosen.

So Usedcarsalesman was in one of the 12 groups; he pitched his stock, did a good job and became one of the 12 that was to make a presentation to the entire class of 250 in the large Auditorium. In the initial presentation, Usedcarsalesman had done the job of explaining the merits of the satellite telephone and how a stock like Iridium was going to grow because its product could do things that existing cellular technology could not. Yours truly did well selling the stock to my classmates representing the heavily urbanized, deep-pocketed mid-Atlantic group. Now, it was on to the big presentation in front of a more diverse group of people from all over the United States.

Usedcarsalesman figured that to win overall, he'd obviously want to win the audience better than the others presenting -- this might kind of clue the judges in to which presentation registered with listeners the most. Therefore, Usedcarsalesman figured he needed to modify his presentation slightly to take account of a larger, more geographically diverse audience now before him.  Knowing that he was going to be facing an audience that now included people from the west coast and the southern U.S., Usedcarsalesman thought, "these people in the west and south already have cellular phones...what would make a company providing satellite phone service appealing to them?" The only thing new he could come up with was "Staying on top of business during a Disaster."

So Usedcarsalesman did the following: he got up in front of this class full of people from all over the United States during the big, safe, go-go bull market of the 1990s and pitched not "Greed," but "Fear!?" As part of his Iridium presentation, he said, "if you live in the south or you live on the west coast and you are ever faced with Hurricanes, Tornadoes, Earthquakes which destroy your regions' communications infrastructure, you can still do business using your Iridium Satellite Telephone... so, Iridium stock will do great!"

Well, in 1999, Usedcarsalesman's pitch for Iridium ended up landing him in 3rd place in a class of 250, which wasn't bad. The 1st place speaker pitched Budweiser stock; 2nd place pitched IBM. So maybe satellite-telephone provider, Iridium, was a little too exotic for business in the peaceful, go-go 1990s. And, he'll admit, the Iridium Company definitely seemed like an expensive solution for a problem that hadn't really reared its head. Of course, Iridium went bankrupt and its billions in assets were purchased a few years later for approximately 25 million.

However, since "Katrina," the stocks and sales levels of Satellite Telephone providers have taken off. So Usedcarsalesman hopes somebody is up in NYC pitching Iridium, Globalstar and other satellite-phone providers like it today; that somebody would likely win a "Stock Presentation" contest this go around!

Katrina: Unfortunate Rumors

Usedcarsalesman speculates that the situation in New Orleans is a bit worse than most people are currently led to believe (understandably, the Newspapers and TV Networks are probably a bit cautious about painting too grim a picture). Although this is just hearsay, it comes by way of a source that I believe to be reliable:

"(from New Orleans)...First off, they expect the death count to be in the tens of thousands...People went to their attics, and unless they had an axe to cut their way out, they drowned, or are stuck...At morgues and cemeteries bodies are being pulled up, and there are just floods of bodies floating everywhere.... Its so bad, that the rescue crews have a system where they go house to house, and in the houses where everyone is dead, they paint black over the door. Houses with survivors get a red mark...The looting is out of control. Gun and hunting stores are being broken into. People are shooting at police, and now are so desperate, even HOSPITALS are being looted for food and water...And, there are real alligator or poison snake problems as well (Water Moccasins, I guess)...The water that is flooding the city has become diseased from all the death and sewage, causing other sickness and possible death, as well as death from the 100 degree weather and humidity...All gas and electricity is off. people are sleeping on the highways...50% of New Orleans is uninsured...People are running out of food and water, and have no cars or gas to get to places WITH such things...A lot of the outlying areas are stuck and those people cant get out because too many trees have fallen on the roads."

Help these folks in any way that you can!

Note, June 23, 2007:  The immediate death toll of all who died in Katrina has been calculated as being approximately 1300-1800 persons depending on the source.  Testimony before the U.S. Congress suggests that Katrina's delayed after-effects on public health likely caused a total of over 4,000 deaths in the New Orleans area